A Well Oiled Machine

The mind is often pointed to as a “problem” and it certainly can appear that way at times. But it seems to me to just be a machine that does what we command it to do. “I am….” fill in the blank, and it just does what we told it to do. Any choice, declaration, command etc. is an instrument by which we give it instructions, from “I’m reliable” to “He’s a jerk”. Part of its nature, which is what we sometimes disparage, is that it defends the commands that we give it, a form of a survival mechanism.

It seems to me that any distinction generates a boundary between itself and anything else and that perhaps some survival mechanism comes along with the act of distinguishing. In the case of a command/choice directed to the mind, this means that not only is it to be executed as instructed, but also to be defended against contrary perspectives. It’s the defense that is more obvious than our choice that created it in the first place since being “defensive” is frowned upon and threatens our inclination to be liked/included.

Part of our conflicted natures is due to the fact that we have made many choices that are contradictory. We are often a mass of internal conflicts of interest of our own making. Internally we can chastise ourselves for acts or words that we regret, when in actuality we have simply allowed one of our own choices to override another. Choosing between any two is sometimes conscious but more typically automated. The automation comes in the form of underlying preferences, which I’ve addressed before, and may depend on a range of things but at least one’s “mood”, how far upstream the command was placed and the amount of energy (intensity) with which it was put there. “He’s a jerk” is a pretty narrow focal range but “I’m reliable” is, though filtered, flavoring a wide variety of behaviors and part of the mind is always on the job watching out to defend the command. The ones that are less deep, like “He’s a jerk”, are often easily discarded by being present to either our deeper commitments or to qualities in that person that resonate with our deeper selves. But those that lie farther upstream can be more entrenched and hold more sway. As in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the computer ignored what it considered lower level commands of the astronauts and followed the instructions higher upstream in the command structure.

“I am Alone”, as an example, was laid down deep. It is also in direct contradiction of the natural gravity of Unity that calls us to be re-cognized as the One – in the form of being included/belonging. There is thus always some underlying tension between the two. Commands that are laid down in the deep quiet, upstream, tend to be more universally spread throughout our awareness and we are typically much less conscious of them. We may be aware of how they manifest but assign blame for that reaction elsewhere. If they are threatened, more energy seems to be brought to bear to defend them. The mind is very, very attentive to its duties and to the level of energy and intent originally used to create each choice.

For this reason, it is often difficult to resolve inconsistencies within our choices. First and foremost, we must become conscious of a conflict and this often becomes visible to me personally by what irritates me or generates stress. It is my custom to think that everything that makes me angry is the result of a choice that I made so is always an opportunity for discovery, whether I like it or not. But what is also clear is that when conflicting choices meet head on, the mind resists any transition that will weaken each choice’s stability. One will surely have to “lose” and that manifests as stress. Rationalizations tend to assign fault elsewhere, which keeps the underlying commitment hidden from my conscious thinking. This is only a way of putting off what will assuredly arise again……and again and again.

Most often in these instances my mind is full of rapid-fire thinking and feels very “static-y” (high frequency). I know that what it’s saying has nothing to do with the “real” underlying issue, though I will often drag it out until I can’t resolve it any other way. This is, fortunately, infrequent but I eventually do an exercise that I call “emptying my mind onto paper”. What I do is write down every single thought that comes to mind about that issue. The mind does tend to drift off onto something that came out on the page so I do have to keep returning it back to the topic at hand. When I feel like I’ve gotten everything, when the mind is seemingly empty, I pause for a minute or two and then start writing again. In nearly every case, at some point the real source of the problem comes out, in the revelation of some old declaration. It always feels like my mind let it out accidentally. Its nature is to defend commands and it just failed to do so. It seems to me that the rate of flow itself was responsible for that mistake, in that it exceeded the capacity of the associated language anchors to keep up – the flow was just too fast for the mind’s wordsmithing. The layer at which they had been attached was incompatible with the larger wave that washed them away.

Energetically there is a crescendo of a sort, where the waves get more and more particle-like and get congested “in my head”. That feeling is what I take as the clue that I finally need to sit down and “write it out”. My rationalizations get very rapid, noisy and stressful as the underlying grander wavelength threatens the range at which they have purchase. The tsunami of deeper awareness is a threat and they react to hold their ground. The tsunami itself exacerbates their frenzy but it does seem that I must choose to name all of their concerns before the parent energy is revealed and they acquiesce to awareness’ underlying commitment.

One way to view this layering of commands is that at each given moment in time I am focused on something in particular. I make my choices based solely on what I’m present to. The jockeying of previous commands for dominance at that moment is dependent on my current energetic focal range too. But regardless of where it started and where it ends, it is always a matter of some choice being made. Even a letting go practice is initiated by a choice to do so. So it can be said that every moment of my life is exactly how I have chosen it to be in a given moment.

There is nothing wrong with the mind. It works perfectly. The programmer must be conscious of what commands are given and though those commands are constrained to a great degree by earlier choices, there still appears to be a modicum of free will presenced in the act of choosing. There are people who’ve had near-death experiences who have said “my whole life passed before my eyes”. Extrapolate that out and imagine the time frame between the Big Bang and now. The original intent of the Singularity may appear minute, when looking from that vastness to the temporal rate in which we currently hang out, but I think that it is here infusing our every choice.