PRINCIPLE EIGHT:   THE MIND RESTS BETWEEN OUR EMOTION AND MOTION

     So far we have discussed beliefs, emotion and behavior, but have not mentioned where the mind fits in to all of this. We will do so now by placing the mind in its rightful place: between our emotion and our behavior.
     The mind is the intermediary between our spirit’s emotion and our physical motion. It stands between the world of meaningless facts and our spirit’s emotional (felt) beliefs regarding those facts. Our mind is our AWARENESS of the world around us and our awareness of ourselves. We know that we have a mind because we are conscious and that we are aware that we are aware—this is the mind at work. The mind is also known as the soul.
     The mind gathers the surrounding facts in this world and acts as a filter. With the mind’s power of reasoning it can filter out facts that don’t add up and connects together the facts that do. The mind can filter out the delusional beliefs of others as nonsense and folly. Try telling an adult that there is a tooth fairy. The mind acts much in the same way as a parent does with a child; the parent guards the child from ignorance, folly and delusion. Without the mind the spirit is unprotected and will believe most anything: tooth fairies, bogeymen, etc.
     At birth all of us were only a spirit with no developed mind. For the first two to three years of our lives there was little to no consciousness or awareness. We have no memories of these years because we had no consciousness during these years. We were a pure spirit being—a child.
     Let us look deeper into the world of the pure spirit being.
     Prior to birth all of us enjoyed a consistent little world known as our mother’s womb. The warmth of our mother’s body surrounded us, never changing more than a degree or two. We rarely felt any bumps or jars, for we were floating in bliss. All sounds were muffled. Nothing was too loud, too warm, too bright or too rough. Life was good! This was the world that we all once experienced.
     Then one day our world mysteriously turned upside down (literally). Our body began to reorient itself to an upside position in preparation for what was about to happen next. Our world was about to change forever. Our present world began to turn into a funnel of sorts. The womb began to reform, creating a wedge which cramped our feet a little too much, so we flipped upside down to give our feet more room to kick about freely. Our head now lay comfortably in this made to order wedge. What we didn’t know was that a great drama was about to unfold. Shortly following this turn of events (flipping) the walls of our world begin to undulate and collapse in all around us. We were squeezed, squeezed hard, and then an opening appeared where our little (or not so little) head was now located. We were strangely pushed down to the point that our head felt like it was being crushed. Our little head conformed (elongated) to this new gateway and we were pushed further down until, viola! All things suddenly became new! We rudely and suddenly experienced extremely bright lights. They were so bright! What happened to our familiar shelter of darkness? We were soaking wet and boy was it cold! We were suddenly grabbed by our little heals and hung upside down once again. We dangled there. We felt sharp slaps to our little bottoms. All sounds were suddenly so sharp and loud! Everything was so loud! Our whole world had so radically changed. We were terrified, bewildered, disturbed; not knowing what was going on. We were scared and mad as hell! Our world was out of control!
     We cried!
     Let us, as adults, now take the time to think counter-intuitively. Can we all say together, “If I believed that I was in harm’s way, and my life was totally out of control, I too would cry?” Is this a fair statement to make? It always is.
     Crying with our arms waving frantically, we were quickly wrapped in something that brought back the reality of that familiar warmth. That felt so right! We were swiftly placed into our mother’s waiting, loving arms and held firmly—cuddled. We heard a familiar voice speaking softly to us. In the comfort of our mother’s arms we believed we were safe once again and all was now under control. The fear and the anger washed away and we slept—we felt safe—peace at last!
     What happened here? This new child, born with a vital spirit, was born believing! This is what the spirit does—it believes. The child at this stage of life is pure “state-of-being.” With no developed mind to make sense of all that has just happened the child emotes and wiggles frantically, leaking this great passion through its little body. This child is speaking loudly and perfectly, not with words, however, but with crying and the motion of waving both hands and feet. Our mothers heard our spirit cry, saw our state-of-being and with perfect listening (counter-intuitively) she cuddled and comforted us, causing us to come to a new belief—“we are now safe!” This new belief is immediately communicated through our bodies for our mothers to hear and see—we fall fast asleep.
     By studying the new born child we can see more clearly just how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. We can see clearly what the spirit is and what it does—it does believe and it does speak. Our spirits are always speaking; they speak forth our state-of-being. We see what life is like without the mind at work.
     As the child grows, the mind develops. As the mind develops it gathers facts and slowly becomes “aware.” One day the light turns on and the child awakens to their new world for the first time. The child becomes self-aware and world-aware. Memories begin to develop, facts are gathered and new beliefs are formed. The child’s own personal world develops before his/her own very eyes, delusions and all. Their world is perfect, until they stumble over their delusion. Their minds filter out their delusion and the process of learning begins. This process will continue throughout life until one day the mind is not even aware of its own spirit anymore. The child becomes an adult.
