"We Sit and Wait"

Presenting Edward Well’s voice… in a first audio, called "We Sit and Wait".

Post-World-Health-Day Depression

According to the WHO, “Depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide. More than 300 million people are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% between 2005 and 2015.” Out of these, some 800,000 per year go on to commit suicide, which seems to be the end result of depressive thinking… Contemplating this on April 7th, I fought against getting depressed about it and studied the situation...

To put it bluntly, societies produce so many depressed people (and suicides) because they are sick societies. They don’t make their citizens happy. But a higher suicide rate in certain areas of the world may also indicate a traditional acceptance of causing one’s own death, as in North and South Korea (ranking tops at 37 and 29 per 100,000), Japan (18), and maybe Russia (19) and Eastern European countries (red countries range from 40 down to 12). Note that Indian culture (21) is also blasé about taking one’s own life, and some African countries (14-18). On the other hand, Islamic societies in the Middle East seem to show such a great acceptance of Allah’s wishes that they rarely take their own lives: Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Oman, Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria and Saudi Arabia are at the bottom of the list, all under 2 per 100,000. Green countries range from 12.84 to 8.54; violet from 8.53 to 4.52; grey countries are below 4.49.

 

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/suicide/by-country/

From the viewpoint of this blog, depression is simple. It’s a result of habitual patterns of wrong thinking and low awareness. The solution is right thinking and increased awareness. The problem is, where to get this from?  Because it isn’t a convenient commodity like a bottle of anti-depressants. Right thinking only comes with high levels of maturity in individual human beings, and this is then reflected to some degree in the societies they live in, or the masses of “followers” they create. But these human beings are few and far between. So people have to look to sometimes surrogate spiritual guides, gurus, religious people and a few intellectuals, psychologists and philosophers to make any headway. The mass media won’t help, nor will governments, political parties, the entertainment industry or big business. Internet today is a major evolutionary step forward in that you can find just about anything - if you feel the urge to look!

Sick societies create depressives, but wrong thinking produces the individual depressive. But mostly this is hardly the individual’s fault. He has been indoctrinated to think falsely and create his or her own messed-up mind. And so we are like tiny little mammals just peeping out of the grass at the lumbering dinosaurs of depression still dominating the Earth. There's lots of evolution to look forward to, but meanwhile what do we do? Without a total understanding of everything that is, the only thing we can do is look to ourselves and strive to increase our own level of awareness and start making the attempt to think properly. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”, as was once said.

Cave Series 14: A Quiet Place

My cave has various chinks in it, maybe five. One lets in a very dim shaft of light, and my movements cause dust particles to rise and they float around in the tenuous light. Another conveys muffled sounds, perhaps from outside, when the wind blows hard. But at the back end of the grotto, what appears to be a dome-like area is the best spot for utter peace and quiet, restfulness and a sense of joy. When sitting here in the darkness, the body dissipates and floats away, tensions are relieved and idle thoughts cease to flow. There is complete silence in this place. The eyes may imagine swirls of colour, but they soon drift away and usher in total blackness and calm, sometimes tinged with a rosy glow of happiness. Many things seem possible here. It is a place of power and joyfulness, and I long to return here whenever I am not groping around the rest of the cave trying get my bearings. I wonder at this spot, and cherish it. It seems like a home away from home, a place to return to always.

Holistic or Piecemeal? International Women’s Day

Just a thought for International Women’s Day, which started out in 1909 as a commemorative event in honour of the preceding year’s female garment workers’ strike in New York, promoted by the Socialist Party of America at that time. Only in 1975 did the UN begin celebrating this day on March 8th.

Nowadays, just about every day of the year is being classified as some kind of celebration day, supposedly for heightened awareness. This is the piecemeal approach to raising human consciousness. Are we really going to fix anything by naming a day as something special, something to “think about”, something to “talk about”?

On the IS-AD blog, we’ve already stated that every day of the year is good for celebrating Self-Awareness. Because this is the holistic approach to making a better world. The more Awareness there is in the human mind-stuff, the better the world will be, because that awareness can be directed towards anything at all – women, men, pets, yoga, elimination of nuclear weapons, even happiness (but you don’t have to wait till March 20th to celebrate the UN International Day of Happiness – you can start now and do it every day if you're not already happy!).

