Mind the Mind - or The Efficient Use of Energy Resources

We received the question: What can we do to help the world, what with climate change, dwindling resources, terrorism, hunger and everything?

Ok, you believe in clean air, healthy food, world peace. You want to combat climate change, overpopulation, hunger. You’re against terrorism, war and hatred. You think love makes the world go round, you have heard that inside we are “pure essences of love”, and you do acts of charity and support your friends, neighbours and even strangers. You try to listen empathetically, you meditate and try to see the oneness of all. So maybe you are a Vegan or a vegetarian, or at least you believe in organic food. You exercise and consume low-fat products, because everyone says that’s what you should be doing. Great. Now what? Have we solved all of life’s problems?

Well, after caring for our bodies – not too ascetically because we live in a culture of abundance – what are we doing with and to our minds? The premise of “you are what you eat” means the body is the recipient of all nourishing and non-nourishing things that we consume through the mouth and enjoy through taste, smell, sight and even touch.

Another premise is “you are what you think, feel and experience”: the mind is the recipient of all nourishing and non-nourishing things that we allow to enter through sight, sound, sensation or feeling (sense perceptions) and how we react by thinking, feeling or reacting to these stimuli (mental reactions).

Why so much concern for the body and what we eat? Of course nowadays, what with so many chemicals and artificial products, we have to be a little more careful than before, when things were “more natural”, but why all this insistence on eating well? Mankind has survived for millions of years without abundance. Humanity grew up by occasionally feasting and often fasting and making do with whatever Nature could give him. In ancient times in fact, scarcity was rampant. Today, abundance is rampant in what we call the civilised world. There are 1.6 billion out of 7.3 billion who are “overweight”, which is 21% of the world’s population. But 784 million are undernourished, 675 million do not have access to drinking water. It would appear to a reasonable observer from another planet that mankind is doing a very poor job of caring for his own species, let alone the other species that are endangered or already practically extinct. Many human beings are well, or too well, but all too many others are unwell. Yet we call ourselves civilised.

The reason is we only start caring about what we put into our bodies when we either have 1) a life philosophy that regulates this, or 2) a kind of superabundance that allows to us be capricious and faddy. When climate change, overpopulation and the desecration and the desertification of the land comes – and it looks like it will if current trends continue – then we shall see if the caprices and fads continue, too, or whether we will have to eat whatever there is, or simply go hungry, starve and finally die out.

So, to prevent this, the solution is the “mind”. My mind, your mind, the mind of your spouse, your lover, your neighbour, the mind of the chance acquaintance at the café round the corner – wherever you happen to be. How can the mind prevent this? By looking at itself, and by first being convinced that there is such a thing as “mind over matter”, and that this “does matter”. For the time being, don’t get overly concerned about what you put into your body. Just go with what you have going. But you should become very, very serious and alert as to what you PUT INTO or ALLOW TO DWELL IN YOUR MIND.

Here is a list of the no-no’s, from A to Z, and it’s not a question of belief or a set or compulsory morals to be adhered to. It’s more a question of sustainability, eco-friendliness, pure ecology and basic psychology of the New Era, to be explained below.

ü  Anger (wrath)

ü  Impatience (initial non-acceptance, leading to annoyance)

ü  Annoyance (the start of irritation)

ü  Irritation (annoyance getting worse)

ü  Frustration (the result of allowing annoyance and irritation to dwell and produce depression)

ü  Boredom (need to be stimulated)

ü  Anxiety (gnawing worry)

ü  Nervousness (fidgeting and worrying)

ü  Covetousness (grasping and desiring)

ü  Despair (disappointment)

ü  Disgust (rejection)

ü  Guilt (shame)

ü  Hostility (bitterness)

ü  Contempt (hate, violence)

ü  Jealousy (fear of someone taking what you think is yours)

ü  Envy (desire for another’s perceived superiority)

ü  Pride (vanity, overweening importance of self)

ü  Sadness (sorrow, hurt)

Each time you “feel” these emotions – we use this verb in quotation marks because they are mostly “thoughts” that affect the nervous system and are not real “feelings” – and act on them, you are contributing to an infection, a viral disease, an epidemic that affects both you, your loved ones, those close to you and the whole planet and universe. Because energy is not created on Earth. We tend to think there is an industry on the planet that “creates” or produces energy, but this is just a conventional fiction. No energy comes from anywhere else but from the Sun, without which we wouldn’t be here. (Petroleum? Liquid solar energy from millions of years ago. Coal? Fossilised solar energy. Water? The blood of the Earth, only here because the Sun is here, etc.). On a normal day, our friends at worldometers calculate that some 20 billion MWh of energy strike the Earth from the Sun. A marvellous figure, and no one should dispute it. It’s not the exact amount that counts, but the fact that it only comes from the Sun. We humans transform our share of this energy by acting and reacting to stimuli. Our minds process this energy in interpreting our sensations. When we feel, we are using solar power. When we think, it’s the sun’s energy. When we move, we locomote thanks to the Sun. Or would you be doing the same things you normally do every day if you were suddenly placed on the surface of Pluto, from which the sun would appear as a star, albeit a bright star? You wouldn’t exist there for a second. You can only exist as you are because of where you are and because of the Earth’s Sun.

Now whatever goes on in your MIND is a planetary, environmental and ecological reality. Either your mind uses the Sun’s energy to promote goodness, healthiness, well-being and serenity, using its limited amount of energy for beneficial purposes, or your mind uses its limited solar power input to create more badness, more unhealthiness, lesser well-being and more insecurity for you and for all. It is really all up to you. You can’t ask or force anyone else to do your work for you. No one can feed energy into a machine to make products it hasn’t been designed to make.  But we humans have been designed to produce a variety of products, for better or for worse. We can and must re-design ourselves. We can because it’s built into our system. That’s what makes us human. But we can also remain sub-human or “normal”, and produce “junk thoughts”, in addition to spam or junk mail. Or we can progress towards being super-human, or fully self-aware. For that we have to re-design our MINDS to produce “good work” for ourselves and humanity before it’s too late. And it’s too late for you when you’re already feeble and dying, or dead. And it’s too late for the World when it’s clogged full of pollution, the ice-caps have melted and famine has spread across the abundant and beautiful lands that human beings didn’t even make – they were only just stupid enough to destroy them because they found they weren’t really as “Aware” or “Self-Aware” as they thought they were. Shame.

So look into your mind, find some support to help you through the initial phases, and practise Self-Awareness. It will help the world. Because the world is you and you create the world through your human experience.

Next article: “Mind Cleaning: The Stevie Wonder Method of Always Living in the Positive”, or Pratipaksa Bhavana.