CLEARER-ING YOUR MIND

Clearer-ing Your Mind

Let's start somewhere near the beginning ---

Sometimes the biggest life-questions that you can ask yourself-- “Who am I?” “What is my purpose?” “Where can I find fulfillment?” – come down to three very simple and immediate challenges:

• “What shall I do to today?”
• “Why?” and
• “How?”

Actually, the third of those questions takes care of itself. As any actor worth his/her salt will tell you – What you focus on doing and Why you choose to do it organically influence How you will go about it.

Grand visions aren't hard to make up, and they either grab you, or they don’t. But the next stages of

• thinking them through,

• real-ising them,
• recruiting resources, and
• carrying them out

are where constipation and confusions start to show up. Having an emotion-backed resolve is pretty important, especially on those days when the fire in your belly gets low. Everyone's days get their share of hurdles, wet blankets and distractions. Duties and the demands of otherness pile up steadily. The bigger issues start to blur when your to-do list is overflowing with demands that don't get sorted into hierarchies of Importance and Urgency so that they can be effectively managed. Arteries begin to clag up.

In meeting the challenge of bringing our inspirations into form, how can we effectively bring projections and pragmatism closer together?

The world's wisdom traditions tell us to look firstly inside ourselves (yes, we have more than one) for hidden but real obstacles that block the way to fulfillment, or sabotage the results we strive to get. Secreted away from sight in our inner operating systems (mind) are long-forgotten, entrenched thoughts, beliefs, concepts and opinions – bots that blind us to the whole of present reality, take over, sabotage and trip us up the minute we try to move beyond our current self-limitations. The “joke” is that most of us don't know they're there. In our ignorance of our selves, we conclude our “failures” to meet our own expectations are caused by “other things”.

Why can't we find them? Because our minds are full of clutter. Stuff that has nothing to do with, or runs counter to what we really want.

Unsorted external and internal demands will always fill the time given to them, and pitch us head-first into the willy-nilly of daily life. Without at least a rough idea of where we want to be by the end of each day, some flexible intention of how to go about it and a clear resolve to get there, distractions habitually indulged inevitably make our existence seem stressed and chaotic.

If only there were crap-cleaning systems for our minds, similar to ones I use on my computers.

There are.

And they work while we're asleep. The bits we're aware of we call “dreams”

What can we do to get mind-cleaning kickstarted?

First and foremost, look past what's on the telly or Facebook and examine instead our inner reality – what are our reactions and responses to what's happening in front of our faces. Notice and pay attention to what's really going on in the boardroom of Me Inc.

What's happening in your mind is, I maintain, the first and perhaps only place you have real influence over where clarity may emerge. People with a clear vision of what they're doing, and why, have a far greater chance of inspiring the same qualities in others than those who don't. 

Clarity of purpose is catching.

But you may have to clear away a lot of accumulated garbage to find where you last left your vision and resolve. Might I even suggest that you no longer have much idea of what Clarity actually looks and feels like since you long ago sold out on it to something that, at the time, seemed more expedient.

What most people find when they look inside are the following conditions in their mental climate:

Confusion – resulting from the presence of wants and needs, values and principles that are either out of date, irrelevant, at odds with each other, or all three. Confusion manifests as not setting clear priorities because the path ahead doesn't look as clear and decisive as once upon a time.

Confusion and cross-purposes leave behind them a trail of dashed hopes, unresolved intentions, failed fantasies, and a pile of debilitating conclusions like “I can't do this”, “Don't set yourself up for a fall”, “I don't deserve...”, and “I'm a screw-up.” There are plenty of others – the human condition comes with a smorgasbord of de-powering stinkin' thinkin' for you to choose from, peddled and pushed at you by others who've already given in to disillusionment and are only too keen to pull you alongside for company and comfort.

To make things even trickier, a lot of us are not even aware of, or will vehemently deny any suggestion of the presence of contrary compulsions within. We are most often and most disastrously brought undone by what we don't know or won't acknowledge.

