You Are Not Your Mind (4of4)

Finally, I am at the last section of the first chapter. There is still a long way to go. I'm beginning to think maybe I bit off more than I can chew, but I feel its going well so far. It's interesting because as I am writing about the book, I am able to integrate my current life experiences. Just feels like a coincidence, or my mind seeing what it wants to see. So the past week has been good and bad. I'm beginning to see that life is never going to be always good. There is always going to be good and bad. What I am learning is how to not let the bad effect me, or get to me. In my last therapy session, I brought up that maybe the reason I focus on the bad is because my mind likes conflict. I was expecting to talk about that specifically, but my therapist took it a step further, something I didn't think to do. She asked, why is that my mind is so focused on conflict in the first place. It was good she did that, because it leads me to the root of the actual problem, which we spent most of the session talking about. After eight sessions I'm getting a good idea of where most of my problems are coming from, or why my mind is functioning the way it is, which helps me work on truly changing. It felt good when I recognized my problems with conflict, but when I became aware of the problems that led to my problems with conflict, I felt even better.

Emotion: The Body's Reaction to Your Mind

There has been a lot of talk about the mind and suffering, but what about our emotions. If you haven't already started asking where they fit in, you might want to think about it now. What do our emotions mean?

Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotions arise at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically, or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.

I have had lots of problems with my emotions. Sometimes I am too emotional and sometimes I don't feel any emotions at all. I have always viewed emotions as just the way you feel. This is just how I feel, I can't help it, these are just my emotions. My view on emotions is changing. I am looking at them as a result of what the mind produces. Emotions are the physical aspect of my thoughts. This is how my body perceives my thoughts.

The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say, the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don't need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain people pick up subliminally and that triggers their own latent anger.

This paragraph rings so many things in my head. When I said earlier that I feel either super emotional, or cold, I now see why. I was always reserved in my emotions and expressing how I feel. I would just keep things inside and bottled up. I was cold. After time it would all just come out and I would explode. I would become super emotional. I began repeating this pattern for years. Each time the cycle repeated, things would be worse, and I was full of more and more problems. I finally realized enough was enough; here I am now.

So, what about when the mind says no and emotions say yes or the other way around. We all know this and have experienced it. I am thinking one thing and I feel another. This is another concept I have struggled with personally over the years. My mind constantly battled with how I felt and I never knew what the true my actually wanted or felt.

If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.

This paragraph is powerful to me. When you're not sure, always look at your emotions. Some of you may have already learned this from your own experiences. I am learning it now, and I'm not just talking about your gut feeling, or listening to your gut. The important thing to understand is that your emotions may not ultimately represent the truth inside of you. As the author says, it is only a reflection of your true state of mind. This opens up the door for another way to 'watch the thinker'. If our ego isn't letting us 'watch the thinker', because it is sending us false thoughts, we will always see the true thinker by watching our emotions.

Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.

I have started doing this. It sounds weird but you have too look out for yourself too. It's ironic to me because I am such a caring person, I am always asking how everyone else is doing, or feeling. I never thought to turn around and I ask myself. It can be very insightful and you may actually be surprised. Most important, it makes you present on what's going on inside of you. Ignoring yourself is no way to get better.

An emotion usually represent an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds - unless there is enough presence in you. If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the motion temporarily becomes 'you.' Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotions: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.

I know this circle all too well. The thought comes, then the emotion, then I am feeling the emotion, then I start thinking about it, then its amplified, etc. It is a vicious cycle indeed. I try to find a distraction but that doesn't actually solve anything. At most it provides temporary relief. This is a problem I am learning to overcome and its going really slow, I'll be honest there, but at least I'm making progress.

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. 'Fear' comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it 'pain.' One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, that harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the 'problem.' Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

This is a very powerful paragraph. I would read this again several times very slowly. I am still reading it over and over trying to truly grasp the big picture. I honestly don't feel I truly understand what he is saying here. I do feel like I am close to seeing it. Its like that feeling you know what is being said is right, you just don't completely comprehend it yet. The last part explains my mind perfectly, how it will never find the solution because it is part of the problem. It also reminds me a little bit of the movie Donnie Darko, specifically the character played by Patrick Swayze. He comes to the school to provide education on getting rid of your troubles in life, obesity, being bullied, or not knowing what you want to be in life. He believes that ever problem we have is a product of fear. I don't think the character played by Patrick Swayze saw it the way as the author of this book, but maybe he was on to something. Just something to think about.

So here I am talking about emotions, and I am making it seem like there is only negative emotions. What about the good emotions? What about love and joy? Where do those emotions fit in? At this point I am thinking, emotions are a result of our thoughts. It is best to be in a state of no-mind. If we are in no-mind, where do the thoughts that create good emotions come from?

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind. Emotions, on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad. So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is usually the short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of switch. Many 'love' relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between 'love' and hate, attraction and attack.

This idea gives me a whole new understand on love. We often find it necessary in order to understand or define something, that we know the opposite of what it is. I don't know what love is but I know what it's not. Can we truly understand love by thinking that way? I also like the idea that these states have no opposite. To me that perfectly explains love. This entices me to becoming above the mind, so I can experience these deep inner states.

Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened - before you have freed yourself from your mind - you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a 'normal' addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on on the other side of the clouds.

This increases my understanding of true love, and now I know how to understand the feelings inside me that relate to it. I know I have more than short moments and fleeting glimpses of true love. I remember reading this for the first time and the realizations I had, the memories that came back to me. The realization of my true inner being, that deep down I am a truly loving person, and there were many times when I was feeling this for more than a mere moment. If anything, this realization has kept me going and has been motivating me to change. I know what is inside of me. I am aware of it now. Many of my struggles as you may read often deal with the simple fact that I just wasn't aware. I am becoming aware of so many things now. Many memories I thought were not there are coming back. I am seeing myself, my past, my life in a new light now.