Going Out Of My Mind

As I walked the beach that day last year I had a sudden remembrance of being 8 months old, standing by the rail of my crib and looking out into the world for the first time and wondering about it all.

It was a warm spring or early summer day, the windows were open, the sheer curtains blowing in a warm, gentle breeze, the sun was shining brightly and the birds were singing. I was alone in the room. I wondered what is this place? who am I? and what is that wierd stain on the linoleum floor? But, and this is a BIG but, I wondered all these things without a single word in my head.

I had no voice thoughts because I had yet to learn any words. No words, no concepts, not a single voice thought in my head, but I did have wonderment and realization. I realized I existed and I wondered about it. I was pure consciousness, pure awareness. That is who I was at that moment and nothing more. My culture had yet to implant an identity into me but I would eventually fall from that state of pure awareness to become a good New England boy and all that that meant. Yet, if at that moment you had taken me to France, I would have become French, to think in French, to believe as a Frenchman, to be all things French. or if in that moment instead you took me to South America and put me in a pygmy tribe, I would be living, thinking and speaking pygmy, I might even be out blowing poison darts at monkeys for supper instead of writing this. All of this is to say that I have come to realize that who we "think" we are is a huge part of our problem.

We must come back to the place of being the watcher, of being awareness itself and disconnect from our thinking mind and ALL of our thoughts if we are ever to become as little children again...to become the watcher of thought and the world around us...to return to being awareness itself. That is our original identity, that is who we really are.

This realization has sparked something unexplainable in me. except to say, that I am learning to be "out of my mind" and in the here and now where thought and thinking can not be at the same time, more and more, In that moment of realization last year I was graced to "feel" once again what/where that place within me is...my center of being, and am able to come back to it more and more easily in my daily life, in the battle to stay in the present moment and out of my mind.

Blessing the Enemy and The Joy of Being

As I was walking through the produce section of my local supermarket today, I suddenly realized that I had been caught up in thought and came back to the present moment. I have done this thousands of times, being lost in thought and coming to the present moment, but somehow this time was new, and as if for the first time.

I suddenly became vividly conscious of where I was, what I was doing and aware of everything around me; aisles of bright and beautiful produce and fruit, the aroma of fresh baked bread, others busily shopping, the assortment of noises, voices, wheeling carts. It was all so clean, bright and beautiful and I had a knowing that everything was exactly as it should be. I was overtaken by a deep feeling of joy, and I burst out in a laugh right there and then. I couldn't contain it.

The other day I was working with someone I occasionally have to work with. Now this semi-retired older guy is the kind of guy who loves to talk about his medical issues; operations he has had, operations he is going to have, or the ills he suffers with. For example, he never simply states he needs a break to eat lunch or a snack, he uses it as an opportunity to tell you about his low blood sugar issues, diabetes and his entire medical history...over and over and over again.

He worked thirty years in a hospital, but since retiring he has had countless operations in the same hospital and, always, it seems, has another operation coming up for a new condition or problem. It is plain that he is conditioned to find identity and purpose, as well as to look for sympathy and attention, his ego needs, from being ill, or in need of a medical procedure.

Most people make a hasty exit when he comes near, for they know what is coming. If he gets your ear, he will suck you dry of any sympathy he can get, even if it is only lip service. In the past I would listen politely, give a word or two, mainly about proper eating, etc and move on to the business at hand. But this week, for the first time, he had me trapped. I could not escape. So I decided to use the opportunity to practice accepting "what is" without resistance to it.

I decided to see what would happen if I gave him my full attention willingly. Nothing else would matter but watching and listening to him fully in the present moment, without thought, without reservation, without judgment, without looking for escape. And so I was fully there for him, watching and listening intently to every word he had to say, and soon a remarkable thing began to happen. As he began to experience what it was like for someone to truly give him the attention he so longs for it began to frighten him, overwhelm him. To my surprise his face began to show puzzlement and even a hint of fear. He slowly backed away and made his own hasty exit, leaving me amazed, in wonderment at what had just happened and with an unexpected and inexplictable inner joy.

