Coined By Your ownself

The Deceptive Mind

We may not have the power to change our situations, but we certainly have the freedom to change how we define them. It is our language and consequent emotional states that reinforce fear and self-hatred and make them stronger. The words we use rob us of our own strength and give it to the two dragons.
The first mistake that we make over and over again is to accept whatever the mind tells us as the “truth” instead of calmly evaluating the usefulness of our mind chatter. The sensory mind was never designed to tell us truth, but to provide us with a perspective, a consistent way to interpret our perceptions. Its function is to collect and present sensory data, all of which are organized by the unconscious habits that control our perceiving and thinking. Our unconscious emotional habits can create many disturbing and unproductive lines of thought that have little to do with reality. Our emotions aren’t the only source of misleading information. The mind can offer us completely arbitrary thought, images, and sensations.


Let’s try an exercise:

THE GREEN FROG EXERCISE

Sit-back, close your eyes, and relax. Focus on an even, smooth breath and clear your mind as best as you can. Let your face muscle relax, and follow that relaxation down to your toes, relaxing the whole body. Now imagine yourself as a great green bullfrog, sitting on a lily pad in the middle of a beautiful, small clear pond. Over to the side you can see red-winged blackbird building a nest. Picture a blue sky with puffy white clouds. It’s about ten o’clock in the morning of a beautiful October day. The sun is shining and you feel the heat of the sun on your back. The sunshine feels very warm on your back. Now jump off the pad into the water. Glook! Ahh, the water feels cool and nice on your warm skin. Swim down under the lily pad. You see the stem coming up from the bottom, attached to the lily pad. As you look up to the surface of the water, you see the sunshine filtering through the water. Beautiful sight!
Now come to the surface, swim over to the lily pad, and climb back on. Feel the pad moving underneath you as you climb on. Now the sun feels really good on cool wet skin. Life is wonderful!
Now open your eyes. Do you really believe that you are a large, green bullfrog? If you do then you need more help than this single article can give you. Most of us distinguish easily between our imagination and what is real…or do we? These imaginations are all nothing more than mind forms. You determine which ones you will believe and accept, and which you won’t.
You may not be able to stop your mind from telling you things, but no one says you have to believe them! You don’t have to accept everything that the mind chatter says. You probably have some particularly troublesome thought that keeps gnawing at you. You may not feel smart enough, or you may feel that what you accomplish is second rate, or worry that someone will find out just how incompetent you really are.
The same thought pop into our mind day after day and we keep proving ourselves that this is not true. But then very next day the thought is back. Every time we have to prove ourselves, we reinforce the underlying negative thought by paying attention to it. This is the second mistake: trying to use language to control the consequences of language.


THE LIMITS OF POSITIVE THINKING

The sensory mind builds on opposites. In other words, there must be a “right” to have “left” and “good to have “bad.” If we think positively, then somewhere in the mind we have negative thinking. As long as we deal with opposites, we cannot eliminate just one side of them. When we stand in front of a mirror, smile, and say. “Today is going to be a wonderful day in every way,” just guess, what the mind is saying on an unconscious level? Probably something very much like “Wanna bet?” or “Yesterday sure was lousy.”
When we deal only with positive statement, that means we are forcing our negative feelings into the unconscious mind. In fact, the very motivation to think positively comes from a negative condition. Why would you need to think positively unless you had already created a negative state? If you didn’t create any negative feelings about yourself, you wouldn’t have to think positively. Your mind would be free to focus on problem solving. No matter how many times you repeat positive affirmations, they only subtly reinforce the negative, and you never gain freedom.
As we shall see later on, we can access the deeper levels of the mind and neutralize the power of our emotional and language habits when we eliminate the need to be positive, we will find that we already are.

Until now we have been trying to know about Self-knowledge, which is only the first necessary step. Knowledge has power, but without skill, we have nothing. We know where the power lies within the different dimensions of the personality, but unless we know how to use that power, unless we become skilled human beings, nothing happens.