Distraction -- manifests as a hundred small things that hook and pull your attention this way and that. We were deliberately born into a wonderland of tempting possibilities, each competing for our favour. And if our parents neglected to teach us how to choose relevant life styles and make decisions congruent with our choices, then it's no wonder we lack the skills to select interesting projects that match our temperament and skills, and follow each one through to some relevant kind of result, Without practice in self-discipline, we're more likely to stay stuck in a childish pursuit of the next shiny bauble, the next “big thing”.

If you ever want to be taken seriously as a human being, maturity must be developed alongside your child-ness. Maturity, in this case, takes the form of your ability to make intellectually and emotionally intelligent choices and commit to them with appropriate decisions. Youngsters fare much better in later life when they are mentored into developing a desire and capacity for withholding their childish temptations to instant gratification. Maturity Parenting, by example and encouragement, leads growing children to voluntarily forego lollies and blue ribbons, and instead develop life skills until they've evolved enough in order to experience Satisfaction.

Self-Discipline is a skill that has to be learned and practised.

Disorganisation – arises from a lack of the kinds of orderly, strategic thinking that lead to productive results. Disorganisation is also a symptom of self-discipline deprivation. If you were spoiled (over- or under-indulged) as a child, then you'll have to learn self-discipline yourself. That's not as tragic as it sounds. Even those of us who grew up under a cover of extreme discipline had to, when we finally broke out, learn the difference between “discipline” and “self-discipline”. There's a universe of a difference between those two! One predicates a life subject to imposed regimes of strict rigidness – the other evolves into a life directed more by voluntary self-mastery

Confusion , Distraction, and Disorganisation are signs of a deficit in the managerial department of our mental and emotional life. Learning to take charge and manage yourself creatively is a basic necessity, unless you really want to live the rest of your life disempowered as a victim. In which case, good luck. There's nothing wrong with being a victim and you certainly won't be lost for others to play games with, but please remember this one Ruthless Rule of Reality – “A Victim's life does not work.” (Just thought I'd mention it).

There's an infinite spectrum of problems and just when you think you've seen them all, some bastard keeps inventing new ones. The problem spectrum changes from person to person, depending on the type of temperament you were born with and the personality you've constructed upon it. Those person-to-person differences are partly caused by dis-agreements about what we actually see as a “problem”, and partly by how our “personalities” and circumstances mysteriously attract (and repel) particular experiences (Why does this always happen to me?!).

At either end of the spectrum you'll find the polar opposites of - a) the tightly controlled, highly disciplined thinker; and – b) the loosely-wound vapid dreamer. There are countless variations on how we deploy our minds, our heart and our spirit, depending on our personal inclinations and the particulars of each situation. And, of course, no two people have exactly the same mindsets, perceptions, capacities for awareness and empathy, and qualities of spirit.

But the paths to attaining clarity are the same for all --

If your goal is clarity, set to one side the thoughts and sensations that fill your mind every day. Differentiate when a more subjective or more objective viewpoint may be more helpful to you. Focus first, on the goal of finding clear air, and that may often mean taking a more subjective look.  If you don't know how to, get yourself with someone who has clarity, and learn. People who are clear-minded are rare, but easy to spot in the crowd.

Confusion is solved by getting honest about what your values really are, getting your priorities of them clear and straight, and knowing under what circumstances you will re-order their hierarchy, even if only temporarily. To do this successfully you have to be ruthless about ignoring what you'd like them to be, what you think they might be, and what you wish they were, and look very critically at the evidence of your behaviour – what you actually do, and what you leave behind you for others to live with. What you leave behind you is the surest test of what's really going on inside you – By their deeds you will know them. And by what they say about the motives and ploys of others will let you see into their hearts.

Confused people confuse others. So do dissemblers and manipulators. The latter confuse others on purpose. They distract in order to camouflage what they're really on about.

Distraction is solved by honing your awareness of subtle shifts in energy and congruity, and getting better at focusing your attention. There's only one way to do these – widen your depth and field of vision by continually checking your insight and your peripheral vision, and exercise directing your attention with intention – on purpose. Since we know from quantum physics that nothing exists until you give your attention to it, and that your attention energises whatever you give it to, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of where you direct your awareness. As I learned from a painful accident I had while learning to ride a bike -- keep your eye on where you want to go, not where you DON'T want to end up.

