Minding your Mind

Peace of mind comes piece by piece.

This Journal entry is a follow-on to the last 4 Journal writings which covered the biochemistry and physiology of meditation, mitochondria, and methylation, as well as a variety of health considerations associated with these 3 important processes of life.

The last Journal ended with the words, “It’s time to shift gears…”

This Journal entry is an opinion about the shifting of the 4 gears of body, mind, emotion, and spirit…and so…this writing is a little introduction to some functional considerations of your very own four-on-the-floor carbon based Spirit vehicle. While practicing my own driving over the years I have developed a good driving record, and I have been able to assist a variety of types of blow-outs, burn-outs, and more serious wreckages along the way.

Sometimes, while driving along, we experience some kind of glitch in the transmission part of our drive train. Then we have to stop in to a mechanic’s shop, or perhaps a more specialized transmission shop, for a transmission check. If you don’t watch out, and before you know it, they might become aggressive and drop the tranny off of the drive train for an overhaul. At the very least they might just do a transmission fluid check and a road test.

There is no one who is a better expert of your vehicle than you, but you have not been taught and empowered with that sense of your own knowing. You are the expert of your vehicle. Learn how to take care of it yourself so that you do not have to visit mechanics. Remember, your vehicle has a built-in healing and repair intelligence. This is the very best intelligence that one can get to know. Get to know all 4 gears and how they operate in the life long transmission of your life.

This repair mechanism, which I call the Divine Healing Intelligence (DHI), is so refined and divinely evolved that no one can adequately describe it. Nonetheless, you can download these ideas into your own mind and add them to your mental Owner’s Manual as an addendum, if you like. I hope to leave you with some worthwhile tips for your driving safety and pleasure.

In the shifting of our four-on-the-floor gears of body-mind-emotion-spirit we can begin with a consideration of the mind gear and how we might learn to shift this gear more efficiently, and not wear it out, and not allow it to foul up the rest of the gears in the transmission case.

The mind gear is often the most clunky and difficult of the gears in the day to day gear shifting and motoring of a life process. This is because we are continually lapsing into some kind of an identity crisis as we attempt to get our mind into the correct transmission gear position and orientation. Everybody visits this identity crisis…every day.

What is Creation’s idea of Itself as your life?

In awakening from the dream of my character role in the play of life, I realize that I do have a role to play, but I do not believe that I am the persona mask that I am wearing. The unique individuation of the Soul that each of us is can only be expressed when our smaller self is overcome and begins to retire. Because we remain conditioned in the matrix of life’s various illusions most of us never find out what Soul wants to express through our lives.

Life on this earth plane may be thought of as a gymnasium for the exercise of the Soul and those parts of its spirit force which it placed into our physical bodies for the purpose of its healing and evolution.

The Christian contemplative, Cynthia Bourgeault, has said, “We all have a GPS inside us, a God Positioning System: the heart. When the heart is attuned, it will allow us to perceive in a whole different way. The egoic, binary (brain mind) operating system perceives by separating and differentiating things from each other. The heart’s perception is pattern oriented. It perceives the whole and then discerns its own place within that whole.”

The heart is the seat of the mind. This statement is generally regarded as the literal truth in all transcultural traditions outside of current day western cultures. This is a well substantiated and researched idea whose time has come. If humanity is going to evolve out of its barbaric earth destroying and human destroying nature, then heart based consciousness and qualities must be embraced by more and more of humanity.

It is usually not highly productive when we challenge other people about their gear shifting identity crisis in an attempt to get them to own up to their denial issues. You will be involved and busy enough just taking care of your own vehicle. If you have done well, then others will notice and they will probably be inquiring as to who you are, and how you did it.

Our coordination and timing with how we use the clutch (pause) device almost always needs assistance. An endless array of driving schools, clinics, therapists, and guru types have sprung up, since forever, in order to help drivers become more facile in the manner of how the mind gear pauses, functions, and flows in the transmission of a life.

And moreover, attendant to these considerations, it seems that almost everyone has forgotten how to put the transmission into neutral from time to time.