So, happy International Women’s Day, but don’t be fooled by today’s pomp and circumstance… Make sure the feminine is well protected tomorrow as well! And every day.

Cave Series 13: Blue Force Field

No black cave the other day… It was a bluish force field, an immense expanse of power extending before me, something like the picture shown here, and I sat there just gaping at it with bated breath, caught up inside it and feeling how I could look around and expand into it at will. I lifted my arms – they weighed nothing. I brought them together and spread them apart  – effortlessly. The field grew stronger, and I was in the midst of it. It was me. Or I was it. I couldn’t tell. Waves of power swept through me, from feet to head. And just as I was beginning to revel in it and enjoy it, I decided, hey! this is all very nice, but it’s beside the point. I am here to get answers to my questions, not watch sideshows. For decoration, I already have the world outside. I don’t really need any modified world-models in the mind. I want an answer to my question. I won’t settle for less. And so I came back to blackness, and kept asking…

Problem Chart 2: Solutions

Here’s the "Problem Chart” again as mentioned above, with the solutions found in state S-A 3 and S-A 3+

Problem Chart 2 with Solutions 

Problem Chart 1: Crying is not the Solution!

Here’s my Problem Chart, which you can use to classify your problems (replace “I” with any other pronoun of your choice!).

Problem Chart 1

Food: Fast and Furious

Today practically everything is fast and frozen, convenience, laced with drugs, chemicals, of unknown origin, maybe grown massively using artificial fertilisers and pesticides, or from genetically modified organisms (GMOs)... Really, this latest phase of human food production, placing economics first and consumer health second, is yet another example of modern-day madness.

Just for the record, the FDA’s list of Additives in Food contains a total of 34,692 words in the document – that's maybe 1,500 additives described there. See the FDA website. Colours for Food Use contains 4,339 words in the list. These are chemicals added to food simply to make them look colourful, since the natural colours have mostly been processed out of them. Modern man lives in a sea of chemicals, food-substitutes and junk food. It’s a wonder we don’t get even sicker than we are.

Here’s the story of what’s really in a McDonald’s hamburger. Instead of simple bread (it used to be flour, water and yeast) and meat and vegetables, this invention contains everything except Ms. McDonald’s old kitchen sink! According to McDonald’s own website, this is the list of ingredients for their popular McDouble sold in USA:

REGULAR BUN:

Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Bleached Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil and/or Canola Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Ammonium Sulfate, Ammonium Chloride, Dough Conditioners (May Contain One or More of: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Azodicarbonamide, Mono and Diglycerides, Ethoxylated Monoglycerides, Monocalcium Phosphate, Enzymes, Guar Gum, Calcium Peroxide), Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Calcium Propionate and/or Sodium Propionate (Preservatives), Soy Lecithin.

PASTEURIZED PROCESSED AMERICAN CHEESE

Ingredients: Milk, Cream, Water, Cheese Culture, Sodium Citrate, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Citric Acid, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid, Enzymes, Sodium Pyrophosphate, Natural Flavor (Dairy Source), Color Added, Soy Lecithin (Added for Slice Separation).

KETCHUP

Ingredients: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Water, Salt, Natural Flavors (Plant Source).

PICKLE SLICES

Ingredients: Cucumbers, Water, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, Calcium Chloride, Alum, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Natural Flavors (Plant Source), Polysorbate 80, Extractives of Turmeric (Color).

SLIVERED ONIONS*

MUSTARD

Ingredients: Distilled Vinegar, Water, Mustard Seed, Salt, Turmeric, Paprika, Spice Extractive.

100% BEEF PATTY

Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper).

And note: “Our fried menu items are cooked in a vegetable oil blend with citric acid added as a processing aid and dimethylpolysiloxane to reduce oil splatter when cooking. We are no longer adding TBHQ to our restaurant cooking oil, but as we transition to our new oil supply, some restaurants may have trace amounts of TBHQ in their cooking oil for a period of time. This information is correct as of July 2016, unless stated otherwise.”

TBHQ = TBHQ is used as a preservative for unsaturated vegetable oils and many edible animal fats. It does not cause discoloration even in the presence of iron, and does not change flavor or odor of the material to which it is added. It can be combined with other preservatives such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA). As a food additive, its E number is E319. It is added to a wide range of foods, with the highest limit (1 gram/kg) permitted for frozen fish and fish products. Its primary advantage is extending storage life.