What I later realized was that the "presence in the present" was too overwhelming for him, perhaps because he never experienced someone paying full attention to him, and perhaps because his ego was being exposed, and became fearful of that exposure. But whatever the reason, he encountered something new, and he did not know what to do with it, so he just fled. I was quietly amused at this unexpected turn of events and could only chuckle and smile as I watched him flee as if he's seen a ghost.

I suspect that what his ego knows is that when he looks for attention from others, he will never really get it, because they are all secretly judging or resenting his imposition. His ego is experienced as a vampirish suck and is resented by most. But his ego is OK with that because he gets to secretly judge the "suckee" in return for their phony kindness or irritation others have with him. In any case, his ego gets the judgment food it needs to survive. Negative attention, after all, is attention, and is more tolerable than no attention at all.

But this time, perhaps for the first time in his life, someone willingly gave him full and undivided attention without resistance or resentment, and his ego, finding nothing to judge, and shown up in the light, became frightened by its reflection in the mirror of non-resistance. My hope is that he will have seen and experienced something greater than his ego that will awaken a longing for it in himself one day.

Every Prisoner Was Once A Child

There are billions of emotionally and psychologically troubled people in this world, but they all began as little children, and little children are very rarely born with emotional or psychological problems.

Children, for the most part, are born with a blank slate. Being raised with the rare and true quality of love, which embodies patience, understanding and kindness, gives children a real fighting chance to off-set the tremendous pressure to conform to the craziness imposed by the world outside the home.

But if the parents are as mad as the outside world, what chance does a child have?

Some children are weak in constitution and will simply conform. Most die that way, except for a few lucky ones. The brighter souls rebel at the imposition though they almost always fail to be creative in the rebellion, and so end up just as crazy, mad, impatient and violent as the object of the rebellion in spite of not wanting to be. The jails and mental institutions are filled with these, though most are doomed to life in the jail cell of their thinking mind.

But teach the conformist or the rebel two things and they can recover. Stop resenting the madness seen around them, because resentment is the singular most dangerous emotion that makes you just as mad, crazy and violent as what you resent. You must also come to see how who you have become identified with is an impostor self implanted within you, mainly by your resentment, which displaced the real you.

Resentment opens the portal of your mind and allows infection and infestation to enter in. That is how evil works, it tempts you to hate it, and when you do it gets inside you and grows up in you. It is for this reason that Jesus said "do not hate your enemy, overcome them with good" He was warning you about not opening your mind to evil, which is exactly what resentment does.

Through resentment you have grown up to become like the very thing you hated outside yourself, but drop resentment and learn to be still, learn to watch your reactions to people, places and things, and the power of self observation will begin to separate you from your imposed conditioning. In this way, you will recover from that conditioning and grow into the self you were meant to be.

Your connection to the love within was lost through negative reaction to things outside yourself. But, and this is the good news, love is restored within as you drop negative reaction to things . At this moment, stop looking outside yourself for anything; not for love, not for understanding. The only thing truly meaningful is found within you; in the quiet stillness between your thoughts. Watch your thoughts often and always cultivate the stillness between them. Allow the stillness to grow and in this way you will reconnect with Love, even as you disconnect from the imposed conditioned self you were never meant to be. Seek and you will find when you do, your life will change for the better and will unfold and flower from within into the self you were always meant to be.

Are You Out Of Your Mind?

In the movie "The Peaceful Warrior" there is a scene where young Dan Millman is suddenly tossed into a small river. He comes flying out of the water, mad as a hatter, and angrily demanded of Socrates "Are you out of your mind!!??" Paraphrased, Socrates says "Yes, I am out of my mind and it has taken me a lifetime to get there, and it is where I am trying to get you." And then he added "When I tossed you into the river, in that moment, you were fully present in the here and now, and out of your mind"

The scene points out the fundamental problem with mankind and suggests that all of our problems stem from one thing; being stuck in our heads, in our minds and therefore not fully available to participate in the here and now.