And another I learned while train-hopping through Europe – travel light. The less luggage you have to carry, the better.

Disorganisation is solved by throwing out non-essentials and tending to the urgent and the important things first and foremost. There's only one way to do that – find yourself some self-discipline and practise it. Start with easy days first, do a stocktake; make conscious choices and decisions as a daily exercise. Ruthlessly throw out anything or any one that has passed its use-by date and keep doing it until you have a new habit – paring down to essentials you need right now, instead of hoarding mementoes from the past (Oh, I might need that again one day?). It may feel hard at first, but you'll soon be rewarded by the awareness of your being getting lighter.

Remember that we are talking here primarily about your inner life, so achieving clarity isn't the same as clearing out your house and straightening out every room. You can have a very busy and complex life going on around you and be calmly clear about it at the same time.

The solutions to lack of clear-seeing don't lie in attacking the problem habits directly; you've tried that and your mind resists you, doesn't it? Mind will not take what you call “Trash” and delete it: what suddenly becomes trash to you will still be “treasure” to the mind. Mind will hide it from you, and use it later to get back at you, either by sabotaging you just when you think you've made progress, or by bringing it back in the form of mental or physical dis-ease. Your mind is indispensable to you, but never be fooled into thinking it's your best friend. If there's a showdown between you and your mind, your mind will dispense with you, if it can, in order to ensure its survival. – I really want you to be clear about that. It's one of the consequences of leaving it in a position of absolute power over your life for so long.

Take care of reorganising your inner life awarefully and watch your external world curve in to travel alongside. Let the external world renovate itself – it will, with a modicum of interference from you. Sound miraculous? There is an explanation for it in quantum physics but, like electricity, you don't need to have a science degree before it will work for you. Just flick the switch.

So, getting back to re-organising. If you became the kind of positive-thinking, mind-control efficiency expert that became so popular in the '90's, you could probably sort your thinking out in a more orderly, focused way. But the effort would be a strain, and the results are likely to be only superficial and temporary because there are inner saboteurs at work under your ground.

The problem I've struck with “positive thinking” is that the preactice takes no account of the Laws of Duality – every positive has equally powerful negatives which, un-addressed, will seek the light of day, just to get things back into balance. The pendulum swing will get you back sooner or later. Positive Thinking is one manifestation of Ego that I call The Topdog – Think only positive thoughts! I'm making you do this for your own good! The Underdog face of our mind is very good at saying “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full sir” to your Topdog face, but sotto voce it is whispering “I'll get you for this”. And so will your heart, unless you’ve listened considerately to its wants and needs along the way. Believe me, having the suppressed half your mind and/or heart for enemies is not going to be good for your happiness or health. I know from hard experience.

You once promoted your ego/mind, both faces of it, to the CEO's chair, a job it just cannot do, but a position it will not give up lightly. And you need your mind to look after the communications and intelligence centre, you really do.

Take back your job as CEO, bust your ego back to the mailroom and welcome your “negative” bits out into the light and start re-integrating your self. A person of Integrity is one who gratefully holds all of his/her qualities -- positive and negative, desirable and not – evenly in balance. Nothing is hidden in a person of integrity. No nasty surprises.

Commit matrimony with your whole mind and heart, conspiring together to do what you want done. Harnessing both sides of your dualities gives you stereoscopic insight and harnesses latent qualities that your judgments of “bad” and “negative” previously kept hidden. Find a way to let/encourage, train and empower your mind to become orderly, focused, clear on its own, and your servant rather than your slavemaster. 

We've all been taught, one way or another, that the mind will run amok if it isn't watched and controlled. Like a child it is easily distracted; an undisciplined mind will run around in all directions. But few people have actually tested whether the mind's nature is so chaotic. What we call “chaotic” may be a very creative, non-linear way to sort out ideas, thoughts and perceptions that may have arrived on your doorstep randomly. An example of mind doing its irrational thing quite well is to watch it when we are “dreaming”. So many of our dreams, upon awakening, don't make much “sense” at all. But mind does know what it's doing. While we sleep, the backrooms are busy sifting through and sorting out today's changes, ready for the next new day. It works. And people who, for one set of circumstances or another, are deprived of the chance to let the mind dream, become very ill indeed.