* Hey, the only one that doesn’t have extra ingredients, but where are they grown, with how much artificial fertiliser and pesticides, and how have they been treated before being slivered?

We don’t need an extended discourse or economic studies (although it would be interested to ascertain the economic benefits of fast food and pre-cooked packaged food vs. the detrimental health effects overall of a typical American diet). The food industry will tell us that cheap food is good and necessary, but the healthcare industry has grown out of all proportion by prescribing all kinds of drugs to treat the symptoms of bad nutrition and bad psychology further down the line when you start getting all kinds of new-fangled diseases!

The man to listen to here is Michael Pollan – author, activist, journalist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

Just a few of his tips:

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

But anyway, common sense says this: Mother Nature has been producing food for millions of years. Ancient man was always conservative in his approach and relied heavily on manual labour to eke out a living, so not much mischief could be done. “Modern” man and his new-fangled technology have been around for less than 100 years (let’s say since the Continental Baking Company introduced “fortified” sliced white Wonder Bread in 1930). Mass production using petroleum-based pesticides and fertilisers and the industrialisation of food manufacturing is only 50 years old. The only basis for relying so completely on such recent science and trusting it so blindly is an ingrained socially-fomented attitude of disdain towards “primitive” people of past ages, which is quite unjustified. We are told they were of course “underdeveloped” and poor stupid folk who could not enjoy the delights of modern-day civilisation, but is this really true?

So let this be food for thought...

Rainshower

Pearl drops and silver

falling on a tree-lined street

Rain curtain of joy

Cave Series 12: Icy Roof

In the blackness, a patch of light appeared… It was not on the walls of the cave. It was on the roof. I looked up, and I saw an opening covered with ice, and I was looking at it from below, as if the cave were full of water. A bluish tinge faded to white, and I clearly saw it was a sheet of ice as viewed from below, and there was daylight up above. This picture, which I subsequently found, is very similar to the effect of this apparition in my cave. It only lasted a few seconds, and then I was back in darkness again. So maybe I do not have to break down the walls, or even find an entry point. The wintery roof may just melt with the coming of spring and then I will simply stick my head up out of the water and breathe new air again. Who knows? Time will tell. Meanwhile just keep sitting.

Cave Series 11: Persevering in the Darkness

Black, darkness… Hey I can’t even see the phosphorescence anymore… There used to be lights, shimmering clouds, green shapes, purple fields and even little images once in a while. Now there is nothing. It’s all gloom, obscurity and shadow. This is when the going gets tough, and who can say if I’m tough enough to get going. There is no stick to beat me on; no word, no gesture. I’m all there is here, there’s no one else, and nothing to guide me. And it’s too dark, too dark to see. I’m knocking on the door, and it’s not heaven’s door, or hell’s gates. It’s just a big black sheet of rock, maybe the gates of Mordor, and I’m a tiny little barefooted hobbit. The only thing I have going for me is that I’m small and difficult to see, so maybe I can fool that huge expanse of rock and its guardians and slip past somehow. I don’t care what’s behind me or in front of me. I just have to keep beating away at those walls – and blowing my trumpet – and see if I can have them tumble down, like the walls of Jericho did once upon a time. 

Blogging for a Year: 16 November 2015 up to Today.

There’s no special significance in the fact that I’ve been blogging at International Self-Awareness Day for a year now, since 16 November 2015. It's just great to be 1 year old!

In my very first "Diary Entry" on November 18, 2015, I said I was “…planning to continue at least until July 2016”. Well, it's now been a whole year. This exercise has at least served me well, and I am now planning to continue for another six-month period, but I would like to know that someone is finding it interesting and/or useful, so I’m just wondering at this anniversary time: 

1) Has the information been of use to you? 

2) If so, what other things would you like to see on this blog?

3) Do you have any other comments you'd like to make?

I'm here, accessible and I will always reply. Meanwhile, thank you all for reading this blog and the IS-AD Facebook page, and special thanks to friends who follow Edward Wells on Facebook.

Celebrate life every day – every moment of it!

Tweaking the System: Slight change, Big difference. A Sensing Exercise.

My information about the “sensing exercise” comes from sources that are “ancient” for me, i.e., going back decades... 