An objective look at the average human being clearly shows that they are caught up in the in the mental dialogue in their head, and therefore not available to be completely aware of the present moment. Today, at the wholesale club I joined, I watched the young lady behind the counter as she went through the computerized process of signing me up as a new member. Her face revealed everything that was going on in her head. It fluctuated between a perfunctory greeting and sales pitch to a furrowed brow at some irritating computer problem that crop up, to letting go the frustration as she seemed to find a solution, then back to annoyance at the return of the problem, which amplified at the need to call a superior to come and override something, to a judgmental, ego inflating gloat when the superior got a bit stuck herself. Her attitude then turned to a suppressed, controlled impatience at the overall though momentary "stuckness" of the situation, revealing an inability to accept what is with grace, and finally coming to a relative "joy" at having things back under control and a return of the ability, once again, to move along as a quickly as possible to get me off her "to do list" and move on to the next thing. This poor young woman was at the mercy of every thought, and every emotion within her during those few moments I shared space with her.

I am certain that if I quizzed her, she could not, with her attention so absorbed within her head, have told me what else was happening in the store around her. I am certain she was oblivious to all the other sounds and dialogue in the store, the announcements on the PA, the ringing telephones, the hum of the copy machine, and certainly didn't even notice the supervisor's habit of scratching her nose in frustration while trying to figure out the problem on the computer screen.

The other day as I was walking into the supermarket I observed a man coming out of the place with his lips intently moving as if in conversation. As he came closer it became obvious that he was indeed having a full blown conversation...with himself. I am not sure if more and more people than ever are lost in their head, or if I am waking up more to see what has always there, but whatever the case, it is apparent that there is a madness within us, and about us, that nobody is talking about. Humanity is in the grip of slavery, to a constant running dialogue in the head, robbing them of full awareness and keeping them from fully participating in the present moment.

Are people out of their minds? Indeed not, all but the few it seems, are quite stuck within their minds, making us all, ironically, quite mad. But learn the art of watching your thoughts, your thinking, your emotions, your reactions to things and circumstance, and you will slowly but surely go out of your mind, which is quite a good thing indeed.

The Aware Watcher

Awareness and God are not two separate things.

Awareness/consciousness is our true identity, it is our birthright.

When we are born all we have is awareness/consciousness, no other identity are we born with.

It is the essence behind the eyes of the littlest children who look out into the world for the first time and ponders its existence.

It is what ponders without words or concepts having learned none yet.

The Watcher is pure and virginal awareness/consciousness.

But immediately the world conspires to kill/suppress this "Self", and works very hard to implant its own culturally induced sense of "self".

Under assault we soon forget that we are the Watcher, and begin to identify with a worldly implanted sense of "self".

It is this "ego self" we come to think of as who we are, and are in conflict with.

It is this externally implanted false self that we will defend to the death rather than see through it.

But see through it we must if we are to lay down the ego life to find the spiritual self...to return to the Watcher state of Being.

Our true identity is awareness/consciousness, we are one with it, and must realize this if we are to be born again to it.

We meditate to separate from thought, to relearn to be the Watcher of thought, and the Watcher of the world around us.

Any sense of self apart from that of the Watcher is the lie, and is what keeps us from returning as little children to what we lost soon after birth.

Oneness with awareness/consciousness, is who we are, and is our only true identity, just as it was Jesus' true identity.

For this reason Jesus said the following:

"I and my Father are one"

"Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?"

"And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are."

New Wine and Old Wineskins

“No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse. People do not put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.”

The above parable speaks to the fact that some things do not mix. The unshrunken cloth used to patch a hole in an old cloak will eventually shrink and make a bigger hole than was there before it was applied. The new wine skins, animal skins formed to make a leather container for wine, are pliable and soft, and will expand with the gases released in the fermentation of the new wine. Together they will accommodate each other, but new wine put into an old skin, already stretched and aged, will burst as the wine gases expand, causing the loss of both.