     How the mind works in relation to our spirit can be further illustrated through our understanding of hypnotism. Most of us have seen a stage show where the master hypnotist asks for volunteers from the audience to come join him on stage. Perhaps three chairs are lined up on stage and the hypnotist asks his volunteers to please take a seat. Our hypnotist begins to say to them, “Please look at and concentrate on the swinging pendulum before you. You are getting sleepy, sleepy—so very sleepy.” Soon the three are strangely quiet and are still. Now the fun begins. The hypnotist suggests to the first volunteer that the temperature in the room is 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The audience watches in anticipation. Sweat begins to roll his forehead. He loosens his collar. The jacket is quickly removed. The audience laughs. The hypnotist suggests to the second person that he is a monkey. He begins to makes sounds like a chimp and hop around the stage. The audience is now in stitches. To the third volunteer the hypnotist suggests they are a seven year old girl playing with a doll. Sure enough, he begins cuddling the doll that is not there!
     What on earth has just happened? In effect the hypnotist turned off the minds of these three participants and spoke (suggested) directly to their spirit without the mind’s fact gathering and filtering capabilities. The hypnotist’s suggestions became the volunteer’s realities—they believe! To the one he was hot, to the other he was a monkey and to the third he was a little girl cuddling a very real doll.
     I ask you now, “If you believed that it was 110 degrees, would you sweat?” “If you believed that you were a monkey, would you act like one?” If you believed that you were a little girl holding a beloved doll, would you cuddle it? If you believed there was a bogeyman in the closet, would you avoid it at all cost? If you believed in the tooth fairy, would you place your tooth under the pillow?
     When the hypnotist snaps his fingers the three volunteers are released from their mindless, delusional state, they awaken to the laughing audience completely ignorant as to why. To them only a moment in time elapsed. They were placed solely in the spiritual state-of-being, without mind, self-awareness or world-awareness. They lived for a while in a world of their own beliefs—their own reality. They become a child—a pure spirit being.
     Without the mind we have no filter. Any fact can suggest anything to us and we will predictably believe it without question. With the mind we question everything, sifting out delusion one by one, slowly but surely. Imperfectly we strive for reality, hoping to climb our way out of our personal bubble world—the world of our own making—the world of our personal reality—our beliefs.
     The illustrations of the pure spirit-child’s birth and the hypnotic states of our three guests help us to understand the difference between mind and spirit. With these illustrations we can dig still further into their differences as we strive to understand them both. The mind lives “in time” whereas the spirit lives “in eternity.” Time is knowledge. The mind is about knowing and the spirit is about believing. Both the spirit-child and the three that were hypnotized lived only in their spirits. During this period they dwelt in a timeless eternity. Time passed, yet their awareness of the fact of time was missing. The spirit is our eternal state-of-being. Only the mind is aware of time.
     We are surrounded by this reality of time and eternity on a regular basis and rarely acknowledge it. Every night when we sleep, if we have had a good night’s sleep, we wake up in the morning refreshed barely aware that eight hours have passed. On the other hand, if we cannot shut our mind off, we toss and turn and the evening seems to last forever. When we watch an absorbing movie on TV our spirit gets drawn into this reality, forgetting the real reality that surrounds us in the real world. Times stands still. Two hours can seem to pass in a moment. When we are engaged with a friend in a gripping discussion, the hours can pass in an instant. Often in moments such as these we say, “Oh my, where did the time go.” When the mind is at rest the spirit lives and comes out to play! The spirit plays during our sleep through dreams, during our pondering through reveries and during our creative moments through imagination.
     In American culture the time to interrupt someone is when they are gazing out a window doing nothing. In Japan, however, the time to interrupt someone is when they are busy doing something—never when the spirit is at play. The spirit is our creative, imaginative force; the mind puts this into the real world. The spirit envisions (sees what is not); the mind builds (takes what is not and births it into something to see). The mind will go to work and take the dream, molding it and bending it (filtering), until all delusions are gone and the dream works in the real world.
     When we understand how the spirit and the mind work both separately and together, we begin to fire on all the cylinders available to us in life. We will begin to actually hear and see what others are saying, instead of what they have merely said with words. We will begin to challenge our own delusions with our minds and climb out of our individual bubble worlds into the real world of truth. We will judge others less, knowing that they too are held captive in their world of beliefs just as we are. We will communicate better, knowing that we are actually speaking to the spirit through the mind and not just to the mind. Our leadership skills will improve, knowing that the beliefs of those we lead regarding us, that is, our competency and our level of caring for them is EVERYTHING. Finally, we will enjoy greater intimacy, as we climb into each other’s world, without judging, just seeking to understand and accept their reality with respect.