Session 4: The Mind, Part Two

To better understand the mind let's define two types, or maybe better defined as two states of mind: the personal mind and the intellectual mind. The personal mind worries, fears, and obsesses over the past and future. The personal mind is not reality, and we can easily get lost in it. Reality is always the present moment and learning to live there brings us out of the unhelpful state that is the personal mind. The intellectual mind solves problems and is creative. The intellectual mind is the state of mind we are in when the mind is serving us, instead of enslaving us.

Our personal mind has two obsessions:

•     “I have a way I want things to be and I’m afraid it won’t be that way.”
•     “I have a way I don’t want things to be and I’m afraid it will be that way.”

These circumstantial obsessions create hell in our minds. We must ponder the question, “How can I be so easily bothered by circumstances that I have no control over?” The problem is not with the circumstances, the problem is what our mind thinks about the circumstances. In other words, life is not unfolding the way we want, and our mind gets upset. Our need to control our circumstances and have them go our way is the Second Noble Truth in Buddhism: The cause of suffering (stress) is desire (preference). If you decide that life should unfold as you want, you will suffer. The great lie we believe is, “Life should be the way I think it should be.” We all have expectations that we store in our heads and believe as truth, and when our interactions with the world don’t go as we planned, we get frustrated. For example, we don’t like when our carpet gets dirty because our expectation is that I am happy when my carpet is clean. Or, we don’t like when someone tailgates us on the road because our expectation is that the driver behind me must be a certain distance away for me to not get upset. These expectations can, of course, vary from person to person. Most of us have similar expectations, but these expectations change greatly among different cultures and parts of the world. Most of our expectations are silly and have created a game in our head that we cannot win. What do you think would happen if we could let go of these expectations? 

There are two types of thoughts: the ones we create and the ones we don’t. The mind has the ability to create thoughts on its own and they are usually negative, worry being one example. So, why does our mind create negative thoughts? First, we need to realize that everything in the world is made up of energy. As we interact with the world, we are interacting with energy. Then, our mind stores the interactions as memories, based on whether they served us or not. This has always been a necessary part of human survival. If our mind were unable to store a memory from a dangerous situation, we would die much sooner. Our evolution has largely been a result of our mind and its survival instincts. 

The downside to our mind storing energy is it leads to incessant thinking. If we do not learn to release our thoughts, our mind obsesses over them and creates negative energy that we feel in our bodies as anxiety and depression. Our qi, or energy, is no longer flowing freely, so our bodies communicate to us in the form of physical symptoms. Yoga, qigong, and tai chi are helpful practices to get the stagnant energy moving. This stagnant energy also causes repetitive dreams, according to Freud. The subconscious wants to release negative energy and so it shows up in the form of a dream because our subconscious is free from our willpower while we sleep. Nightmares are traumatic experiences that we have suppressed in our subconscious because of the negative effect they had on us. This is a healthy protection mechanism that we use to survive. These dreams frighten us because we have difficulty dealing with the pain that these experiences caused. The chattering mind that we experience while awake is the same thing as a dream. As we release stored energy, our mind will get quieter during our waking state and we will no longer have repetitive nightmares.