Dropping the thinking mind is necessary, because, contrary to its inflated opinion of itself, it is not the alpha and omega – there’s more!
Sometimes we have to lose our minds in order to come to our senses – Neale Donald Walsh
Mind’s usefulness is limited because it only works with concepts of reality which we formed based on our past experience. This means, it draws on only a small band width of all the information available to us. Furthermore, it is tainted by Ego, skewing its perceptions even more. From this it is clear that mind alone is not enough to deal competently with life. We each carry within us an intelligence, power and wisdom, far greater than that of ego-mind. To be all we can be, we need to go beyond the mind.
The veil of mind covers reality. The unknown is the home of the real. To illustrate this, imagine suddenly waking up on a different planet where nothing is like it is on Earth. You would have to take everything at face value. You have nothing to compare this new experience with, so your habitual mental classifications and judgments don’t apply. What you are left with, is untainted perception. Unfortunately, unless we are vigilant, the older we get, the greater our store of pre-conceived ideas which get in the way of our perceiving reality clearly.
Efficiently ineffective
When my dad left my mom and me and soon after returned to Germany, I was 10. My mom wasn’t coping very well on her own to say the least and we had no other family in South Africa to turn to. I responded by developing an interesting coping mechanism: Rigid schedules became my certainty and continuity in a world that no longer felt manageable. I drew up detailed weekly timetables for myself that included the superfluous such as what time in the morning to get up, when to brush teeth and when to feed our pets right down to what TV programmes to watch. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d gone as far as adding ‘breathe in – breathe out’ at 10 second intervals!
A model child you might say and yes, I was admirably efficient – so mature for my age, I was frequently told – but miserably ineffective. Here’s why:
What should have stayed a temporary coping mechanism, out of necessity, remained in place for years on end. It gradually turned into a habit and became a way of life long after I had left home and the need for it had passed. I left myself no leeway for spontaneous action. Everything I thought of doing was put on lists to be dealt with at the specific time of day allocated to that section of my life, making my days very predictable.
I completely throttled my creative flow by this automaton-like existence. My soul must have been pulling its hair out – I wonder if our guardian angels have shrinks, because mine certainly needed one with how I was carrying on! On the whole, I was oblivious to what I was doing to myself bar those uncomfortable moments when I felt inexplicably, deeply sad, yearning for something I could not even identify, missing something I’d never had.
To live in the known is bondage, to live in the unknown is liberation.
Stop the movie
To put it bluntly: dropping the thinking mind is a no-brainer because mind is noise. It obscures our innate bliss. Stuck in thought, we can’t nurture ourselves and simply be. We can’t give ourselves what we yearn for, because we can’t hear ourselves properly above the background mental chatter.
If we live in our minds, we are unconscious, mere sleepwalkers. The end of thought is the beginning of being, of becoming conscious. Simply being puts us in touch with Self and what we need.
The answers we seek never come when the mind is wound up. In survival mode, we’re in a rut and we end up playing the same mental movie over and over again – which in the end is based on mere speculation. The rule of thumb here is that anything that causes mental push-pull, any mental tug of war is a sign of ego and is based in fear. When our mind is at ease, however, things look very different. Self then has a chance to share its truth and creative solutions. The right action always comes out of a space of quiet and centredness.
You have the power
Our stress levels are determined by the nature of our thoughts and how much power we give them. We create our frame of mind by our thoughts which produce our emotional states. We have the ability to train ourselves to change those thoughts at a drop of a hat – that’s our power. Through self-observation, we can become increasingly independent of both external events and internal moods. It is possible to learn to determine our moods and maintain our emotional equilibrium no matter what happens. Events in our lives need not have any undesirable effect on us.
Think about it: Any state of consciousness can only arise within ourselves. The same event affects people in diametrically opposite ways since we project outwardly our internal reality which differs vastly from person to person. This inner landscape and not the external events themselves, provokes our response.
Get in touch with me here if you’re ready to step into your power!
The greatest gift we can give to this world is to keep the mind still.