Dear Friend

It’s our coming of age this week, Letter #21…!

Now, do you have a mind that is more kind or more blind...?! How can you know for sure? 

Your mind is the centre of the universe for you, so the more you understand it the better life will be. As I said last week, understanding is liberating.

Exploring and learning about your mind

Last week we began looking at conscious living, the mode of human life where we are aware of what we are doing, where we occupy the ‘present moment’ and know we are in this current moment.

If anybody is serious about improving their life in this troubling age of ours, then learning to live consciously is essential. Without it we cannot achieve any kind of liberation for ourselves, for it is our schooled and conditioned subconscious mind which automatically reacts to the triggers out there (events, happenings, situations, people, things).

In our conscious mind mode, we can detach ourselves from the 'inner voice' of our subconscious mind.

Last week I suggested that you can practise living consciously by practising noticing your sitting down, walking, eating and breathing.

This week I’d like you to start thinking about the mind itself. Exploring and learning about our mind is the key to achieving optimal health, while ignorance of it means ignorance of who we truly are, which is the root cause of all our health woes - be they physical, emotional, psychological or social.

The following tale is slightly adapted from a text I wrote for my teacher students as part of the know-how and skills development necessary to be reflective teachers, who observe and notice what is going on in their classrooms, rather than assuming and believing what their students are doing and thinking.

The course is called Classroom Inquiry, and the equivalent for us in normal life is ‘self-inquiry’ or ‘life inquiry’.

We look within our mind and memory to find the hidden causes of our behaviour, actions and words. We want to know what causes us to automatically react to external triggers the way we do. To do that we have to become acquainted with thought and thinking…

Before you read the tale, here are some key words referring to mind activity which we want to be sure we understand in a practical sense. You will see them used in the context of the tale, but have a think for yourself first.

noticing — observing — hearing — awareness — becoming aware — realising — reflecting — paying attention

Noticing my inner voice with the help of running water

Many years ago, I used to go to a massage place in a small valley town in northern Thailand. It was in an old teak building set in a nice tropical garden area, replete with the sounds of nature and, one quickly noticed as one entered the grounds, the sound of running water. The source of this water noise couldn’t be seen, but it sounded just like a waterfall.

Having a massage is an interesting activity because we are (supposedly) in a fully receptive and passive mode for two hours while the masseur is doing all the work, with nothing for us to proactively do for that time period. It is with this receptivity in mind that this particular massage place becomes interesting to anyone who might wish to improve their awareness and observation skills.

Here is what I reflected on and learned about noticing, observing, becoming aware, and losing attention while having my first massage there. I do this kind of thing, not because I’m a freak, but because I teach my students about such matters. These are essential skills if we are to inquire about ourselves and about our work and our life.

I was lying there, muscles and tendons being worked on, and I suddenly noticed and became aware of the noise of the falling water. I felt startled at this observation because…

… clearly the water hadn’t stopped falling but, equally clearly, I had stopped hearing it because how else could I have suddenly started hearing it again? This meant that, at some point, unbeknownst to me, my ears had effectively ceased being open for business. Something had closed them from hearing the water for a while, and yet now my hearing sense organ had suddenly reopened, whereupon I was hearing and noticing and being aware of the sound of the falling water again.

A short time later during the massage the same thing happened again! I suddenly could hear the noise of the water falling again. My ears had stopped hearing, again without me noticing when the hearing had stopped, but now that I was hearing the water again, they were open for business again. And this happened a few times, and now I was getting curious. As the masseur continued her work, I was reflecting upon it all and realised what I wasn’t noticing was when I stopped hearing this water noise, the point at which my hearing channels became somehow blocked.

Clearly my awareness and my noticing of the falling water sound was intermittent. So what was it that was removing my awareness and noticing of the falling water noise? It was as if something within me was acting as a tap to the waterfall, turning it on and off several times during the time that I was lying down receiving my massage. But I would only be aware of the ‘tap’ turning the water on, and not of the tap turning the water off.

