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Art of Thinning Out Thoughts

In the rubber plantations, planters take recourse to the method of thinning out the rubber
trees by cutting the small surplus trees which stand in the vicinity of big trees. By so doing they
can tap more milk (rubber juice) from the big trees. Even so, you must thin out the thoughts by
destroying them one by one in order to drink the ambrosial milk or nectar of immortality.
Just as you retain only the good fruits from the basket and discard the bad ones, so also,
keep good thoughts in your mind and reject evil ones.
Just as the warrior chops off the heads of enemies, one by one, when they come out of a
fortress through a trap door, so also, chop off the thoughts, one by one, when they emerge out
through the trap door to the surface of the mind.

When the tail of a lizard is cut, the cut end will flutter about for sometime as there is still
a little residual Prana in the tail. After one or two minutes all motion will cease. Even so, even
after thinning and reducing the thoughts, some thoughts will move about like the tail of the
lizard. But they are powerless. They cannot do any serious harm. There is no vitality in them.
Just as the drowning man tries to catch anything to save himself, so also, these lifeless
thoughts try their level best to come back to their previous state of life and vigour. If you go on
regularly with your daily practice of concentration and meditation, they will die by themselves
like a gheeless lamp.
Passion, egoism, jealousy, pride and hatred are very deep-rooted. If you cut the branches
of a tree, they grow again after sometime. Even so, these thoughts that are suppressed or thinned
out for sometime, manifest again after sometime. They should be completely rooted out by
strenuous efforts, Vichara, meditation, etc.