The principle of incompatibility is the lesson of the parable but it speaks not only to the laws of physics, but also to the law of metaphysics. It speaks of the incompatibility of the spiritual and the non-spiritual. For example, awareness and ego are two diametrically opposed entities. One is ethereal and timeless; the other is earthy, material and falls apart at the grave. Awareness can observe the ego, but the ego can not observe awareness, for the minute that it does, ego dies and awareness comes into being. And being intelligent, the ego does not want to die and seeks survival at all costs. That is why it clings to the intellect full of its facts and figures, its judgments and pronouncements that form its basic structure.

The ego can learn what awareness knows, but it can not know what it has learned. Knowledge is the elixir of life to the ego, but knowledge about something is not the same as understanding, the essence of awareness. Knowledge is acquired information while understanding is the realization gain by personal experience. When understanding comes, knowledge ceases. For example, you can learn from the mouth or hand of another all about the fragrance of the amazing, exotic moonflower which opens it petals only at night, but until you inhale its wondrous fragrance for yourself, you can never really know what it is like. It will always be just information and no amount of information will give you understanding. Information, knowledge sucked up from third party sources, is the substance of ego. Personal experience is the substance of understanding. This hold true of spiritual principles as well. There is much information about what life is like without an ego, or even what life is like as the ego dies, but no amount of information can deliver the experience to you. Even with all your thinking and imagination, you will always be speculating, that is, until you experience it for yourself.

The ego thrives and survives on information but if realization and understanding were to suddenly “occur” to the ego, the ego would cease to exist as awareness came to life. It would burst and disintegrate into the nothingness it was all along, even as personal understanding came into being. This is why neither truth nor ego are compatible. Truth and ego are mutually nullifying. Truth can be learned by the ego, but it can not be understood by the ego. Truth is realized and experienced and when this happens, knowledge and ego die, as realization and awareness arise where ego once stood.

The Key That Unlocks Peace and Happiness

Krishnamurti, the Indian spiritual leader, getting along in years, once asked "Do you want to know my secret?". He answered his surprised audience "I do not mind what happens". How many understand this statement? It contains within it the beginning and end of all emotional suffering.

That ability to accept "what is"...to accept whatever the current reality in ones life is...without resistance to it, is the pathway to peace and happiness that all the great spiritual leaders over the ages have pointed to. The bible says it this way; "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds"

I know a lady whose "lover" died before the relationship was consummated. He died several years ago, but the pain and agony of a "lost love" continues to consume the woman all these years later, robbing her of peace and happiness. Resistance to the facts...failure to accept his death and let him go and failure to make peace with the reality of the situation, are keeping her in lingering inner turmoil and emotional pain. The resistance to accept "what is" prevents her from regaining inner peace and experiencing love in the present moment. She clings to a dead relationship, actually she clings to the "idea" of a relatioship that no longer is and never will. The inability to "let go" keeps her mind/soul trapped "back there", in the illusion of a relationship that no longer exists, even as she is emotionally tortured in the present. In this way the past kills the possibilities of the present, and poisons her future, making for a miserable, ruined life.

The other side of the coin is that when one does encounter a painful happening or negative experience and puts up no resistance to it, but instead accepts the reality of the moment, uses it to see if and where the ego clings to that which it should not, the moment passes and human being emerges all the more human for it. Pain and suffering can be an embittering, calcifying experience for the ego, or, if dealt with properly, can lead to a more aware, more accepting, more understanding and more compassionate human being. Accepting "what is" leads to a deeper relationship with Reality, and all the blessings that only "oneness" with Reality can bring.

The horror and trap of the ego is that it's highest faith is in it's own thoughts and thinking. But the problem with that is that thoughts and thinking are always about past experience or some future to come, and never about the present moment, which is all we ever really have. One can not be absorbed in thinking and be in the present moment at the same time. It is virtually impossible. Yet, to live in the present moment, where Reality and its blessings are experienced, is to learn to become one with the Awareness of thought and thinking. There is no other higher possibility of true and lasting happiness and peace.