There is something else altogether going on here, and there are nearly as many theories about what that might be as there are dream therapists. We take for granted, looking at our own confusion, that it would be a struggle to turn inner chaos into something more orderly. But I've done enough time in the wilderness, recording and studying my dreams, to realise that dreaming is one of the mind's ways of automatically doing the sorting, filing, data processing and cleaning up for us – on the night-shift while the rest of us is asleep.

Perhaps if I drop the terms “chaotic” and “disorganised”, since some of that activity might be quite functional. If I use instead the terms “disturbed” or “perturbed” or “unsettled” to describe how we feel when we're out of balance? This is where the world's wisdom traditions offer a valuable secret. They teach that the deeply unsettled mind comes about through one thing only –- identifying with some thing, some notion, some belief, some principle or value or some way of being that we are NOT, thereby losing sight of what we really ARE. In this context it may be that the depth of our suffering may be evidence of a gap between our true self and those fabrications that we are not. From time to time we all get lost and lose our bearings. Feeling “off” is just a warning bell.

There's no long-term ascendancy in selling out to “otherness”: in fact, quite the opposite. Neither you nor I can possibly be a puppet of outside demands and pressures unless we see our true self as secondary, while whatever else that we've attached our “I” and “Me” to as primary. After all, reasonable mind tells us, how can you eat, put a roof over your head, raise a family, and so on without plunging heart and soul into the “hard realities” of daily existence? Well, I suggest that we can – by engaging creatively with the hurly-burly of the world “out there”, but not identifying with either “it”, or with the struggle. The difference may be described as the difference between riding a horse and being a riderless horse. By playing with the challenges, but not making or taking them personally, we free-up our selves. There is great freedom, agility and power in this one simple secret – Don't take it personally. People who take things personally may be letting a false sense of self-importance take over. And my emphasis is on “false….importance”

It also helps to know at what level of Need your current challenges are coming at you, and to meet each of them at that level, according to the rules of that level. Are your challenges biological/physiological, basic safety or survival, or are they social, or related to poor self-esteem or are they matters arising from a deficiency of self actualisation?

Needs Levels

• Biological and Physiological needs include air, nourishing food and drink, shelter, warmth, sex and sleep.
• Safety needs include protection from the elements, security. stability, order, law, and freedom from fear.
• Social needs include friendship, intimacy, affection and love from family, a sense of It's OK to be here”, friends, groups, romantic relationships.
• Esteem needs include experiences of achievement, a sense of mastery, awareness of inter-dependence and choices, a sense of place in the order of things, recognition, prestige, self-respect and respect from others.
• Self-Actualisation needs include experiences of realising personal potential, experiences of expressing yourself and finding fulfilment, the experience of personal growth, and a few peak experiences to put a cherry or two on top.

Maslow himself summarised his theory – 'It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organised into a hierarchy of relative prepotency' (Maslow, 1943, p. 375).

In the light of all this, look at what's in your face now. If you're going through a major trauma like grief, divorce, loss of a job or geographical relocation, you'll probably find yourself being bounced by a complex set of challenges around different levels of need. You feel like the ball in a squash tournament and find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the scale and the number of whacks you’re copping. Yes?

Take some time out to tease out the knot of problems and sort each separate strand onto a shelf-level that feels appropriate. Don't get hung up on whether you get this sorting process “right” – trust your judgment. What's of prime importance right now is to just do the identifying and sorting. There can actually be no “wrong” choices here and you can shift something around to somewhere more appropriate at any time. What's more important is that you make an aware choice and stay awake and present to what shows up next. Decide at which level each need demands to be met. Then prioritise according to the hierarchy I've just given you.

Again, there are no right or wrong choices in which position you place things on your hierarchy – hierarchies change anyway – continually; it's the act of making this choice now in these circumstances that lifts you from being the emotional subject of the problem to being more objective. It creates separation and distance between “Me” and “the Problem” and helps you see more clearly through what once seemed either an impenetrable knot or a dead end. And just in the seeing there is movement.

