The Mind

Over the years my mind has driven me crazy. Well...what I thought was crazy. For years I considered my thoughts to be who i am. They defined me. After all it was me that was thinking them. The only problem is that whenever I referred to mind there was this weird anomaly. I was referring to myself in the third person.

Come on. We all do it. We all talk to ourselves. So who or what are we talking to? That's just it though if we are our thoughts and by default our minds then why do we say things like i told myself this or that or my mind is driving me crazy or... Even our language doesn't integrate our minds with who we are. MY mind.

Now I taught English for 6 years to foreigners so I got asked a lot of unusual questions which made me ask a lot of unusual questions. Like MY indicates the ownership of a thing. In which case if 'my' indicates that we own that thing then we ARE NOT that thing. In much the same we dont say that because we own a car that we are that car. The same for anything else, yet, when it comes to MY mind, we get all confused and think that when our minds are going nuts that it means we are too.

So maybe I'm rambling a bit. But the point is that the day I felt the SPACE between my mind and me things changed. SO im going to get something out of the way right from the start. You might say "Ok..but then who are you?" Right now that really isn't important. That you can eventually decide for yourself on your own. The important question right now is more "WHERE are you?"

SO the smarter ones among you might say well I'm sitting at my computer thinking whatever I'm thinking about this blog or this post. That's not what I'm talking about. I mean within the confines of your body. You see we can define a human being into four basic categories. The Body, The Mind, The Emotions, and then the one that everyone gets all uppity about...The Spirit or YOU or that part of you that you know is there that you really don't know how to define.

So when I ask where are you? I'm asking if you can identify the spirit part of you in amongst the mind the emotions and the body.

Try Something for me.

Read what follows, try it and see what you experience.

Close your eyes and breath.
Watch yourself breathing for a while (there goes that whole third person thing again)
Just sit there.
Now if it hasn't happened already become aware of any thoughts your having. Just follow them don't try to change them. Just watch in the same way you were watching your breath.
Now remember that you are sitting on your chair and realise that your thoughts are being shown to you at the frontal area of your head. Almost as if you  are watching them on a movie screen. Don't try to see the edges of the screen just FEEL that because you're watching these thoughts there must be a space between 'you' and them. If it doesn't happen at first stay with it.
After a few seconds (for some it might be immediate) you should be able to feel that space. As if your thoughts really are happening in front of you. Only this entire process is within your body.
Now come back to your breath. When you do this the mind will stop what its doing and follow you before once again projecting things in front of you. The thoughts that you were aware of before should have disappeared.

You see the purpose of this exercise is to realise the separation between yourself and what we call the mind. Everyone I have ever done this with experiences this 'space'.

The interesting thing about this is that quantum physics (essentially the science of the very small) tells us that the spaces between small things is actually very vast. So although you might experience the gap as small it isn't really. ;)

Okay so really whats the point? Well like I said in the beginning once i realised that there was a gap between what I perceived as my consciousness/spirit/soul whatever you want to call it and my mind I felt I had more ability to control what was happening internally to me. In other words my thoughts weren't affecting me as much as they were before. I was able to 'see' more clearly