The Process For Dissolving Mental Projections: Steps 3 & 4

June 25, 2015.Reading time 17 minutes.

Cartoon by Anne Derenne http://adene-editorialcartoon.blogspot.com/ — Cartoon by Anne Derenne

This article continues my Jailbreak Your Mind series, which will form the basis of a self help book currently in the works. This follows on directly from the previous post.

The four step process for dissolving mental projections is:

1. Identify the projection

2. Reduce the subjective to the objective

3. Take any appropriate physical action

4. Change the thought

The last post explored the first two steps, which are the key. This entry will deal with the latter two.

Take any appropriate physical action

The final two steps are the optional ‘clean-up’, that may or may not be necessary. If it’s a ‘physical’ problem (ie., not simply a product of my thinking), then the next step is to objectively determine what I need to do to tackle it. If I have a headache, I take a painkiller. If I’m tired, I go lie down. If I’m feeling stressed or overburdened, I seek ways to reduce my load by delegating or ditching what I don’t really need to do.

Recognise the issue and, if need be, brainstorm ways that you can deal with it. Put your problem-solving skills to good use. See it as a challenge and recognise that, whatever the issue, you have or can access or develop all the resources you need in order to deal with it. This may involve asking other people for help, or developing certain skills or resources. There is a solution to any challenge we might face in life.

Let’s go back to our examples. The first one was ‘I am depressed at my lack of success in life’. When I stripped away my subjective interpretation I realised that the reality of the situation was that I was making judgements about my life. Because my life hadn’t conformed to my idea of what I think it should be, I was suffering. It wasn’t actually ‘my life’ that was causing me to suffer, it was the thoughts I was thinking about it; my story about it. Simply realising this may have been enough to end the problem. Perhaps now I recognise that life isn’t designed to match up to what we think it should be, and it never will! Perhaps I can accept this and learn to enjoy the upside of life and take things as they come. Or perhaps I can identify some areas where I can make some improvement and decide to commit to that. Maybe I could get more education, or change my job, or start a business. There’s nothing to stop me.

Take the issue you’re working with, keep it at the objective level, and see if there is any physical action you want or need to take. There may be some action you need to take or you may find that, like the travelling monk, the issue completely disappeared when you realised the nature of your superimposition: i.e., there was never a snake there to begin with, therefore there’s nothing to be done about it!

Objective Issue: My boss has been making unreasonable demands
Objective ways to deal with it: Schedule a meeting. Share my concerns. Ask for greater support. If appropriate, work on improving my skills, time-management, etc. Or maybe look for another, better job.

Objective Issue: I am single and would like to be in a relationship
Objective ways to deal with it: Start dating again. Be clear on what I am looking for. Build my confidence and self esteem.

Objective Issue: I have been making judgements about my body
Objective ways to deal with it: Learn to love myself and my body. Learn to take care of my body. See and appreciate the very best about myself. Practise loving self-massage. Eat well and do some fun exercise to feel good

Change the thought

So we’ve reduced the subjective to the objective, stripping away our mental story and reducing the object, situation or circumstance to its own status. This has either made us realise that there is no problem at all; it was simply a problem in our imagination, or, if there was a physical component to the problem, it enabled us to take a clearer and more objective look at how we ought to proceed.

That may be all that we need to do. Our brave traveller didn’t need to fend off that snake at the well or run for his life. All he needed to do was leave his subjective reality and come back in touch with objective reality and realise that the snake had no existence other than a thought, a misperception in his mind—and poof, the ‘snake’ disappeared, never to return.

Given that most problems start off on the level of mind, that’s where they will be resolved. Very often the final step is to change the problem by changing our thought about it. If the problem is our mental story, then we need to rewrite that story.

Again, objective reality is neutral in itself. Shakespeare summed it up perfectly in Hamlet:

“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

We project interpretations on reality and those interpretations are based upon our experience, conditioning, likes, dislikes, desires, fears and beliefs. Again, if those interpretations are working for you—which is to say, you are going through life in a relatively peaceful, happy, satisfied state, then you are welcome and advised to hold onto those interpretations. You need only question them when they begin causing suffering and dysfunction for you and those around you.

Emotional pain is a sign that your thoughts and interpretations aren’t working for you; that there’s a core conflict that must be resolved. In this way, negative emotions are actually a positive thing. Pain is a mechanism designed to alert us to a problem, to action that needs to be taken on some level. Physical pain is dealt with on the level of the physical. If you burn yourself, the pain immediately alerts you to remove yourself from the source of heat.

Emotional pain is dealt with on the level of mind. When it’s not legitimate, clean pain, it’s a sign that there’s a problem on the level of our thinking, interpretations and projections. That’s where the problem lies and that’s where the problem will be solved. The great problem in our culture is that we simply aren’t raised with the tools we need to be able to navigate this inner world; the world of our thoughts and feelings and the immense cause and effect relationship between them.

I’ve run the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum as I’ve run over this process, but it’s necessary to continually hammer this home until it ‘clicks’. Because when it does, our relationship with reality changes forever. What we’ve learned to do is to strip away the mental story we’ve imposed on reality. We’ve essentially deconstructed our interpretation of reality. This is not something we need to do just once in order to be free. It needs to become a habit. We need to continually keep pulling ourselves out of our illusory subjective realm and back to objective reality time and time again, until it becomes second nature, an instant reflex.

As we’ve seen, the subjective realm is not a direct, accurate representation of reality. It’s an indirect, conditioned and distorted reflection of empirical reality. Deconstructing our story enables us to see that our original issue was either an illusory problem that didn’t really exist, or was an issue that did have some physical component but which was most likely exacerbated or distorted by the mind. The way to clear things up for good is to change things on the level of thought. This involves a process called reframing. If it’s your story that’s been causing the problem, and it very often is, then it’s time to rewrite that story!

This is a simple process—although, again, simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. It may take some time and practise to master the art of reframing.

Take the original subjective interpretation that was causing the problem for you. Firstly, recognise that it is just an interpretation and usually one that was made quite unconsciously, based upon the mind’s habitual tendency to process reality a certain way. Recognise that it was only one of many different interpretations you could have made regarding the issue or situation. Take a moment to consider what other, more positive interpretations you might give the same issue. How might you reframe the situation in a more positive light? In what ways might this situation actually be a good thing?

Let’s use one of our original examples. How might “I’m depressed at my lack of success in life” be reframed? In step two we already deconstructed this thought by seeing that the real problem was my notion that life should match up to what my mind thinks it should be. A mature, objective mind knows that life simply doesn’t work like that! Getting depressed because life isn’t giving me what I want is actually a rather childish state of mind (and yet it is the source of so much of our suffering).

Reducing it to the objective level, I realise that my life is a certain way and I am creating an inner resistance to that. In step three I realised that I can take action to change things on a physical level. I might want to do that, or I might by now have realised that the real problem was the way I was choosing to interpret my life situation. So in this step, having realised the problem was my largely just interpretation, my story, I now have the opportunity to change things on the level of thought. The moment we change the way we look at things, our entire experience changes—an alchemical process that happens from the inside out.

I’m going to reevaluate the thought “I’m depressed because of my lack of success in life”. That interpretation, the notion that I’m not successful and that my life is a mess, is the root of my problem and it’s causing a great deal of suffering. What if I instead decided to see things in a more constructive light? What if I changed it to: “life is giving me new challenges and opportunities to grow and change”. This is instantly more empowering, and it’s just as true, if not more true, than my original interpretation. I’m no longer wallowing in self-pity and judging myself and life as harshly. This new thought, this rewritten story, is motivating and encouraging. Rather than feeling depressed and deflated, I’m much more likely to be at peace and even excited at the opportunities I have to play with my circumstances and to explore different possibilities.

