A friend wondered, how can I train my mind and soul to not be easily excited? Here is my answer, slightly modified:

By learning to accept thoughts (that thoughts exist) without owning them or acting on them.

Thoughts exist, they come and go — but we do not need to identify with them (e.g. ‘I am these thoughts, I am what I’m thinking’). Nor do we need to act on them (e.g. ‘I must do something about this thought’).

So practice regularly just “watching” thoughts go by. Without acting on them. Without categorizing them. Without judging them. Truly learning to do nothing at all with them. Letting the whole movement of thought thus settle down, de-agitate, and rest. The deep rest of (so to speak) just being-with-Being.

In that way we become masters of our inner world. Our thoughts cease to shove us around — and we stop shoving them around! There is a harmony because, most thoughts we just let go. Your mind becomes a tool, definitely an awesome instrument– but it ceases to run the show.

By practicing standing back from thoughts — from ideas, meanings, signs, compulsions to act, desires, etc. — we gradually find a freer center from which to think and act, we are less habitualized, less reactive, less controlled, less bound.

Thoughts stop shoving us around, but they also stop shoving “is”, the rest of reality, around too! Because, ultimately, the problem is that our thoughts distort reality. We do not see things as they really are. Then, when we act on that faulty seeing, we ‘make real’ the distortion, thus causing disturbances in the field.

By practicing seeing things more ‘nakedly’, without an interpretive lens, without looking for x/y/z meaning and significance, without one’s self at the center, one comes to see things as they really are, without the ‘filter’ of our mental delusions.

Clearing away all the distortion of the real in thoughts, is a lifelong journey of seeing reality as it really is. But the first step is getting that distance, so we are not literally ‘enacting’ the distortion and thus (seemingly at least) disturbing the harmonious, clear fabric of things.

Uncoupling thoughts from action, break that automatic reactive loop, that cascade from mental event to enacted event.

Just start noticing how this works. You can do this all the time, just getting aware of those ‘chains’ — gradually you will see how flimsy they are, and you will find freedom.

Without that filter of mental misapprehension, we are so much closer to things as they are, and thus much calmer and accepting and in the flow of reality. A saint or enlightened person is someone who has gotten rid of the delusionary filter. If they “see God” everywhere, it’s not because of some fantastic experience they’re having. It’s not them hooking on to some unbearably intense train of sensation and significance and holding on for dear life. There is nothing out of control, or dangerous, or scary, or unstable — disturbance part is always the doing of the ego. Rather, they just are with the simplicity. It does not even need to “have meaning.” It isn’t a sign of anything. And there is nothing to do with it but watch and adore.

From that adoration, — and not from the mind! — the question of action will resolve itself quite naturally.

Walter Burghardt, SJ, defined contemplation as “a long loving look at the Real.” While the above program has strong links to yogic-buddhist style of meditation, as an effort to cut the source of mental delusion off at the very root, functionally (and ultimately) it all points in the same direction of naked awareness: unbiased, undesirous, unselfed, all-loving looking at just-what-is.