In being tempted by the devil in the wilderness during his 40 days of fasting, were Jesus Christ ordinary mortal, He would have most likely exclaimed “what am I thinking about?!”. We are not told that the devil appeared to Him in any way like he did to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is right, therefore, to think that he appeared to Jesus as a thought in very much the same way as thoughts appear to every man and woman today. Instead of wondering what he was thinking about, the enlightened one knew quite clearly that the thoughts that were appearing to Him were not his. In spite of the extreme conditions that were prevailing at the time, Jesus was able to fend the devil off and continue with his work. Can the same be said about many of us today?
I recently had the privilege of interacting with a profound book – The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle – and I must say that it accorded me an experience that enabled me to come to terms with this everyday phenomena. It is simply amazing how much transformation us human beings can go through, without as much as a thought of the enormity of what is actually happening to us. Coming to terms with this truth can only change one’s life.
My story.
Living in Africa and being surrounded by so many unnecessary limitations as is the norm for most countries in the continent, I grew up to see many, many reasons (or excuses), for the debilitating underdevelopment of every facet of life around me. Deep inside, I knew quite well, that all this difficulties that we have to endure daily, could either be removed or overcome in one way or the other, but the ever present voice of excuses was always there to console me to live for another day. In my country, we once had a president who was always quick to remind us that we were better off than Somalia (he never compared us with the better off countries) – this was an external voice, but one of those voices anyway. And therefore life continued.
As a child, I remember reading comics and other illustrations that had two little guys in the minds of people. A little guy with a set of wings and a halo, and another little guy with a set of horns and a tail. Each of them worked really hard to get one to either do good or bad, but most of the time the little horned/tailed guy won the day leaving the other little guy dejected. Today, I realize that this is a simplistic if not wholly wrong perception of the truth. There are no little guys competing for attention in our minds. Just us, who hold the truth, and many other voices (and reasons) that always seek to give us the easy way out of every situation that we may encounter.
I have come to learn that living with many voices in your head is insane. If it was not, then it would not be true to say that if one visited the psychiatrist and confessed of hearing voices in their head, they would be detained for treatment. It is therefore imperative that we make every effort to retain only one voice in our heads.
Daily exercise.
How do we ensure that we only retain one (the truth) voice in our heads?
If the mind is the playing field of the many voices, then we cannot find the solution therein. The solution must come from somewhere else. There are two ways of thinking – with the mind and with the heart. Unfortunately for many, education systems are based on mind thinking only, almost entirely neglecting heart thinking. Because of the education systems already mentioned, this becomes a rather difficult subject to broach as it becomes rather difficult for many to understand. Happily, the art of thinking with the heart has been practiced for ages in many different ways and is indeed available to all cultures of the world. Better still, many teachers have emerged and gone universal in the quest to share this incredible activity with any who care to listen.
It all starts with the spiritual dimension. Everything begins in the spirit and not in the mind as has been suggested by many. To say that things start as a thought is correct but to say that things start in the mind is wrong. The mind is only the passage through which things are translated into the physical hence its analytical capabilities. Not to understand this simple truth is many a time abortive and disastrous. For us to be able to follow through with those creative thoughts, we need to be able to constantly make reference to the origin of the thought so that we may work with all the data that is available to us. Beautiful ideas are aborted or turned into disasters when the mind takes them over and conjures its own end to them. We all know that the mind has a knack of complicating even the simplest of matters since over the years it has been told that the more complicated it can get, the more intellectual it is. We also know that life is simple. Besides, the views of the two minds are always at odds on everything issue. For example, where the outer mind may think “hold on to” the inner mind may be suggesting “let go” – this is a classic example of the constant conflict that we experience in life on a daily basis.
Personally, I have used simple meditative like procedures to arrive at a point that I can clearly realize the strength of the inner mind. I have also committed to daily practice doing this, on top of engaging the same, every time I am faced with an out of the ordinary situation. Different people will find it useful to access their heart mind different ways. We must seek to a way that is most comfortable with our lifestyles, but accessing this kind of information is as easy as 123. Try googling the words ‘inner mind’.
Summary.
In summarizing, we see that the first step is to come to terms with the fact that we are not our minds. The second step is devising or learning an easy way of accessing the heart or inner mind. The third step is learning to obey and to stick to the instructions of the heart while giving mind voices the contempt that they deserve. Just like Jesus, we must let those mind voices know that we know the truth by countering them with it.
Trying this out has personally given me an unbelievable burst of energy and seriously awakened my creativity. Yet I know there is more on the way.
Quip.
A week ago, an elderly man that we spent an afternoon with, raised this interesting question – “Why do people, when they grow old, go back to walking exactly as they did when they were little children?”- we all thought that it was because by that time the ego is either dead or is seriously disabled!