It’s all in the way we choose to look at things. Again, it bears repeating; any form of mind-created emotional stress or suffering is a sign that we are thinking low quality thoughts. What we’ve been doing is telling ourselves horror stories about ourselves and our lives, or stories on a par with the classic Greek tragedies—and then wondering why we’re feeling anxious, stressed and emotionally beaten!

The mind works like a computer. The input will determine the output; and so will the software we’re running. If there are glitches in our programming, this will distort everything and create one big, buggy mess that’s prone to malfunction and crashing. It doesn’t have to be that way. If our mind is giving us problems, this is simply a sign that we need to learn how to use it better and more efficiently.

That’s what the next part of this series will focus on: going deeper into how the mind works and how we can shift negative thoughts, beliefs and painful emotions. You might want to take some time to reflect on these essays and learn the master the 4 step process for dissolving projections before moving on. This is one of the foundational practises for jailbreaking the mind. It should be done over and over until it becomes a habitual response to life. Whenever things are getting on top of us, we need to quickly shift out of the subjective and reduce it back to the objective. For there lies our true point of power and stability. We are coming back to reality and back to ourselves.

The Process For Dissolving Mental Projections: Steps 1 & 2

June 21, 2015.Reading time 15 minutes.

This article continues my Jailbreak Your Mind series, which will form the basis of a self help book currently in the works. This follows on from the previous entries in the series: The problem of suffering, A mind at war, A revolutionary new understanding of experience and reality, The 3 Levels of Reality and the Walls of our Mental Prison and The experience equation. Together these articles form an extremely useful and practical resource and tool for understanding and overcoming psychological suffering, consistent with the insights of both modern psychology and the ancient wisdom of Vedanta. To fully benefit from the following piece, check out at least the previous two entries, which lead directly into it.

The 4 step process for dissolving your projections

This couldn’t be simpler, and if you can master this you may not even need to read the rest of this series. You’ll be set for life! Simple doesn’t always mean easy, however, for the mind can be incredibly stubborn and conservative in its tendencies.

Here’s how to dismantle and reconstruct our thoughts and interpretations of reality. Remember, by changing the thought (the story we’re telling ourselves about the experience), we automatically change the experience. Simple though this sounds, it really does work.

The four step process is as follows:

1. Identify the projection

2. Reduce the subjective to the objective

3. Take any appropriate physical action

4. Change the thought

The first two steps are the real key, and the final two are the tidy-up that may or may not be necessary afterward. Let’s take each step in turn and learn how to apply this understanding.

Identify the projection

First of all, we don’t need to dismantle every single thought, projection and interpretation. That would take forever. It’s the nature of the mind to take the neutral objective reality and assign it meaning and interpretation. This is part of the mechanism by which we navigate life. If your meanings and interpretations are working for you, then there’s no problem. If your subjective experience of reality is a rich and happy one, all is well and good and you have no need to change it.

The problems arise when our projections are limiting and/or negative in nature; which is to say that they are causing us to suffer. Painful emotions arise from thinking thoughts that are out of harmony with reality.

Recall our earlier differentiation of clean and dirty pain. Clean pain is unavoidable in life, but is self-correcting—it naturally resolves itself and we move on, returning to balance and psychological harmony. Dirty pain is when our thoughts keep us bound in a mental prison of our own inadvertent making.

They say that awareness is half the battle and that is very true. The first step to resolving this psychological suffering is to pinpoint it. Let your suffering lead the way. Hone in on an area of your life in which you are experiencing some kind of lack, dissatisfaction, anxiety or stress. Do that right now, come up with something that has been causing you some kind of pain and write it down somewhere.

I’m going to include some examples:

I’m depressed at my lack of success in life

My boss is a jerk

I’m single and feel no one will ever love me

I hate the way that I look

Reduce the subjective to the objective

The next step is to strip out all meaning, interpretation and value you have placed upon the situation and consider it as objectively as you can.

This is where the magic happens, and it happens in the blink of an eye. Recognise where you have been projecting or superimposing your unconscious likes and dislikes, and reduce the object, situation or circumstance to its own empirical status. The cake is no longer ‘delicious cake’, it is just ‘cake’.

What we’re doing here is seeing the situation objectively, free of the filter of the mental story we have created around it. Instead of “Sally is a nasty cow and she always has it in for me,” which is clearly a subjective interpretation, a mind-made story…we see that the reality of the situation, on an objective level, is simply “Sally said something that I didn’t like”.

This immediately strips the situation of the story we have crafted around it. The reality is always much simpler and easier to deal with than the story we’ve concocted about it. At the objective level Sally simply said something. At the subjective level, which has been the root of our suffering here, Sally has said something unacceptable and is a terrible person determined to make our lives a misery.

The stories we tell ourselves can be immensely horrific. We craft bleak and extremely immersive tales of woe. It’s most likely not just Sally we have a problem with, but perhaps all women, or all men, or all human beings. Or perhaps the main problem we have is with ourselves. We may continually tell ourselves that we are a pathetic loser, a lowly little worm incapable of achieving anything in life. A significant number of people lose themselves in such terrible mental stories, getting sucked into horrific subjective worlds quite divorced from the value-neutral objective world. These mental prisons tend to self-perpetuate; the more we tell ourselves the same old stories, the stronger the thought-based prison bars become. All the while we’re spiralling further and further from the simplicity of vyavaharika, the empirical reality. Stripping the projection or story from a situation, reducing the subjective to the objective, immediately frees us from our mind-made prisons. We start to see things as they actually are and only then does reality become much easier to deal with.

This may pose a challenge if we have a lot of emotional energy invested in our projections. We may have spent so much time getting worked up about a certain predicament that it can be hard to set aside the psychological projection and strip out all meaning we have invested it with. Recall that objective reality is in itself value neutral—it only has the value that we assign it. We need to recognise where we have been adding or subtracting value or meaning to the situation—and consciously see it as it is rather than as we think it is.

The situation that has been causing us so much suffering can and will be interpreted differently by other people. What may have been the source of much consternation will simply be a non-issue for someone else. Which is, of course, a sure sign that projections are at work.

For a moment, let’s adopt the attitude of Star Trek’s Mr Spock.

Set aside your emotional response and be dispassionate and logical in your analysis of the situation. Label your original issue under ‘subjective reality’ and then analyse it from the level of ‘objective reality’.

Here are our examples:

Subjective Reality: I’m depressed at my lack of success in life
Objective Reality: My life hasn’t matched up to my idea of what I think it should be

Subjective Reality: My boss is a jerk
Objective Reality: My boss has been making unreasonable demands

Subjective Reality: I’m single and feel no one will ever love me
Objective Reality: I am single and would like to be in a relationship

Subjective Reality: I hate the way that I look
Objective Reality: I have been making judgements about my body

You might already notice that, by stepping out of the subjective level and coming back down to the empirical level, things are already simpler, more manageable and the emotional sting is greatly diminished—if not gone altogether. How did the weary traveller in our earlier story get rid of the snake that had scared him witless? He simply realised that it wasn’t a snake at all. Objectively, it was only ever a piece of rope. With this knowledge, the snake vanished in an instant!

Reality is always far simpler than the stories we weave about it in our mind. Even if you feel that life is complex and you always have a hundred and one things to do, you only ever have one thing to do—and that’s the task immediately in front of you. Whether you’re raising kids or running a multi-national corporation, in spite of the seeming complexity of life, the present moment is always reasonably simple. Wherever you are, there you are, and whatever you are doing is all you that need to be doing. When I start to think about the immensity of writing a book and all the blood, sweat and tears that go with it, I realise that I’ve got lost in the subjective realm of thought. I then pull myself back to the objective present moment, in which I am simply sitting in a chair, typing on my computer, one key at a time. Anything more than that is veering into the realm of story.

