Our actions are all too frequently driven, rather than undertaken in awareness—driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent, and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for. Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank, and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize and imprison us.
