Next we’re going to work with the mind and its thoughts, then the heart
and its emotion s. They don’t come in through your senses, but they are
certainly things you experience. As we comb through each layer, it’s going
to become easier and easier to let go—to accept and surrender . Remember ,
you are not surrendering life; you are surrendering your resistance to life. We can use the term mindfulness to mean that you are always conscious of
what is really going on around you and inside you. Y ou’re not just conscious
of the appearance of things but also their true nature: where they come from,
why they are the way they are, and what it took for them to manifest before
you. Mindfulness is a natural, effortless process once you let go of personal
distractions. Instead of thinking that the moment in front of you has to be a
certain way, you start thinking that it’s pretty awesome the way it is. In fact,
it’s amazing that it even exists. From now on, everywhere you look and everything you interact with,
be sure to say, “Thank you.” And be sure to pay tribute to the stars. They are
not just romanti c things twinkling in the night sky. They are the furnaces of
the universe. They have created  everything for you. Can you thank them? Can you appreci ate this truth, and understand that you didn’ t do anything to
deserve the trees, the oceans, and the sky? You don’t even know where You
came from. You’re just in there experiencing this amazing gift unfolding
before you. This is spirituality—coming into harmony with r eality , instead of
your personal self.PART III: 
The MindChapter 11. Empty Mind
As a conscious being, you are aware of the world coming in through your
senses. But your awareness is not limited to that outside world. You also
have inner experiences. Sometim es when the world comes in, it makes you
feel good. Other times, it make s you feel bad. Since the outside world is
really just structures of atoms, why does it have that inner effect on you? How could a bunch of atoms get you all jumbled up inside? What’s going
on? You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside
world, the mind , and the emotio ns. Now that we have deeply examined the
nature of the outside world, let’s start our journey into understanding the
second object of consciousness:  the mind. What is mind? We all know what
mind is. We’re in here, and we experience it every day of our lives. In the
simplest sense, mind is a place in which thoughts exist. We have thoughts
all the time: “Why is he driving so slow? I’m going to be late. Now what am
I going to do?” Undoubtedly these are thoughts, but where do they exist? They certainly don’t exist in the outside world. Scientists are not able to
read your thoughts, as hard as they have tried. But you can. There’ s not a
machine they’ve  ever made, even for billions of dollars, that can read your
thoughts. Y et you can, ef fortlessly . That’ s a pretty amazing power you have. Take a moment to digest that fact. Your consciousness has the ability to
be aware  of things that machines can’t detect: thoughts and emotions. These
objects of consciousness surely exist, but not in what we define as the
“physical” world. Our scientists have shown us that the whole universe
comes down to energy. Thought s and emotions are simply energy vibrating
at such high rates that machines can’t detect them. Someday they might be
able to. Machines couldn’ t detec t gamma rays, X-rays, or even infrared light
until we made machines that could pick up those subtler vibrations. Scientistdidn’ t then classify these higher -vibration objects as something alien to our
world. They simply expanded the definition of the electromagnetic spectrum
to include them. It’s not that the higher vibrations hadn’ t always been there,
we simply hadn’ t been able to detect them. Likewise, your thoughts are there and have always been there. What if
a scientist told you, “No, your thoughts are not there. I can’t detect them, so
they don’t exist. ” You’d walk away and laugh. You know your thoughts are
there. You, the same conscious awareness we’ve been discussing, have the
ability to pay attention to, or not pay attention to, the thoughts being created
at this higher vibration of energy. Through the years, people have called this
higher range of vibrations the mental plane . Many questions come up regarding the topic of mind. For example,
what are thoughts and where do they come from? Since scientists don’ t have
direct access to your thoughts, only you can answer these questions. You’re
in there, and you have the ability to look at your mind. You even use the
terms “my mind” and “my thoughts .” You say, “I had a terrible thought the
other day. My thoughts are really bothering me lately .” How do you know
you had a terrible thought? How do you know that your thoughts are
bothering you? You are in there, so you know what it’s like to be in there
experiencing thoughts. You can think of mind as a very high-vibration field
of energy in which thoughts can be created. Mind is not the thoughts. Mind
is the field of energy in which  thoughts are capable of exist ing. Just as
clouds are not the sky, but they exist in the sky and are formed out of the
substance of the sky, so thoughts are not the mind, but they exist in the mind
and are formed out of the substance of mind. Buddhists talk about empty mind . In the purest sense, that is what we
are refer ring to when we use the term “mind.” It is a field of energy with
nothing in it. There are no thoug hts. There’ s just an absolutely still, formless
field of energy we call “mind.” This not conceptual; you can go there. Meditators who have gone deep understand this. You just rest in void, in
empty mind. You’re there, but there are no thoughts. It’s just completely
quiet, completel y empty . It’s like a powerful computer that has no software
on it. The comp uter has great potential, but it doesn’ t do anything. That is
what empty mind is. It’s not stupid; in fact, its latent capabilities are
enormous. It is simply still, not creating thoughts. Basically , that is what
Buddhists mean by empty mind, and it is our starting point for
understanding mind.The outside world exists independent of this field of mind. Whether the
mind is still or the mind is noisy , the planet continues to spin on its axis and
all the galaxies continue to float through space. The energy that makes up
the phys ical plane is at a grosser vibration rate than the energy that makes
up the mental plane. From your own personal experience, you know that
consciousness is capable of being aware of both the physical plane and the
mental plane at the same time. Now that we’ve examined the concept of empty mind, let’s begin the
process of forming objects in the field of mind. In order for you in there,
consciousness, to be aware of the physical plane, you were given a physical
body to house the five senses that pick up sight, sound, smell, taste, and
touch. This body is a gift that the stars gave you and that evolution
perfected. Because of the senses, the vibrations from the outside world come
in. They pass through the sensory receptors, up the sensory nerves, into the
brain, and then manifest in the mind where you experience them. This
rendering of the outside world is one of the most basic functions of mind. It’s very much like watching a ball game being played in California while
you’re in Florida. The actual physical light and sound vibrations are picked
up by the cameras at the game. They are then digitized and transmitted to a
receiver at your home. The received signals are then rendered onto your flat-
screen TV. It seems like you are looking at the game, but you are not. You
are looking at the rendering of the transmitted signals that the cameras
picked up. It’s amazing how much this parallels what is happening when you
“see” the world around you. Your senses pick up the different vibrations
from the outside  world, just like a camera’ s sensors do. In the case of your
senses, however , you can pick up five different vibration rates, not just sight
and sound. Your senses convert the different vibrations into electrical nerve
impulses and transmit them to the brain. The signals are then rendered in the
mind’ s energy field to as closel y as possible replicate the original physical
source. You become aware of what is going on in front of you by being
aware of its mental image rendered in your mind. Just like you become
aware of the ball game in California by being aware of what is rendered on
your TV screen in Florida. You’re not out there in the world. You’re inside. You’re way back
inside. Though the world is happening everywhere, you only experience the
part that is picke d up by your senses and rendered in your mind . Mind is nolonger empty—it has formed its energy into the exact image of what is
within the scope of your senses . As we discussed, you are not looking out
into the world. The outside is being reproduced in your mind, and you are
looking at that mental image. It’s really not that different from when you are
dreaming. In the dream state, images are being created in the mind, and you
are looking at them. The waking state is the same, except that the mental
images are being generated by the senses instead of by the mind itself. These mental images that form in the mind are like the images that form on
your flat-screen TV. The screen was blank, but now it has taken  the form of
the ball game in California. Your mind was empty , but now it has taken the
form of the outside world around you. Your mind is so brilliant. Your flat-screen TV has a digital signal
processor that takes the receive d digital signal, decodes it, and renders it
onto the screen and through the speakers. Your mind takes the encoded
nerve impulses and reproduces the entire scene in front of you, including
depth perception, as well as adding touch, smell, and taste. It renders all this
detail made out of the higher energy vibration of the mind. This exact
rendering of the outside world is one of the primary functions of your mind. It allows  you in there to experie nce the outside world. The mind is such an
amazing gift. It is naturally form less, yet it can create forms that are more
brilliant than those made by the most powerful computer . Mind  is really the
first personal computer . In fact, it is so personal that it doesn’ t need any
external form. Its display screen is inside, its computing and graphics
capability are inside, and you don’t need a keyboard, mouse, or voice
recognition to communicate with it. It is so close to you that it responds to
your will and the slightest impulse from your heart. We have now gone from empty mind to a mind that renders the outside
world so you can experience your surroundings. Experience is the nectar of
life. You’re in there, and you’re capable of experiencing because of the
rendering capability of your mind. Of what meaning is life if you don’t
experience it? We spent a lot of time discussing how the outside world was
created—billions of years of stellar activity resulting in what appears around
you. You saw how it was create d; now you see how conscious ness, which
does not belong to the world  of form, can experience it—through the
miracle of mind. In truth, consciousness is the most profound miracle. An essence that
knows that it knows that it knows. Everything else is something you’reconscious of—th e true magic is consciousness itself. When consciousness is
simply experiencing reality as imaged in the mind, that is what we call
being in the present moment. At this point in our discussion, there is
nowhere else to be. The real world is outside, it is being reflected in your
mind, and you are aware of the image right in front of you. In this very
simple state, you are experiencing what you were meant to experience: the
gift of the moment that’s being  given to you. It comes in, and you learn
from it simply because you experienced it. There are no distractions; there is
just total oneness with the moment in front of you. Everyone has had some rare moments like this. Perhaps it took a
beautiful sunset to bring you to such a state of one-pointed consciousness. You were driving around a corner and, all of a sudden, the sun was setting
with beautiful purple, orange, and magenta. It was the most beautiful thing
you had ever seen, and it compl etely blew your mind. What does that mean,
“It blew your mind”? It means there was nothing left in your mind but that
image of the sunset. Not the mortgage, not the problem with the boyfriend,
not the worries from the past. The only experience you were having was this
beautiful sunset coming in throu gh your eyes, rendering in your mind, and
merging with your entire being. Your entire consciousness was centered and
focused on the experience you were having, instead of being scattered all
over the place. It was truly a spiritual experience. That is what The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describes as the experiencer
and the experience becoming one. You have allowed a merger between
subject and object. There’ s nothing distracting your consciousness from
what is happening right in front of you. This is the yogic state of dharana—
one-pointed concentration. You’ve had other experiences that approach this state of one-pointed
absorption. Sometimes in intimate moments with someone you love, when
everything is just right, you lose yourself in the moment. All of a sudden,
total beauty and peace come over you. When consciousness merges with the
object of consciousness, you can feel the presence of God. In yogic
philosophy , the Self is called sat-chit-ananda,  eternal-conscious-bliss. When
Self focuses one-pointedly on a single object, one experiences the nature of
Self—total peace, contentment, and overwhelming bliss. This is available to
us at any time if we can just learn to enter the undistracted state of one-
pointed consciousness.Chapter 12. Birth of the Personal Mind
Why don’t we live in an ecstatic state of one-pointed consciousness all the
time? What went wrong? What caused the fall from this proverbial garden? It’s very simple: The world comes in and it’s beautiful. The very act of
experiencing it is tremendously moving when it comes all the way back into
you. However , that does not mean it all feels the same. Heat feels different
from cold—because it is different. That doesn’ t mean one is better than the
other . They just feel different. Somebody gently touches you, and that feels
very different than if they bump into you. Different things are experienced
in different ways. The Buddhis ts say everything has its natur e. A coiled
rattlesnake comes into the mind as a very different experience than a
butterfly landing on your arm. That rattlesnake is giving off its nature—
emanating its particular vibration. That vibration is awesome in its own way ,
but it certainly doesn’ t create the same inner experience as the butterfly . There’ s nothing wrong with this. It’s very real. What’ s wrong with having a
variety of experi ences? If a butterfly landed on you every mome nt, it would
become so normal that it would be nothing. God knew how to create a
