Action Stops Thinking

It is my routine. Eyes closed, effortless mode, no expectation and no deliberate effort to meditate. And that morning a set of thoughts nagged me aimlessly. Aimless random thoughts that just occur, I am not even bringing them into consideration and they occur, and then one leads to another and I am somewhere inside it without knowing when I entered.

Then in the next instant the idea occurs. Stop thinking. If I just get conscious, doing something with conscious effort, the loop will break. And second, move, do some physical action. So I decided to walk around.

I walked around and I was in the present moment, aware of myself as a physical being, and it was a kind of conscious effort. And in the next few minutes I forgot I was in an aimless thoughts loop.
That word stayed with me afterwards. Forgot. Not stopped, not solved. Forgot.
Because the same word works the other way also. The mind keeps me in something three weeks old or something due next week, and while it is doing that I forget my physical being. The body is right there, the floor is right there, the breath is going on without asking me anything, and I have forgotten all of it. So the loop is not doing anything dramatic. It is only making me forget where I am actually sitting.

And I think that is why mind is confusion. It has no physical existence. It is a bundle of thoughts and nothing more, and a bundle of thoughts can sit anywhere, in the past, in next month, in a conversation that is already finished. The body cannot do that. The body has one address and it is here.

Maybe you have sat like this also.
When I am the drishta, things are just occurring. Maya. I am not the one running them and I was never running them. And the moment that settles even a little, the mind has nothing left to arrange. Because controlling needs a future, planning needs a future, and if I am only watching what is happening then there is no future available to work on. That is the part I keep noticing. Not calm, not peace. Only that there is suddenly nothing to arrange.

So the walking is not a technique and it is not go for a walk and your mood will lift. It is that when the legs are moving with some awareness, the doing is going on and I am not standing behind it deciding anything.

I do not know if the action stopped the thinking, or the thinking had already stopped and the walking was going on anyway. In those few minutes I did not check. I checked afterwards, and by then I was back.