Robert de Ropp explained this exercise in an appendix to his “Master Game”. Ouspensky and de Salzmann mentioned it. J.G. Bennett described this and others, and so have many other people in the Gurdjieff tradition. The Master himself gave an account of it in Chapter 7 of the First Book of “All and Everything”, when Beelzebub was instructing his grandson Hassein on how to prepare himself for the future: “…at your age, it is indispensably necessary that every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendour, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence… Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts – as if they were conscious– ”...not to “…hinder your general functioning....”, after which he went on to enumerate the consequences of this.

Now unless you have some kind of guru or teacher, the individual seeker has to look after him or herself, and be reasonable. There are so many “opinions” about one thing and another, relating to eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping, waking, believing, thinking and offering yet more opinions, that it behoves the smart student to do all the necessary research, and then forget everything and start afresh. Find out for yourself. We’re supposed to be doing things to make ourselves more conscious, more in the present, more aligned with reality, not more dependent on others. So as long as you don’t jump off a building, or play Russian roulette, or blindly enter a sect, you’ll be fine... Just go your own way and discover. Listen to all, but get real data only from people who are tried and tested Masters, with real knowledge. And even then, test it out for yourself.

My sensing exercise, or “I”-Placement exercise, placing Awareness into 27 parts of the body successively and then bringing awareness of the body in its totality, has served me pretty well until now. It’s 25-28 minutes of pure concentration. It’s a challenge to remain awake. It’s a way to move energies around and experience sometimes powerful results. But it’s just a preparatory job, much like something for a child as “immature” as little Hassein. So, inspired by a new exercise which I have not done yet, but plan to do (the Isha Kriya from Sadhguru, a truly living source of wisdom today, and highly active in social media), I changed one little adjective to an definite article in the mental phrases that I use for my exercise. That means that instead of saying “I am in my right eye”, I made the change to “I am in the right eye”, thereby modifying the whole mindset of “proper English usage” and copying the Spanish, French and Germans and others, who use reflexive pronouns and definite articles with verbs indicating things they do to their bodies. Paraphrasing them, it’s like saying: “washing myself the hands”, “taking off the shoes for myself”, or “combing (for myself) the hair”, which all sound funny in English, but are realities in other languages, in which speakers strangely choose not to identify so much with their body parts and personal items, using “the” most of the time instead of “my”, “your” or “ours”.

This made me laugh a little, and it sounds strange, but it did the necessary trick. Suddenly the exercise became a little more objective. I was not identifying so much with “my” body and “its” parts anymore. It refuelled my attention and awareness. It was like hovering over a meadow like a drone, dropping my awareness into different sections of the field as if I were a farmer sowing seeds, and hoping for a good crop!

So that’s part of the game, master game or otherwise, of making up and modifying your own exercise as you go along, keeping attention riveted and preparing the field of the body for higher experiences, if possible.

Clingers and Hoarders I Have Known

Sadhguru of the Isha Foundation recommends a simple exercise for wellbeing called Isha Kriya. We can all do it, but it’s a great solution for clingers and hoarders as well – people who are blindly identified with their possessions. 

This exercise is a big revolution – or a terrifying revelation if you haven’t pondered on this before. Within the complete exercise there are various stages, but stage 1 is that on the in-breath you repeat to yourself “I am not the body” and on the out-breath – it gets even worse –: “I am not even the mind”. Poor materialists! They are left in the lurch here. Will their personalities or even their humanity be taken away from them if they do this? If they’re not the body or the mind, what’s left?

There’s a lot left, the whole universe in fact, and it’s infinite, so don’t worry. Animals are stuck in their patterns, humans are supposed to be able to grow and move upwards…

Let me just mention two cases of clinging and hoarding. One is a little old lady who, it is said, grew up in the war years (WW2) and is thereby supposedly justified for keeping all her things, however big, small, useful or potentially useful or useless, or because they came from this person or that, and although she normally knows where these things are, she really does have quite a quaint little house all full of objects, tools, heirlooms, papers, clutter, even stacks of scratch paper and Shredded Wheat cards, and of course lots of dirt, grime and filth.

The second example is an elderly gentleman who as a boy collected vinyl records, left them at his mother’s home 45 years ago, went back to visit only once for a few days in all those years, and has never bothered about the records since, but when they were recently cleaned out of the attic and sold to a collector, and he was told about it, he protested effusively from another continent that no one should have interfered with his affairs!

