Self Mastery and the Whole Person

We cannot separate ourselves into parts. We come as a complete package. Any action we take involves all dimensions of the personality – physical, mental, and spiritual. Let’s go back to the Travelling Exercise we did earlier and do it again. This time, be aware of the different power functions at each level. Don’t try to change them, or use them I any particular way. Just pay attention and become more familiar with how they operate within your personality.
As you go through the exercise and become more relaxed and focused, feeling of loneliness, anxiety, or self-criticism will disappear. This is because we are most natural when we are relaxed and focused. We were not born fearful, self-critical and lonely. These are products of mind, not innate functions. These dragons are hidden in our habits and strike at the most inconvenient times. In confronting our dragons, we will see how to take their power away, and use it to create harmony, joy, and love in our lives.



OUR HUMAN MIND HOME OF DRAGONS

Mark Twain said, “I am an old man with many troubles. Most of which never happened.” Most of the time the things we worry about never take place. But even knowing that doesn’t stop us from worrying and creating problems for ourselves. Even when our past experience tells us that everything will eventually work out, we spin our wheel, stress our bodies, and become irritable with our friends and family. All for very little reason.
But while you were worrying, it didn’t seem that it was inappropriate. It seemed that like all the hell was going to break loose. Who was telling you to be frightened? Who was telling you that you wouldn’t be able to handle it?



The Chattering Mind (Ashant Mann)

Pay attention to what is happening inside your head at this moment. Notice you are constantly talking to yourself. We give this mental activity a very generous name, “thinking.” But actually most of what goes inside our head is not thoughtful at all, just on idea setting off another, one image leading to other. Mind chatter can be thoughtful, creative and productive. But left unmanaged, it can be endless source of unhappiness, stress and disease.
In fact the first thing you will notice about the mind that it can move in time and space. Your mind can take you anyplace, anytime and in any situation. But the brain and our body stays in present. The brain does not discriminate between thoughts or images of the past, the present and the future. To brain every thought happens in present. To the brain, every thought, every image, is as real as the next one. So every thought is immediately translated into biochemical and neurological events so that the body can respond. When your mind anticipates the future or dwells on the past, your body responds as if the event were happening in the present. Mind and body are no longer coordinated, creating a state of imbalance. This lack of coordination is insignificant if our thoughts are emotionally neutral. If say at this very moment your mind drift and you think about the milk you have to buy before going to home. The moment you have this thought, your body gets programmed to do the task. If you were hooked to sensitive medical instruments, like an EEG (electroencephalograph) to read brain waves, an EKG (electrocardiograph) to measure heart rate, and a GSR (galvanic skin response) detector (such as a lie detector), we would be able to measure subtle changes in your body as it responds to the thought.
Since you were not emotionally involved with the particular thought, you invest little energy in that programming. The changes in your body are subtle. But if the thought would have been, say about losing your job or being in an accident, the emotional energy associated with these thought would dramatically increase and set off an alarm reaction inside your body. When we worry, we constantly create this imbalance between our mind and body. Much of this mental activity is useless – consisting of endless speculations on future events and reconstruction of past events. When we constantly program ourselves with fear and negativity, our bodies have no choice but to respond with tension and stress.
Take a moment to become aware of your chatter. Don’t get involved with it, just be a witness and watch the different thoughts, images, and sensations that arise in your mind. Now let us try this short exercise;

1) Close your eyes and visualize your mind like a room, with thoughts and images coming in one door, passing through the room, and going out the other door. Notice how one thought leads to another in a seemingly endless progressive of thoughts, images, and sensations. As you do this, be aware of how your body feels.
2) Close the door the thoughts are going out, and let the thoughts pile up in one the room for a few moments. Then pay attention to your body. What differences do you notice?
3) Now open the door and let the thought clear from the room. How does your body react as the thoughts depart the room?
4) Then close both doors, and picture an empty room. What do you notice in your body?

Which was most comfortable: watching the thoughts pass through, letting the thoughts pile up, or having just the image of the empty room? How did it feel when you let the thought pile up in the room? Isn’t that very similar to how you feel on a busy, rushed day?


Each and every thought has some direct impact on the body. That is where the dragons live – the uncontrolled thoughts and images of the sensory mind.

Fear: the most dramatic of the dragons is fear. It colors our perceptions, distort our thinking, and destroy us as individuals as well as our families and neighborhood, even our nation. We are not born with fear. We are born with a primitive biological drive for self-preservation. But this biological drive has expanded to include more than just our physical being, it also includes our ego-self, i.e. “mein.”
Many of us have experienced the difference between fear and self-preservation.
Have you ever had a close call in your automobile or faced some other danger or crises. If you recall the instance clearly, you would remember that things began to happen in slow motion. You were relaxed, clear minded, and focused and had time to take small action to protect yourself. It’s not unusual that during a crisis you will act with self-preservation. Then once the crisis is over, all of sudden you feel weak, your heart races, and you become fearful as you realize what might have happened. There was no experience of fear until your mind began to chatter about what might have happened.
We create fear when we speculate about future. We never fear from what is happening, we only fear or worry about what might happen. Fear is a projection of “what if.” We are dealing with a fantasy, an expectation of some future event, not an event that is happening at the moment. The mind perceives possible future harm; the body acts as if it is happening now; and Jhuu Mantar, we have fear reaction.
Fear always involves the ego, our personal sense of identity, which expands to include the people and things with which we are emotionally identified. Instead of simply having a problem to solve, we have a problem that potentially will harm “me.” Listen to and compare the language of someone who worries about a certain event and someone who faces the same event with confidence. Along with pessimistic references to the future, the worrier will also have a number of self-references, all reflecting some kind of pending tragedy or harm that he will suffer. The individual with confidence will speak about the problem that must be solved, and probably already planning some action. His ego is not on the line in any negative way.
We train ourselves to fail by the worries and fear we imagine. The greater the imagined threat, the more energy goes into the imbalance between mind and body, and more diseased we become. Fear has no value other than to create stress, misery and cloud our intellect.

Self-hatred: It isn’t difficult to create a chronic pattern of failure and misery. All you have to do is constantly remind yourself of how awful, weak, or incompetent you are, and brood on your past mistakes, hurts and failures. Just as unmanaged chatter about future creates fear, unmanaged chatter about the past crates self-hatred. But instead of fight-or flight reaction, your body becomes passive and goes into retreat. Again you lose touch with the present, and cannot deal with it effectively and joyfully. The consequences are that you become withdrawn, weaken the immune system, make more mistakes, and feel even more incompetent.

The language of self-hatred is just as destructive as the language of fear, and much varied. In The Quite Mind, Dr. John Harvey identifies several different categories of destructive inner chatter that feed the dragon of self-hatred.