world that would always be exciting. Your consciousness actually expands because of the knowledge that
flows into it. You are learning and growing through the experiences you are
having. This learning through life is true spiritual growth. It is the evolution
of the soul. Just like everyth ing you learn makes you smarter, every
experience you have makes you wiser . When the presence of a rattlesnake
comes into your mind, true, it’s not a comfortable inner experience. It
doesn’ t feel the same as a butterfly , but it is just as rich. It is just as
important. If you’re willing to be open at this level, you’re still in the idyllic
garden. There are no problems; there are just learning experiences. No
matter what happens, you are becoming greater .Unfortunately , that is not how we live. Something went very wrong. Let’s take this fall from the garden in slow motion. First, some thing comes
in; let’s start with the rattlesnake. It’s not a particularly comfortable
experience. In fact, a hissing rattlesnake is meant to be an uncomfortable
experience—it may even generate discomfort at a survival level. That would
be a strong inner reaction to the outer experience. But this uncomfortable inner reaction isn’t bad, per se—it’ s just a
different vibration. Just like some colors are soothing and others are harsh. Colors aren’ t bad or good; they are just different vibration rates of the
electromagnetic spectrum. You can learn how to be comfortable with these
different vibrations. A rattlesna ke is not going to stay there rattling your
whole life. It’s going to come, and it’s going to go—and its uncomfortable
vibrations are going to go with it. Then something else will happen. You
live in a happening place filled with growthful experiences. You are simply
in there experiencing creation as it comes in and passes through you. You don’t practi ce that level of acceptance, however . You in there who
is experiencing what’ s renderin g in your mind—you have the ability to
resist what is not comfortable to you. You were given free will. You can use
that will like inner hands to push away thoughts and emotions if they don’t
feel right. Surely you have done that. That resistance is an act of will. W ill is
an innate power you have—it is actually a power that emanates from
consciousness. Just as the Sun stays where it is in space, but it emanates
rays that have great power , so consciousness remains at its source, but its
awareness emanates out onto whatever it focuses on. There is great power
when consciousness focuses on something, just as there is great power when
the Sun’s rays are focused through a magnifying glass. You can feel the
power of one-pointed concentration. It is, indeed, concentrated
consciousness. That is the source of the power of will. The power of will plays a very important role in understanding how the
mind developed from a place of clarity to one of confusion. You have surely
noticed that your awareness does not fall evenly on all objects that render in
your mind. You pay attention to some objects more than others. If the
vibration of the object was more comfortable or uncomfortable, you either
“liked” it or “didn’ t like” it. This is the foundation of how the personal mind
got built: like and dislike. It happens at a very primal level. Basically , it
depends on whether you in there have the ability to experience somethingthat comes in without doing anything about it—other than fully
experiencing it. This is the ability to allow objects to simply pass through . If an inner experience is not neutral to you, it draws your
consciousness to focus on it. The moment that happens, the things passing
through your mind are no longer  even; one has stood out from the rest. All it
took was for you to focus your consciousness on it. Your consciousness is a
force, and you are focusing that force on a particular mental object. When
the force of consciousness is focused on a mental object, that object cannot
pass through the mind like the other objects. Just as the solar winds interfere
with objects passing through space, so focused consciousness is a force that
affects objects passing through the mind. When you focus consciousness on a particular mental form , you
impede that form’ s ability to pass through the mind. The very act of
concentrating on it makes it stay in your mind. You know this. When you
want to do math  in your mind, you concentrate on the numbers so they stay
long enough for you to manipul ate them. In fact, anytime you want to hold
something in your mind, you must focus your consciousness on it so it does
not just fade away. Concentrat ion of consciousness freezes forms in the
mind so that they don’t just pass through. Thus, when you saw a rattlesnake,
it might as well have been a standalone item in your mind. The truth is there
were trees, grass, sky, and other items rendered in your mind aside from the
snake. But you focused your consciousness on the rattlesnake and let the
rest pass through. Interestingly , because you focused so much consciousness
on it, you froze the experience of the snake in your mind. There was no way
you were going to let this uncomfortable experience all the way in, and that
is the birth of resistance. Do you know what that means, “letting it all the way in”? We
discussed this earlier regarding the beautiful sunset and the perfect romantic
experience. You wanted to fully experience these beautiful moments, so you
opened up and let them pass all the way into your being. These are the
special moments in life, when something touches you to the core of your
being. No way this rattlesnake is going all the way in there. You don’t have
to think about it. Resistance is simply a natural response to something that’s
not comfortable. Y ou try to keep it at a distance. Have you ever kept something at a distance in there? Perhaps
something some one said that hurt you in the past, maybe an awkward stage
you went through when you were young, or even a terrible divorce. Ofcourse you have, but that doesn’ t mean the event didn’ t happen. It wouldn’ t
be in there if it hadn’ t already happened. You can’t stop the event from
having happened, but you don’t have to let it all the way in. Mind is a big
place. There’ s plenty of room between where the experience is first imaged
in your mind and where you actually fully experience it. You can use will to
keep the mental  image at a distance from you. This is a very primal act of
resistance. Now that you have resisted experiencing the rattlesnake, and let the
rest of the moment pass throug h, here comes a butterfly . It lands on you,
which is such a beautiful experience that you naturally focus on it. When it
starts to fly off, you don’t want it to go away , so you use your will to hold
on to the mental  image. This is what Buddhists call clinging . You can’t hold
on to the butterfly itself because it flew away . So you try to hold on to the
mental thought pattern of the butterfly . You push away what it was like to
experience the rattlesnake and you cling to what it was like to experience
the butterfly . Neither of these mental patterns can finish their natural
journey through  the mind. Not only do you lose out on fully experiencing
them to the depth of your being,  you are also left with these mental patterns
stuck in your mind. Neither rattlesnake nor butterfly remain before you, but
they are left as patterns in the mind’s energy field. Such is the power of like
and dislike. Both clinging and resisting keep the mental renderings in your mind. This is very important to understand. Experiential mind was meant to be
like a clear TV screen: it renders the image being sent to it. But now you’ve
held on to imag es that are no longer being generated by the outside world. They got stuck in your mind as mental patterns, and as a resul t, you’re out
of harmony with reality . You were in there experiencing the gift of reality;
now you are also experiencing the patterns you held on to in your mind. These patterns in your mind are totally different from the patte rns in other
people’ s minds. Each person’ s trapped mental patterns are unique and very
personal. They come from how we interacted with our past experiences. Since we’ve all had different past experiences, and interacted with them
differently , the impressions held in our minds are totally different. This is
the birth of the personal mind. The problem is: reality is not personal. As you’ve already seen, we
didn’ t create this world. We are simply experiencing the miracle  of creation
unfolding aroun d us. Yes, there are rattlesnakes and butterflies in the world,along with lots of other things. But now there are RATTLESNAKES and
BUTTERFLIES in your mind, even when they are not actually in front of
you. Now that you’ve held these leftover mental impressions in your mind,
reality has to compete with them for your attention. Your ability to fully
focus on the outer world is going to be hindered by the constan t distraction
of these inner impressions.Chapter 13. Fall from the Garden
Resistance is the beginning  of what can be considered the fall from the
garden. You were just fine being aware of this awesome, everchanging
creation. It presented constant gifts of experiences for you to learn and grow
from. Take the gift of music. When you are deeply absorbed in music, there
are no stray thoughts, only the music effortlessly coming in and feeding the
depth of your being. You can be raised to the state of ecstasy while listening
to music. When the mind is clear , everything comes in that way. You are
either in a heave nly state experiencing what is pouring into you, or you are
deeply absorbed in the inner stillness of your being. You have returned to
the garden—everything is ef fortlessly beautiful. Once you hold on to rattlesnakes and butterflies in your mind, you are
unable to stay in that pure state of consciousness . These two mental patterns
have become powerfully charged objects that draw your attention toward
them. When the mind was clear , what attracted your consciousness was the
rendering of the outside world as it passed through. This rendering was very
entertaining and fulfilling, but since you had nothing going with it, it just
came and went. In contrast, the powerfully charged objects you have held in
your mind do not come and go. The world in front of you comes and goes,
but these mental objects remain because you are holding them in your mind. Furthermore, since they are differentiated as more important than the rest,
your consciousness becomes more distracted by these mental objects. Everything is no longer equal, and this creates a major problem . Next
thing you know , you’re walking down the road, and there’ s a rope. But the
rope no longer feels the same as it would have before you saw the
rattlesnake. The rope reminds you of the rattlesnake. What does “reminds
you of” mean? It’s not a rattlesnake; it’s a rope. Nonetheless, when the rope
comes in, consci ousness now has a choice: pay full attention to the rope thatcame in, or be distracted by the negative rattlesnake image stuck in your
mind. The mind will immediate ly join these two mental objects together as
one, and you will get scared. Scared by a rope? Y es, terrified by a rope. A similar thing happens with the image of the butterfly stuck in your
mind. After the butterfly flies away , you’re still focusing on the image in
your mind. You’re still feeling good about it and trying to hold on to it, even
though it is no longer part of your here-and-now reality . Then something
new comes in from the outside, like a person walking by. Your mind may be
rendering this new image perfectly , but your consciousness is not fully
seeing it. Your consciousness is still distracted by the butterfly  image that
got left in your mind. It used to be that the moment in front of you was the
experience you were having inside. Now you have a preference— you would
rather experience the mental image of the butterfly than the reality in front
of you. There has become a whole new world for consciousness to focus on
—the world you built in your mind. That world does not match the reality of
creation. That inner world is your own personal creation made out of the
mental objects you didn’ t let pass through. That’ s what those images in your
mind represent: things that happened in the past that you willfully kept in
your mind. As we shall see, these impressions are the initial seeds that
eventually grew into the self-concept or personal self. To see this more clearly , let’s once again look at the example of a flat-
screen TV. When the first plasm a screens came out, they had “afterimages.”
Manufacturers warned that if you paused an image for too long, it would
actually burn a shadow of the image into the plasma screen. When the show
continued, the old image would  still be there. Would you enjoy watching
TV like that? You’ve finished the news, but when you turn on a movie the
afterimage of the newscaster is still superimposed on top of your movie. That’ s exactly what is happenin g with the butterfly and the rattlesnake. You
can no longer clearly see what is going on in front of you becau se you have
these other images on the screen of your mind. You’ve messed up your
screen. You didn’ t mean to. It seemed innocent to push exper iences aside
when you didn’ t find them pleasant. Where do you think they went when
you resisted them? They got stored as lasting impressions in your mind. It is worth looking at the effect of these leftover images in slow
motion. In the beginning, the miracle of creation took place. It created form
that is coming in through your senses so you can experience it. Apparently ,
at some point you didn’ t like certain vibrations, so you pushed them awaywhen they rende red inside. That willful resistance caused them to stay in the
mind. This is where personal comes from. We said earlier that nothing is
really personal. But you have chosen to fill the sanctity of your mind with
frozen images from your past. These impressions will stay in your mind and
will pull your consciousness toward them. You now have a limited and
biased view of reality that will distort all of your experiences for the rest of
your life. That is the power of the personal mind. So far we have only focused on the rattlesnake you resisted and the
butterfly you clung to. Those alone are sufficient to distort your experience
of reality. But be honest with yourself: How many of these charged
impressions do you have? You’ve done this your entire life. Plus, these
stored impressions build on each other . Now that you have a stored
rattlesnake impr ession in there, you can easily get scared by the sound of a
baby’ s rattle. In fact, if the disco mfort is bad enough, you may choose not to
be around babies. That’ s a personal preference, and this is where all
personal prefere nces come from. Once you create preferences, they will
dominate your entire experience of life. These impressio ns that stay stuck in the mind are called samskaras in
yogic science. They are discussed in the ancient Upanishads texts. How
could people know about this thousands of years before Sigmund Freud
discussed his theories on suppression? It is because they were meditators. They didn’ t need someone to teach them about this—they saw it going on in
