Gesar

Our experience is more than the thoughts, emotions and events that stand out in memory. What happens when we turn our attention inward to observe and listen? Very quickly we become aware of a nearly constant stream of mental activity that manifests as internal dialogues. We may not have paid much attention to these dialogues before, dismissing them as mind idly playing with thoughts, or as part of our efforts to think through and resolve issues that are unclear. But if we focus with awareness on this internal chatter, we may notice that mind is playing two distinct roles. One aspect of mind is noticing, another is listening. Further, the noticer is making statements that the listener is receiving and interpreting. There is mind that perceives, cognizes, and identifies, and mind that acts upon what has been cognized. Moving back and forth, sealing and validating cognition through recognition, mind creates the continuity that sustains our view of reality.

Looking more deeply, we find that within this inner realm, many activities are in process simultaneously. There are thoughts and imagery that entertain and project as visualizations or fantasies, reflecting back to mind and stimulating imagination and trains of thought. There is a judge who assesses good and bad, right and wrong. There is a discriminator who determines what to like or dislike, what to accept and what to reject. There is the self that we express as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. There are followers and influence-peddlers, collectors of data, memories and feelings, reminders and prodders and monitors of causes and effects. We present ourselves to the world as a single being operating rationally from a single perspective and point of view, but inside, a whole society or regime is active.

Accustomed to looking at objects from an ‘outside-standing’ perspective, we may never have thought to look at the subject, to take into account the speaker’s voice, the thinker’s mind, the decision-maker’s activities. We have been taught, or have assumed, that we are the ones who are feeling and thinking, determining meaning and making decisions.

But when we look through the magnifying glass of awareness, we learn that mind is not just ‘I, me, and mine.’ We begin to see that mind is far more complex than we may have thought, and the process by which mind translates perceptions and meaning is not necessarily a clear and orderly progression. While we have a sense of meaning that comes through feelings and thoughts themselves are not necessarily organized in a  logical sequence, but combine and find expression in different ways.

We might imagine that just as the rhythms of speech shape sound into words that can be conducted to our senses, our decision-maker mind shapes meaning sequentially from awareness to consciousness to words and concepts. If our awareness were fully open, 360 degrees, we might be able to observe how this process operates. Until we can do this, however, we can say only that we experience reality through the filters of mind. We depend for meaning on mental processes that do not seem to connect in predictable ways. No wonder we are vulnerable to confusion and the problems that come in its wake.

For thousands of years, a question has plagued humanity: why does life have to have so many problems? Must we continue to experience frustration and confusion? Must we waste much of our lives in coping with emotional upheavals? Since it has always been this way, we may think we have no choice: “That is the way it is,” we say. But can we question if this really has to be?

Problems are situations that we cannot resolve. They seem completely real, yet the circumstances we experience as a problem are conducted to us by mind. We can only think about the problem in the ways that mind allows, and mind operates through rules imprinted on its ways of perceiving and presenting reality, leaving us very few alternatives or solutions.

If mind’s way of operating blocks off all conceivable alternatives, there is nothing more we can do. We become fused to the problem as it has been set up by mind. For the most part, people just accept that this is the way things are. Yet, it seems important to give this matter serious thought and do what we can to resolve it.

We are fortunate to be beneficiaries of knowledge gathered through many centuries of inquiry into every conceivable subject, but mind itself has seldom received the depth of attention necessary to ease its burdens and enable it to operate in happier and more creative ways. Mind has incredible power and flexibility, but uncared for and unguided it becomes a despot, limiting the ways we can know and respond, and subjecting us to confusion, anxiety and despair. If we wish to free ourselves of problems, we must become more aware of what mind is and what it needs