What
is Mind? We talk about mind a lot, but what is it? Where is it? I ask my grandchildren and they point to their head, but that's not the mind – that's your brain.
Saying your brain is your mind is a bit like equating your computer
with the stuff it does. Besides, we now know that your mind exists
and is at work in every living cell of your body; it's not limited to
your brain.
Is
your mind real? Or is it just an appearance like (as someone once
said) –
like the wind in the breeze, ruffling the trees in the charcoal
drawing on Japanese rice paper?
Maybe that's why mind is so hard to get a handle on. Despite the fact
that we all have a mind, no surgeon on earth can point to it or
photograph it, or cut it out, but we can all see evidence of where it
is moving.
My
favourite definition of the Mind, and its purpose, comes from Werner
Erhardt:- Mind is a linear arrangement (like DNA necklace) of multi-sensory, total
records of successive moments of Now. The purpose for having a mind
is the survival of the mind itself, and of anything the mind
considers itself to be. That
may include the survival of your body/mind; it may not. The main
purpose of the Mind is the survival of its ideas, concepts, opinions,
judgments and beliefs, and anything else It considers important at
the time. You don't have much of a say in the matter, at least while
you think those things are who you are.
How powerful is Mind? The
Australian aborigines point a bone at someone and they die.
Someone tells you something about yourself and you take it on board.
Same difference.
During
our childhood, we all, at some point in time, overlooked our own
experience, and allowed our mind to believe what it was told, by someone whose approval was more important to us then than our own integrity. We
bought into the opinions of others about us. We still do. No wonder we now don't
have a clue who we are. Our minds are stacked to the rafters with
umpteenth-hand stuff that didn't work for those who unloaded it on
us, and it's now turning our present lives into a righteous royal
mess.
Our
ideas, concepts opinions and beliefs about everything, all need to be
turned over and examined in the light of our own raw experience. Any
that don't fit should be turfed out and the space used to be
simply aware of what happens next.
Each
mind is the ultimate in self-centredness and image. Your mind, like
mine, wants to look good, keep itself safe, protect its beliefs, justify its
points-of-view, its conclusions and its decisions; it wants to seek
agreement and validation from other minds, avoid disagreement and
invalidation, and to be right, at any
cost. Are you getting reminders now of positions you've been so
right (or so wrong) about lately? Good.
You
cannot live this life without a mind. It's an essential messenging service. But
it belongs on the ground floor, not in the CEO's chair in penthouse
boardroom. The trick, I'm finding so far, is to just allow your mind
to be. Examine it, by all means, and get to know how it works. But
for God's sake, let it be – resistance to it is futile because you
become
what you resist. And I, for one, don't want to be at the mercy of my mind any more. I'm not my mind, and I never have been, but I didn't know
that until I started to wake up and realise the mind isn't real –
and I'd got suckered into believing and pretending myself to be
everything my mind wanted me to be. What a mess that made!
Simply
wake up to what your mind is up to. Watch it do its routines and run
its rackets: don't get involved. Mind is handy to have ---
fortunately, because I don't think we have a choice about that. But
its value is way overrated. We don't have to continue being
our mind and hoping for a better result. That is, frankly, insane.
There are other ways of doing things, without suffering. Check some
of them out........
[Baby,
Don't Get Hooked On Me – Mac Davis – 3:03]
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