Any time you are starting to feel stressed or overwhelmed it’s a sure sign that you need to burst the thought bubble and come back to objective reality. This is the essence of Zen, which emphasises the art of simply being where you are and putting your full attention on that. It frees up an immense amount of energy and dissolves stress and psychological tension like nothing else.

Reducing the subjective to the objective immediately bursts our mind bubble. Our projections, definitions, superimpositions and filtering thoughts dissipate and we see things as they are, as opposed to how we think they are. Things become so much easier to deal with that way! Life is infinitely easier when we let go of our stories and simply deal with what’s in front of us. It’s our stories that keep our mind prisoner and the moment we let go of those stories is the moment we turn the key and open the door to freedom.

When we are able to view a situation objectively, we realise one of two things. Firstly, we may see that the situation in question wasn’t actually a problem at all, we were just making it into a problem by perceiving it as such. Or we may realise that there is still a problem that needs dealt with, and, free of our mental catastrophising, we now feel better equipped to deal with it.

The important thing here is to question whether the issue is actually a problem at all. If it’s just a problem because of the way I’ve been choosing to look at it, then when I change the way I look at it, it ceases to be a problem (see the next step). The problem was one of subjectivity, and by reducing the subjective to the objective, I have instantly dissolved the problem. Way to go! The only thing I then need do is be sure that my old thinking patterns don’t drag me back into the mud again.

Or perhaps it is a genuine, physical problem and I need to take some action to correct it. Making this distinction enables me to move onto the next step.

(To be continued)

The Experience Equation

May 17, 2015.Reading time 6 minutes.

Following directly on from my last post, The 3 Levels of Reality and the Walls of our Mental Prison.

Our projections become our ‘reality’. This is caused by mistaking our thoughts for reality. These thoughts are the building block of our constructed reality and form the walls of our mental prison. What tends to cement these walls in place is a simple law: emotion follows thought. When we think painful, negative thoughts, we automatically generate painful, negative emotions. It’s basic cause and effect.

Try it right now. Take a moment to think about something terrible. Imagine something awful happening, or tell yourself that you are a big, fat, ugly loser. Hold that thought for a moment and then see how you feel in your body. What’s your visceral response to that thought? Does your body feel good, or does it feel tight, constricted and uncomfortable? Does the thought generate a positive, happy feeling or emotion, or does it make you feel unhappy, sad or anxious?

Now, brush that off and hold a positive thought in your mind. Imagine something wonderful happening to yourself or your loved ones, and tell yourself that you are a beautiful, talented, deserving and wonderful person. Hold that picture in your mind. Now check in with your body and notice how your body responds to these positive thoughts? Can you feel a sense of loosening and relaxing? Do you feel a warm tingle, or a sense of lightness and ease? Do these thoughts generate happier and more liberating emotions and feelings?

I’m willing to bet that this demonstrates to you the incredible power of thought in creating our emotional and feeling states.

The basic equation of experience is:

Consciousness + thought = experience

Consciousness is a given. Without consciousness, which I’m here defining as the baseline awareness that is forever with us–there is nothing. Consciousness is quite obviously the foundation of our experience, the light by which everything is known to us. While pure consciousness is immutable and unchanging, clearly something is always changing because our experience is never the same from moment to moment. What changes then, is thought.

If you’re still not quite on board with this, then recall our earlier analysis of experience. We don’t, and can’t, experience anything outside of us; outside of consciousness. Everything that we experience is experienced in our own consciousness, for consciousness is the medium by which we perceive and experience, in the same way that you can’t take photographs without film in the camera (in the pre-digital age anyway!).

Our senses relay stimulus, which creates representational images in our mind; thoughts that correspond with the sensory input. Everything that we experience is a thought in our mind. It sure doesn’t feel like that, I know, but there’s no getting around it. The wall I’m staring at across the room is a wall-thought; a representation of wall created in my mind.

To further highlight the interrelationship of thought and experience, consider the fact that everyone experiences things differently. A dozen people can be sitting in the same room, doing the same thing, but each of them are going to have a different experience because each are essentially experiencing their thoughts. The objective is so easily obscured by the subjective and we all tend to buy into what are essentially mind-generated projections.

Back to the cake example—I am given cake, which I then eat. The moment I cast judgement about the cake, whether I deem it good or bad, delicious or the most disgusting baked good I’ve ever come across, I am projecting. My likes and dislikes, which are unconscious, are creating a projection about the cake, a superimposition which I then believe is real. Reality for me becomes “this cake is delicious” or “this cake is disgusting”.

New thought equals new experience

If it’s our thoughts about reality that are actually driving our experience, this implies that in order to change our experience, the quickest and most surefire way to do that is to change our thoughts. A new thought equals a new experience. Thoughts really are that powerful. A single thought can actually change the course of an entire life.

Unfortunately it’s an exhausting and labouring process having to monitor, remove or change every thought that enters our mind. That’s why the positive thinking approach, while correct on one level, isn’t offering a particularly viable solution. Trying to remove or change every thought is like trying to empty the ocean of water or change the composition of h2o. Not only is it an impossible and fruitless task, it’s an unnecessary one. There’s a far more effective way of dealing with our thoughts and projections. And that’s what I’m going to share with you next…

The 3 Levels of Reality and the Walls of Our Mental Prison

May 14, 2015.Reading time 12 minutes.

This is a continuation of my Jailbreak Your Mind series, which will form the basis of a self help book currently in the works! This follows on from the previous articles The problem of suffering, A mind at war and A revolutionary new understanding of experience and reality

We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.

Anais Nin

The snake and the rope

Many years ago, so the story goes, a wandering monk arrived at a small village. Evening was creeping in and, and thirsty from his long journey, the traveller was relieved to find an old well at the edge of the village. But as he approached, eager to quench his thirst, he caught sight of a large snake sitting by the side of the well. Although it was getting dark, in the twilight he could clearly see its coiled body and upraised head. The snake, motionless, was clearly ready to strike. The monk was overcome by terror and instinctively froze on the spot. His stomach seized up in dread and he could feel beads of sweat dripping down his forehead. What was he going to do? From what he could see it was clearly one of the largest, most venomous snakes. Any sudden movement and the snake would get him.
Several long, agonising moments passed before an old man stumbled through the darkness toward the well, carrying a lantern. “What’s wrong?” he called to the monk, sensing his anxiety.

“Don’t come any closer,” the monk replied, his voice trembling. “There’s a snake!”

“Where?” the man asked. “I don’t see any snake.”

“Right there, beside the well.”

The old man took another step closer and let out a chuckle. “That’s no snake,” he said.

rope-snake The monk squinted. Now the old man’s lamp was illuminating the dark, he could see that he was indeed correct. What had presumed was a snake was in fact a rope coiled around a bucket at the side of the well, the tip of the rope sticking up like the head of a snake.

This ancient Vedanta story is a metaphor for the number one problem we face in life; specifically that we aren’t seeing things as they really are. We live our lives in a twilight state, for appearances can be and are deceptive, complexity abounds, and our understanding, knowledge and perception are always limited. It’s all too easy to mistake a rope for a snake and we do this all the time.

This process is called projection or superimposition. The mind interprets reality a certain way based upon sensory input. This then becomes our reality. We slip from objective reality and inhabit a world of subjective reality. While the snake has absolutely no reality at all and is simply a misapprehension created by the mind, it is completely real to us. We fully inhabit that subjective reality, experiencing all the anxiety, distress and fear that comes with it. The snake is very much real to us until knowledge (the light of the lamp) reveals to us our error. When that happens, our subjective reality collapses in an instant. Our projection vanishes, the bubble we were inhabiting bursts and we come back to objective reality.