their own minds. If you are quietly centered in conscious awareness, you
can see what is passing before you. You are the ultimate experie ncer of your
mind; you’re just not paying attention. Instead of paying attention, you’re getting so uptight about wanting
butterflies, and not wanting rattlesnakes, that you’re losing your centered
awareness. Whe n the world around you comes in and hits, or activ ates, your
stored patterns, you can no longer observe reality objectively . Your
consciousness gets drawn into the activated samskaras, and everything
becomes distorted. This is the foundation of the psyche , your personal self. What is the psyche? It’s something you build inside of the mind that’s
about you: “I’m the one who doesn’ t like rattlesnakes. I’m the one who likes
butterflies.” You just built a self-concept. Someone else doesn’ t have that. They have a psyche built around thunderstorms, dogs that bite, and kittens
that snuggle. Everyone has had different experiences, and therefore,
everyone is building a differen t personal mind inside. No one is doing itpurposely; it’s reactive. It happens quite naturally because you’re not ready
to openly experience life. The highest state is to be comfortable learning and
growing from life’s experiences. But if you’re not comfortable with some
experiences, you use your will to resist them. That merely means you’re not
evolved enough  in that area. There is physical evolution and there is
spiritual evolutio n. They both involve adaptability to your environment. The
former for your body , and the latter for “you” in there, the soul. When events come in, they are meant to be experienced by you. If you
have trouble experiencing them , that’s the whole purpose of learning to
accept. What right do you have to either cling to or resist reality? You didn’ t
make reality , and you weren’ t here for the billions of years that created it. We’re back to, “Do you like the fact that Saturn has rings?” Your answer
was, “It’s none of my business.”  That’ s the correct response for every bit of
reality that took billions of years to end up in front of you. The real questio n is not whether you like things, it’s why are you not
okay with them? The reason is actually quite simple: becaus e you can’t
digest them. It’s hard to let some experiences just pass through without
residual disturba nce. But you need to learn how to do it. You learned to play
tennis. You learned to play the piano. You’ve learned all kinds of things,
maybe even calculus. You didn’ t know how to do these things to start with. They were surely uncomfortabl e until you learned to be comfortable with
them. The soul can learn. You in there, the consciousness, can learn to
experience reality. In order to do so, you must not resist. Other wise, you’re
going to immediately push reality away . That’ s what acceptance is:
nonresistance. It is having the commitment to fully allow reality to pass
directly into the highest part of your being. In the end, all you are
surrendering is your resistance to reality . You learn to let it come in, even if
it is not comfortable as it pours into you. The same thing is true with positive experiences, like the butterfly . Somebody you like comes up to you and says, “You know , I really like you. You’re very attractive to me, and I enjoy being with you.” That is such a
nice experience that you immediately cling to the beautiful things they said. They go back to what they were doing, but you can’t. You can’t focus on
your work because the impressi ons left in your mind keep distracting you. This is the oppo site of Be Here Now;  you’re practicing Be There Then. You
just had a beautiful experience, and you ruined it. You ruined it by holding
on to it, like the butterfly . You ruined it by creating a preferenc e about oneof life’s experiences. Now every time the phone rings, and it’s not the
person who said the nice things, you get disappointed. Be aware that you
did this. Somebody said someth ing nice to you, and you couldn’ t handle it. You couldn’t just let it be a nice experience. Instead, you clung to it in your
mind, and it actually messed you up. Whether you use your will to resist or cling, these leftover impressions
will stay in your mind. You’ve now created an entire layer of mind that’s
holding your samskaras, your unfinished patterns from the past. You will
come to see that these acts of clinging and resisting determine the quality of
your life. These impressions distract your consciousness from the reality of
the current moment. What is more, if you are constantly distracted by these
samskaras in your mind, you’re never going to experience who you really
are. There is a vast difference betw een memory and a samskara. Just as
your computer has memory storage capability , so does your mind. It is a
natural function  of the mind to store compressed versions of what was
received by the senses in its long-term memory . These stored memories can
be retrieved with the slightest intent. You learn a person’ s name, meaning it
is stored in long-term memory . When you see them again , the name
normally comes  up into the forefront of mind without any effort, though
admittedly , sometimes we have to apply willful effort to bring the memory
back. These are fairly normal ways memory is stored and recalled. In drasti c contrast to normal memory , if you experience an event that
you have trouble handling when it renders in your mind, you use will to
either consciously or subconscio usly suppress it. You don’t want it in your
mind at all, not presently or long-term, so you try to push it out of the mind
completely . Whe n you do this, you are resisting the entire event: what came
in throu gh the senses, what you felt emotionally , and what your thoughts
were about it. This resisted “package” of the experience cannot pass through
you in the normal fashion—bec ause you won’ t let it. The entire energy of
the event is locked inside of your mind, and it does not sit there quietly . Because it keeps trying to release its blocked energies, it can distort your
memories of the past as well as disturb your experience of the present. Blocked energies in the mind are like a computer virus that distorts both the
conscious and subconscious minds. In later chapters we will deeply explore
how these blocked energy patterns, samskaras, also block your natural
energy flow .When you comm it to spiritual growth, you work on letting go of the
stored blockages from the past and not storing any more from the present. This does not mean the mind’ s normal memory storage proce ss does not
take place. You are not willfu lly forgetting life’s experiences. You are
simply not resist ing or clinging to the experiences, and thus not storing them
as samskaras. They remain harmless, objective memories. Let’s take an example very close to home for some people. You have
an ex-husband: “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to talk about him ever
again. I don’t even like it when someone says his name. It makes me
uncomfortable, even years after the divorce!” This is not object ive memory
talking—it is definitely a samskara. You say you divorced your ex-husband,
but you really didn’t. He’s still inside bothering you. You don’t even want to
go to a party if you think he might be there. You have  kept these
impressions blocked in your mind, and ultimately you have created an
alternate univer se in which you are still dealing with your ex. Normal
memory is not like this; it is well behaved. Like a computer ’s memory , it
does not pop up by itself. It does not have blocked energies that need to be
released. Normal memory is there when you need it—it does not haunt you
throughout your life. Fortunately , most things you encounter in life are neutral to you. They
pass through unblocked and are available for recall when appropriate. You
have driven by white lines on the road many times, but they don’t come
back up by themselves at inopportune times. Neither do the cars, trees,
buildings, and myriad other objects you encounter each day. They come in,
and they pass through. But there are a few things that are harder to deal with
inside, and therefore you resist them or you cling to them. This is how you
fell out of the garden of reality . Impressions stayed inside your mind and
became the foundation blocks upon which you built your psyche.Chapter 14. The Veil of the Psyche
Your psyche is like  a computer program running in your mind based on your
samskaras. It’s in there talking to you about things that happened before,
what you wish would happen now, and what you hope does or doesn’ t
happen tomorrow . You’ve actually created an alternate reality  inside your
mind that is very complex. It’s a tremendous menagerie of the stored
moments you were not able to let go of. At this point, you don’t even need
another rattlesna ke to get you disturbed. The fact that the experience of the
snake is stuck in your mind means other things will remind you of it. In fact,
you can remind  yourself of it without the need of an external reminder . You’re driving down the street, minding your own business. Suddenly , you
remember how scary that snake was, and you get scared again. We’re not
dealing with reality anymore. We have such a mess built up in there that it’s
no wond er we have so much trouble with life. Such is the nature of the
personal mind. Regardless of how messy it gets in there, the fact remains that the
personal mind is not you—no more than your TV screen is you. But it’s
much more difficult to objectiv ely watch your mind than your TV screen. This is because of the power of the impressions you have stored in your
mind. These past impressions compete with the image of realit y coming in
from the outside and make it hard to tell which is which. It is difficult to
maintain a seat of objective observation when it gets so confusing in there. Samskaras are not to be taken lightly; they seriously distort your experience
of life. Let’s take the example of a psychological Rorschach test, often referred
to as an inkblot test. The psychologist holds up an inkblot and asks what
you see. You immediately respond that you see people making love or,
perhaps, mommy and daddy fighting. In other words, the Rorschach teststimulates the patterns you’ve stored inside your mind, causing you to see
what’ s not actually there. The truth is the whole world is a giant Rorschach
test. The world is a flow of atoms unfolding in front of you. It’s no more
personal than the inkblots. But it’s hitting your samskaras, and that
stimulates stored mental and emotional reactions. Now , instead of
experiencing what is passing by outside, you are experiencing the likes,
dislikes, beliefs, and judgments stored inside. These impress ions are so
strong that you actually think they are what is really out there, just like the
inkblots. The personal mind has taken over your entire life. You are no
longer free to enjoy the experie nces that are actually happening—you are
forced to deal with what your mind says is happening. Let’s look a little deeper into how samskaras affect your life. We have
discussed that what is coming in from the outside stimulates your mental
blockages from the past. Past experiences were uncomfortable when you
first resisted them, and they are going to be uncomfortable when they come
back up. To make matters worse , just as with the Rorschach test, you are not
seeing what is actually outside—you are seeing your inner issues projected
onto the outside. That’ s why life seems so scary and why it seem s to always
be hitting your weak spots. The truth is, life is not hitting your weak spots,
you are projecting your weak spots onto life. Yet not everyth ing you stored
in there was negative. You held on to some positive things from the past. The problem is they’re not happening anymore, and that is disappointing. If
you go back to the same place  where you saw the butterfly , and it’s not
there, it becomes a negative experience. Understand, you have just made life a lose-lose situation. If anything
reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to
reexperience what you liked before, you lose. This is in drastic contrast to
what Zen calls beginner ’s mind . If you are not expecting anything in
particular from a situation, and then something special happens, it can touch
you really deeply . It could be a beautiful sunset, the first unexpe cted kiss, or
some other welcome surprise. If it touches you so deeply because you have
no sams karas in your mind about the event—you have beginner ’s mind. Otherwise, you will be expecting something based on prior experiences, and
that will interfere with the spontaneity of the event. The end result is that these samskaras have ruined your life. You’ve
made it so that unless something drastically different happens to pull you
out of this preference system, you can’t feel anything fully. That’ s whysome people must go to the extremes to get a rush. It is also why some
people try to keep everything exactly the same so life doesn’ t disturb their
samskaras. In either case, trying  to keep the mind a decent place to live in
can force people  to look for escapes, such as drinking and drugs . You get to
the point where you’re running around trying to appease your mind. Eventually , you will come to realize that it’s not the job, the spouse, or
the car that gets old—it’ s listen ing to the mess in your mind that gets old. While all of these patterns from  the past are blocked in your mind, you in
there can neither experience the miracle of life unfolding before you, nor
can you experience the natural beauty within you. Your awareness is
completely distracted by these stored mental patterns, and you must devote
your days and nights to serving them. You can no longer exper ience reality
—you are stuck experiencing yourself. There’ s a concept in Zen known as “just tree.” It fits perfectly with our
discussion. The story goes as follows: There was a young Buddhist monk in
a monastery who would go for daily sessions with the Zen master . The
master would ask him some questions, and the monk would leave. One time
when the young monk walked in, the master looked at him and remarked,
“What happened to you? Y ou look so alive and filled with light.”
The monk was surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I see a dif ference in you, my son. What happened?”
The monk told him, “I was walking across the courtyard and saw the
big oak tree. I stopped and looked at it. I had seen it many times before, but
this time I saw just tree. I just saw the tree. Somehow , it took me to such a
deep place that I felt an awakening. I felt a moment of enlig htenment. It
took me beyond myself.”
“That tree has been there for a hundred years,” the master reflected. “You have walked by that tree every single day since you’ve been here.”
“Yes,” the stude nt said, “but when I previously walked by the tree, it
often reminded me of the tree Buddha sat under when he reached
enlightenment. Other times, the tree reminded me of the one I fell out of
when I was little. The tree alway s stimulated thought patterns from my past. This time I saw just tr ee.”
