Once Upon a Time

I totally mis-understood René Descartes quote “I think therefore I am.”

Perhaps misunderstood is too strong, maybe I should say, “I never really thought much about it, a nice ‘saying’ but, so what.”

However, over time, and through my ‘clearing’ practice I have come to understand this better.

Most of us cannot stop thinking, there is a program running somewhere inside of us that is addicted to thoughts! Or maybe it is terrified of the silence between the thoughts! Ah Ha..that is the real reason we cannot stop thinking, the alternative, to the overused mind, is annihilation. No wonder the thinking mind avoids the quiet space between thoughts.

But… If Descartes was correct – ‘I think therefore I am’ and IF this can be simplified down to whatever I think I am! Then, whatever you think, you are. So, it is not just the act of thinking that makes you who you ‘think’ yourself to be, it is the thoughts themselves that create this concept of an individual thinker.

Thoughts are interesting, at least I think they are. We may believe that in order to think, we have to have a mind, otherwise what / who is thinking?

The reading that I have done, and the subsequent experiences all point to the fact that Mind is non-local. Meaning Mind is not confined to Time and Space, ergo it is everywhere at all times. Not confined to an individual. I often ask people, if they believe they have a mind, please point it out! Whoops.

What if (here we go again), we do not have a mind of our own, rather, we have a nervous system that accesses the non-local Mind. Hmm, we assume that thoughts that arise in our awareness belong to us. I am thinking this, I think that, my thoughts on the subject are…

Much the same as we ‘think’ that emotions and feelings are ours.

It is the same for emotions and other feelings, it is the nervous system that is picking up signals, interpreting those signals, via a biological process, into something that we call an emotion, or a feeling, or… a thought.

So, if we do not have a mind, we just believe we do, then where do thoughts come from, and why out of all the thoughts in the world, do we get stuck in a very narrow channel of the same old thoughts?

If we consider the Buddhist concept of The True Nature of Mind, something that we seem to lose when we are born into and programmed to fit in to a body, and we follow the ‘logical’ procession that Mind is non-local, then the True Nature of Mind must be here and now. As are the other Buddhist concepts of Omnipresence, Omnipotence and Omniscience.
All present, all powerful and all knowing.

All this must be here now, available to anyone with the ability to use into these aspects of Mind. Yet, I suspect, it is our conditioning into the physical world what limits our ability to connect with these understandings.

We are told we are this, we are that, we are good at this, we are not good at that, this is right, that is wrong, this is good, that is bad.

Back to Descartes, we are told /taught what to think, to think then is to be. Our conditioned thought process then limits what we can receive from this non-local mind. It is like a radio, stuck on a particular channel, Or channels, in some countries those channels are sports, politics and the weather!

We are stuck in a polarised world where our conditioned past has dictated right and wrong, good and bad. Like and dislike. Our personal radio receiver has been limited by that which we have been told. Yet all radio receivers, aka individual beings, on the planet are perfectly capable radio receivers, capable of picking up so much more.

When our thoughts go round and round and never seem to get anywhere, is this a problem with the radio, or is it that the tuner is stuck on limited reception? When that which we take to be our mind appears to be full of, for the most part, nonsense, is this a faulty mind or just a conditioned mind?

All the time we hold onto the belief that the thoughts are ours we will continue to try to make sense of them, by, guess what! thinking about them. Phew, sounds exhausting, especially as thinking within the limited awareness cannot escape that conditioned past and come to an answer that is going to make any sense.

Instead, try using whatever facilities that you have, to notice thoughts and then stop trying to ‘do’ anything with them, just observe without feeding, or energising them.

Don’t deny them, but try not to believe them either. At present they are just random pieces of information that your awareness is addicted to. Not yours of course, just random thoughts floating around in the greater, non-local mind.

And remember, if you think that the thoughts are yours, then, as you think, so you become. If you are content, at peace in your own world, then carry on. If not, recognise they are not yours and then see who you become.