Which level of reality are you inhabiting?

We touched upon this in the last chapter, but it’s so important I’m going to come back to it again. Vedanta speaks of three ‘levels’ of reality.

PARAMARTHIKA — The absolute reality, the ground of existence

VYVAVAHARIKA — Empirical, objective reality; the (shared) world of objects and forms

PRATIBHASIKA — Subjective reality; the (personal) psychological world we inhabit

The first level of reality, which we haven’t touched upon so far, is called paramarthika, or the absolute reality. This is the one, unchanging factor that underlies all changing phenomena; that which allows everything to exist; the ground of reality. One of the greatest Western philosophers, Immanuel Kant, described it as the noumenon at the root of all phenomena. The noumenal contains and provides the context of the intelligible world and all its contents, yet is beyond the mind’s ability to perceive, penetrate and know. It can only be inferred by examining the nature of experience. In terms of who we are, this is the very ground of our being, the root of pure awareness; the subject.

The next level is called vyavaharika (don’t worry about the long Sanskrit names, I’m not going to test you on those!). Vyavaharika is the empirical or objective reality; the world of shapes, forms and objects. This is the tangible world we all inhabit and provides shared experience. It is, in and of itself, value neutral. Although there is pleasure and pain, light and dark, there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ until the mind assigns value to discrete experience. In our story, vyavaharika was the man approaching a well at night and encountering a bucket and rope.

The third and final level is called pratibhasika, which means subjective reality. This includes our dreams, imagination and also the level of superimposition and projection, where we filter our experience of reality and very often see what isn’t there. It’s on this level that we distort reality, either through the screen of our conditioning, likes and dislikes, beliefs or assumptions, or by our ignorance and lack of knowledge.

In the story, the travelling monk slipped into this subjective level of reality by assuming that what he saw was a vicious snake. The suffering and anxiety it caused him was very much real, but it was based on an illusion. There was never a snake there. Therefore the only way out of this problem was to break the illusion and end his ignorance. This can only be done by knowledge, by reducing the subjective back to the objective and seeing what is really there as opposed to what we think is there. The monk overcame his fear and distress by shattering the projections his mind had made.

It’s so easy to slip from objective reality, from vyavharika, into subjective, pratibhasika. It’s quite natural, too. Let’s say I’ve made a cake and I place it on the table. The reality is: there’s a cake on the table. Then I invite two friends to have a slice. They’re both eating the same cake, but one of them likes it and the other doesn’t. Whether they say “it’s a lovely cake” or “it’s horrible”, both have moved into subjective reality. One cake, yet two different realities for two different people. Then we step outdoors and the sun is shining. My first friend, who is clearly the more agreeable of the two declares that “it’s a lovely day”. My other friend shakes his head and says “it’s too hot”. Again, there’s one objective reality, yet it’s splintered into two subjective parallel realities.

We’re forever flitting between the objective and subjective levels of reality. We do it so subtly and imperceptibly, at the drop of a hat. Without even having to think about it, the cake becomes ‘yummy’ or ‘yucky’ and the weather becomes ‘lovely’ to ‘too hot’. It’s really not the cake or the weather that we’re experiencing, it’s our thoughts about them that we’re experiencing.

The nature of thought and experience

This in itself isn’t a great problem. We all have our own likes, dislikes and conditioned responses, so the way that I might interpret a certain experience or situation will be different from the way that you interpret it. You say tomayto, I say tomato.

The problem is when our thoughts, interpretations and projections cause us to suffer. This happens when we interpret reality in painful, self-limiting, dysfunctional and destructive ways. When we have a limiting self image and think of ourselves as being worthless and inadequate little worms, or have a distorted view of the world and the nature reality, we suffer immensely.

Remember, these are just own own personal, subjective interpretations. It’s almost certainly a fact that such notions are not shared by everyone else, so they do not belong to the objective world, which is defined as empirical reality. We’re no longer in touch with reality. We’re lost in the realms of pratibhasika, the subjective, illusory reality—and we don’t even know it. As far as we’re concerned, that rope is a snake, that cake is horrible and the weather is too hot. Even worse, we’re maybe certain that we are unworthy, inadequate little losers, that our significant others are jerks and the world is a terrible place to be.

Next up: The experience equation!

A Revolutionary New Understanding of Experience and Reality

April 17, 2015.Reading time 19 minutes.

In the last post in this series, I explored the fundamental conflict at the heart of the human psyche. We’re at war! A war between who we are, who we think we are and who we are choosing to be in daily life. The cost of war is always immense, and the suffering can blight an entire lifetime. We become prisoners of our own mind, thoughts and concepts about ourselves.

The answer, as I suggested, is to lay down our arms, hold up the flag of surrender and learn to create a harmonious synergy between the the three aspects of the human ego: the essential self, the imagined self and the social self. I’ll be exploring this in greater detail later on; the art of living an authentic life that is in alignment with who we really are. As Socrates said:

“Give me the beauty of the inward soul: may the outward and the inward man be at one.”

A life without authenticity, without living in harmony with one’s own nature, is never going to be a particularly happy one. It took me a number of years to realise that it’s simply not possible to find lasting happiness when there’s a disparity at the core of our psyche: a gulf between who we are and who we are choosing to be in daily life.

Addressing this imbalance does takes a little time and work. It rarely happens at the click of our fingers, as nice as that would be. Before we can move forward, it’s important to recognise how the mind keeps us in bondage. That is the key to everything. Our entire experience of reality is filtered and distorted by the mind. The only way to be free is to understand this and learn how to make our mind work for and not against us.

What follows is an inquiry into the nature of experience. This may be the most important section of this series. Once you truly understand what I’m about to tell you, your life will never be the same again.

There is a way out of suffering and the good news is you don’t need to spend thousands on therapy, workshops, seminars, books and training. The mind is liberated by knowledge—knowledge of reality and how the mind works. If knowledge is power, then self-knowledge is liberation. All you need to do is read on with an open mind and be willing to reflect on what I’m about to share.

Out of touch with reality

It was a bright Spring day and I decided it was time to take the dogs for a walk. So I put on my coat, leashed them up and set off. Although I was gone for about half an hour, before I knew it I was back at the door. I suddenly realised that I’d barely experienced the walk at all!

If you’d asked me to describe in any great detail where I’d gone, what the weather was like, and what I’d seen, I’d only have been able to give the most cursory of responses. You see, I hadn’t been walking the dogs at all—I’d been sleepwalking the dogs. I was completely lost in thought the whole time. I was walking around on autopilot, tuning out virtually all sensory stimuli in order to indulge whatever was going on in my mind. I was barely interfacing with my environment at all.

I realised two things that day. Firstly, that this is not a particularly satisfying way to live. And secondly, that human beings actually experience reality through a kind of bubble: an invisible mind-made bubble comprised of thoughts, words, concepts, memories and fantasies.

We tend to assume that we experience just a single, objective reality, but that is not the case. There are actually two levels of reality. Well, actually there are three, but I will go into that another time, as I want to keep this as simple as possible.

The first is the concrete objective reality. This is a shared reality, comprising where we are physically and what’s going on around us. The second is an abstract subjective reality. Made entirely of thought, this is a mind-based and therefore private level of reality. On my aforementioned walk, the latter was every bit as real to me as the first, and virtually all my cognitive energy was being channeled into it.

Even when the mind is comparatively quieter and we aren’t as lost in the ceaseless chatter of our inner monologue, there’s still no escaping the fact that this mind-bubble comes between us and a clear, direct, fresh experience of life. We’re asleep at the wheel, simultaneously inhabiting objective reality but so often lost in a superimposed, dream-like reality made entirely of thought. Pretty far out, huh?