The master smiled.“Just tree” is what we talked about in the beginning of our discussion of
mind. The tree comes in, renders in your mind, and that’s all you see. In
contrast, the tree comes in, renders in your mind, and stimulates any past
samskaras you have about trees. Your samskara mind becomes activated,
and your consciousness is scattered between the primary image of the tree
and the second ary explosion that takes place inside. The secondary
explosion is the reaction within your mind due to the stored patterns there. You can’t have pure experience s anymore. The young monk did—he saw
“just tree.” If you didn’ t understand this before, hopefully you do now. A
Zen master would be pleased with you, because “just tree” is a very deep
concept in Zen Buddhism. There is nothing  wrong with the mind itself. Just like there is nothing
wrong with a computer , per se. It is how you use these powerful gifts that
can cause a problem. There is almost no limit to the brilliance of mind. People think Einstein was smart, but they don’t understand their own
brilliance. We all have the human mind, every single one of us. We don’t
have a possum mind, a squirrel mind, or even an ape mind. We have the
human mind, and the human mind is brilliant.Chapter 15. The Brilliant Human Mind
What’ s so specia l about the human mind? Let’s take a look. For billions and
billions of years, while the planet Earth was spinning through space, the
process of evolution took place. There were minerals, then plants, then
animals, all formed from atoms created in the stars. The planet had been
floating in space for 4.5 billion years before modern humans showed up. It
is worth  noting that before humans showed up, life on Earth for the other
species stayed pretty much the same. Food, shelter , and surviv al were the
name of the game. Things haven’ t really changed that much for them. The
monkeys lived in trees for tens of millions of years, just as they do now. The
fish swam in the waters for hundreds of millions of years, just as they do
now. Everything  on Earth stayed pretty much the same until you humans
showed up with your human mind. You discovered electricity and made the
nighttime bright. You built giant skyscrapers and machinery that never
existed before. You even dug into the earth, extracted minerals, and
developed advanced materials like silicon chips. Then you built a rocket
ship, got in, and flew to the moon. Compare that to what any other animals have done. They are living
exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years
ago, a million years ago. You’re  not. You used to live in caves;  now you’re
planning to live on Mars. What  did that? Did God hide a rocket ship, and
you found it somewhere? No, your mind did that. Your mind figured out
everything was made of atoms, then you figured out how split the atom. The
human mind actually figured out how the universe was made, all the way
down to the quantum level. Your mind put up the Hubble Space Telescope
that can see back to the beginning of creation. The Hubble can pick up light
that has been traveling through space for more than thirteen billion years. This allows us to see what was happening thirteen billion years ago. Canyou even think about that? The fact is you can because you have a human
mind. The human mind is an amazing thing. That is some serious stuff we’ve
figured out. You’re back in there, deep inside, and you have the use of a
brilliant mind. That said, what is the average human doing with their mind? Einstein used his mind to ponder “thought experiments” about the behavior
of light, gravity , and the physics  of outer space (even though no human had
ever been there!). Meanwhile, you keep your mind busy with relationships,
what people think of you, and how to get what you want and avoid what you
don’t want. You may not have Einstein’ s mind, but compared to any other
living thing on Earth, your mind is brilliant. The question is not whether
your mind is brilliant; the question is what are you doing with that
brilliance? What we see so far is that the mind by itself, without you interfe ring, is
doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s giving you the gift of rendering
the outside world for you to experience. But you had some troub le accepting
that gift. You started resisting when it felt a little too uncomfortable and
clinging when it felt a little too good. This caused the buildup of mental
patterns inside of you. Now , processing current external experiences
becomes distorted by the reactions of past samskaras. You can think of this as layers of the mind. The first layer is where the
rendering of the present external experience is taking place. We can call that
the here-and-now layer . The next layer is the stored patterns from the past
that you did not release when the external experience was over. We can call
that the samskara layer . But there is yet another layer . This layer is what you
are doing with your brilliant mind to try to solve the discomforts created by
the samskaras. This is the personal-thoughts layer , and it is the one you
identify with the most—you think this is who you are. The combination of
these three layers is what we call the personal mind. Yours is completely
unique to you and you alone. We create the personal-thoughts layer when we use the tremendous
intellectual power of our mind to conceptualize an outside world that will
not bother us and will, in fact, make us feel good. It seems perfectly logical. The problem is, what we think will make us feel good or bad is simply the
result of blocked mental patterns from the past. If we use our mind’ s
brilliance to develop thought patterns based on how everyone and
everything needs to be for us to feel okay , we have limited our life toserving our samskaras. And our personal thoughts don’t stop here. What
good is it to analyze how you need things to be if you’re not also going to
think about how to get them that way? First we figure out the strategy of
how to be okay , then we figure out the tactics of how to make it happen. Strategy and tactics—that’ s military training. In essence, we are at war with
the world. The personal mind has taken on the task of how to get the world
unfolding in front of you to be the way you want. That should set off alarm
bells because we’ve already discussed in great detail where the world in
front of you comes from, and it has nothing to do with what’ s going on
inside your head. The moment in front of you is the result of all the natural
forces that caused it to be as it is. The preference system in your mind is the
result of the past experiences that you couldn’ t handle. These are two totally
different sets of forces that have  nothing to do with each other . For example,
there are current impersonal forces that are causing it to rain. There are past
personal forces causing you to not like the rain. You have just pitted
yourself against  the universe, and you are going to lose. Nevertheless, the
personal mind thinks it’s right. You actually think that the universe should
be the way you want it to be.PART IV: 
Thoughts and DreamsChapter 16. The Abstract Mind
Fortunately , your mind has a layer b eyond the layers  of the personal mind. It
has been  called the impersonal mind, the abstract mind, or even the purely
intellectual mind. This layer of mind is not distracted by the inner
commotion caused by your samskaras. It is free to soar unhindered into the
pure brilliance and creativity of a higher expression of mind. This higher layer of your mind, which we will call the abstract layer , is
what allows you to build rocket ships, develop air-conditioning, and
discover the existence of atoms. The abstract mind is what truly makes
humans great. You are not limite d to experiencing only through your senses;
you are free to explore in the realm of pure intellectual mind. Your mind can
take you pretty much anywhere. Do you want to build rovers that can go to
Mars so you can explore the planet on the internet? Wonderful, you can do
that because your mind is capable of expanding beyond the limit of your
senses and the limit of your personal thoughts. Mind can operate at many
levels—the question is, what are you doing with it? Intellectually , you have the ability to take images from outside and do
creative things with them. You are free to use your mind’ s power to be
artistically abstr act and intellectually logical. A perfect example  of the latter
would be Einstein’ s thought experiments. Einstein came up with many of
his greatest theories sitting in his armchair and reasoning out very abstract
concepts. This is a great tribute to the power of our minds. It is a far cry
from getting lost in your personal thoughts and making these thoughts about
yourself the total meaning of your life. Once you create thoughts about what
you want and don’t want, and how to force the world to be that way, you
will never be okay inside. You will lose much of the great power of abstract
thought because you cannot abstract from yourself. Life will become a
battle between reality and your mental preferences. This use of mind iscalled the perso nal mind because its thoughts are all about you and your
concepts, views, and preferences. The teachings of mindfulness, which center awareness on the current
moment, encou rage you to focus on something other than the personal
mind. Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its
incessant addict ion to the personal. Another way to transcend the personal
mind is by using  your intellectual mind to create and do things that are not
personal in nature. This inclu des being an engineer who reasons out
problems or a medical researcher who studies diseases and how to cure
them. Artistry , computer science , mathematics—all of these are examples of
beautiful uses of the imperson al mind. The mind is great; it’s just not
supposed to be used for storing all your personal preferenc es and then
thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored. The outside world is simply not going to magically match what  you’ve
stored in your mind. In fact, it is not very intelligent to expect it to. Is it
really intelligent to devote your life to fighting with life so it aligns with
your past good and bad experiences? How can you enjoy life if you are
always worrying and struggling  to get it your way? That’ s what all of our
societies are doing, and that’s what almost every human being has done. People just haven’t evolved enough to learn not to do that. Rich people,
poor people, sick people, healthy people, married people, single people—
they all are bound in the same way. If they get what they want, they are
relatively okay . If they don’t get what they want, they suffer to a greater or
lesser extent. Fortunately , you do not have to live this way. There is a much
higher way to live life. But it requires that you change how you interact with
your mind and with the life unfolding before you. To understand this transformation, let’s first take a look at how you
even decided what you want and don’t want. If you pay attenti on, you will
see that your past experiences determine your preferences. You didn’ t just
make it all up from scratch—your views, opinions, and preferences are
formulated based on data from your past. For example, let’s say you are
totally secure in your love relati onship until you hear that your friends had a
breakup, and they are miserable . All of a sudden you start worrying about
your own relatio nship. You were fine before you heard about your friends,
but now you’re not. You stored the concept of a breakup inside  your mind,
even though it really had nothing to do with you. Y ou took it personally .Is it possible to process the information without it getting stuck in your
mind? Of course it is. Your friends had a problem, and they shared it with
you. It came into your mind, passed through your consciousness, and you
experienced the feeling of compassion. The interaction actually made you a
greater being. You were able to fully absorb the reality of life without it
getting stuck in your mind. If you want to recall it later, you can willfully
restore it from memory in all its glory . But it will not keep coming back up
by itself. Since it did not get stuck in the conscious mind, or shoved into the
subconscious, it will not advers ely affect your life. It actually made you a
better person because you were able to handle the experience. On the other hand, if you were not able to process the experience
without resistin g it, it will stay stuck in the conscious mind and create
havoc. If you really resist it, it will get shoved down into the subconscious
where it will fester and spread its disturbance throughout the mind. In either
case, you are storing what you are afraid of in your mind. If you do this, you
will be afraid of your own thoughts. How could you not be? You made a
collection of unpleasant thoughts in your mind, and they are going to keep
coming back up. Now , in order to live in there, the analytical aspect of mind
must be utilized  to figure out what needs to happen outside for you to be
okay . This is where preferences come from. They are simply attempts to use
outside events to solve the fact that you are not doing well inside. This
results in the constant practice of judging everything that’s unfolding based
on your preferences. It’s easy to see why people don’t agree with each other . Nobo dy else
has had the experiences that came in through your eyes. What you have
inside your mind is completely different from what others have  inside their
minds. It can’t be otherwise because the data in your mind came from the
experiences you had. Nobody else had those experiences, not even close—
not your spouse , your children, or your friends. Not only were your past
experiences different, but you processed them differently . We can certainly
force ourselves to conform to other ways of thinking in order to gain
acceptance, but that just makes living inside all the more complicated. You
not only have your default way of thinking resulting from your stored past
impressions, but now you must suppress parts of that in order to conform to
the “group” mindset. No wonder it gets messy in there! You are holding  all that persona l stuff inside your mind—the good, the
bad, and the ugly. The inevitable result is that if the moment in front of youhappens to align well with your stored patterns, you feel great. You feel
open, excited, and enthused. If it doesn’ t align well with your stored
patterns, you get upset. You immediately close, get defensive,  and maybe
even get depressed. Now we’re back to the question we asked earlier ,
“What’ s it like living in there? ” Sometimes it’s nice; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s heaven; sometimes it’s hell. This is why. It is not because
God made it that way. You did this. You were given free will, and what you
did with your free will was make a mess out of your mind. Instead of being
in awe that the moment in front of you even exists, you fight with it to make
it match what you want.Chapter 17. Serve Mind or Fix It
All your prefere nces exist  because you stored experiences from the past
inside your personal mind. This makes it dif ficult to live in there, but instead
of fixing it, you double down and try to satisfy your preferences. “I want to
feel good, and the way to feel good is by getting the house I want.” “The
way to feel good is by owning the car I’ve always wanted.” “The way to
feel good is by finding a better relationship—this one’s not doing it for me.”
These attempts to compensate for your blockages are, at best, short lived
because you are not actually getting rid of the blockages. The foundationa l choice we have in life is either constantly contr ol life
to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our
blockages. The fact is we stored these samskaras inside. We shouldn’ t have,
but we did. Now instead of getting rid of them, we expect the world to adapt
to them. We know it’s not going  to happen by itself, so we use the personal-
thoughts layer of mind to analyze how the world needs to be to match what
we want. We’re brilliant at figuring out how to make someone become
attracted to us, or to change things so they better fit our limitati ons. Almost
everything we do is governed by this personal-thoughts layer of mind. It is
the same analytical power of mind that Einstein used to see E = mc2, but
you’re using it to figure out what to do if someone’ s talking badly about
you. This entire layer of mind  intellectualizes and analyzes your stored
patterns to try to figure out how the world needs to be so that when it comes
in, it will feel good and never feel bad. That is why you tend to have so much trouble making decisions. You’re trying to figure out how each choice will make you feel later. “Where do I want to live? Should I change jobs? I need to figure this out.”
You’re trying to mentally conce ptualize how the proposed action will match
the patterns you’ve stored inside. You don’t even think twice about it. “Ofcourse that’s what I’m doing. What else would I do?” How about live in
reality and enjoy the moments that are unfolding in front of you? That’ s
what else you can do. Use your mind to be creative, inspiring, and do great
things. Don’ t let the mind always be thinking about itself and what it wants. Learn to enjoy life as it is—instead of limiting the ways you can enjoy it to
serve your past impressions. The self-centered, analyzing layer of mind is the worst. It is the model
you build about how everything and everybody needs to be for you to feel
okay , including the weather tomorrow . “It better not rain tomorrow , I’m
going camping.” Now you’re getting upset about the weather! You have no
control over the weather , yet it’s bothering you. It’s not just the weather . The
driver in front of you is going ten miles per hour below the speed limit. Let’s watch your mind: “This is ridiculous. I don’t have time for this. What’ s wrong with them? They’re supposed to be in the slow lane.” Turns
out the problem is not how the person in front of you is driving. The
problem is what your mind is doing about how the person in front of you is
driving. Eventua lly you catch on that you’ve developed an entire  intellectual
model of how every single thing needs to be: how people should behave,
how your spouse  should be dressed when you’re going out, even how much
traffic there should be. How many things do you do this about? Pretty much
every single thing. You honestly believe that what you made up is how it
should be. The truth of the matter is, that’s absurd. There is no way what
you made up in your head, based upon your very limited past experiences,
has anything to do with what’ s supposed to be happening in the real world. Think about it for a moment. What you want the weather to be has
nothing to do with what it’s going to be. The weather has to do with
meteorology , not your preference system. If you really want to know why it
had to rain on your day off, go study science. A wise person realizes that the
world is not going to unfold the way they want it to because it’s not
supposed to. No two of us agree how it’s supposed to unfold , yet there’ s
only one world out there. We best leave reality to either science or God, not
to every one’s individual prefer ences. The world in front of you has the
power of reality  behind it. It is unfolding in accordance to the influences
that made it be the way it is, and there are billions of influences going back
billions of years. In contrast, you’re just making up how it’s supposed to be
based on the impressions you held inside from your past. When realitydoesn’ t happen the way you want, you say reality is wrong.
