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.