This, by the way, is my cartoon depiction of the bubbles we live in…

So what happens when our every experience is filtered by our mind-bubble? Basically, we no longer have authentic encounters with life, the world and other people. We no longer see and relate to what’s out there—instead we see and relate to our labels, concepts and judgements of what we think is out there. The latter is a level of complete projection and superimposition. We superimpose our thoughts and interpretations onto reality and fail to realise that in so doing we have coloured or distorted reality!

This is a mainly unconscious process and is considered normal for most people. We plod through life, lost in thought and out of touch with the world around us. You might even go so far as to say that every human being is engaged in a mind-created virtual reality. This virtual reality is always distorted to a greater or lesser extent and is often chock full of manufactured threats. We’re literally having bad trips and seeing all manner of horrors, many of which are simply imagined. Our inner world of course determines our behavioural responses and this explains why human behaviour is often incredibly warped and insane.

Where do we experience things?

Let’s take this even deeper. Bear with me—you will be duly rewarded, I promise. This is a radical understanding that, properly understood, is guaranteed to forever change the way you look at life.

As with most cool things in life, it starts with an interesting question. Where do we experience things? Do we experience things outside of us, or inside of us?

It’s natural to assume that we look through our eyes much the same way as we look out of a window, and that we experience reality out there. This is called ‘naive realism’. Here’s another Rory cartoon to illustrate:

“Naive realism”: how we think perception and experience happens

But it’s actually impossible to experience anything out there. If I look at a tree, it might seem that I’m experiencing the tree over there. But I’m actually experiencing it in my mind. Data is being relayed by my senses and processed by my mind, which then creates an internal representation of a tree. What I’m experiencing is a tree thought!

Our entire experience of reality is simply a representation of reality created by our mind. We’re not experiencing a world of things out there, what we’re actually experiencing is a world of thoughts, in here.

The mind is the instrument by which we perceive objects; the mirror that reflects objective reality. We cannot perceive anything outside of our mind. No mind, no experience. So everything that we perceive and experience in life, even though it may appear to be outside of us, is actually perceived and experienced in our mind.

"Representational realism": how perception and experience actually happens — “Representational realism”: how perception and experience actually happens

The implications of this are pretty staggering! If you’re still reading this, you deserve a muffin.

Twice removed from reality

This obviously turns a few things on their head. The general assumption is that we simply experience things. When we actually stop to analyse the nature of experience, we come to realise that, as I said above, it’s not the things themselves that we experience, it’s our internal representation of those things.

And because of the mental overlay that filters our interpretation of experience, we rarely have an accurate, unbiased interpretation of experience. We lose touch with objective reality and get stuck in our own little subjective reality.

New stimulus is constantly coming in through the senses, creating new internal representations of reality. And the mind is constantly filtering those representations. Attempting to make sense of the input and discern a narrative pattern, the mind is constantly churning out thoughts and stories, based upon past conditioning, experiences and memories, beliefs and opinions, likes and dislikes and numerous other factors.

So not only is our perception of reality taking place within the mind, but it’s also filtered and interpreted by the mind. Our experience of reality is actually twice removed from reality!

Two levels of reality

One of the conclusions we can draw from this analysis is that it can be very difficult to separate the objective (what is) from the subjective (what we think is). We naturally assume that what we are experiencing is objective, but it’s almost always subjective.

It’s on the subjective level where the problems lie. The bubble, as I call it, gets in the way: the mental repository of all kinds of faulty scripts and coding; self-sabotaging errors that colour everything we experience; everything that we think and do. Our mental filter gets distorted and this in turn generates a painful experience of reality.

The understanding that there are two levels of reality is an important one. In fact, it is the key to liberating your mind.

To summarise again, the levels of reality are:

The objective: the ‘real world’; the world of tangible ‘things’, namely objects and experiences. The reality we seemingly experience out there and which is more or less the same for everyone.

The subjective: the ‘inner world’; the filtered reality we experience as shaped by our thoughts, experiences and conditioning.

The problems arise when we confuse the two through a process of superimposition—and this happens all the time! Mistaking our interpretation of experience as being concrete reality is a surefire recipe for disaster and is in fact the root of just about all human conflict in the world. We’re not actually seeing things as they are. We’re instead trapped in our bubble; and the bubble can be a pretty miserable place to be!

Perhaps you can see how this creates all kinds of chaos in human interaction. Let’s say you come into the room and start talking to me. Here’s what will inevitably happen. My mind will filter and interpret what you are saying in line with what I already think and believe. It’ll be coloured by my general mood and any past experiences I may have had with you, be they good or bad. Accordingly, it won’t really be you or what you’re saying that I’ll be experiencing—it’ll be my own interpretations of you and what you’re saying.

Objective reality is always value neutral and it’s usually very simple. You entered the room and started talking; nothing more, nothing less. But I’ve lost touch with objective reality. I’m in my subjective reality. As far as I’ve concerned you’ve interrupted me when I’m busy, are talking crap and are a bit of a jerk. I see that as the reality of the situation. Only it isn’t reality at all.

Events in themselves are neutral. It’s our mind that assigns meaning and value to experience, either positive or negative. So my thoughts have distorted reality and caused suffering for me—and this will probably make me act in a certain way that causes offence or suffering for you too. Human relationships are so complex because each interaction involves not two people, but four. There’s not only you and I, but there’s your mental image of who you think I am and my mental image of who you think you are. These are almost like mental avatars, and it’s those avatars that are really driving relationships!

Experience is determined by thought

Let’s pull this all together. We don’t perceive anything outside of our mind; that’s simply not possible, for the mind is our instrument of perception. What we perceive are actually internal representations in our mind. Furthermore, we rarely experience those representations objectively. We perceive things as we think they are, for every experience is processed through the filter of our thoughts, beliefs, likes, dislikes and conditioning. Reality is value neutral, but the mind assigns value, either positive or negative. As Shakespeare wrote:

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The mind’s job is to not only process sensory stimuli, but to attempt to make sense of it and fit it into some kind of narrative structure. It does this by creating stories around the things we experience. We relate to life through a veritable library of mental stories. When then tend to get stuck in these stories, which, through the process of projection and superimposition, we mistake as being reality. In actual fact, we’re completely out of touch with reality and are inhabiting a kind of virtual reality. If our thoughts and interpretations are suitably negative and self-limiting, this virtual reality can be our own living hell.

So what can we do about this? How do we deal with the bubble that’s filtering and distorting our reality? How do we stop ourselves getting sucked into subjective alternate realities and the suffering that comes along with them? We do that by bursting the bubble! We apply knowledge about the nature of mind and reality. Quite simply, we learn to reduce the subjective to the objective. Once we’ve got a clear grasp on how to do that, we’re pretty much home free and that is what I will be exploring in the next essay.

The Problem of Suffering

March 30, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

This is the first in a series of articles that will form the basis of a book to be published later in the year. It is about Jailbreaking the mind — everything I’ve ever learned about understanding the mind, overcoming psychological suffering and being free!

The wound is the place where the Light enters you – Rumi

No one escapes suffering in life. It’s simply not possible. It’s an unavoidable byproduct of being alive, and one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. The very act of birth is suffering, and sooner or later every human being will grow to experience pain in many forms, from the stress of modern life, relationship difficulties, bereavements and eventually sickness, infirmity and death. Alas, it’s all part and parcel of being human.

While there’s no getting around that fact, there are ways to transcend it, to deal with the difficulties we face and to rise up from the ashes–stronger, wiser and more powerful, resilient and happier than before. Throughout history, attempts have been made to understand and offer solutions to this core human predicament. This has been the province of philosophers and theists for thousands of years, and in recent times modern psychologists too.