Some of us never even learned the neutral position. And many of us seem to be forever stuck in reverse. Our vehicular ego containers are jerking and lurching about in a thousand outer directions…a foot on the gas, or a foot on the brake, or a foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. This is a chaotic way to drive and live.

In developing our practice of how to mind our Mind, we have to consider that which it is accustomed to doing…all the time…and that is that the mind is always thinking. We are addicted to our way of thinking, and this addiction leads to all of the other types of addictions which we practice.

Most people spend the majority of their time interacting with thoughts and opinions about everything. Furthermore, we use computers, smart phones, internet, email, and social media to help keep us preoccupied. We take all of this distraction for reality itself, but really this is just a world of our own doing and fabrication. It is all driven by our thinking mind. The mind is always thinking new worlds into being.

And so, a work-up of the content of this Journal writing will consider the one universal addiction which all humans have…and that is that we are all addicted to thinking in our brain mind. This addiction is so pervasive and so universally common and so human that it is simply dismissed and not even considered as an addiction by the vast majority of people. However, it is the primary foundational addiction from which all of the other addictions arise.

Once you learn how to liberate discursive thoughts as they arise, then they cannot take hold and create more karmic baggage and drag on your journey. When the thinking mind takes a break, even for a few seconds, a kind of relaxed awareness replaces the usual stream of thoughts. If only we could learn to encourage this kind of still awareness and not fill this space with anything else…just let it be.

From our memories of our painful past and our personal inventory of unresolved and unforgiven traumatic imprints, we create and enable every subsequent type of chemical, behavioral, and dissociative addiction which has ever been tried.

We create these secondary addictive processes to try to numb and placate the pain which may be associated with the primary addiction, which is…simply put…how we think. Due to our unresolved traumas, much of our thinking is shame and guilt based at its deepest level.

As I have often stated in these writings, an addiction is any behavior which we do that is based on a fear of internal growth.

If you can feel it, you can heal it. You are invited to consider coming out of denial about your addiction processes. Then the mind gear and the emotion gear have a better chance of becoming clarified as tools of discernment and discrimination, and then meshing correctly with the drive train of the body gear and the spirit gear.

More to come…I’ll have to get in my mind and think it up…

Signing off from Crestone…and Beyond.

Associated Readings

In his 2009 book The Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield writes:

“Just as the salivary glands secrete saliva, the mind secretes thoughts. The thoughts think themselves. This thought production is not bad, it’s simply what minds do. A cartoon I once saw depicts a car on a long western desert highway. A roadside sign warns, ‘Your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles.'”

Below are some more thoughts on the subject for your consideration.