Living-Untethered-by-Michael-Singer.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Next we’re going to work with the mind and its thoughts, then the heart
and its emotion s. They don’t come in through your senses, but they are
certainly things you experience. As we comb through each layer, it’s going
to become easier and easier to let go—to accept and surrender. Remember,
you are not surrendering life; you are surrendering your resistance to life. We can use the term mindfulness to mean that you are always conscious of
what is really going on around you and inside you. Y ou’re not just conscious
of the appearance of things but also their true nature: where they come from,
why they are the way they are, and what it took for them to manifest before
you. Mindfulness is a natural, effortless process once you let go of personal
distractions. Instead of thinking that the moment in front of you has to be a
certain way, you start thinking that it’s pretty awesome the way it is. In fact,
it’s amazing that it even exists. From now on, everywhere you look and everything you interact with,
be sure to say, “Thank you. ” And be sure to pay tribute to the stars. They are
not just romanti c things twinkling in the night sky. They are the furnaces of
the universe. They have created  everything for you. Can you thank them. Can you appreci ate this truth, and understand that you didn’ t do anything to
deserve the trees, the oceans, and the sky. You don’t even know where You
came from. You’re just in there experiencing this amazing gift unfolding
before you. This is spirituality—coming into harmony with r eality, instead of
your personal self. PART III: 
The MindChapter 11. Empty Mind
As a conscious being, you are aware of the world coming in through your
senses. But your awareness is not limited to that outside world. You also
have inner experiences. Sometim es when the world comes in, it makes you
feel good. Other times, it make s you feel bad. Since the outside world is
really just structures of atoms, why does it have that inner effect on you. How could a bunch of atoms get you all jumbled up inside. What’s going
on. You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside
world, the mind, and the emotio ns. Now that we have deeply examined the
nature of the outside world, let’s start our journey into understanding the
second object of consciousness:  the mind. What is mind. We all know what
mind is. We’re in here, and we experience it every day of our lives. In the
simplest sense, mind is a place in which thoughts exist. We have thoughts
all the time: “Why is he driving so slow. I’m going to be late. Now what am
I going to do. ” Undoubtedly these are thoughts, but where do they exist. They certainly don’t exist in the outside world. Scientists are not able to
read your thoughts, as hard as they have tried. But you can. There’ s not a
machine they’ve  ever made, even for billions of dollars, that can read your
thoughts. Y et you can, ef fortlessly. That’ s a pretty amazing power you have. Take a moment to digest that fact. Your consciousness has the ability to
be aware  of things that machines can’t detect: thoughts and emotions. These
objects of consciousness surely exist, but not in what we define as the
“physical” world. Our scientists have shown us that the whole universe
comes down to energy. Thought s and emotions are simply energy vibrating
at such high rates that machines can’t detect them. Someday they might be
able to. Machines couldn’ t detec t gamma rays, X-rays, or even infrared light
until we made machines that could pick up those subtler vibrations. Scientistdidn’ t then classify these higher -vibration objects as something alien to our
world. They simply expanded the definition of the electromagnetic spectrum
to include them. It’s not that the higher vibrations hadn’ t always been there,
we simply hadn’ t been able to detect them. Likewise, your thoughts are there and have always been there. What if
a scientist told you, “No, your thoughts are not there. I can’t detect them, so
they don’t exist. ” You’d walk away and laugh. You know your thoughts are
there. You, the same conscious awareness we’ve been discussing, have the
ability to pay attention to, or not pay attention to, the thoughts being created
at this higher vibration of energy. Through the years, people have called this
higher range of vibrations the mental plane. Many questions come up regarding the topic of mind. For example,
what are thoughts and where do they come from. Since scientists don’ t have
direct access to your thoughts, only you can answer these questions. You’re
in there, and you have the ability to look at your mind. You even use the
terms “my mind” and “my thoughts. ” You say, “I had a terrible thought the
other day. My thoughts are really bothering me lately. ” How do you know
you had a terrible thought. How do you know that your thoughts are
bothering you. You are in there, so you know what it’s like to be in there
experiencing thoughts. You can think of mind as a very high-vibration field
of energy in which thoughts can be created. Mind is not the thoughts. Mind
is the field of energy in which  thoughts are capable of exist ing. Just as
clouds are not the sky, but they exist in the sky and are formed out of the
substance of the sky, so thoughts are not the mind, but they exist in the mind
and are formed out of the substance of mind. Buddhists talk about empty mind. In the purest sense, that is what we
are refer ring to when we use the term “mind. ” It is a field of energy with
nothing in it. There are no thoug hts. There’ s just an absolutely still, formless
field of energy we call “mind. ” This not conceptual; you can go there. Meditators who have gone deep understand this. You just rest in void, in
empty mind. You’re there, but there are no thoughts. It’s just completely
quiet, completel y empty. It’s like a powerful computer that has no software
on it. The comp uter has great potential, but it doesn’ t do anything. That is
what empty mind is. It’s not stupid; in fact, its latent capabilities are
enormous. It is simply still, not creating thoughts. Basically, that is what
Buddhists mean by empty mind, and it is our starting point for
understanding mind. The outside world exists independent of this field of mind. Whether the
mind is still or the mind is noisy, the planet continues to spin on its axis and
all the galaxies continue to float through space. The energy that makes up
the phys ical plane is at a grosser vibration rate than the energy that makes
up the mental plane. From your own personal experience, you know that
consciousness is capable of being aware of both the physical plane and the
mental plane at the same time. Now that we’ve examined the concept of empty mind, let’s begin the
process of forming objects in the field of mind. In order for you in there,
consciousness, to be aware of the physical plane, you were given a physical
body to house the five senses that pick up sight, sound, smell, taste, and
touch. This body is a gift that the stars gave you and that evolution
perfected. Because of the senses, the vibrations from the outside world come
in. They pass through the sensory receptors, up the sensory nerves, into the
brain, and then manifest in the mind where you experience them. This
rendering of the outside world is one of the most basic functions of mind. It’s very much like watching a ball game being played in California while
you’re in Florida. The actual physical light and sound vibrations are picked
up by the cameras at the game. They are then digitized and transmitted to a
receiver at your home. The received signals are then rendered onto your flat-
screen TV. It seems like you are looking at the game, but you are not. You
are looking at the rendering of the transmitted signals that the cameras
picked up. It’s amazing how much this parallels what is happening when you
“see” the world around you. Your senses pick up the different vibrations
from the outside  world, just like a camera’ s sensors do. In the case of your
senses, however, you can pick up five different vibration rates, not just sight
and sound. Your senses convert the different vibrations into electrical nerve
impulses and transmit them to the brain. The signals are then rendered in the
mind’ s energy field to as closel y as possible replicate the original physical
source. You become aware of what is going on in front of you by being
aware of its mental image rendered in your mind. Just like you become
aware of the ball game in California by being aware of what is rendered on
your TV screen in Florida. You’re not out there in the world. You’re inside. You’re way back
inside. Though the world is happening everywhere, you only experience the
part that is picke d up by your senses and rendered in your mind. Mind is nolonger empty—it has formed its energy into the exact image of what is
within the scope of your senses. As we discussed, you are not looking out
into the world. The outside is being reproduced in your mind, and you are
looking at that mental image. It’s really not that different from when you are
dreaming. In the dream state, images are being created in the mind, and you
are looking at them. The waking state is the same, except that the mental
images are being generated by the senses instead of by the mind itself. These mental images that form in the mind are like the images that form on
your flat-screen TV. The screen was blank, but now it has taken  the form of
the ball game in California. Your mind was empty, but now it has taken the
form of the outside world around you. Your mind is so brilliant. Your flat-screen TV has a digital signal
processor that takes the receive d digital signal, decodes it, and renders it
onto the screen and through the speakers. Your mind takes the encoded
nerve impulses and reproduces the entire scene in front of you, including
depth perception, as well as adding touch, smell, and taste. It renders all this
detail made out of the higher energy vibration of the mind. This exact
rendering of the outside world is one of the primary functions of your mind. It allows  you in there to experie nce the outside world. The mind is such an
amazing gift. It is naturally form less, yet it can create forms that are more
brilliant than those made by the most powerful computer. Mind  is really the
first personal computer. In fact, it is so personal that it doesn’ t need any
external form. Its display screen is inside, its computing and graphics
capability are inside, and you don’t need a keyboard, mouse, or voice
recognition to communicate with it. It is so close to you that it responds to
your will and the slightest impulse from your heart. We have now gone from empty mind to a mind that renders the outside
world so you can experience your surroundings. Experience is the nectar of
life. You’re in there, and you’re capable of experiencing because of the
rendering capability of your mind. Of what meaning is life if you don’t
experience it. We spent a lot of time discussing how the outside world was
created—billions of years of stellar activity resulting in what appears around
you. You saw how it was create d; now you see how conscious ness, which
does not belong to the world  of form, can experience it—through the
miracle of mind. In truth, consciousness is the most profound miracle. An essence that
knows that it knows that it knows. Everything else is something you’reconscious of—th e true magic is consciousness itself. When consciousness is
simply experiencing reality as imaged in the mind, that is what we call
being in the present moment. At this point in our discussion, there is
nowhere else to be. The real world is outside, it is being reflected in your
mind, and you are aware of the image right in front of you. In this very
simple state, you are experiencing what you were meant to experience: the
gift of the moment that’s being  given to you. It comes in, and you learn
from it simply because you experienced it. There are no distractions; there is
just total oneness with the moment in front of you. Everyone has had some rare moments like this. Perhaps it took a
beautiful sunset to bring you to such a state of one-pointed consciousness. You were driving around a corner and, all of a sudden, the sun was setting
with beautiful purple, orange, and magenta. It was the most beautiful thing
you had ever seen, and it compl etely blew your mind. What does that mean,
“It blew your mind”. It means there was nothing left in your mind but that
image of the sunset. Not the mortgage, not the problem with the boyfriend,
not the worries from the past. The only experience you were having was this
beautiful sunset coming in throu gh your eyes, rendering in your mind, and
merging with your entire being. Your entire consciousness was centered and
focused on the experience you were having, instead of being scattered all
over the place. It was truly a spiritual experience. That is what The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describes as the experiencer
and the experience becoming one. You have allowed a merger between
subject and object. There’ s nothing distracting your consciousness from
what is happening right in front of you. This is the yogic state of dharana—
one-pointed concentration. You’ve had other experiences that approach this state of one-pointed
absorption. Sometimes in intimate moments with someone you love, when
everything is just right, you lose yourself in the moment. All of a sudden,
total beauty and peace come over you. When consciousness merges with the
object of consciousness, you can feel the presence of God. In yogic
philosophy, the Self is called sat-chit-ananda,  eternal-conscious-bliss. When
Self focuses one-pointedly on a single object, one experiences the nature of
Self—total peace, contentment, and overwhelming bliss. This is available to
us at any time if we can just learn to enter the undistracted state of one-
pointed consciousness. Chapter 12. Birth of the Personal Mind
Why don’t we live in an ecstatic state of one-pointed consciousness all the
time. What went wrong. What caused the fall from this proverbial garden. It’s very simple: The world comes in and it’s beautiful. The very act of
experiencing it is tremendously moving when it comes all the way back into
you. However, that does not mean it all feels the same. Heat feels different
from cold—because it is different. That doesn’ t mean one is better than the
other. They just feel different. Somebody gently touches you, and that feels
very different than if they bump into you. Different things are experienced
in different ways. The Buddhis ts say everything has its natur e. A coiled
rattlesnake comes into the mind as a very different experience than a
butterfly landing on your arm. That rattlesnake is giving off its nature—
emanating its particular vibration. That vibration is awesome in its own way,
but it certainly doesn’ t create the same inner experience as the butterfly. There’ s nothing wrong with this. It’s very real. What’ s wrong with having a
variety of experi ences. If a butterfly landed on you every mome nt, it would
become so normal that it would be nothing. God knew how to create a
world that would always be exciting. Your consciousness actually expands because of the knowledge that
flows into it. You are learning and growing through the experiences you are
having. This learning through life is true spiritual growth. It is the evolution
of the soul. Just like everyth ing you learn makes you smarter, every
experience you have makes you wiser. When the presence of a rattlesnake
comes into your mind, true, it’s not a comfortable inner experience. It
doesn’ t feel the same as a butterfly, but it is just as rich. It is just as
important. If you’re willing to be open at this level, you’re still in the idyllic
garden. There are no problems; there are just learning experiences. No
matter what happens, you are becoming greater. Unfortunately, that is not how we live. Something went very wrong. Let’s take this fall from the garden in slow motion. First, some thing comes
in; let’s start with the rattlesnake. It’s not a particularly comfortable
experience. In fact, a hissing rattlesnake is meant to be an uncomfortable
experience—it may even generate discomfort at a survival level. That would
be a strong inner reaction to the outer experience. But this uncomfortable inner reaction isn’t bad, per se—it’ s just a
different vibration. Just like some colors are soothing and others are harsh. Colors aren’ t bad or good; they are just different vibration rates of the
electromagnetic spectrum. You can learn how to be comfortable with these
different vibrations. A rattlesna ke is not going to stay there rattling your