There’s a wealth of information, knowledge and support out there. But it’s still up to each individual to find, understand and apply that knowledge, and to dig the way out of the dungeon of our own mind, bit by bit. And that’s where many of us have been going wrong. We simply haven’t been trained to do so; to understand how the mind works, how thought generates emotion and how to keep it all in check.

Two types of suffering

There are two basic types of suffering. Understanding this is an important key to freedom. The first is the natural suffering that is an inevitable part of life and the second is the unnatural, mind-made suffering that is generated by our thoughts, beliefs and interpretations of life. Based on terms by psychologist Steven Hayes, I talk about this as ‘clean pain’ and ‘dirty pain’. The first is experienced by all living beings and includes experiences such as loss, sickness, old age and death. Although often very painful, a person with a healthy psychology is able to deal with the experience and move on from it in a reasonable space of time.

Dirty pain however is unique to human beings and is an entirely mind-generated suffering. Whereas clean pain generally resolves by itself, dirty pain can be a never-ending nightmare. It has the power to consume us and cause a lifetime of aguish and suffering.

Although it may have been triggered by an external experience, dirty pain is generated and sustained entirely by thought. It is subjective and interpretative rather than objective. It stems from the mind and can only be corrected on the level of the mind. It manifests in a number of different ways, including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, anger, resentment and many other neuroses.

Modern society is failing us

The way human suffering is dealt with in modern society is wholly inadequate. While we have developed some excellent tools and therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, generally when someone goes to their doctor with depression, anxiety, or any other mental health issue, they are given drugs that may at best numb the feelings, but will do nothing to tackle the root cause.

Recent studies have actually shown that antidepressants are barely any more effective than placebos, which has obviously caused great concern in the medical community—although it certainly hasn’t stopped widespread prescription of what might as well be sugar pills (and which would certainly have fewer side-effects).

In a stroke of genius, the pharmaceutical industry managed to propagate the chemical imbalance theory. This is the notion that depression and other mental/emotional issues are a biological disease that could only be cured by taking whatever medication they have to offer. But as Dr Ronald Pies, editor of The Psychiatric Times stated, “in truth the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists”.

While many people feel notion that depression is a disease notion takes the social stigma out of what is already a deeply painful and very real condition, it played right into the hands of the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry and is also entirely disempowering. Brain chemistry is not something that is set in stone. It’s constantly changing, moment by moment. Every thought that we think actually changes the chemistry of the brain! So the idea that we need drugs to do that is laughable. Change your patterns of thinking and you literally change your brain.

There is a way out

There is a way out of depression and other forms of mental and emotional suffering— and I speak from experience. In our culture we like things to be easy and swift, and we’re trained to expect instant gratification, so simply popping a pill every morning obviously has great appeal. But it’s certainly not an answer to the problem; at the very best it might help us ignore the underlying issue.

The way out of psychological suffering is actually pretty simple. It’s based on knowledge—knowledge of what drives the mind and our entire experience of life. But it does require work and consistent effort. It requires getting down into the trenches and having the courage to question all kinds of deeply-held thoughts, beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and about life. When any mechanical apparatus ceases to function the way it should, what do we do? We don’t try to mask the problem or patch it up in the vain hope it will get better. We have to actually take it apart and develop an understanding of how it works and how to fix it.

The tendency of the mind is to project the root of our problems onto external factors, but the truth is the large part of human suffering is generated by the mind. We’re in a prison of our own mind’s making. The mind spins a subjective reality that sucks us in, causing an incredible amount of needless pain and suffering, not just for ourselves but also others.

Stay tuned over the next few months for what will essentially be a crash course in understanding how the mind works, how it creates our suffering, and how to break free of it.

An Internal Civil War (advice for dealing with emotional stress)

May 26, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

Stop taking those thoughts and feelings so seriously... (Image: Stockvault) — Stop taking those thoughts and feelings so seriously… (Image: Stockvault)

One of the best bits of advice I was ever given was this:

When you’re feeling low emotionally, don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

When our state of consciousness has dipped, our thinking is not clear; it becomes cloudy and distorted. We then tend to see the world as an unequivocally terrible place and we focus on the very worst in ourselves and in others. Whereas, when we feel lighter, freer and happier emotionally, our outlook and our view of the world/ourselves/others is radically different. It’s the very same world we’re inhabiting, and our situation and circumstances and those around us may be exactly the same…but we can see things in a far clearer, more balanced way.

Which suggests it’s not really the world that we actually experience — it’s our thinking that we experience. If we can ride out the storm and just take it easy until things balance out, then our minds will naturally be clearer, freer and more capable of making objective discernments and decisions.

I know it’s so easy to let our emotional state cripple us. I really love the Bhagavad Gita. It starts with Arjuna throwing his hands in the air as he’s about to go into battle and saying “to hell with this! I quit! I give up! I’m not gonna do this.” By his own admission his mind is “a mess” and he can’t see anything clearly anymore.

What does Krishna tell him? Basically this: “hey, you’re letting your emotions override your judgement and blind you to your duty, to your responsibilities and to your purpose. You’re wallowing in self-pity and this is unbecoming of the great soul that you are! Get up and do what you gotta do! Fight!”

This is maybe not the advice we want to hear but sometimes we need a splash of cold water in the face. The war of the Gita is a metaphor for the war we face every single day; the war being waged in our own minds and psyche. It’s the war between doing what we’re meant to do — following our dharma and pandering to the petty little likes and dislikes, desires and fears of the mind. I often think of it as the self-created disparity between who we are and who we choose to be in our daily lives.

It’s tremendously stressful and what we’re actually experiencing is an internal civil war. We’re pulled in different directions; our heart leading us in one direction and our unconscious conditioning leading us in the opposite direction. The result is confusion, pain and suffering and often an almost crippling sense of anxiety or depression. Modern society doesn’t give us any signposts with regard to our dharma…it’s too messed up by capitalism, materialism, greed and consumerism. In fact modern society is a large part of the problem, so we have to look beyond it…

In the next post I will reflect a bit more on the nature of the the problem and the age-old conflict of me vs life.

The Only Thing You Ever Need To Know About Self Esteem

March 18, 2014.Reading time 11 minutes.

The issue of self esteem is something that’s unique to human beings. It’s not something that animals or plants have to bother about because they’ve already got it sussed! In fact they have a great deal to teach us about what is, for many people, something of a thorny issue. I kind of wish I’d learned the truth about self esteem and self worth when I was growing up. It might have made those adolescent years a heck of a lot easier. Because what I’m going to tell you about self esteem is profoundly simple, yet once grasped can be nothing less than life-changing.

Self esteem is defined as our overall measure of self-worth and the notion we have of our inherent value. Our self esteem affects how we feel about ourselves and drives our behaviour and outlook on life at a fundamental level.

Perhaps because our society is driven by competition, attainment and acquisition, most of us are raised to believe, either consciously or unconsciously that our self esteem is conditional and is determined by external factors. In other words, we believe that in order to legitimately feel good about ourselves (or even just feel OK about ourselves), we have to be a certain way.

We tell ourselves our self esteem wouldn’t a problem if we were just a little bit taller, better looking, more skilled or talented at certain things, if we had more friends or more money, or got better grades in school or college or if he had a loving partner or the perfect gym bod. If our bodies, minds and life circumstances don’t measure up to this conceptual idea we have of adequacy, then we feel we feel inadequate and lacking. This is simply because we’ve tied our sense of self esteem and self worth to external conditions, many of which we have no control over. Low self esteem can adversely affect every area of our lives, from relationships and social situations to education and career.