1. What’s On My Mind?, Becoming Inspired with New Perception by Swami Anantanada, who teaches us ways to free ourselves from the grip of what yoga traditionally calls “the inner enemies”. These mental habits—including infatuation, pride, anger, worry, jealousy, and fear—take us away from awareness of the Self (God). This small sized book of 144 pages of text considers some of our more difficult emotional states from a yogic perspective and offers “new perception.” This book is a gem, and is highly recommended for those who are reaching for emotional sobriety.
2. Minding your Meditation…an earlier Journal entry on this website. With practice meditation quiets and clarifies the mind and the emotions.
3. Making Friends with Oneself…a short writing by Pema Chödrön about an important subject.
4. This is Your Brain on Bliss…by Buddhist monk Matthew Ricard, “the happiest man alive.”
5. Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten…a nice 2009 article about the great German quantum physicists of the pre WWII period and how they considered their new quantum physics and mysticism.
6. Living the Yogi-way…a Tibetan Buddhist teacher explains a few characteristics of Pristine Mind…”When we rely exclusively on our ordinary mind, our search for happiness takes place in the chaotic and arbitrary-seeming world that most of us now experience. It is a world we perceive to be driven by a series of events we get caught up in, within which we live and seek happiness, but which, in truth, is a rat race to nowhere. The Buddha called this samsara, a Sanskrit word that means an endless cycle of pain and pleasure, happiness and sadness, that results from a misperception of reality. It just circles around and around, never getting anywhere. It is filled with hopes and fears, and produces very little lasting or deep happiness.”
7. What Happens to Your Body When You Use the Internet…problems created by digital dependence.
8. Turning Negative Thinkers into Positive Ones…a nice brief article from the NYT about a noble 8-fold practice to turn automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) into what I term as APTS, automatic positive thoughts…you develop an new and enlivening aptitude.
9. The Zen of Not Knowing…”In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.”
10. The Wise Investigator…a Burmese Buddhist monk explains.
11. Samadhi Movie, 2017-Part I-“The Illusion of Self”…this is a beautiful 1 hour movie journey that will help open your doors of perception. Take the time to sit with this production, with earphones, and no distractions.
12. Finding Freedom Right Here, Right Now…some nice perspectives on real happiness from thought leader Jack Kornfield.
13. Gratitude…a nice brief synopsis of the health benefits of gratitude.
14. The Power of the Third Moment…insightful commentary about the moments of sensing, arising, and reacting and how to create mental composure for the best karmic outcome. “By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions. You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.”
15. Train Your Mind: Don’t Be Frivolous…a clear and succinct commentary on one of the mind training teachings from a well known Buddhist tradition. This is a timely commentary for today’s frivolous culture.
16. There are 4 writings on this website about how the heart functions outside of its role of pumping blood. These electromagnetic considerations are all important for body-mind-emotion-spirit health, and are the most important considerations for living a happy and healthy life that I know of. There are many many people who live happy and healthy lives in our world who would never need to read such writings. They are the living examples of a glowing heart and a beautiful mind…1) The Pulse of Life, 2) The Spiral of Life, 3) The Prayer of Life, and 4) The Beginning of Life.
17. Adverse Childhood Events…a writing on this website about where all of our troubles usually start.
18. Express Gratitude…the healing power of gratitude is explored here via a dozen methods to practice expressing it.
19. The Gift of Waiting…instead of always trying to distract ourselves from the discomfort of waiting, much can be accomplished while we wait.
20. Time to Declutter…simplify your mind and its worries by decluttering.
21. Dropping Distraction…more ideas about how to take control of your life.
22. Finding Our Essence of Mind…many pearls of clarity are expressed here. “We have a physical body, but our body is only a robe, and we will eventually have to take this robe off. Our body is not just moving around aimlessly, manipulating its arms and legs. Something is moving through it, something is wearing this body like a robe.”
23. Calm Abiding…the 5 stages of calm abiding are presented.
24. Biohacks to Boost Fitness and Improve Your Sleep…good sleep is important for the mind.
25. Meditation’s Secret Ingredient…a well written article by Mark Epstein which explains the benefits of right concentration when used as a means in meditation, as well as in the activities of mundane life.
26. Whisper Thoughts and Feelings…Doc Childre, the founder of HeartMath, gives us some good advice about a practice to replace worry and fear with an attitude of managed concern.
27. Finding Patience…this Buddhist perspective on patience is the best short writing on the subject I have ever read. The author explains gentle forbearance, endurance of hardship, and acceptance of the truth as important ways to cultivate patience. This will help us in how we mind our mind.
28. On the Contagious Power of Presence…a beautiful brief writing on everyday mindfulness.
29. Mindfulness and Difficult Emotions…one of the very best writings on mindfulness that I have ever encountered.
30. Documentary–Stare Into the Lights My Pretties…more considerations about our brain health and growing social dissociation issues which are negatively impacted by all things digital.
31. Soothing the Hot Coals of Rage…a nice short description of how to center in the body and meditate about sensations that need to be felt and forgiven so that healing can occur.
32. Why you should get bored more often…a nice little writing about the creative benefits of daydreaming. “We switch from one form of social media to the next, check our email, catch up on the news — all within a span of twenty minutes. We prefer the certainty of these distractions over the uncertainty of boredom (I don’t know what to do with myself, and I’d rather not find out).”
33. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self…a good book on the importance of boredom, by Manoush Zomorodi.
34. What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next…”There’s so much chaos in the world right now that we have little choice but to wake up to it. Heightened uncertainty is an excellent opportunity for growth.” The author presents 8 steps for personal accountability and growth in difficult times.
35. Thinking Big…a short writing which explores a mystery of the mind known as “foundational mind.”
36. Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less…author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that we’ve come to see rest as a passive, inert process—as the absence of work, rather than as something that stands on its own and has its own value and qualities.
37. What’s Streaming through Your Mind?…Doc Childre, the founder of HeartMath, explains “managed concern”…how to change thought streams that don’t serve our best interests.
38. Consumed with Love…a beautiful contemplation from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, 7-5-19, about the Divinity within and how this connects us to the Divinity in all things and events.
39. Liberation…free your mind from the limiting shackles which most religious institutions promote. This writing presents a brief opinion about what priests do for a living.
40. Adventures in Going Nowhere…author Pico Iyer has figured out how to be still in the midst of the world’s busyness. “If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems—and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind—lie within.”
41. Avoid Burnout Before You’re Already Burned…”Taking care of your body on a physical level is the foundation of avoiding burnout, and this starts with the three pillars of health: proper sleep, diet and exercise. If you’re living a lifestyle that’s contradictory to your true personality or values, it can also cause mental fatigue and anguish, facilitating burnout.”
42. Mind to Matter: How Your Brain Creates Material Reality…posted here on 1-17-21. Effective techniques are presented in this article to help us calm our minds in the midst of stress. “Our brains are hard-wired and evolutionarily adapted to pay attention to potential threats. As a result, most of us need to train our brain to notice the positive and to feel gratitude.”
43. How to Create a Mini-Retreat at Home…posted here on 3-21-21. This is a short reading with a nice recommendation from a Buddhist practitioner…”Given the chronic exhaustion many of us carry, we need a long, insulated period of time where we can let ourselves completely soften, ground, and recalibrate. After this system reset, right mindfulness and right concentration become more accessible because we have re-established basic, normal physiological functioning.”
44. Minding the Storehouse…posted here on 6-27-22. “Right understanding (and right functioning) of the mind does not come from thinking, but from actively and attentively observing the complex constellation of energies and activities of mind.”