whole life. It’s going to come, and it’s going to go—and its uncomfortable
vibrations are going to go with it. Then something else will happen. You
live in a happening place filled with growthful experiences. You are simply
in there experiencing creation as it comes in and passes through you. You don’t practi ce that level of acceptance, however. You in there who
is experiencing what’ s renderin g in your mind—you have the ability to
resist what is not comfortable to you. You were given free will. You can use
that will like inner hands to push away thoughts and emotions if they don’t
feel right. Surely you have done that. That resistance is an act of will. W ill is
an innate power you have—it is actually a power that emanates from
consciousness. Just as the Sun stays where it is in space, but it emanates
rays that have great power, so consciousness remains at its source, but its
awareness emanates out onto whatever it focuses on. There is great power
when consciousness focuses on something, just as there is great power when
the Sun’s rays are focused through a magnifying glass. You can feel the
power of one-pointed concentration. It is, indeed, concentrated
consciousness. That is the source of the power of will. The power of will plays a very important role in understanding how the
mind developed from a place of clarity to one of confusion. You have surely
noticed that your awareness does not fall evenly on all objects that render in
your mind. You pay attention to some objects more than others. If the
vibration of the object was more comfortable or uncomfortable, you either
“liked” it or “didn’ t like” it. This is the foundation of how the personal mind
got built: like and dislike. It happens at a very primal level. Basically, it
depends on whether you in there have the ability to experience somethingthat comes in without doing anything about it—other than fully
experiencing it. This is the ability to allow objects to simply pass through. If an inner experience is not neutral to you, it draws your
consciousness to focus on it. The moment that happens, the things passing
through your mind are no longer  even; one has stood out from the rest. All it
took was for you to focus your consciousness on it. Your consciousness is a
force, and you are focusing that force on a particular mental object. When
the force of consciousness is focused on a mental object, that object cannot
pass through the mind like the other objects. Just as the solar winds interfere
with objects passing through space, so focused consciousness is a force that
affects objects passing through the mind. When you focus consciousness on a particular mental form, you
impede that form’ s ability to pass through the mind. The very act of
concentrating on it makes it stay in your mind. You know this. When you
want to do math  in your mind, you concentrate on the numbers so they stay
long enough for you to manipul ate them. In fact, anytime you want to hold
something in your mind, you must focus your consciousness on it so it does
not just fade away. Concentrat ion of consciousness freezes forms in the
mind so that they don’t just pass through. Thus, when you saw a rattlesnake,
it might as well have been a standalone item in your mind. The truth is there
were trees, grass, sky, and other items rendered in your mind aside from the
snake. But you focused your consciousness on the rattlesnake and let the
rest pass through. Interestingly, because you focused so much consciousness
on it, you froze the experience of the snake in your mind. There was no way
you were going to let this uncomfortable experience all the way in, and that
is the birth of resistance. Do you know what that means, “letting it all the way in”. We
discussed this earlier regarding the beautiful sunset and the perfect romantic
experience. You wanted to fully experience these beautiful moments, so you
opened up and let them pass all the way into your being. These are the
special moments in life, when something touches you to the core of your
being. No way this rattlesnake is going all the way in there. You don’t have
to think about it. Resistance is simply a natural response to something that’s
not comfortable. Y ou try to keep it at a distance. Have you ever kept something at a distance in there. Perhaps
something some one said that hurt you in the past, maybe an awkward stage
you went through when you were young, or even a terrible divorce. Ofcourse you have, but that doesn’ t mean the event didn’ t happen. It wouldn’ t
be in there if it hadn’ t already happened. You can’t stop the event from
having happened, but you don’t have to let it all the way in. Mind is a big
place. There’ s plenty of room between where the experience is first imaged
in your mind and where you actually fully experience it. You can use will to
keep the mental  image at a distance from you. This is a very primal act of
resistance. Now that you have resisted experiencing the rattlesnake, and let the
rest of the moment pass throug h, here comes a butterfly. It lands on you,
which is such a beautiful experience that you naturally focus on it. When it
starts to fly off, you don’t want it to go away, so you use your will to hold
on to the mental  image. This is what Buddhists call clinging. You can’t hold
on to the butterfly itself because it flew away. So you try to hold on to the
mental thought pattern of the butterfly. You push away what it was like to
experience the rattlesnake and you cling to what it was like to experience
the butterfly. Neither of these mental patterns can finish their natural
journey through  the mind. Not only do you lose out on fully experiencing
them to the depth of your being,  you are also left with these mental patterns
stuck in your mind. Neither rattlesnake nor butterfly remain before you, but
they are left as patterns in the mind’s energy field. Such is the power of like
and dislike. Both clinging and resisting keep the mental renderings in your mind. This is very important to understand. Experiential mind was meant to be
like a clear TV screen: it renders the image being sent to it. But now you’ve
held on to imag es that are no longer being generated by the outside world. They got stuck in your mind as mental patterns, and as a resul t, you’re out
of harmony with reality. You were in there experiencing the gift of reality;
now you are also experiencing the patterns you held on to in your mind. These patterns in your mind are totally different from the patte rns in other
people’ s minds. Each person’ s trapped mental patterns are unique and very
personal. They come from how we interacted with our past experiences. Since we’ve all had different past experiences, and interacted with them
differently, the impressions held in our minds are totally different. This is
the birth of the personal mind. The problem is: reality is not personal. As you’ve already seen, we
didn’ t create this world. We are simply experiencing the miracle  of creation
unfolding aroun d us. Yes, there are rattlesnakes and butterflies in the world,along with lots of other things. But now there are RATTLESNAKES and
BUTTERFLIES in your mind, even when they are not actually in front of
you. Now that you’ve held these leftover mental impressions in your mind,
reality has to compete with them for your attention. Your ability to fully
focus on the outer world is going to be hindered by the constan t distraction
of these inner impressions. Chapter 13. Fall from the Garden
Resistance is the beginning  of what can be considered the fall from the
garden. You were just fine being aware of this awesome, everchanging
creation. It presented constant gifts of experiences for you to learn and grow
from. Take the gift of music. When you are deeply absorbed in music, there
are no stray thoughts, only the music effortlessly coming in and feeding the
depth of your being. You can be raised to the state of ecstasy while listening
to music. When the mind is clear, everything comes in that way. You are
either in a heave nly state experiencing what is pouring into you, or you are
deeply absorbed in the inner stillness of your being. You have returned to
the garden—everything is ef fortlessly beautiful. Once you hold on to rattlesnakes and butterflies in your mind, you are
unable to stay in that pure state of consciousness. These two mental patterns
have become powerfully charged objects that draw your attention toward
them. When the mind was clear, what attracted your consciousness was the
rendering of the outside world as it passed through. This rendering was very
entertaining and fulfilling, but since you had nothing going with it, it just
came and went. In contrast, the powerfully charged objects you have held in
your mind do not come and go. The world in front of you comes and goes,
but these mental objects remain because you are holding them in your mind. Furthermore, since they are differentiated as more important than the rest,
your consciousness becomes more distracted by these mental objects. Everything is no longer equal, and this creates a major problem. Next
thing you know, you’re walking down the road, and there’ s a rope. But the
rope no longer feels the same as it would have before you saw the
rattlesnake. The rope reminds you of the rattlesnake. What does “reminds
you of” mean. It’s not a rattlesnake; it’s a rope. Nonetheless, when the rope
comes in, consci ousness now has a choice: pay full attention to the rope thatcame in, or be distracted by the negative rattlesnake image stuck in your
mind. The mind will immediate ly join these two mental objects together as
one, and you will get scared. Scared by a rope. Y es, terrified by a rope. A similar thing happens with the image of the butterfly stuck in your
mind. After the butterfly flies away, you’re still focusing on the image in
your mind. You’re still feeling good about it and trying to hold on to it, even
though it is no longer part of your here-and-now reality. Then something
new comes in from the outside, like a person walking by. Your mind may be
rendering this new image perfectly, but your consciousness is not fully
seeing it. Your consciousness is still distracted by the butterfly  image that
got left in your mind. It used to be that the moment in front of you was the
experience you were having inside. Now you have a preference— you would
rather experience the mental image of the butterfly than the reality in front
of you. There has become a whole new world for consciousness to focus on
—the world you built in your mind. That world does not match the reality of
creation. That inner world is your own personal creation made out of the
mental objects you didn’ t let pass through. That’ s what those images in your
mind represent: things that happened in the past that you willfully kept in
your mind. As we shall see, these impressions are the initial seeds that
eventually grew into the self-concept or personal self. To see this more clearly, let’s once again look at the example of a flat-
screen TV. When the first plasm a screens came out, they had “afterimages. ”
Manufacturers warned that if you paused an image for too long, it would
actually burn a shadow of the image into the plasma screen. When the show
continued, the old image would  still be there. Would you enjoy watching
TV like that. You’ve finished the news, but when you turn on a movie the
afterimage of the newscaster is still superimposed on top of your movie. That’ s exactly what is happenin g with the butterfly and the rattlesnake. You
can no longer clearly see what is going on in front of you becau se you have
these other images on the screen of your mind. You’ve messed up your
screen. You didn’ t mean to. It seemed innocent to push exper iences aside
when you didn’ t find them pleasant. Where do you think they went when
you resisted them. They got stored as lasting impressions in your mind. It is worth looking at the effect of these leftover images in slow
motion. In the beginning, the miracle of creation took place. It created form
that is coming in through your senses so you can experience it. Apparently,
at some point you didn’ t like certain vibrations, so you pushed them awaywhen they rende red inside. That willful resistance caused them to stay in the
mind. This is where personal comes from. We said earlier that nothing is
really personal. But you have chosen to fill the sanctity of your mind with
frozen images from your past. These impressions will stay in your mind and
will pull your consciousness toward them. You now have a limited and
biased view of reality that will distort all of your experiences for the rest of
your life. That is the power of the personal mind. So far we have only focused on the rattlesnake you resisted and the
butterfly you clung to. Those alone are sufficient to distort your experience
of reality. But be honest with yourself: How many of these charged
impressions do you have. You’ve done this your entire life. Plus, these
stored impressions build on each other. Now that you have a stored
rattlesnake impr ession in there, you can easily get scared by the sound of a
baby’ s rattle. In fact, if the disco mfort is bad enough, you may choose not to
be around babies. That’ s a personal preference, and this is where all
personal prefere nces come from. Once you create preferences, they will
dominate your entire experience of life. These impressio ns that stay stuck in the mind are called samskaras in
yogic science. They are discussed in the ancient Upanishads texts. How
could people know about this thousands of years before Sigmund Freud
discussed his theories on suppression. It is because they were meditators. They didn’ t need someone to teach them about this—they saw it going on in
their own minds. If you are quietly centered in conscious awareness, you
can see what is passing before you. You are the ultimate experie ncer of your
mind; you’re just not paying attention. Instead of paying attention, you’re getting so uptight about wanting
butterflies, and not wanting rattlesnakes, that you’re losing your centered
awareness. Whe n the world around you comes in and hits, or activ ates, your
stored patterns, you can no longer observe reality objectively. Your
consciousness gets drawn into the activated samskaras, and everything
becomes distorted. This is the foundation of the psyche, your personal self. What is the psyche. It’s something you build inside of the mind that’s
about you: “I’m the one who doesn’ t like rattlesnakes. I’m the one who likes
butterflies. ” You just built a self-concept. Someone else doesn’ t have that. They have a psyche built around thunderstorms, dogs that bite, and kittens
that snuggle. Everyone has had different experiences, and therefore,
everyone is building a differen t personal mind inside. No one is doing itpurposely; it’s reactive. It happens quite naturally because you’re not ready
to openly experience life. The highest state is to be comfortable learning and
growing from life’s experiences. But if you’re not comfortable with some
experiences, you use your will to resist them. That merely means you’re not
evolved enough  in that area. There is physical evolution and there is
spiritual evolutio n. They both involve adaptability to your environment. The
former for your body, and the latter for “you” in there, the soul. When events come in, they are meant to be experienced by you. If you
have trouble experiencing them, that’s the whole purpose of learning to
accept. What right do you have to either cling to or resist reality. You didn’ t
make reality, and you weren’ t here for the billions of years that created it. We’re back to, “Do you like the fact that Saturn has rings. ” Your answer
was, “It’s none of my business. ”  That’ s the correct response for every bit of
reality that took billions of years to end up in front of you. The real questio n is not whether you like things, it’s why are you not
okay with them. The reason is actually quite simple: becaus e you can’t
digest them. It’s hard to let some experiences just pass through without
residual disturba nce. But you need to learn how to do it. You learned to play
tennis. You learned to play the piano. You’ve learned all kinds of things,
maybe even calculus. You didn’ t know how to do these things to start with. They were surely uncomfortabl e until you learned to be comfortable with
them. The soul can learn. You in there, the consciousness, can learn to
experience reality. In order to do so, you must not resist. Other wise, you’re
going to immediately push reality away. That’ s what acceptance is:
nonresistance. It is having the commitment to fully allow reality to pass
directly into the highest part of your being. In the end, all you are
surrendering is your resistance to reality. You learn to let it come in, even if