What do you think? What was turning the ‘tap’ off?

My explanation was this…

I’d be aware of the falling water noise. Then my mind would wander off, would start to think of things, either past memories or future projections. At this point my mind was now preoccupied with its own internal thought patterns and thinking, and this inner mind activity would shut down my access to external sounds and therefore block my noticing of the falling water noise. After a while perhaps my thinking would take a short break, at which point my hearing sensory channel would be accessible to my consciousness again, and would inform me of the falling water noise, which had of course never stopped. And so it went on!

So there was this sort of ping pong game between noticing the water noise on one side of the net, and the mind wandering off on its own journey of thinking on the other side of the net; when one started the other stopped, when one stopped the other started. If my mind was producing thoughts, I was unable to notice the water noise. If I was noticing the water noise, my mind was not lost in thought. They did not happen at the same time. I did not notice my mind’s thoughts interrupting the water noise, nor did I notice the water noise interrupting my mind’s thoughts.

Subsequently, upon making these realisations, and while still receiving my massage, I then consciously resolved to observe the falling water noise, rather than just noticing it. My aim was to continuously hear the falling water noise, and to avoid losing the sound of it which had been happening every time my mind became preoccupied with thinking.

And guess what!

I found that, even with this intention, I would still, without noticing, lose the sound of the falling water noise, but, most likely due to my new intention, I was able to quickly notice that my mind had wandered off into its own thinking, and therefore could stop this train of thought by returning to the falling water noise. So, it still had the power to disobey my intention!

I then moved it up another gear. Now I began practising the deliberate act of holding my attention onto the falling water noise in an effort to block the mind’s thought patterns interrupting me. Amazingly, the mind would still try to do its thinking but by now, and being fully focused on the water noise, I could spot this immediately when it began, and therefore with minimal interruption I was able to continue to observe the water noise.

What in effect ensued was that I was alternately observing the water noise and observing my mind wanting to start thinking about something.

I was observing my mind, presumably using my mind to observe itself.

Interesting; I had to use my mind to focus on the external world’s happenings, but the mind also had its own ideas and clearly preferred to be thinking about its own preoccupations rather than listening to some falling water. Yet, with practice I was able to fend off its efforts to take over my field of attention.

~~~~~~~

Now you try it

So, here is something for you to contemplate for the coming week, and I’ll return to this in next week’s Letter. I also have a task for you to do it all for yourself and see if what happened to me at the massage happens to you. (It will!)

If I had resolved to focus on the running water sound, and to not do any thinking, yet my mind kept on producing thoughts… where were those thoughts coming from? I chose not to think, but my mind did its thinking anyway.

And look at that typical usage of English in the sentence just before: ‘but my mind…’ … my mind? Who is me, then? If it’s my mind, then who is this possessor of the mind inside me? Who, in fact, am I?

Who are you, if you are not your mind?? Here’s another typical usage of English: ‘I was torn between two minds’. There I am again, this time in the middle of two minds! Getting to the bottom of this is the start of our liberation from being automatically triggered into our behaviour, and taking control of our own life

Your weekly task

So here’s a task for you.

(It feels in a deja vu sort of way that I’ve set this task for you already, but I can’t find it in previous Letters; however, if I did do that, it’s well worth doing many times anyway!).

I’ll give you a choice of two venues to carry out the task, and just try it out next time you’re in one of them.

(You are of course welcome to choose any venue you wish! Just make sure you have things to listen to and watch, and to not be interrupted by others, or by your devices.)

 Go out into nature somewhere and sit down for a half an hour or so, or just keep walking around in it. Or, go to a cafe or some such place in an urban setting, and be sure nobody will interrupt you for half an hour. Ignore your phone.

During this time your focus and intention is to not be thinking, rather to listen and observe what is going on around you. Practise noticing your surroundings, and then notice if your mind has become preoccupied with its own thinking and thoughts.

Where do these voices come from? See you next week, and we’ll investigate things further.

All the best

Philip