The root of this problem is clearly the thinking mind. It’s based on a mistaken assumption: that our self esteem is conditional and depends on innumerable outside factors.

But what if our self esteem was innate and unconditional? What if there was nothing we had to do, become or prove in order to know that we are worthy, valuable and innately good? What if nothing that has ever happened to us, or ever will happen to us, can in any way diminish our innate worth?

I could take a gold coin, scratch it, burn it, cover it in soil and spit on it….and yet nothing I did to it would in any way diminish its value. It has innate value because its nature is gold. It’s impossible to remove ‘goldness’ from the gold. And, you know what? We are gold, through and through!

We are good enough by virtue of what we are: amazing expressions of pure consciousness functioning through a unique body/mind/intellect. The light that animates us, pure awareness, is the most precious thing in the world and it can be neither added to nor subtracted from in any way. We have nothing to add to ourselves and nothing to prove in order to have worth. Our self worth is innate and inalienable. It’s our birthright and the only thing that can take it away from us are the unquestioned thoughts in our own minds. The capacity human beings have to think, analyse and differentiate is a great blessing, unique to our species, but it can sometimes be a great curse as well.

I’ve always had a great love of animals (check this post). Animals are totally themselves, totally authentic, and pure. Animals are perfect exactly the way they are, the way they’ve been programmed to be, and they have no issue with that. Imagine how absurd it would be if a puppy developed low self esteem because it didn’t think it was big enough yet, or it felt it was the wrong colour, or its tail was the wrong shape. Or if a cow felt inferior because it didn’t feel its markings matched up to the other cows in the field. Or if a little chihuahua had low self esteem because it lived next door to a great dane. Clearly that would be ridiculous. Yet that’s what we humans are doing all the time — and it’s no less ridiculous!

We are the way we are. We didn’t create our bodies, we didn’t choose the circumstances around us or the limitations we have to contend with every day. We are where we are and we are who we are, and beneath all the million and one things we might judge and condemn and want to change, there’s an innate perfection at the core of our being: the clear light of awareness, the Self that animates our being; the light in which all phenomena arises and subsides, quite of its own accord. How can our self esteem and self worth not be innate? How can it depend on outer achievements and notions of success and failure? Because regardless of whatever we might strive to attain and acquire in life, we’re ultimately going to lose it all. A newborn baby hasn’t achieved a single damn thing in life; it can’t even speak or feed itself, and yet no one would claim that baby had no worth. It’s worth is there by virtue of its existence, its being, its shining consciousness.

In reality there should be no such thing has low self esteem or high self esteem. Our sense of self esteem and self worth ought to be fixed and immutable, in the same way as an animal’s is. Our worth and value is much like the worth and value of that gold coin: no matter what we might do, what we might gain or lose, nothing affects our value in any way. A homeless man on the street ought to have the same measure of self worth as the president of a country. They both have very different circumstances; one would be deemed highly successful and important by society’s standards and the other a nobody or loser, but beyond those conceptual, mind-made judgements, both have the same level of worth, importance and innate beauty. We all do. And no one can take it away from us, regardless of what they might think about us or say or do. (I’m aware some people might argue that in the case of a homeless person, for example, low self esteem might be necessary to compel them to change their circumstances. We don’t need low self esteem to do that — in fact low self esteem would be a hindrance more than anything. If we are suffering, we can take steps to alleviate that suffering without telling ourself that our circumstances and experiences diminish us in some way. We transcend all that happens to us.)

As I write this, I’m watching some sparrows hopping about outside. None of them think they are any better or worse than any of the others! They just are as they are. They’re each different, and yet not different, and each perfect exactly as they are. Human beings are no different. We just tend to think we are…and therein lies both the problem and the solution.

How much easier would life be if we truly realised that no matter what life throws our way, and no matter what other people think or how they treat us, nothing can diminish our innate worth and value. It’s simply non-negotiable! How freeing is that? It releases us from the immense pressure and burden of trying to be good enough, trying to prove that we matter and are valuable and worthy of love and acceptance. We don’t have to do anything to be worthy of love and acceptance (including, and perhaps most importantly, our own). We already are, and we always will be.

Changing old psychological scripts

April 23, 2013.Reading time 7 minutes.

Our minds are basically full of scripts, embedded sets of instructions and programming rather like the scripts used in computer programming. Most of our problems in life stem from faulty scripts; the coding that’s running our conscious and unconscious minds. If there’s a misprint at the coding level, the entire output of our mind will be skewed and this will affect just about every aspect of our experience of reality.

One of the key things I’ve learned is that it’s really not life that we experience, it’s our thoughts that we experience. The exception might be if you’re a zen monk, in which case you’re more likely to have an intimate and direct experience of reality as it is, without being absorbed by the mental overlay the rest of us place over it. This mental overlay is created by our thoughts, our beliefs, our interpretations, habitual responses, conditioning and any number of psychoses and neuroses that are lurking in the darkened cellar of our unconscious. In vedanta the unconscious is referred to as the ‘causal body’ and the habitual thoughts, beliefs and mental compulsions that are spewed out from the causal level are called ‘vasanas’, which are kind of like grooves in consciousness causing ingrained tendencies of mind, thought and behaviour. People with very heavy vasana loads don’t actually have very much free will: their minds are basically being run for them rather than by them. Extreme examples are addicts or people with enormous compulsions. The more we repeat certain actions or indulge certain thoughts, the more it strengthens the vasana, and the more robotic and predetermined our thoughts and behaviour are.

Yet if we have the ability to become conscious (which is to say aware) of these vasanas and pre-encoded scripts, we are able to choose whether we wish to be victim to them and keep playing out the same old programming, or whether we wish to change them. We immediately gain a measure of free will we didn’t have before.

The mistake we tend to make is trying to fix our problems on the wrong level. We try to change things on the external level; rearranging the circumstances of our life, trying to get life to match up with our personal likes, dislikes and desires — which frankly is a recipe for a lifetime of frustration, because life is not set up that way. It doesn’t care about our likes or dislikes, or what we want; it’s a program itself, and it works according to its own laws and an infinite and inextricably interconnected set of factors far outwith our control. The key is to get to the root of our problem on the causal level; which is the say, the level of the cause. And it invariably has to do with the scripts we’re running in our head. Faulty script = faulty perception, faulty thoughts, faulty beliefs, faulty output.

Life works from the inside out, not the outside in. Think about it; we appear to experience an external world outside of ourselves, but where do we actually experience that ‘external world’? We experience it in our consciousness. No consciousness, no world, no nothing. It’s impossible to experience anything outside of consciousness.

You don’t experience the world ‘out there’, although it appears to be. You experience it ‘IN HERE’ — in your awareness — and there’s no distance between you and your awareness, is there? So it’s all in you. Everything!

The moment you start to appreciate that, and develop the self-awareness to recognise the faulty scripts you’re running, is the moment you begin to taste freedom.

These faulty scripts can be numerous and manifold. Some examples might include:

* I have rotten luck, everything goes wrong for me

* I’m not good enough

* Other people aren’t to be trusted

* It’s a cruel, dog-eat-dog world

When scripts such as those are running in the background, they influence and determine your experience of life in countless ways. The solution can only be to get to the level of the problem, investigate the scripts you’re running and repair the faulty coding. Sure, you’ve probably amassed a whole lot of evidence to justify and ‘prove’ those scripts, but that’s what the mind does (it selectively interprets ‘reality’ in a way that justifies what it already believes). But you have the ability to choose a different, healthier and more productive, resourceful set of beliefs. I’ve already written about how to dismantle negative beliefs here, so I won’t repeat myself. It takes some persistence and vigilance (if you’ve been running a particular script for a long time, it’s amazing how sneakily it can strive to reassert itself), but it absolutely can be done.

