The brilliance of the monkey mind…
- and also the brains of pigeons, rats, and crows.
Brains make lists. This is because brains have to prioritize actions and elements for survival. They have to line up action sequences - that's what a daily life is. The only people who don't need to do this are those who just follow orders, who have no life, and just do what they are told.
If you have responsibilities - a job, a home, friends, family, pets, people who rely on you - in meditation, you will notice, your brain spends time prioritizing your lists and refining your action sequences. This takes place because you are at ease, on a sort of vacation, and meditation is a good time to practice being your best self.
This is one of the reasons why the term "monkey mind" in the meditation traditions is actually a toxic mental parasite designed to weaken you.
When you are daydreaming and thinking about your shopping list, you are actually practicing the yoga of sequencing actions. You are running through a choreography, with more of your instincts backing you up, more senses employed, more of your chakras supporting you, more relaxation. More in your body.
The Software Lobotomy
Monks just do what they are told. They have taken vows. So they want to lobotomize the parts of their brains that have desires and make decisions. In the place of that, they install the power structure of the ashram they are in. This aspect of meditation technology is a kind of amputation. A blessing for that small percentage, probably less than 1% of a population, that are natural renouncers. Their path truly is to renounce everything, including their individuality, desires, personal life, ego, any capacity for intimacy, any desire to be touched or to have sex, PERMANENTLY. In exchange for sacrificing their individual life, a monk or nun gets to be supported to pray all day. In the meditation traditions, this concept of "the monkey mind" as a something negative is a teaching that is only for those on the path of Renunciation. If you are not a nun or monk, it will harm you, like injecting chemotherapy poison into your bloodstream if you are healthy.
From psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues:
"Monkeys can keep strings of information in order by using a simple kind of logical thought.
Rhesus macaque monkeys learned the order of items in a list with repeated exposure to pairs of items plucked from the list, say psychologist Greg Jensen of Columbia University and colleagues. The animals drew basic logical conclusions about pairs of listed items, akin to assuming that if A comes before B and B comes before C, then A comes before C, the scientists conclude July 30 in Science Advances.
Importantly, rewards given to monkeys didn’t provide reliable guidance to the animals about whether they had correctly ordered pairs of items. Monkeys instead worked out the approximate order of images in the list, and used that knowledge to make choices in experiments about which of two images from the list followed the other, Jensen’s group says.
Previous studies have suggested that a variety of animals, including monkeys, apes, pigeons, rats and crows, can discern the order of a list of items (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13). But debate persists about whether nonhuman creatures do so only with the prodding of rewards for correct responses or, at least sometimes, by consulting internal knowledge acquired about particular lists.
Jensen’s study adds to evidence suggesting that, like humans, monkeys can mentally link together pairs of items into lists that guide later choices, says psychologist Regina Paxton Gazes of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.
That’s probably a valuable ability in the wild, she says, because many animals need to monitor where group mates stand in the social pecking order. “An ability to construct, retain, manipulate and reference ordered information may be an evolutionarily ancient, efficient [mental] mechanism for keeping track of relationships between individuals,” she says."