The following is a nice writing about the nature of the mind from a Buddhist lama’s perspective.

Your Mind is Your Religion

Lama Yeshe, the great sage of Kathmandu in the 1970’s, expounded Vajrayana Buddhism to the first wave of Westerners seeking wisdom in the Himalayas.

By Lama Thubten Yeshe

When I talk about mind, I’m not just talking about my mind, my trip. I’m talking about the mind of each and every universal living being. The way we live, the way we think—everything is dedicated to material pleasure. We consider sense objects to be of utmost importance and materialistically devote ourselves to whatever makes us happy, famous, or popular. Even though all this comes from our mind, we are so totally preoccupied by external objects that we never look within, we never question why we find them so interesting.

As long as we exist, our mind is an inseparable part of us. As a result, we are always up and down. It is not our body that goes up and down, it’s our mind—this mind whose way of functioning we do not understand—not just our body, but our mind. Therefore, sometimes we have to examine ourselves—not just our body, but our mind. After all, it is our mind that is always telling us what to do. We have to know our own psychology, or, in religious terminology, perhaps, our inner nature. Anyway, no matter what we call it, we have to know our own mind.

Don’t think that examining and knowing the nature of your mind is just an Eastern trip. That’s a wrong conception. It’s your trip. How can you separate your body, or your self-image, from your mind? It’s impossible. You think you are an independent person, free to travel the world, enjoying everything. Despite what you think, you are not free. I’m not saying that you are under the control of someone else. It’s your own uncontrolled mind, your own attachment that oppresses you. If you discover how you oppress yourself, your uncontrolled mind will disappear. Knowing your own mind is the solution to all your problems.

One day the world looks so beautiful; the next day it looks terrible. How can you say that? Scientifically, it’s impossible that the world can change so radically. It’s your mind that causes these appearances. This is not religious dogma; your up and down is not religious dogma. I’m not talking about religion; I’m talking about the way you lead your daily life, which is what sends you up and down. Other people and your environment don’t change radically; it’s your mind. I hope you understand that.