When you’ve sorted out the coding glitches that have been colouring your experience of reality and creating all kinds of problems in your life, you’ll probably find one of two things: the problems resolve with surprisingly minimal effort on your part, or they simply don’t bother you anyone, in which case they are no longer ‘your problem’. But you don’t have to take my word for this, you really have to try it yourself!

Desensitised to life, part 3: Coming back to life!

February 26, 2013.Reading time 12 minutes.

“Lost in thought and lost in time…

I knew the moment had arrived

For killing the past and coming back to life.”

Pink Floyd

It wasn’t until after I titled this blog that I realised there was a Pink Floyd song of the same name, and those lyrics fit perfectly!

In the last couple of posts (Asleep at the wheel and Lost in thought) I explored how we tend to go through life in a kind dazed sleepwalking state in which we’re often barely lucid of ourselves and our environment. A lot of our mental energy is channeled into our inner monologue, the stream of mental chatter that’s forever broadcasting like a radio in the background (or foreground) of our awareness. We often end up totally immersed in this inner ‘DVD commentary’ of our lives, distancing us from a pure, direct experience of reality. This is because we end up not relating to and responding to life, but our thoughts and opinions — our stories — about life. It’s rather like a mental overlay we place over reality; a thought-fuelled virtual-reality that we experience as being real. The problem is this virtual-reality is very often distorted by all kinds of conditioning and irrational mindsets which poison our experience of life.

I don’t believe that life went to the immense bother of creating this universe and depositing us here just so we can exist like a bunch of living-dead zombies, driven almost exclusively by our conditioning, desires and fears. Let’s be honest: it doesn’t feel good living this way. We feel limited, incomplete, anxious, depressed, fearful, unworthy and a lot of the time immensely bored and frustrated because life so rarely matches up with how we think it should be. Our problems exist largely in our minds. If you were to sit down and take some time to let go of your thoughts and emotions, your memories and projections, your perceptions and related associations, what do you think would remain? Would you still have any problems? Or would you in fact just be at peace with life? (Why not try that for a moment?)

I believe the way out of our predicament is to COME BACK TO LIFE. We do this by finding ways to wrestle free of the stranglehold the untamed mind has on us. We can learn to differentiate between quality thinking (reasoning, contemplation, constructive analysis and discernment) and useless thinking (redundant, repetitive, pointless thought spirals that are never constructive and usually makes us feel pretty bad). Rather than being mastered by the mind, we learn to master it and use it as the tool that it is. This is a revolutionary concept for many!

Creating gaps in the mind-stream is something well worth learning to do. It takes effort and practise because in our culture it’s not something that comes naturally to us. But it frees up an enormous amount of mental energy and allows for an incredible release of tension and stress. When we learn to see beyond our story of reality (which hinges upon memories of past perceptions and an imagined future), we open ourselves to simply experiencing life as it is, in this moment, NOW. It’s immensely freeing and liberating. The tension can drop away from us in moments and we are open to experiencing more peace, aliveness and happiness than we perhaps ever thought possible. This is the essence of zen; a simple, pure, direct experience of reality independent of the thoughts we tend to plaster over it and get lost in.

Here are some simple ways I’ve found of stepping out of living on autopilot and COMING BACK TO LIFE.

* FRESH PERCEPTION. One of my favourite things to do. To exercise fresh perception, imagine you have arrived on the planet for the first time. Consciously see and experience everything as though it’s all new to you. Take a walk. Instead of convincing yourself that you know everything along the way, imagine you’d never seen any of it before. Observe everything with the eyes of a young child: see everything as fresh, alive and exciting. Reclaim some of that childlike wonder. Wherever you are and whoever you are with, let go of all preconceived ideas you might have about them and just BE THERE, fully engaged, endeavouring to let go of memory and expectation. Imagine that this is the first and last time you’ll ever be in that place, with those people. Take in every last detail and notice just how peaceful and alive you feel. This exercise is fun and extremely enlivening. Try using it at least once a day for a week.

* ENGAGE YOUR SENSES. This ties in with fresh perception. In fact it’s hard to do one without the other. By engaging your senses you take your focus out of the stream of chatter flowing through your mind and become aware of your sense perceptions. Where are you and what are you seeing? Take in every last detail. Even if you’ve been in this place a thousand times before, set yourself the challenge of trying to notice little things you’ve never noticed before. Fully observe whatever sights, sounds, tastes, smells and tactile sensations your senses are relaying to you. Allow yourself to really FEEL your body. Move your attention into various parts of the body and feel the aliveness in every cell of your body.

* MEDITATE. Meditation has been used for thousands of years as a means of stilling the mind, balancing body and senses and bringing about a state of peace and harmony. There are probably hundreds of different techniques for meditating out there, but I find the simplest are the best. Essentially meditation allows us to become aware of our own awareness; we can learn to witness and detach from the thoughts and emotions that arise in our consciousness without automatically being pulled in and swept away by them. We come to know ourselves as the observer of our thoughts and emotions rather than being our thoughts and emotions. This is immensely liberating.

* TAKE A DEEP BREATH. Or two or three. Taking a moment to consciously focus on your breath is a potent mini-meditation in itself. Breath and mind are quite closely linked; the quality of your breathing affects the quality of your mind. Focussing on your breath, slowing it and deepening it (as we breathe we should really feel our stomach moving out and in) instantly quietens the mind, brings us back to the present moment and relaxes and rebalances us.

* LIVE THE APPROPRIATE LIFESTYLE. This is really just common sense: if your lifestyle, habits and food and drink choices are bad, you’re going to feel bad. I’ve learned the immense importance of creating a peaceful and authentic lifestyle. It’s important to ensure your home environment is a tranquil and harmonious place; clean, orderly and easy to be at peace in. Eat good food; yoga philosophy encourages us to cultivate a balanced and harmonious mind by eating a ‘sattvic’ diet (healthy, natural foods that exclude processed foods, meat, sugar and stimulants). Where possible spend your time around people who you feel relaxed and comfortable around and try to avoid drama queens and stress inducers. These simple lifestyle choices have an amazing effect on the way we feel. If we live in a tip, are surrounded by people that drive us mad and all we ever do is eat pizza, drink beer and watch TV, we’re not going to feel particularly alive. It’s up to us to take responsibility for how we’re living and what we’re exposing our body and mind to.

* APPRECIATE SPACE. Instead of unconsciously striving to fill up every single moment of your life with activities and distractions — the need to always be socialising (whether in person or social networking, the 21st century’s ‘pseudo-socialising’), or watching TV or browsing the internet, why not just STOP for a while and allow yourself to experience stillness and space. Learn to appreciate unplanned moments and to enjoy being in silence. This may be challenging for some people, but it’s something well worth trying.

* DO WHAT YOU LOVE. Only engage in the things you really WANT to do on a deep level, and don’t just do things compulsively to fill up the time. Do what makes you come alive, no matter what other people might think. I know one guy who’s true joy is reading about and talking about aliens and UFOs. Seriously — he lights up when he talks about it! It’s his passion and it makes him really come alive. Who are we to judge? As Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss.

These are some simple ways I’ve found for overcoming the mind’s tendency to keep us locked in sleepwalking mode.

Our time on planet earth is very brief. We’re not here to be a prisoner to our minds, thoughts and habits. We’re here to be truly ALIVE and to live consciously with passion, peace and joy. We live in a deadened society and are surrounded by deadened people, so it might take a while to bring ourselves back to life. But it’s an effort that’s well worth making.

If you have any other suggestions and tips for bringing yourself back to the present moment (which is life!), I’d love to hear them.

Rory.

BEYOND THE DREAM

Category: personal development