I was recently at a meditation retreat, and a group of meditators much more advanced than me universally agreed that an apt description of their minds was "like a box of ferrets".
The illusion that you control your chain of thought vanishes pretty quickly with meditation. The reality is that your attention shifts rapidly (especially between different senses) and that most of those shifts aren't under direct conscious control.
It's almost like the facade of mental control is a sieve that tries to exclude the chaos and let something coherent flow through... And you can't even be certain how it accomplishes that. It's a mystery where the nonsense and sense even comes from, too.
Somehow we mistake the sieve for free will, or that it's even a fully conscious mechanism. But it "just happens". It's very strange stuff.
I was recently at a meditation retreat, and a group of meditators much more advanced than me universally agreed that an apt description of their minds was "like a box of ferrets".
The illusion that you control your chain of thought vanishes pretty quickly with meditation. The reality is that your attention shifts rapidly (especially between different senses) and that most of those shifts aren't under direct conscious control.