The Mind

Free Your Mind - Free Your Life.

Escape entrapment by developing:

thought emotion, and communication.

Clear out your mental garbage and

Develop new ways of thinking.

Avoid being overwhelmed -

by your emotions or by another's.

Be in control of your feelings and be in control your life.

Renew your mind and renew your existence.

We are trapped within our minds within our universes. Like the maker of the computer who becomes controlled by his creation, we as spiritual beings have become entrapped within our own creations - our minds. Developed, like the computer, to free us from the tedium of routine existence, our minds have become our masters. Made originally for us to control, they now control us.

Minds full of junk

As beings living now, we have minds filled with junk - perhaps from many aeons ago. And ways of doing things that belong in the days of tooth and claw! We need to both clean out our minds, and remake new, more useful programs to help us live effectively and to continue our spiritual quest.

Our minds contain thoughts, procedures and images - pictures, sounds, feelings and taste-smells. We think by following procedures we have developed - but probably long forgotten and long been unaware of.

For example, in a phobic situation, we see something which we associate with some emotions and consequently behave in a certain way.

In the phobic state the emotion is fear and the behaviour is probably escape or attack. In a phobia the thing we are afraid of is not a threat to the body. "Nothing is a threat to the spirit!"

(Nothing is a threat to the spirit!) The fear is irrational or extreme.

Even if we do not have phobias, the principle affects all of us.

The way we think in phobicly does not help us at all. At the very most it is a relic from some past threat. Phobias are not usually big issues with many of us, but their principle affects us all, when we think of irrational nervousness in situations where there is no physical threat.

And the same mechanism works whenever we loose control of ourselves, either due to extremely pleasurable or painful emotions. We react with too much emotion and overwhelm ourselves.

When we hear speech in a certain tone, for example, and we note certain actions we might conclude that the other person doesn't like us, and we think we should get our own back. Mental program:

... When someone speaks like that in that sort of situation, it means they don't like me, and mean me harm. And whenever people intend to harm me I must get my own back ...

Because, for example, our parents used a particular tone when they did not approve of what we did, does not mean that the person in our present life who uses that tone is thinking the same way as our parents did.

It certainly doesn't mean that they have the same powers and threats which our parents had! Yet our mind continues to use these old procedures, with their inappropriate response. We might suddenly become silent and nervous, unable to speak or feel extreme rage and throw a temper tantrum. With our parents this might have worked or have been wise, but it is less likely to work in our adult lives.

Our bodies remember the Age of Tooth and Claw.

In a primitive existence, where threats to life are common, it is wise to set up procedures which give us advanced warning of danger and which present us with fearful mental pictures or sounds, which motivate us to escape or attack before the real threat emerges. If these procedures are so powerful that

* they shut down the conscious, thinking mind and work our bodies like a reflex -

* independently of our conscious thinking and will - and

* automatically put us into a fight or flight mode

* with all the fear and panic that gives us energy

* then this may a small price to pay for survival.

That is, it may have been helpful in caveman times. In fact, it probably was. Even if this meant we have lots of false alarms. Because of the danger it is worth it. It's better to jump a few times a day than be devoured by tigers! Notice flocks of birds, how they panic many times a day at the slightest sign of danger. But for us, in modern society, such responses no longer needed. They may even prevent us from attaining what we want, and reduce us to mere automata. In fact, they probably do.

Freeing ourselves of these ancient or childish ways of thinking and acting and remodelling, we can learn to respond better. If a hungry tiger suddenly appears, and looks at us greedily, then a split-second reflexive response with extreme fear (to energise us) and fight, flight or feigning death would be appropriate. If the boss looks at us fiercely, this panic response, designed for tigers does not help. Bosses do not normally pounce on people and begin to eat them! And under these circumstances we need to use our brains, not our emotions! By keeping our heads and communicating wisely, we would certainly do better. What worked in the jungle, does not work in the modern office!

Clean up the mind

By clearing out this mental debris and developing more appropriate ways of thinking, we can free ourselves and regain mastery of our minds. Like the computer designer who has succumbed to his machine, and realises that he must free himself of its control, we need to free ourselves of our obsolete mental procedures.

"If you don't know where you're going - you'll end up somewhere else!"

Let's go back to basics. What do we mean by developing or clearing our minds so we can start again with a fresh new mind and a fresh new life? We know that when we feel good, our world appears bright and cheerful. And when we feel bad, our world appears dull and threatening. When our minds are bright, so is our world. We know also that computers and Minds are useful things, when kept in their place. Yet both work on the Garbage-in-garbage-out principle. A mind full of false computations is just as useless as a computer with false data. When we realise that much of the data and procedures in our minds was put there during