The World is My Mirror Read Online Free Page A

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    The mind is subject to some bad press in spiritual circles, rendering it an inadequate device for self-realisation. We hear things like, ‘The mind has not a clue,’ or, ‘You need to transcend the mind to reach nirvana.’ However, the mind, or thinking, is not going away. We need it to function responsibly and intelligently in this world. We need to know our enemies as well as our friends through the amazing cognitive capabilities that match current patterns with older established ones. It is useful to dodge a person in the supermarket who’s bored you to tears on a previous encounter and so enable your half hour lunch break to be as productive as possible. The mind is a marvel of nature. The emergence of thought is the emergence of ‘world’. Thinking creates novel situations and constant change that appear and disappear almost instantaneously. If we accept the evolutionist theory of life, then we can see physiological change and novelty are considered a gradual tinkering brought about by slow environmental pressures; thinking is not bound by the same time constraints.
     
    The trick is to give it something to do. This way it will be like a sheepdog at your feet waiting for you to throw that tennis ball for the hundredth time. It hates standing still. It gets bored, restless and silly. Give it some homework and mark its results. Be strict, though, it can be very economical with the truth and it is a master of deception. You thought Derren Brown was good? Wait till you see what your own mind is capable of.
     
    Probably the strongest, most ubiquitous belief the mind has is that you, whatever that is, is located inside the body as a person‌—‌whatever that is. This, the mind argues, is your ultimate residence, the location from which you view the world and plan your activities for the rest of your life. In here we can hold our secrets and fantasies. We can contemplate whom we would like misfortune to visit and imagine the triumph after defeating our enemies from the past and present in a mock battle that would leave the writers of Star Wars in a daze. Yes, in here no one can see our vulnerabilities; no one can really know we’re worthless and unlovable.
     
    But take a look; see where this world where you gain all the ideas for your scripts comes from. Let us start with a big one‌—‌other people. Generally other people appear to us as objects. They seem to have clearly defined boundaries and stand out from whichever background is appearing at the time. They match with a previously held pattern that rings the ‘human being’ or ‘person’ bell. We then perhaps smile, recoil or greet our object. We make a connection.
     
    Now, give your mind this one to chew on: have you ever witnessed a so-called other person and also been absent? I cannot stress enough that you should answer only from your direct experience. Do not allow thought to create an idea of another person existing in time and space that you are not privy to. The mind cannot help but come up with a very intellectual answer that will take you from here to Timbuktu and back again. It is only trying to help. It wants to find an answer that meshes with some higher order or core beliefs set down at a much earlier time. Do not accept its first answer, give it something else to do. Ask it if anything else is apparent when the other person appears. It might start to have an inkling where this investigation is going. A bead of sweat may appear on its wrinkled, perplexed brow. Keep going. Ask it if there is a sense of knowing or presence indicated in its answer. Just wait for a reply. Be patient. It might play the ‘shadow card’.
     
    The shadow card works like this: objects as we know them might not be what we actually see, but there is still something forming an impression on our nervous system. There is still someone inside constructing something outside and creating a mind object, even if that mind object is not a faithful one-to-one match