Exploring the Mental Experience
I am surprised by the number of people I meet in person and online who have never stopped to consider the nature of their thoughts or beliefs. What seems to be much more common is that people’s minds are dragging them around, back and forth through life experiences, and they assume that all those thoughts and beliefs that arise are correct, important, and worth defending.
The study of psychology has come a long in way in looking at how we react to our environment, how we are affected by events, and what types of psychosis occur from various types of abuses, etc. And neurobiology is growing exponentially in our understanding of how the brain operates through us, creating personality and what we refer to as mind and awareness.
But unless you have an interest in either of those topics, you might be going through life being blindly run by brain responses, not realizing the noise you’re putting up with, how often you upset yourself, and that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Buddhism offers great, simple tools that teach us how to become mindful of our minds, and how to change them. You needn’t be a Buddhist though, and mindfulness helps you in every other area of your life too.
Recently, I gave a few talks in Second Life to help raise awareness about how we can discover the nature of our thinking and beliefs, to see how we often do ourselves a disservice by ignoring these valuable processes, and that we need not be dragged around by reactions. We can learn to tame our minds and befriend it, rather than being yanked around by it.
I was surprised by a few things in talking to people:
- Many have never considered assessing or looking at how they think
- Few have or want to question beliefs they have formed over the years
- Many are resistant to the idea of giving up fear, worry, anxiety, and the thoughts that create those states
- Many are afraid to question whether thoughts are valid, useless, or annoyingly repetitive
- The idea of ignoring and not following thoughts is often frightening
I was born with a strong tendency to curiosity, including about my own mind: where thoughts come from; why they often conflict; why do they rarely stop arising; what causes a thought to arise at any given time; how do we “see” in our mind’s eye.
For seven years now, I have used mindfulness meditation to observe my mental processes. I have experienced firsthand how incredibly unreliable the mind can be, how plastic the brain is, meaning I can create the change that would benefit me, and how weightless and unsubstantial many ideas and opinions are. I’ve recognized I have mislabeled many of my thought “types” and I’ve been able to completely let go of worry, plow through fear, and reside in a genuine state of calm that is now a normal state for me.
Happiness arises naturally when we see clearly that we put too much importance on the voices upstairs, when we recognize how many negative thoughts we tend to follow and believe, and that we can choose to ignore them. When we experience firsthand that there is nothing of importance except what is in the present moment, then worry dissovles.
Yet, there is much resistance to looking at one’s own mind. I have to admit, it’s a much scarier place than you might have guessed when you first look. We are normally so used to just bee-bopping around in life, reacting to this and that, following the rants and circular thinking, that when we pause and look, we see what amounts to a small closet over stuffed with a bunch of useless crap that needs to be let go of.
And then there is fear of letting go of the image we had of ourselves. But the bold truth is you were never really there in the first place. You only “thought” you were.
Tags: beliefs, Mind, mindfulness, thoughts
