On The Right Track

 Living in the dream-like turning of thoughts has always been fraught with deception and problems. And in this age of global communication, it's even more so. Each day it seems there is some new crisis. And with so many different sources telling us what to be afraid of and who to be angry at, it can be dizzying. 

All this makes it easy to get off-track and lose one’s sense of center and balance. And these days, we see many people spinning-out with extreme polarization, running with ideologies, both far-right and far-left, like they’ve been infected with a psychic poison. We know that what we fill our mind with can make us sick, like an infectious disease. So being ensnared in biased bubbles of beliefs is dangerous, both personally and collectively. The medicine for this mental poisoning is to come out of the mind and live from our center. This is both the refuge from the craziness of this world and the source of right action.

So where do we find our center? How do we find our center? It is always located in the stillness of being, our own consciousness — independent of all mind-talk. To become conscious of our own consciousness puts us on the right track. So simple and an enormous challenge. This is our ongoing choice and humanities evolutionary stepping-stone.

Like Blinders On A Horse

 

When we look at our world we can readily see that when people’s emotions go up, intelligence and clarity goes down. They are inversely proportional. It’s true for all of us. When we get fired-up with feelings such as fear, anger, despair, our clarity becomes less (and the ego identity gets stronger). 

Beliefs that feed the emotionality and story are like putting blinders on a horse — blinding us to certain things, and to a deeper truth. Every individual has experienced hurt and many people carry past wounds. And these un-healed psychic wounds contribute to the blinders of belief. 

Consciousness itself is not wounded and has never been wounded, is already and always free and whole. This is why it is so important to make this distinction between mind and consciousness, and to see that the essence of our being is conscious Life. 

Some may think; “oh I had a negative thought or emotion. That means I lost it”.  No. It means you’re human. In this human drama, it’s not realistic to think we can live in a condition of calm and equanimity all the time. But when we recognize and accept that our real nature is infinite conscious life, the blinders come off — again and we recognize our true home — again, ever deeper, until our last breath.

The Final Frontier…

 

There is a philosophically interesting episode in the original Star Trek series, where a scouting party goes down to a planet looking for a place for the crew to rest after a difficult mission. They quickly discover that what ever they are thinking about becomes their experience — both the good and the bad. They become totally confused. To stop the chaos from unfolding, Captain Kirk orders the scouting party to, “stand at attention, don’t think, just be at attention”. Just then a being shows up and informs them that this planet was created by their race as a kind-of amusement park, where they could simply imagine anything they want and experience it.

In a similar way, our thoughts; the conscious ones — but to a much larger extent, our ‘unconscious’ and semi-conscious, habitual thoughts manifest as our personal reality. And our experience is drawn-out over time (and maybe playing out over lifetimes) as the mind generates a past, present and future. Sadly, for much of humanity, we see generations of repeated suffering as people are constrained by the deep mental wiring and beliefs of a hard life.

While there is big mystery to humanity’s unfoldment, those of us who are fortunate to live in relative safety, security and freedom have the opportunity to shape our experience to a fair degree.

It is my wish and prayer that all beings come to recognize the value of stopping the momentum of the mind and consciously focus attention on the field of living silence again and again so that one can shape one’s experience with harmony as the foundation.

Practicing Good Mental Hygiene

In our high-tech world we are advised to practice ‘good digital hygiene’. Our cell phones and other digital devices can easily become infected with all kinds of viruses, malware, spyware, ransomware, personal data harvesting, etc., so it’s recommended to reset our phones or at least turn them off and back on daily to clear some of these potential threats.

In a similar way, the outer and inner stresses of our lives can cause the mind to become infected and go into negative spirals of thought and feeling, so it’s wise to practice ‘good mental hygiene’.

We ‘reset’ the mind by bringing ourselves fully present. Because in these moments, alert awareness takes priority over the mental noise. And while the mind won’t be quiet for too long, each time we become aware of the silence that is present under all thinking and feeling, even briefly, it interrupts the incessant, habitual, (and dis-empowering) inner-talking.

In these moments of presence we can take a breath and simply be — not trying to know what it all means — and the space between thoughts becomes greater and more significant. And even in the midst of these uncertain times, it opens our consciousness to a recognition of the beautiful simplicity and clarity of our natural Being.