for me. And finally the definition of a mind that can’t do math.
In this case I saw the thought and how it had the potential to control my life. Then I saw the guises that surrounded the thought. Sometimes, as in the next section, I see the guises first and then the patterns became clear.
If you ever have the thought, “Because I think it, it must be true,” now is the time to notice that your thoughts may or may not be true. In either case though, one thing is certain: your thoughts don’t define you. That’s because you are the awareness that sees the thoughts. Later you will see that as awareness you are much greater than anything that your thoughts can define.
So without fighting with your thoughts, you can tear out the root of the thought, ‘I can’t.’ Just see that it doesn’t apply to you, to the nature of the world, or to your mind. That will knockout its support. Then you won’t care about this thought at all. The thought, ‘I can’t,’ can come and go as it wants. That’s because it lost its power to bind you in limitation, and to therefore cause suffering. When you recognize a thought as just a thought you take away its power.
My View of the World
At some point in my own spiritual practice I was always very nice. Nice to the point where it didn’t feel genuine. It had the feeling of being sickly sweet. I felt very uncomfortable around people. Knowing that suffering was not part of life, I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind this feeling of being too nice.
I first saw my view of the world: the world was a tough place where people were out to get me. I always had to be on guard. “Was it any wonder,” I thought, “that I studied martial arts including Kung Fu and Aikido.” It fit right into my view of the world.
Then why was I so nice to everyone? It became very clear. This was my self-defense. If I could get the people who were ‘intrinsically bad’ to like me, then I could protect myself. I spotted where I picked up these thoughts and exactly how they worked in my life.
At that point I just looked afresh at my view of the world to see if it was really bad, if people were really out to get me. First, I noticed the beauty of nature around me from the trees and tall grass to the reflection of the sun and the hills in an icy stream. At that moment I noticed a harmony that was vast and joyful. It was the same harmony as that I had eyes and ears and there were things to see and hear, that I needed to breathe and there was air.
I saw that people were a part of this amazing harmony, that at their core they had the same feeling of bliss and love that I have. They loved their children and their pets and I saw how most people just wished me the best.
To my amazement, the cold, distant, harsh world, which I thought was out there, came right inside me, and on the inside it wasn’t cold or harsh at all. My heart opened up and I discovered that on the inside everything is connected by a vast unseen harmony. That even though it is unseen, it is my direct experience.
I wanted to develop a more genuine behavior pattern and ended up discovering how the whole universe was inside me. More on this later, but for now hold your hat, you never know how vast and how amazing your meditation practice can get when you strive for self-discovery. Clear out these little conceptual frameworks that seem to rule your life, and then without replacing them with anything, let it rip.
I think you will discover that life is more than just not being depressed or angry. Life is vast; life is beautiful; life is beyond our imagination. If you feel that ‘life’ is anything less than that, peel off the limitations that you think belong to you. You will start to have experiences that you could never have anticipated. What you thought was separate and distant will come right inside, in oneness.
Later on in this book we will talk more about the emotions in, “When our Emotions Get Out of Balance,” and “Freedom Fom the Grip of Anger.” But for now we will talk about another aspect of the mind: “The Memory.”
The Memory
There is one last function of the mind that we should look at. That’s the memory. Many people feel that it’s their memory that provides the sense of continuity for their life. It is because of what they remember that they know who they are.
But if you examine your memory closely, you will discover some astonishing facts. First of all, you forget a lot more than you remember. If you don’t believe me, what did you have for lunch 27 days ago? For all of the things that you do in the course of a single day, you only remember a very small portion of them, and that’s what you call your life.
Secondly, even the things that you remember, you remember imperfectly. Over time the facts and the details get lost. Generally the details in your memory favor you, and not the other people in the memory. If you need proof of this, try getting several people to describe an event that they just experienced like a crime scene. Everyone will have a different version of what happened. Which one is correct? That’s why when someone writes a memoir, I wonder if they are just writing another form of a novel.
Now thirdly, when you experience your memory, are you experiencing it in the past, or are you experiencing it now? We are really just experiencing our memory now, aren’t we? So memory is not proof of what happened in the past; it’s proof of what’s happening right now.
With all of these flaws, it certainly isn’t our memory that gives our life a sense of continuity and reality, is it? So what is it that makes your life seem real, and that makes it seem like one continuous story. To discover this, you have to notice the one thing that almost everyone overlooks: you are aware of your memory.
In fact you are aware when you remember something, and you are aware when you forget it. Few people ever get curious and ask, “How did I know that I forgot that.” If they looked finely, they would notice that it’s because they stand as awareness that they notice what they remember and what they forget.
In fact the function of the mind called memory is just an imposture. The sense of continuity and reality comes from you, the awareness that knows the memory, and not from your memory.
In the next chapter we will talk about the little hook that pulls us into limitation. Noticing this hook is the secret to quickly stepping out of limitation and suffering. That’s the thought, ‘I.’ See “The I Thought.”
The I Thought
Is the thought, ‘I,’ the very subject of our experience? ‘I’ think, ‘I’ have good thoughts, ‘I’ get angry, ‘I’ am a secretary, a doctor, etc. You often mistake this little word, ‘I,’ attached to your thoughts to be you, the subject. In Indian philosophy this is sometimes called the ego. You can consider this ‘I’ thought to be the hook that makes thoughts seem like they define you. Yet when you look carefully you can easily see that you are also aware of this thought, and by your awareness you are even greater than the thought of ‘I.’
So in your meditation notice that you are aware of the thought that seems to be the subject, ‘I,’ as well as the object that seems to consume your attention. This ‘I’ thought is just another object in your awareness; it is not you.
This ‘I’ also appears to provide continuity between all of your various experiences in the waking state, when you are dreaming, and when you are in the deep sleep state. Here the ‘I’ thought is more subtle than just a thought. It is an assumption that somehow the environment of thoughts that populates your mind provides the feeling of continuity for your life. Yet it is interesting that when you look, you find the thoughts in the waking state are often completely different from the thoughts in the dream