Similarly, one person thinks that the world is beautiful and people are wonderful and kind, while another thinks that everything and everyone is horrible. Who is right? How do you explain that scientifically? It’s just their individual mind’s projection on the sense world. You think, “Today is like this; tomorrow is like that; this man is like this; that woman is like that.” But where is that absolutely fixed, forever-beautiful woman? Who is that absolutely forever-handsome man? They are nonexistent-they are simply creations of your own mind.

Do not expect material objects to satisfy you or to make your life perfect; it’s impossible. How can you be satisfied by even vast amounts of material objects? How will sleeping with hundreds of different people satisfy you? It will never happen. Satisfaction comes from the mind.

If you don’t know your own psychology, you might ignore what’s going on in your mind until it breaks down and you go completely crazy. People go mad through lack of inner wisdom, through their inability to examine their own mind. They cannot explain themselves to themselves; they don’t know how to talk to themselves. Thus they are constantly preoccupied with all these external objects, while within, their mind is running down until it finally cracks. They are ignorant of their internal world, and their minds are totally unified with ignorance instead of being awake and engaged in self-analysis. Examine your own mental attitudes. Become your own therapist.

You are intelligent; you know that material objects alone cannot bring you satisfaction, but you don’t have to embark on some emotional, religious trip to examine your own mind. Some people think that they do; that this kind of self-analysis is something spiritual or religious. It’s not necessary to classify yourself as a follower of this or that religion or philosophy, to put yourself into some religious category. But if you want to be happy, you have to check the way you lead your life. Your mind is your religion.

Don’t think that examining and knowing the nature of your mind is just an Eastern trip. That’s a wrong conception. It’s your trip.

When you check your mind, do not rationalize or push. Relax. Do not be upset when problems arise. Just be aware of them and where they come from; know their root. Introduce the problem to yourself: “Here is this kind of problem. How has it become a problem? What kind of mind feels that it’s a problem?” When you check thoroughly, the problem will automatically disappear. That’s so simple, isn’t it? You don’t have to believe in something. Don’t believe anything! All the same, you can’t say, “I don’t believe I have a mind.” You can’t reject your mind. You can say, “I reject Eastern things”—I agree. But can you reject yourself? Can you deny your head, your nose? You cannot deny your mind. Therefore, treat yourself wisely and try to discover the true source of satisfaction.

When you were a child you loved and craved ice cream, chocolate, and cake, and thought, “When I grow up, I’ll have all the ice cream, chocolate, and cake I want; then I’ll be happy.” Now you have as much ice cream, chocolate, and cake as you want, but you’re bored. You decide that since this doesn’t make you happy you’ll get a car, a house, television, a husband or wife—then you’ll be happy. Now you have everything, but your car is a problem, your house is a problem, your husband or wife is a problem, your children are a problem. You realize, “Oh, this is not satisfaction.”

What, then, is satisfaction? Go through all this mentally and check; it’s very important. Examine your life from childhood to the present. This is analytical meditation: “At that time my mind was like that; now my mind is like this. It has changed this way, that way.” Your mind has changed so many times but have you reached any conclusion as to what really makes you happy? My interpretation is that you are lost. You know your way around the city, how to get home, where to buy chocolate, but still you are lost—you can’t find your goal. Check honestly—isn’t this so?

Lord Buddha says that all you have to know is what you are, how you exist. You don’t have to believe anything. Just understand your mind; how it works, how attachment and desire arise, how ignorance arises, and where emotions come from. It is sufficient to know the nature of all that; that alone can bring you happiness and peace. Thus, your life can change completely; everything turns upside down. What you once interpreted as horrible can become beautiful.

If I told you that all you were living for was chocolate and ice cream, you’d think I was crazy. “No! no!” your arrogant mind would say. But look deeper into your life’s purpose. Why are you here? To be well liked? To become famous? To accumulate possessions? To be attractive to others? I’m not exaggerating—check yourself, then you’ll see. Through thorough examination you can realize that dedicating your entire life to seeking happiness through chocolate and ice cream completely nullifies the significance of your having been born human. Birds and dogs have similar aims. Shouldn’t your goals in life be higher than those of dogs and chickens?