Now compulsive hoarders always have a justification for keeping all those things others “mistakenly” call unneeded. They are very adroit at explaining why such-and-such an object is of great value to them. See the "Batman" parody, below. And egoistic, uncaring persons who cling to things only when they’re gone are also very good at berating others for their insensitivity. But they are not so strange. The fact is that attachment and identification affect all of us – it’s just the degree and the object of attachment that are different.

What we are most attached to is of course our body. Body-love is drummed into us from all sides from the moment our little baby tummies are tickled by kind-hearted relatives. Some people possibly develop body-loathing by themselves later on. Yes, we have to learn how to use the body. Sure, we need to learn motor skills. But when there is no antidote to constant body-identification, we grow up firmly ensconced in our little shells and think that the body is all there is, and, for some reason, it has to be kept young as well when age creeps in. Some people actually progress a little further to think it’s their minds that make them who they are. And reeling its head over both these domains is the grandiose Ego who also thinks he’s the biggest of bosses, and woe unto him who offends that entity, because it will rear its ugly head and smite all and sundry and pummel them down into the dust.

So it’s quite easy to progress from the love of or identification with the physical body, and our attachment to our minds, and extend our boundaries to include our things, our possessions, our little souvenirs of life that no one knows what to do with when we die – unless the chain of identification continues in offspring or relatives. Of course no one would spurn a nice inheritance – especially cash, land and buildings – but what about those old letters, postcards, photos, mementoes and papers that meant so much to one person but fail to attract any interest from descendents?

So, yes, those familiar with Thoreau will side with his “Simplify, simplify”, but it really means that we have to look at things from a new viewpoint.

Growing means accepting life as it is. As life goes on, we should become wiser and wealthier in understanding, not necessarily in possessions. When we die, we leave everything behind – body, mind and possessions. So why live life clinging onto these and hoarding them? What possible good does it do to “us”? Because behind the body, and behind the mind is the “I” that is the Observer, the Consciousness, the small-scale representative of the Creator. That is what we need to promote and nourish and care for, not dust and ashes, not sense perceptions falling onto the field of awareness and being reacted to, not things made of clay, stone, wood, paper and man-made composites, however needed or useful they may be during our lifetime.

Celebrate your Self-Awareness and thank heavens you are not just your body, or your mind. But much more than that if you really want to be. 

A Democracy Lesson for Today...

With so much hot air, on mainstream airtime, about the results of the US elections, few realise that it is traditionally only half the population who actually cast a vote, so any candidate without a landslide victory always gains office with the consent of about a quarter of the population, like Mr Trump has now done. 

Some 25% of voters really vote for one candidate, 25% for the other candidate, and around 50% vote for “Nobody”. They are supposedly just sitting at home, reading or playing baseball, and only occasionally are they called the “silent majority”. Well, yes, they're probably silently thinking that no one is good enough for them, so that’s why they won’t come out and cast a ballot. Politicians don't like that, but they might start listening when turnout slips below the dreaded 50% line. Then what excuse will we have?

US turnout in the 2012 presidential election was 53.6%, based on 129.1 million votes cast and an estimated voting-age population of just under 241 million people. In the aftermath of the recent elections, smart people will do their homework and check out the current 2016 voting-age population and the number of votes actually cast to November 8. And you’ll find that it’s “business as usual” and the trend continues: US presidents never win by any kind of true majority. They are mostly elected with the ballots of a quarter or less of the population (obviating the mechanism of the electoral college). 

Nevertheless, this situation is dangerous for true democracy, and it was addressed before the elections by (one of) the world’s greatest “thinkers” – an Indian mystic whom I am following. In a real lesson on democracy, here’s what he told an audience in San Jose, CA. No one should miss this.

Are You in Control?

Dear Mr Concierge, what do you really control in your life?

My concierge said he had a problem... He shares a flat and has been told he has to move out in 2 month’s time because the property is being sold after 17 years of rental. This was a terrible blow to him, and he complained about the injustice of this… He says he needs more time.

