9 Mind Cleaning Tips...

This is dedicated to "E" and "J".

One. First, it’s a good idea to get familiar with your “personality type”, and one good way to do this is to take the Riso Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator test, available from the Enneagram Institute or downloadable on request from this blog in either Spanish or English. After you do the test and hand in your results, you can have the .pdf version of The Wisdom of the Enneagram (only in Spanish at present).

Your personality type will either confirm what you already know or give you a surprise why you do, say and feel things in your own way. It also helps to explain why other people do the things they do, and what kind of relationships you can have with them. When you see how personalities interact and how others affect you, you are beginning to bring a certain amount of order into your mind. This “liberates” you to a certain extent, because:

1. You no longer expect to receive from others what they cannot give. This includes parents, siblings, friends spouses, lovers and acquaintances.

2. You realise your strengths and weaknesses as regards yourself and others.

3. You begin to free your “you” from the contents of your mind. Personality was formed from your childhood and youth in quite an unconscious way, and you have to bring this into your present consciousness and accept it.

Two. Establish a plan. You’ve read self-help books, psychology or spiritual or transformational material to the bursting point. You’ve gone fishing here and there and found interesting things.

- If you’re the intellectual, ectomorphic or cerebrotonic type, you’ll never stop reading and thinking about things and you’ll get stuck in words only without action. Life isn’t just brains.

- If you’re the physical, mesomorphic or soomatotonic type, you’ll want to do things and you won’t bother studying too much – round yourself out and study as well! Life isn’t just muscle.

- If you’re the fun-loving, feeling, endomorphic, viscerotonic type, you won’t read and you won’t practise much – you’re busy having fun. But life isn’t just socialising and gut!

So consider your type and devise a plan that works for you. Edward Wells’ plan, which is pretty hefty, calls for at least 3 to 4 hours per weekday of “work on the mind and body” (excluding weekends which are for socialising), including rituals, yoga, breathing exercises, yoga exercises, sensing, zikr or prayer, walking with mental practises, meditation and contemplation. You have to make your own plan depending on your time, work, leisure and family. But you can start with much less. Just be creative and keep adjusting. Believe nothing, find out for yourself.

Three. Do it. Implement your plan. Sit down and practise. Don’t just make timetables and then not do it. The reality is in the doing. If you need help, go to four.

Four. Find other people interested in doing the same. Or study material that really helps you look inside yourself. Reading about it is not enough. Stop reading and start doing, and if you have others who are interested, compare notes. Find inspiration. There has to be fuel in the machine to start it and keep it going.

Five. Cultivate the “Witness” or the “Observer”. You should already have realised that “you” are not just your sensations, or your feelings (that’s tough for some!), or not even your thoughts (that’s even tougher!). You may feel like you are being stripped of everything you’ve acquired in life – your likes and dislikes, your opinions and beliefs, your pet peeves and fixed ideas… Sorry, it’s not that they have to go, you just have to realise that you aren’t them, nor are they “You”. There is a “You” standing behind all these workings of the mind which is your Self-Awareness, your Consciousness, your “You” that is able to observe or witness all these operations of the mind – the thoughts, feelings and sensations. Sensations are pretty easy – you have a hunger pang and you can decide whether to eat or not, or what to eat. You’re not going to starve if you don’t eat for an hour or two, right? So a sensation is just a message to your “You”, and “You” are the boss! A feeling, you may think, is much more you – but it ain’t necessarily so, as the song says, because your feeling comes from an initial thought and you have not analysed all your feelings and thoughts yet, so maybe your feeling, especially if it’s a “negative” or “bad” feeling, is just an old habit of thinking along certain lines and generating the corresponding feeling. You need to be free from feelings you don’t choose to have. We are looking for mind cleaning and freedom from the past. Because your thoughts are only generated from past inputs. You can’t logically think something you don’t know. Thought is wonderful, but it’s only “this is this; this is not that”, in computer language 0 or 1. We need to go beyond thought to “What is this?”, “Why is this?”, “How can this be?”. That is a question to the “You”, the “Witness” or the “Observer” that requires mental cleansing and silence for an answer to come. And that answer comes from beyond thought.

Six. Persevere and stick to it. Nothing is going to change in 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months or a year. We are so steeped in our own mindset, our society, our memories, our habits and our conditioning, that it will take major efforts and a long time to bring about any change. Either you apply steadfastness or you’re dead. You can’t just chop and change and expect immediate results. We’re talking about years and years of non-self-awareness, status quo and unexamined life that cannot be changed until we really want to change it and go all out to realise change. If in doubt, continue. When in doubt, continue. When all seems lost, continue. There’s no other way.

Seven. Look into your mind and see where the things you call “you” really come from. Re-analyse your personality type and go deeper and deeper. Establish order, struggle and do your practises.

Eight. Readjust your plan. After a time, you should feel quite comfortable with your working plan, and you won’t need to struggle with yourself to actually do it. You want to do it. You feel the need to find time to sit and meditate. You actually start enjoying it and needing it. You start having an “inner friend” who’s on your side now. You may miss a day or a session here and there, but you will feel the urge to come back to your practises, and you will want them. You’re moving inward. You’re feeling stronger. Outside, you may even start looking calmer and younger to others, more relaxed, more attractive….!

Nine. Re-assess everything. Your sense of inner calm is much stronger now. You are discovering that “You” are much more than body, feelings and thoughts. You are behind and inside all this; these are all externals of the mind, the content of mind, and “You” can decide, within your limitations, what thoughts, feelings and sensations you will have. You are freer than before. You are at the gates to freedom... You have a long way to go, but this is just the beginning of in inward journey that will only end for this body, as far as we know, when you die. But do not speculate, do not come to conclusions... doubt and you simply can't go wrong.

After this, stop thinking and reading, and start doing!