I’m not trying to decide your life for you, but you check up. It’s better to have an integrated life than to live in mental disorder. A disorderly life is not worthwhile, beneficial to neither yourself nor others. What are you living for—chocolate? Steak? Perhaps you think, “Of course I don’t live for food. I’m an educated person.” But education also comes from the mind. Without the mind, what is education, what is philosophy? Philosophy is just the creation of someone’s mind, a few thoughts strung together in a certain way. Without the mind there’s no philosophy, no doctrine, no university subjects. All these things are mind-made.

How do you check your mind? Just watch how it perceives or interprets any object that it encounters. Observe what feelings—comfortable or uncomfortable—arise. Then check, “When I perceive this kind of view, this feeling arises, that emotion comes; I discriminate in such a way. Why?” This is how to check your mind; that’s all. It’s very simple.

When you check your own mind properly, you stop blaming others for your problems. You recognize that your mistaken actions come from your own defiled, deluded mind. When you are preoccupied with external, material objects, you blame them and other people for your problems. Projecting that deluded view onto external phenomena makes you miserable. When you begin to realize your wrong-conception view, you begin to realize the nature of your own mind and to put an end to your problems forever.

Is all this very new for you? It’s not. Whenever you are going to do anything, you first check it out and then make your decision. You already do this; I’m not suggesting anything new. The difference is that you don’t do it enough. You have to do more checking. This doesn’t mean sitting alone in some corner contemplating your navel—you can be checking your mind all the time, even while talking or working with other people. Do you think that examining the mind is only for those who are on an Eastern trip? Don’t think that way. Realize that the nature of your mind is different from that of the flesh and bone of your physical body. Your mind is like a mirror, reflecting everything without discrimination. If you have understanding-wisdom, you can control the kind of reflection that you allow into the mirror of your mind. If you totally ignore what is happening in your mind, it will reflect whatever garbage it encounters-things that make you psychologically sick. Your checking-wisdom should distinguish between reflections that are beneficial and those that bring psychological problems. Eventually, when you realize the true nature of subject and object, all your problems will vanish.

Some people think they are religious, but what is religious? If you do not examine your own nature, do not gain knowledge-wisdom, how are you religious? Just the idea that you are religious—“I am Buddhist, Jewish, whatever”—does not help at all. It does not help you; it does not help others. In order to really help others, you need to gain knowledge-wisdom.

The greatest problems of humanity are psychological, not material. From birth to death, people are continuously under the control of their mental sufferings. Some people never keep watch on their minds when things are going well, but when something goes wrong—an accident or some other terrible experience—they immediately say, “God, please help me.” They call themselves religious but it’s a joke. In happiness or sorrow, a serious practitioner maintains constant awareness of God and one’s own nature. You’re not being realistic or even remotely religious if, when you are having a good time, surrounded by chocolate and preoccupied by worldly sense pleasures, you forget yourself, and turn to God only when something awful happens.

No matter which of the many world religions we consider, their interpretation of God or Buddha and so forth is simply words and mind; these two alone. Therefore, words don’t matter so much. What you have to realize is that everything-good and bad, every philosophy and doctrine—comes from mind. The mind is very powerful. Therefore, it requires firm guidance. A powerful jet plane needs a good pilot; the pilot of your mind should be the wisdom that understands its nature. In that way, you can direct your powerful mental energy to benefit your life instead of letting it run about uncontrollably like a mad elephant, destroying yourself and others.

I think you understand what I’m talking about. What I want is for you to check up. A simple way of checking up on your own mind is to investigate how you perceive things, how you interpret your experiences. Why do you have so many different feelings about your boyfriend even during the course of one day? In the morning you feel good about him, in the afternoon, kind of foggy; why is that? Has your boyfriend changed that radically from morning to afternoon? No, there’s been no radical change, so why do you feel so differently about him? That’s the way to check.

[Also] before you do anything, you should ask yourself why you are doing it, what is your purpose; what course of action are you embarking on. If the path ahead seems troublesome, perhaps you shouldn’t take it; if it looks worthwhile, you can probably proceed. First, check up. Don’t act without knowing what’s in store for you.

♦

This is an excerpt from Make Your Mind an Ocean: Aspects of Buddhist Psychology (1999). Used with permission of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Boston.