it is not comfortable as it pours into you. The same thing is true with positive experiences, like the butterfly. Somebody you like comes up to you and says, “You know, I really like you. You’re very attractive to me, and I enjoy being with you. ” That is such a
nice experience that you immediately cling to the beautiful things they said. They go back to what they were doing, but you can’t. You can’t focus on
your work because the impressi ons left in your mind keep distracting you. This is the oppo site of Be Here Now;  you’re practicing Be There Then. You
just had a beautiful experience, and you ruined it. You ruined it by holding
on to it, like the butterfly. You ruined it by creating a preferenc e about oneof life’s experiences. Now every time the phone rings, and it’s not the
person who said the nice things, you get disappointed. Be aware that you
did this. Somebody said someth ing nice to you, and you couldn’ t handle it. You couldn’t just let it be a nice experience. Instead, you clung to it in your
mind, and it actually messed you up. Whether you use your will to resist or cling, these leftover impressions
will stay in your mind. You’ve now created an entire layer of mind that’s
holding your samskaras, your unfinished patterns from the past. You will
come to see that these acts of clinging and resisting determine the quality of
your life. These impressions distract your consciousness from the reality of
the current moment. What is more, if you are constantly distracted by these
samskaras in your mind, you’re never going to experience who you really
are. There is a vast difference betw een memory and a samskara. Just as
your computer has memory storage capability, so does your mind. It is a
natural function  of the mind to store compressed versions of what was
received by the senses in its long-term memory. These stored memories can
be retrieved with the slightest intent. You learn a person’ s name, meaning it
is stored in long-term memory. When you see them again, the name
normally comes  up into the forefront of mind without any effort, though
admittedly, sometimes we have to apply willful effort to bring the memory
back. These are fairly normal ways memory is stored and recalled. In drasti c contrast to normal memory, if you experience an event that
you have trouble handling when it renders in your mind, you use will to
either consciously or subconscio usly suppress it. You don’t want it in your
mind at all, not presently or long-term, so you try to push it out of the mind
completely. Whe n you do this, you are resisting the entire event: what came
in throu gh the senses, what you felt emotionally, and what your thoughts
were about it. This resisted “package” of the experience cannot pass through
you in the normal fashion—bec ause you won’ t let it. The entire energy of
the event is locked inside of your mind, and it does not sit there quietly. Because it keeps trying to release its blocked energies, it can distort your
memories of the past as well as disturb your experience of the present. Blocked energies in the mind are like a computer virus that distorts both the
conscious and subconscious minds. In later chapters we will deeply explore
how these blocked energy patterns, samskaras, also block your natural
energy flow. When you comm it to spiritual growth, you work on letting go of the
stored blockages from the past and not storing any more from the present. This does not mean the mind’ s normal memory storage proce ss does not
take place. You are not willfu lly forgetting life’s experiences. You are
simply not resist ing or clinging to the experiences, and thus not storing them
as samskaras. They remain harmless, objective memories. Let’s take an example very close to home for some people. You have
an ex-husband: “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to talk about him ever
again. I don’t even like it when someone says his name. It makes me
uncomfortable, even years after the divorce. ” This is not object ive memory
talking—it is definitely a samskara. You say you divorced your ex-husband,
but you really didn’t. He’s still inside bothering you. You don’t even want to
go to a party if you think he might be there. You have  kept these
impressions blocked in your mind, and ultimately you have created an
alternate univer se in which you are still dealing with your ex. Normal
memory is not like this; it is well behaved. Like a computer ’s memory, it
does not pop up by itself. It does not have blocked energies that need to be
released. Normal memory is there when you need it—it does not haunt you
throughout your life. Fortunately, most things you encounter in life are neutral to you. They
pass through unblocked and are available for recall when appropriate. You
have driven by white lines on the road many times, but they don’t come
back up by themselves at inopportune times. Neither do the cars, trees,
buildings, and myriad other objects you encounter each day. They come in,
and they pass through. But there are a few things that are harder to deal with
inside, and therefore you resist them or you cling to them. This is how you
fell out of the garden of reality. Impressions stayed inside your mind and
became the foundation blocks upon which you built your psyche. Chapter 14. The Veil of the Psyche
Your psyche is like  a computer program running in your mind based on your
samskaras. It’s in there talking to you about things that happened before,
what you wish would happen now, and what you hope does or doesn’ t
happen tomorrow. You’ve actually created an alternate reality  inside your
mind that is very complex. It’s a tremendous menagerie of the stored
moments you were not able to let go of. At this point, you don’t even need
another rattlesna ke to get you disturbed. The fact that the experience of the
snake is stuck in your mind means other things will remind you of it. In fact,
you can remind  yourself of it without the need of an external reminder. You’re driving down the street, minding your own business. Suddenly, you
remember how scary that snake was, and you get scared again. We’re not
dealing with reality anymore. We have such a mess built up in there that it’s
no wond er we have so much trouble with life. Such is the nature of the
personal mind. Regardless of how messy it gets in there, the fact remains that the
personal mind is not you—no more than your TV screen is you. But it’s
much more difficult to objectiv ely watch your mind than your TV screen. This is because of the power of the impressions you have stored in your
mind. These past impressions compete with the image of realit y coming in
from the outside and make it hard to tell which is which. It is difficult to
maintain a seat of objective observation when it gets so confusing in there. Samskaras are not to be taken lightly; they seriously distort your experience
of life. Let’s take the example of a psychological Rorschach test, often referred
to as an inkblot test. The psychologist holds up an inkblot and asks what
you see. You immediately respond that you see people making love or,
perhaps, mommy and daddy fighting. In other words, the Rorschach teststimulates the patterns you’ve stored inside your mind, causing you to see
what’ s not actually there. The truth is the whole world is a giant Rorschach
test. The world is a flow of atoms unfolding in front of you. It’s no more
personal than the inkblots. But it’s hitting your samskaras, and that
stimulates stored mental and emotional reactions. Now, instead of
experiencing what is passing by outside, you are experiencing the likes,
dislikes, beliefs, and judgments stored inside. These impress ions are so
strong that you actually think they are what is really out there, just like the
inkblots. The personal mind has taken over your entire life. You are no
longer free to enjoy the experie nces that are actually happening—you are
forced to deal with what your mind says is happening. Let’s look a little deeper into how samskaras affect your life. We have
discussed that what is coming in from the outside stimulates your mental
blockages from the past. Past experiences were uncomfortable when you
first resisted them, and they are going to be uncomfortable when they come
back up. To make matters worse, just as with the Rorschach test, you are not
seeing what is actually outside—you are seeing your inner issues projected
onto the outside. That’ s why life seems so scary and why it seem s to always
be hitting your weak spots. The truth is, life is not hitting your weak spots,
you are projecting your weak spots onto life. Yet not everyth ing you stored
in there was negative. You held on to some positive things from the past. The problem is they’re not happening anymore, and that is disappointing. If
you go back to the same place  where you saw the butterfly, and it’s not
there, it becomes a negative experience. Understand, you have just made life a lose-lose situation. If anything
reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to
reexperience what you liked before, you lose. This is in drastic contrast to
what Zen calls beginner ’s mind. If you are not expecting anything in
particular from a situation, and then something special happens, it can touch
you really deeply. It could be a beautiful sunset, the first unexpe cted kiss, or
some other welcome surprise. If it touches you so deeply because you have
no sams karas in your mind about the event—you have beginner ’s mind. Otherwise, you will be expecting something based on prior experiences, and
that will interfere with the spontaneity of the event. The end result is that these samskaras have ruined your life. You’ve
made it so that unless something drastically different happens to pull you
out of this preference system, you can’t feel anything fully. That’ s whysome people must go to the extremes to get a rush. It is also why some
people try to keep everything exactly the same so life doesn’ t disturb their
samskaras. In either case, trying  to keep the mind a decent place to live in
can force people  to look for escapes, such as drinking and drugs. You get to
the point where you’re running around trying to appease your mind. Eventually, you will come to realize that it’s not the job, the spouse, or
the car that gets old—it’ s listen ing to the mess in your mind that gets old. While all of these patterns from  the past are blocked in your mind, you in
there can neither experience the miracle of life unfolding before you, nor
can you experience the natural beauty within you. Your awareness is
completely distracted by these stored mental patterns, and you must devote
your days and nights to serving them. You can no longer exper ience reality
—you are stuck experiencing yourself. There’ s a concept in Zen known as “just tree. ” It fits perfectly with our
discussion. The story goes as follows: There was a young Buddhist monk in
a monastery who would go for daily sessions with the Zen master. The
master would ask him some questions, and the monk would leave. One time
when the young monk walked in, the master looked at him and remarked,
“What happened to you. Y ou look so alive and filled with light. ”
The monk was surprised. “What do you mean. ”
“I see a dif ference in you, my son. What happened. ”
The monk told him, “I was walking across the courtyard and saw the
big oak tree. I stopped and looked at it. I had seen it many times before, but
this time I saw just tree. I just saw the tree. Somehow, it took me to such a
deep place that I felt an awakening. I felt a moment of enlig htenment. It
took me beyond myself. ”
“That tree has been there for a hundred years,” the master reflected. “You have walked by that tree every single day since you’ve been here. ”
“Yes,” the stude nt said, “but when I previously walked by the tree, it
often reminded me of the tree Buddha sat under when he reached
enlightenment. Other times, the tree reminded me of the one I fell out of
when I was little. The tree alway s stimulated thought patterns from my past. This time I saw just tr ee. ”
The master smiled. “Just tree” is what we talked about in the beginning of our discussion of
mind. The tree comes in, renders in your mind, and that’s all you see. In
contrast, the tree comes in, renders in your mind, and stimulates any past
samskaras you have about trees. Your samskara mind becomes activated,
and your consciousness is scattered between the primary image of the tree
and the second ary explosion that takes place inside. The secondary
explosion is the reaction within your mind due to the stored patterns there. You can’t have pure experience s anymore. The young monk did—he saw
“just tree. ” If you didn’ t understand this before, hopefully you do now. A
Zen master would be pleased with you, because “just tree” is a very deep
concept in Zen Buddhism. There is nothing  wrong with the mind itself. Just like there is nothing
wrong with a computer, per se. It is how you use these powerful gifts that
can cause a problem. There is almost no limit to the brilliance of mind. People think Einstein was smart, but they don’t understand their own
brilliance. We all have the human mind, every single one of us. We don’t
have a possum mind, a squirrel mind, or even an ape mind. We have the
human mind, and the human mind is brilliant. Chapter 15. The Brilliant Human Mind
What’ s so specia l about the human mind. Let’s take a look. For billions and
billions of years, while the planet Earth was spinning through space, the
process of evolution took place. There were minerals, then plants, then
animals, all formed from atoms created in the stars. The planet had been
floating in space for 4. 5 billion years before modern humans showed up. It
is worth  noting that before humans showed up, life on Earth for the other
species stayed pretty much the same. Food, shelter, and surviv al were the
name of the game. Things haven’ t really changed that much for them. The
monkeys lived in trees for tens of millions of years, just as they do now. The
fish swam in the waters for hundreds of millions of years, just as they do
now. Everything  on Earth stayed pretty much the same until you humans
showed up with your human mind. You discovered electricity and made the
nighttime bright. You built giant skyscrapers and machinery that never
existed before. You even dug into the earth, extracted minerals, and
developed advanced materials like silicon chips. Then you built a rocket
ship, got in, and flew to the moon. Compare that to what any other animals have done. They are living
exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years
ago, a million years ago. You’re  not. You used to live in caves;  now you’re
planning to live on Mars. What  did that. Did God hide a rocket ship, and
you found it somewhere. No, your mind did that. Your mind figured out
everything was made of atoms, then you figured out how split the atom. The
human mind actually figured out how the universe was made, all the way
down to the quantum level. Your mind put up the Hubble Space Telescope
that can see back to the beginning of creation. The Hubble can pick up light
that has been traveling through space for more than thirteen billion years. This allows us to see what was happening thirteen billion years ago. Canyou even think about that. The fact is you can because you have a human
mind. The human mind is an amazing thing. That is some serious stuff we’ve
figured out. You’re back in there, deep inside, and you have the use of a
brilliant mind. That said, what is the average human doing with their mind. Einstein used his mind to ponder “thought experiments” about the behavior
of light, gravity, and the physics  of outer space (even though no human had
ever been there. ). Meanwhile, you keep your mind busy with relationships,
what people think of you, and how to get what you want and avoid what you
don’t want. You may not have Einstein’ s mind, but compared to any other
living thing on Earth, your mind is brilliant. The question is not whether
your mind is brilliant; the question is what are you doing with that
brilliance. What we see so far is that the mind by itself, without you interfe ring, is
doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s giving you the gift of rendering
the outside world for you to experience. But you had some troub le accepting
that gift. You started resisting when it felt a little too uncomfortable and
clinging when it felt a little too good. This caused the buildup of mental
patterns inside of you. Now, processing current external experiences
becomes distorted by the reactions of past samskaras. You can think of this as layers of the mind. The first layer is where the
rendering of the present external experience is taking place. We can call that
the here-and-now layer. The next layer is the stored patterns from the past
