Making Peace with the Mind

The mind is a beautiful and complex machine that is wonderful for problem-solving and planning.

The mind enjoys telling a story and if there's no-one there to listen, it will happily tell stories to itself. Stories about what happened in the past, discussing current situations, imagining things that may happen in the future. It will bend and twist facts about what happened to make it more gratifying in some way, perhaps more entertaining. On and on it goes in a fantasy world, while all along, reality - the present moment - is being missed.

The mind has a conversation with people that aren't there, it rehearses what it's going to say to someone, it revises a past conversation and creates an idea of how things should have gone. It even creates conversations with people it will never meet, and imagines how that interaction might go "If I met the president I would tell him..."

It looks for problems where there may be none. It may even try to solve other people's issues, such as "If I had a child like that, I would..."

It replays events from the past, analysing details about what happened and then creates different scenarios on how it could have gone "What I should have said to her was..."

Depending on your particular conditioning, the mind may reminisce about beautiful moments in the past which offer a nice distraction from the present moment or go over horrible details about traumatic events that happened, activating deep emotional pain.

It may plan for a better future, another way to escape what is happening right now, offering some relief from challenging present circumstances.

It makes assumptions about why things happened and creates ideas about the world, people, and everything else. Abuse as a child may leave that mind believing that all men are bad or the world is a dangerous place. Most of this is unconscious, and if beliefs are not questioned, they can stay buried for the person's entire life.

When we have to make a decision we often ask our mind. The mind, being similar to a computer program, can only give us information based on what happened in the past and what it has learnt about the topic at hand. We often follow the advice, getting ourselves caught up in similar challenges and patterns over and over again.

The mind can make us feel superior and powerful, or wounded and broken. We have almost no control over what thoughts will arise, and what emotional reactions that will activate.

The mind ends up being all things for us - a best friend - someone that will seem to listen and attempt to offer advice, a judge and critic - analyzing ourselves and everyone else, a mean parent scolding us for mistakes we make, a comedian and entertainer singing songs and making jokes, and on and on it goes.

Not only does all the chatter keep us entertained and stimulated, but it also stops us from noticing the stillness and silence that is always present. This is how we unknowingly overlook our true nature. The noise of the mind doesn't give us space for us to realise it's there.

This continual identification with thoughts is sometimes called egoic consciousness or ego and is what I consider a side effect of the formless manifesting into form. We can feel like who we are is an entity that lives somewhere in the head area. Most of humanity is lost in the trance of separation, unaware of who they really are or how the mind is keeping them believing in something false.

Through an awakening, we start to notice how the mind works and begin to let go of thought patterns and beliefs. We realise we've been believing a fraud, and that much of what it's expressing is coming from a place of deep wounding from personal and collective pain. It's unable to be unbiased - it can only repeat conditioning. We start to realise that we've been treating the mind almost like it's a God, as if it knows everything and is looking out for our best interests. It can be shocking to see how many poor decisions we've made by going to this false prophet for answers.

One of the most fascinating parts of the entranced mind is not only that the insanity of it all is considered normal (as long as you're not saying it out loud), but most of us never question whether the subject of all the conversation actually exists. When we start to make explorations like this, we begin to break the flow of automatic identification from thought to thought. The mind can no longer operate in the same way, and the illusory self starts to fall apart. Eventually, the ability to identify with thoughts will end, and you will be able to live permanently from the realisation that you are emptiness, which will feel like peace and freedom.