You'll soon realise for yourself that you have to settle lower-level, basic needs like food, shelter and safety before you start working on your social skills, self esteem and attending to getting the most out of life. Only when each level of needs has been deliberately and demonstrably satisfied can you effectively move on to higher vibrational-frequency levels. In the meantime, don't worry about the peak level of self-actualisation because as you consciously and intent-fully deal with the lower levels, you’re already in training and higher aspirations will automatically start to fall into place, too, all by themselves.

There's a cosmic joke that you already are what you're looking for; you just haven't seen it yet. But working your way up each rung of the ladder of more basic needs will help you real-ise those ultimate questions -- Who am I? What's my purpose, etc? You'll probably find you really are, and have been all along, a conscious agent who is free to choose at any time which level of being to operate from that may be most appropriate to the moment. What has happened up to this point is that, in the absence of you making conscious choices, your ego has determined default choices for you in your absence. That's why you've been in a rut, getting the same results, over and over again.

While you're doing this groundwork, do take time out each day – even if only for 10 minutes – to reflect quietly and appreciatively on the wider picture of what you're doing, how far you've come, and where you'd like to get to. I do this every night on retiring, giving my subconscious all night then to work out the details. By committing to a practice of meditation, you take your mind to a level where daytime clarity will become more natural and effortless.

Perhaps the analogy of a river will help to show what happens.  On the surface, a river can be fast-flowing and whipped up into waves and eddies. As you descend into it, however, the river's flow becomes slow and steady, and at the very bottom, the water may be so calm that it hardly moves at all. In the same way, there's a level of emotional and mental consciousness that knows only peace, calmness, and clarity. But unlike a river bottom, it's not sluggish. There is an exquisite self-balancing coexistence between relaxation and alertness. 

A settled, alert mind, in fact, is the most capable of meeting the day's demands because it is guided from within and coming from a state of balanced readiness. Self-awareness permeates every aspect of your being, and when you pay attention to it you know where and who you are in any given moment and, grounded in that knowing, you are clear about what’s happening and where you're going. Suddenly it turns out that the day contains enough time for you to experience gratitude and feel fulfillment, which is a timeless way of being, undisturbed by demands, duties, and distractions.  

An awareful way of being also leads to changes in your daily life that can be summarised as things you naturally do and things you just don't do any more..... not because you forbade yourself, but because they just don't interest you any more.

YOU DO

• Make your surroundings orderly and uncluttered.
• Take a close look at stresses that need to be addressed.
• Identify, and engage with, influences that work for you.
• Find a friend or confidante who shares visions of clarity and fulfillment.
• Take moments to Centre yourself several times a day, and additionally whenever you feel distracted or unsettled.
• Go outside to soak in the calm and inspiration of Nature. Note how she works. You might notice there's a lot of Allowing going on, and not much interference.
• Follow a regular daily routine, without being enslaved to, or browbeaten by it.
• Get at least six hours of good sleep every night.
• Eat and exercise healthily.
• Hold Balance and Possibility as sacred look-fors in every situation.
• Surround yourself with playmates and life-lovers. 

YOU DON'T

• Remain in situations that turn disordered and stressful and which you don't have the power to change.
• Push your work time to the limit of exhaustion, mental or physical.
• Get tied down by other people's opinions and attitudes.
• Let stress go unaddressed.
• Act while under the pump.
• Let a good night's sleep slip by more than once or twice a week.
• Drown yourself in bad news and the world's chaotic unrest.
• Ignore your body's signals – be aware of when it wants rest, nourishment, down time, and a chance to reset itself through meditation and quiet time alone.
• Forget to provide yourself with pure food, water, and air, restful and comfortable shelter. 

What these lists suggest is that as your inner world becomes more orderly and clear, your actions in the outer world follow suit. If they don't, look inside again – you've missed something. Both sides of every equation are important. Life is a Balancing Game. Just remember that without inner clarity, all the external neatness and organisation won't serve as a substitute; it will merely be a temporary cover-up.

Inner fulfillment is the goal of life, and spreading fulfillment around is its purpose.

It has always been thus.