Well, whenever something unexpected hits you in life, it’s because you haven’t analysed exactly what you control in your life. But wait, is total control possible? There’s a simple answer: N-O, no. Externals will always get out of hand at some point. But it is a good exercise to put things into focus once in a while. A rough guideline would look like this:

Money:	Job, income, outlays	Is my job secure? I could lose it any time, then I wouldn’t have an income. Am I prepared for this?
Roof:	Housing, property, rent	Do I own my property? Taxes may increase. If I’m renting, contracts can be terminated, so I need to realise that.
Possessions:	Transport, collections, furniture, decoration, personal items	Do I have a vehicle? It may be break down or be damaged at any time, even stolen. Disasters can strike and destroy my possessions. Robbers could break in and steal something, etc.
Food:	Eating and drinking	Do I control the source of my food? Do I know where it comes from, how it’s grown or produced? Is it natural or full of man-made chemicals and preservatives, factory food and fast food? Is this healthy? Am I in control of the water or liquids I drink?
Relationships:	Spouse, family, children, friends	Can I be sure a marriage or relationship will last forever? Do family members create problems for me, or I for them? Are my children growing up properly, and what does that mean? Can I always trust my friends? Will they make me happy at all times? Are they supposed to?
Health:	Sickness, disease and death	Will I succumb to illness at some time? Am I healthy? Will disease strike unexpectedly? Will I even die two minutes from now, I do not know, do I?
Mind:	Thoughts, feelings, impulses...	Can I trust my own mind to work properly and not misguide me? Am I in control of my own mind? Do I control thoughts, feelings, impulses? What about the unconscious and/or subconscious? What about my dreams, hopes and fears? Is my mind even mine? What is my mind composed of? Do I know?

You see, there’s no guarantee from outside sources, from the “externals” in our lives. Anything can change at any time, and the epigrammatic Murphy even made a Law of it. If anything can go wrong, it will (and some add, “and at the worst possible time!”).

So an intelligent human being will never trust only to “externals”, nor will he or she have any expectations that override actual occurrences. A smart person will get to the bottom of the whole equation and realise that it is the MIND that is the problem. We (mis-)“train” our minds (or they have been mis-trained for us due to wrong education) in such a way that all externals, all our sense perceptions of whatever happens out there, simply automatically (and without much intelligence) spark off a reaction in the mindstuff that opposes the reality of any situation that doesn’t coincide with our little wishes, our likes and dislikes or expectations. Our minds are out of control, and therefore any situation can go wrong at any time and make us anxious, stressed-out and miserable.

The solution to this is to “re-train” the mind to see reality as it is. It may be useful to make a chart of your “externals” and see how they might change at any time and so be better prepared for when they do, because they will. But that’s a makeshift plan. The real plan is to work on the mind so that it will not simply react to a changing circumstance and produce anxiety, fear, worry, misery or what have you, but on the contrary simply see the occurrence and find a solution, if there is one, or adapt. Now what do we need for that?

We need a total “mind overhaul”, and for that we have to sit still and look inside where all the action is happening all the time. We may think something is happening “out there in the world” that affects us, but it is not really happening there. It is taking place inside our heads and hearts, because that is where the seat of our experience can be found. We receive impressions and that is what makes up our world, and our world is inside us. So why are we looking around outside for a solution? It’s a neverending mistake to do that.

This has been stated ever since the first smart guy or guru began talking to someone else – many millennia ago. There’s a Mullah Nasrudin story about it, with the Mullah looking for the key to his house out in the garden, having lost it inside, where it was too dark to search, and I’ve also found a French cartoon strip about this adapted for America in 1942. Take a look... and search for some light in the inner darkness.

Cave Series 10: Face East, Young Man

By the glowing phosphorescence of a rock in my cave, I noticed something on the floor and groped for it. It was an old compass, but it still worked, and I could make out the directions too. I now saw I was sitting with my back to the East, so I turned round and immediately felt better. Renewed hope overcame me. The mouth of the cave is East, I thought, so that is the way to face. It was the mistaken theory of "Manifest Destiny", an excuse for imperialism, that encouraged people to Go West, as Horace Greeley urged, to practically destroy Native American culture and "conquer the wild west", so I was determined to do the opposite and turn my face towards the wisdom of the East. And so I sat with palms turned upwards, and they tingled and practically caught on fire as I imagined the exit opening up and me walking out into the sunshine. But alas, that was not to be, and I decided to settle down and sleep for a while to see the sky outside, albeit in my dreams, or was it a faint premonition of things to come? 

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!