Your inner awareness establishes what seem like rules. Even the most wild person still has repeating patterns in their lives. They don’t choose these patterns. The patterns come from the matrix of the self, or mind if your prefer. This matrix is configured not by outward pressures, but by principles perhaps unique to it.

So “Who am I?” is answered by my actions and not my relationships? Yes, but your actions start before the event horizon of your body. Your actions are not predestined, but they are pre-chosen. Sort of like the principle of karma, but the karmic pattern is not fixed. There are active forces that reconfigure this pattern, and thus reset the whole event matrix that shows up as what you see and physically do.

This is why it’s hard to change? Not only do we have to choose differently, we have to build the energy to reform all those patterns? Yes, and the energy is built in the simplest of ways. It happens in a pattern of thresholds, punctuated equilibrium of paradigms.

Awareness? It starts with awareness. The realization of awareness as a force active in your being. You don’t get to do anything by halves. Consciousness is an all or nothing thing, but elements of each frame of awareness sometimes have traits in common, so those parts may look unchanged.

Like having an epiphany? Yes. This is perhaps why people consider it divine inspiration. The shift in consciousness can be so radical you can feel like a person possessed for a while. It’s a psychic rebirth, and much like any newborn, the new consciousness is highly impressionable so it adopts traits that are expected of it. Then someone performs an exorcism on it, and buries it under a nice pile of psychological scarring, or the impression stage dramatizes radically and puts the person in a mental institution.

The “You’re not the same person” accusations start flying. So it can seem self defeating. It just takes a bit of finesse though to do smoothly. The finesse comes when you see the roadmap. People often mistakenly believe that their consciousness is confined to whatever state it is in now, but every cell in your body, as well as every neuron, is sensitive to the balance of factors in your sensory environment, in your diet, in your emotional diet. The hormones your chronically stimulate, or neglect, as well as all the subtle signals that impress themselves on our subconscious mind through our mirroring nervous system. The brain renders every abstract sensation into an objective metaphor so it makes mind states into places and emotions into objects.

You can read the metaphors in dreams, in meditation. They aren’t random. Your mind, and the domain of experience we call mind in general, is not some nebulous phantasm not with self awareness, and you can make choices based on reading the road signs. Make your jumps in self awareness be a bit shorter so you don’t get lost in the life you are living right now, and you can even deliberately glean desirable traits from each step. But you can’t take the steps if you think that thoughts are self rather than sensations. You can’t find a desirable state of being if you think that you are served by fixed ideas of relationships rather than inner contact with those others you love so dearly. You are not a husband. You have a husband relationship. You are not a sister. You have a sister relationship. Any relationship is a living neighbourhood. A landscape that can be developed in ways well beyond the fixed choices people think they have. People fear mind control. They fear manipulation in any way, especially the paranormal, but no direct manipulation is even necessary.

And they live their whole lives manipulated by their own thoughts. Yes, and the thoughts of others, not realizing that they can ignore the billboard and instead go for a walk in the park. You won’t unplug from your mind by stepping back from how you think the mind works. Stepping back, you move more deeply into what the mind actually is.

Once you see the manipulation in the billboard, you can’t see it the same again. Instead of being a compelling message, it becomes of passing interest maybe, if even that. Anyone lost in this metaphor?

If you see the body as other than self, as an object that you may have an intimate relationship with but are not defined by, then how can anything the body does be anything different than what the weather does? And the body thinks. It doesn’t means we don’t have a mind, but where is it?

I’ve started seeing depression as that. Not me, but a cloud in my head. It’s an accurate way to see it, and in extreme cases you might need medical help, but in most cases that is not at all necessary.

I guess the mind is in that third point? Yes.

This seems like something a Vulcan would do. Step back and observe the emotion. Well, it’s also what Romulans do. But the Romulans channel the emotion into action, and the Vulcan’s sublimate it. They came from the same culture, originally.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~