that you did not release when the external experience was over. We can call
that the samskara layer. But there is yet another layer. This layer is what you
are doing with your brilliant mind to try to solve the discomforts created by
the samskaras. This is the personal-thoughts layer, and it is the one you
identify with the most—you think this is who you are. The combination of
these three layers is what we call the personal mind. Yours is completely
unique to you and you alone. We create the personal-thoughts layer when we use the tremendous
intellectual power of our mind to conceptualize an outside world that will
not bother us and will, in fact, make us feel good. It seems perfectly logical. The problem is, what we think will make us feel good or bad is simply the
result of blocked mental patterns from the past. If we use our mind’ s
brilliance to develop thought patterns based on how everyone and
everything needs to be for us to feel okay, we have limited our life toserving our samskaras. And our personal thoughts don’t stop here. What
good is it to analyze how you need things to be if you’re not also going to
think about how to get them that way. First we figure out the strategy of
how to be okay, then we figure out the tactics of how to make it happen. Strategy and tactics—that’ s military training. In essence, we are at war with
the world. The personal mind has taken on the task of how to get the world
unfolding in front of you to be the way you want. That should set off alarm
bells because we’ve already discussed in great detail where the world in
front of you comes from, and it has nothing to do with what’ s going on
inside your head. The moment in front of you is the result of all the natural
forces that caused it to be as it is. The preference system in your mind is the
result of the past experiences that you couldn’ t handle. These are two totally
different sets of forces that have  nothing to do with each other. For example,
there are current impersonal forces that are causing it to rain. There are past
personal forces causing you to not like the rain. You have just pitted
yourself against  the universe, and you are going to lose. Nevertheless, the
personal mind thinks it’s right. You actually think that the universe should
be the way you want it to be. PART IV: 
Thoughts and DreamsChapter 16. The Abstract Mind
Fortunately, your mind has a layer b eyond the layers  of the personal mind. It
has been  called the impersonal mind, the abstract mind, or even the purely
intellectual mind. This layer of mind is not distracted by the inner
commotion caused by your samskaras. It is free to soar unhindered into the
pure brilliance and creativity of a higher expression of mind. This higher layer of your mind, which we will call the abstract layer, is
what allows you to build rocket ships, develop air-conditioning, and
discover the existence of atoms. The abstract mind is what truly makes
humans great. You are not limite d to experiencing only through your senses;
you are free to explore in the realm of pure intellectual mind. Your mind can
take you pretty much anywhere. Do you want to build rovers that can go to
Mars so you can explore the planet on the internet. Wonderful, you can do
that because your mind is capable of expanding beyond the limit of your
senses and the limit of your personal thoughts. Mind can operate at many
levels—the question is, what are you doing with it. Intellectually, you have the ability to take images from outside and do
creative things with them. You are free to use your mind’ s power to be
artistically abstr act and intellectually logical. A perfect example  of the latter
would be Einstein’ s thought experiments. Einstein came up with many of
his greatest theories sitting in his armchair and reasoning out very abstract
concepts. This is a great tribute to the power of our minds. It is a far cry
from getting lost in your personal thoughts and making these thoughts about
yourself the total meaning of your life. Once you create thoughts about what
you want and don’t want, and how to force the world to be that way, you
will never be okay inside. You will lose much of the great power of abstract
thought because you cannot abstract from yourself. Life will become a
battle between reality and your mental preferences. This use of mind iscalled the perso nal mind because its thoughts are all about you and your
concepts, views, and preferences. The teachings of mindfulness, which center awareness on the current
moment, encou rage you to focus on something other than the personal
mind. Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its
incessant addict ion to the personal. Another way to transcend the personal
mind is by using  your intellectual mind to create and do things that are not
personal in nature. This inclu des being an engineer who reasons out
problems or a medical researcher who studies diseases and how to cure
them. Artistry, computer science, mathematics—all of these are examples of
beautiful uses of the imperson al mind. The mind is great; it’s just not
supposed to be used for storing all your personal preferenc es and then
thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored. The outside world is simply not going to magically match what  you’ve
stored in your mind. In fact, it is not very intelligent to expect it to. Is it
really intelligent to devote your life to fighting with life so it aligns with
your past good and bad experiences. How can you enjoy life if you are
always worrying and struggling  to get it your way. That’ s what all of our
societies are doing, and that’s what almost every human being has done. People just haven’t evolved enough to learn not to do that. Rich people,
poor people, sick people, healthy people, married people, single people—
they all are bound in the same way. If they get what they want, they are
relatively okay. If they don’t get what they want, they suffer to a greater or
lesser extent. Fortunately, you do not have to live this way. There is a much
higher way to live life. But it requires that you change how you interact with
your mind and with the life unfolding before you. To understand this transformation, let’s first take a look at how you
even decided what you want and don’t want. If you pay attenti on, you will
see that your past experiences determine your preferences. You didn’ t just
make it all up from scratch—your views, opinions, and preferences are
formulated based on data from your past. For example, let’s say you are
totally secure in your love relati onship until you hear that your friends had a
breakup, and they are miserable. All of a sudden you start worrying about
your own relatio nship. You were fine before you heard about your friends,
but now you’re not. You stored the concept of a breakup inside  your mind,
even though it really had nothing to do with you. Y ou took it personally. Is it possible to process the information without it getting stuck in your
mind. Of course it is. Your friends had a problem, and they shared it with
you. It came into your mind, passed through your consciousness, and you
experienced the feeling of compassion. The interaction actually made you a
greater being. You were able to fully absorb the reality of life without it
getting stuck in your mind. If you want to recall it later, you can willfully
restore it from memory in all its glory. But it will not keep coming back up
by itself. Since it did not get stuck in the conscious mind, or shoved into the
subconscious, it will not advers ely affect your life. It actually made you a
better person because you were able to handle the experience. On the other hand, if you were not able to process the experience
without resistin g it, it will stay stuck in the conscious mind and create
havoc. If you really resist it, it will get shoved down into the subconscious
where it will fester and spread its disturbance throughout the mind. In either
case, you are storing what you are afraid of in your mind. If you do this, you
will be afraid of your own thoughts. How could you not be. You made a
collection of unpleasant thoughts in your mind, and they are going to keep
coming back up. Now, in order to live in there, the analytical aspect of mind
must be utilized  to figure out what needs to happen outside for you to be
okay. This is where preferences come from. They are simply attempts to use
outside events to solve the fact that you are not doing well inside. This
results in the constant practice of judging everything that’s unfolding based
on your preferences. It’s easy to see why people don’t agree with each other. Nobo dy else
has had the experiences that came in through your eyes. What you have
inside your mind is completely different from what others have  inside their
minds. It can’t be otherwise because the data in your mind came from the
experiences you had. Nobody else had those experiences, not even close—
not your spouse, your children, or your friends. Not only were your past
experiences different, but you processed them differently. We can certainly
force ourselves to conform to other ways of thinking in order to gain
acceptance, but that just makes living inside all the more complicated. You
not only have your default way of thinking resulting from your stored past
impressions, but now you must suppress parts of that in order to conform to
the “group” mindset. No wonder it gets messy in there. You are holding  all that persona l stuff inside your mind—the good, the
bad, and the ugly. The inevitable result is that if the moment in front of youhappens to align well with your stored patterns, you feel great. You feel
open, excited, and enthused. If it doesn’ t align well with your stored
patterns, you get upset. You immediately close, get defensive,  and maybe
even get depressed. Now we’re back to the question we asked earlier,
“What’ s it like living in there. ” Sometimes it’s nice; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s heaven; sometimes it’s hell. This is why. It is not because
God made it that way. You did this. You were given free will, and what you
did with your free will was make a mess out of your mind. Instead of being
in awe that the moment in front of you even exists, you fight with it to make
it match what you want. Chapter 17. Serve Mind or Fix It
All your prefere nces exist  because you stored experiences from the past
inside your personal mind. This makes it dif ficult to live in there, but instead
of fixing it, you double down and try to satisfy your preferences. “I want to
feel good, and the way to feel good is by getting the house I want. ” “The
way to feel good is by owning the car I’ve always wanted. ” “The way to
feel good is by finding a better relationship—this one’s not doing it for me. ”
These attempts to compensate for your blockages are, at best, short lived
because you are not actually getting rid of the blockages. The foundationa l choice we have in life is either constantly contr ol life
to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our
blockages. The fact is we stored these samskaras inside. We shouldn’ t have,
but we did. Now instead of getting rid of them, we expect the world to adapt
to them. We know it’s not going  to happen by itself, so we use the personal-
thoughts layer of mind to analyze how the world needs to be to match what
we want. We’re brilliant at figuring out how to make someone become
attracted to us, or to change things so they better fit our limitati ons. Almost
everything we do is governed by this personal-thoughts layer of mind. It is
the same analytical power of mind that Einstein used to see E = mc2, but
you’re using it to figure out what to do if someone’ s talking badly about
you. This entire layer of mind  intellectualizes and analyzes your stored
patterns to try to figure out how the world needs to be so that when it comes
in, it will feel good and never feel bad. That is why you tend to have so much trouble making decisions. You’re trying to figure out how each choice will make you feel later. “Where do I want to live. Should I change jobs. I need to figure this out. ”
You’re trying to mentally conce ptualize how the proposed action will match
the patterns you’ve stored inside. You don’t even think twice about it. “Ofcourse that’s what I’m doing. What else would I do. ” How about live in
reality and enjoy the moments that are unfolding in front of you. That’ s
what else you can do. Use your mind to be creative, inspiring, and do great
things. Don’ t let the mind always be thinking about itself and what it wants. Learn to enjoy life as it is—instead of limiting the ways you can enjoy it to
serve your past impressions. The self-centered, analyzing layer of mind is the worst. It is the model
you build about how everything and everybody needs to be for you to feel
okay, including the weather tomorrow. “It better not rain tomorrow, I’m
going camping. ” Now you’re getting upset about the weather. You have no
control over the weather, yet it’s bothering you. It’s not just the weather. The
driver in front of you is going ten miles per hour below the speed limit. Let’s watch your mind: “This is ridiculous. I don’t have time for this. What’ s wrong with them. They’re supposed to be in the slow lane. ” Turns
out the problem is not how the person in front of you is driving. The
problem is what your mind is doing about how the person in front of you is
driving. Eventua lly you catch on that you’ve developed an entire  intellectual
model of how every single thing needs to be: how people should behave,
how your spouse  should be dressed when you’re going out, even how much
traffic there should be. How many things do you do this about. Pretty much
every single thing. You honestly believe that what you made up is how it
should be. The truth of the matter is, that’s absurd. There is no way what
you made up in your head, based upon your very limited past experiences,
has anything to do with what’ s supposed to be happening in the real world. Think about it for a moment. What you want the weather to be has
nothing to do with what it’s going to be. The weather has to do with
meteorology, not your preference system. If you really want to know why it
had to rain on your day off, go study science. A wise person realizes that the
world is not going to unfold the way they want it to because it’s not
supposed to. No two of us agree how it’s supposed to unfold, yet there’ s
only one world out there. We best leave reality to either science or God, not
to every one’s individual prefer ences. The world in front of you has the
power of reality  behind it. It is unfolding in accordance to the influences
that made it be the way it is, and there are billions of influences going back
billions of years. In contrast, you’re just making up how it’s supposed to be
based on the impressions you held inside from your past. When realitydoesn’ t happen the way you want, you say reality is wrong. Section summary: 

Please summarize the chapter sections provided above. Note that repetition avoidance measures have been applied during summarization. **Section Summary**

Part II explores various aspects related to **Mind**, specifically covering topics

1\. Introduction to concepts \*\*Empty\*** \\& *emotions*. \\ \\
   • Discussion begins exploring internal processes ratherthan relying solely on sensor input. \*
    → Emptiness/void/nature
      —> Understanding & connection points
    
 Part VIV : Thoughts/Dreamsand Reality Chapter #7 : Conscious Awareness• Exploring Inner workings



In conclusion,

Would appreciate feedback/suggestions please. Thanks. Best regards.
The problem is that people are not learning to accept and surrender, and instead, they are creating a personal mind by resisting and clinging to certain experiences and emotions.
What is the author suggesting is the main problem in people's lives?
Mindfulness is being aware of what is happening inside and outside of you, and understanding the true nature of reality.
What is the author's definition of mindfulness?
The purpose of the mind is to render the outside world for you to experience, and it is not meant to be used to analyze and manipulate reality to fit your personal preferences.
What is the author suggesting is the purpose of the mind?
The author is warning against the dangers of resisting and clinging to certain experiences and emotions, which can lead to a distorted view of reality and a life of suffering.
What is the author warning against?
The author is suggesting that the key to spiritual growth and enlightenment is to learn to let go of resistance and clinginess, and instead, focus on being present in the moment and accepting reality as it is.
What is the author suggesting is the key to spiritual growth and enlightenment?