The mind itself is contraction. Unless the mind is informed in the moment by spiritual consideration, it is a form of contraction, and attention is locked into that contraction. People are constantly engaged in thinking, thinking. Thinking is really a conversation you are having with yourself. Speech is the same thing engaged with others. That process is a meditation on contraction. The mind is a problem, it takes the form of a problem. You hope that thinking will produce release from this contraction, this problem. You are trying to get free of a knot, an oppressive sense of existence. You are trying to think your way out of it, trying to solve a problem, get an answer. And, of course, occasionally the mind does let loose with some relieving concept or other, but it always returns to these contracted states, because the mind is about this self-perpetuating disease.

This disease is as much a lock on attention as a cramp in the body. If you have pain in the body, attention dwells on it very directly, or at least subliminally. Thinking is pain of this kind. It is a compression of the Living Conscious Force, a suppression of it, a knot in it, a contraction of its field. Therefore, this perpetual thinking is pain.

In these moments of chronic thought, rather than put your attention in that thought process and try to think your way out of the pain, you should understand yourself, be able to find yourself out and divert your attention, submit yourself with full attention to the Living Reality. Submit yourself whole bodily, release yourself from the oppression of chronic thinking, chronic conversation with yourself, Narcissism. The art of spiritual life is a matter of relocating attention, noticing that attention is simply dwelling in a contracted state and giving it over to the Transcendental and All-Pervading Force and Being with every aspect of the body-mind. This is the direct way of practicing. Your common technique, however, tends to be developed on the basis of contraction itself, or egoity itself. You think and feel that you have a problem, even though you might not be able to explain just exactly what that problem is, and you generally try to keep on thinking. You think and think and think and fret and fret and read and read and talk and talk and are in pain the whole time.