heavy mental noise ...

Much of my thought life is engaged with anything but the Present Moment. There are too many extra thoughts! I have been trying to categorise them in order to recognise when I am not engaging with and simply 'being' in the Present Moment. All these thoughts clearly and not so clearly work with the false self to perpetuate an unconscious existence, an unreal world in which 'I' take centre stage caught in the autonomous (non) existence of thought forms thus robbing me of realising Essence! (What is the fall of man but the separation of Form from Essence - the loss of spirit, living in the flesh - the preoccupation with external at the expense of internal reality). So lets look at what constitutes this 'Mental Noise':

PAST RELATED:
Re-living past achievements and successes - this builds up the ego.
Re-living past failures and embarrassments - this too builds up the ego. If I cannot be important with a sense of achievement I can certainly get centre of attention with my sense of failure!

FUTURE PLANS:
Things I ought to do / Things I intend to do / Things i must not forget to do.
Projected fantasies of success
Fears of a future real or imagined event
Future Spiritual attainment ... Practicing the Present Moment as a means to an end.
INTERNAL THOUGHTS:
Fabricated Reality - little alterations to past scenarios, fantasies ... 
Analytical - Introspective circular thinking. Not to be confused with observational as one recognises the false egoic self.
Problematical - the false self thrives on problems - they give it meaning.
Distracting - I'll go and eat something. I will check Facebook for the nth time!
Internal conversations - things I would say if I could.

A GENERAL SENSE OF 'I'M NOT WHERE I SHOULD BE'. Space
A GENERAL SENSE OF 'NOT HAVING WHAT I THINK I NEED TO BE MORE FULFILLED'. Possessions

All these things can be seen as a frantic attempt to keep ourselves 'alive’. We are performing a kind of juggling act wasting energy and making so much 'noise'. All the time we are robbing ourselves of true life which comes from 'quietness', 'stillness' and an 'awareness' of all that we have and are NOW. ... and in that awareness we lose ourselves in Another ... there is no room for little 'Me' in the Present Moment which is not perceived through the conceptual work of the mind but intuitively through the 'spirit'.
I thought this. imagine that you are in a noisy factory in the middle of nowhere. The noise is deafening. You decide to walk out into the open air. What a relief! The noise is there but distant and the more you engage with the quietness of 'outside' the more distant the noise becomes until eventually you are so taken up with the view and the sounds of outside the noise in the factory seems no longer to exist. However, a quick blip and you begin to hear the noise again ... the distraction becomes so irritating you decide to go back in to try to shut it off but begin to be consumed by it again. 'Whatever we resist persists' - by trying to fight against and subdue noise we increase our awareness. By allowing it to be it ceases to persist.
Father Thomas Keating said our thoughts are like noisy children in the background. When we engage in Centering Prayer we are like adults focusing outside- perhaps looking out of the window - the noise of the 'children' recedes into the background. Until eventually the children, aware of your 'awarenes' become quiet and come to join in with what you are engaged in! Focussing on the Present Moment marshalls eventually all our faculties into its own alignment. This is nothing spiritual but natural - what we do with what we have NOW in relation to God is another thing!