Login

Please Login with your Twin Powers account.

 Who Pulled The Plug? Part 1 

 

I have written extensively about our minds and expanding our awareness to help people access more of their power and potential. This is non-trivial as it this takes time, effort and a greater awareness of power and what this means to us. There is a lot to learn and many areas where we need to grow. The big lessons take lifetimes and are very difficult to work on directly. These lessons are core things and their affect radiates and affecting many of our thoughts and beliefs and so forth.

To learn any of the "big" lesson (or potentially THE big lesson if there is such a thing) we must work on many smaller ones. Some of them seem insignificant and are often overlooked; however, any one of them can make a huge difference in many aspects of our lives. The lesson of power and of course personal power is a prime example of this. In this essay we are going to look at some of the lessons of power we can work on every day to develop our access to our own inherent power.

The lessons of power are not always "bit ticket items". As a result we often fail to work on the small ways we waste our power. This is in part because we are often unaware of them and when we do they seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We do not realize that if we keep at them they will make a big difference. Looking at the bigger picture of power itself can help us recognize their significance, provide us with some impetus to work on them and help us become aware of the little things we can do.

In this essay I will not to provide a definitive list of all the things we do that disperse our power and address them individually. This is a fool's errand. We don't learn how to add by learning how to add every combination of number one could possibly add. Yes, we teach addition using examples of additional with small numbers. The concept of addition is what they need to grasp so that they can add any numbers together. The same applies here. We will look at power itself and then some of the most common ways we disperse our power by explaining them and how they impact us. I believe you can then use this knowledge and apply it in your life. 

One thing I want to clarify off the top is that power is something we all have. Still I get that many read about power and, when they look at themselves and their lives, think they have little of it. We hear this frequently from people struggled or who compare themselves to others that appear to be so much stronger and more powerful. Rest assured that this is absolutely not the case. Yes, some have more power to access than others for various reasons; however, it is not due to someone having an inherent lack of power. It is not like we have little and they have lots. The fact is we all have lots but they make better use of theirs. Even those with the least have more than enough power to transform their lives and the most successful have far more power than they are using. So, our challenge is not a lack power, it is in learning what it is and how not to waste it.

 

 

 

So, just what is power? Well, power itself is not overly complicated. Our power is not found in our physical, emotional or mental aspects, these are temporary vehicles. Our power comes from those aspects of us that are "immortal". People refer to these aspects by different terms such as true self, core consciousness, higher self, soul, spirit or monad (an esoteric term). For the sake of this discussion the term is irrelevant. What matters is understanding that it is power from these higher aspects that enlivens our lower vehicle. We happen to see our mind as who we are but it has NO power. Our consciousness empowers our mind just as gasoline powers a car or electricity a stove. All our minds can do is allow our power through or block, filter and disperse it.

Power itself, and therefore the lessons of power, are rooted in the Law of Limitation. This is a topic I have touched on before in other essays (1). Limitation is the first law of manifestation and it is also the first law of power. Power is useless unless it can be conserved or harnessed and this is where an understanding of the Law of Limitation comes into play. The law is stated quite succinctly in the quote below. Of course there is more to the law than one is likely to gleam from this quote alone. Be that as it may, it is sufficient for the topic at hand. I recommend you not just read the quote, but also take some time to contemplate it.  

 

"The Law of Limitation means the concentration of power by the rejection of the irrelevant." ~ The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune (2)

 

In terms of our accessing power, what the law tells us is that we concentrate our power by focusing our attention. One common example of how we do the opposite is seen in how we spend time thinking about things that do not matter or are of little to no value. We tend to think too much and fill up the seconds with all kinds of thoughts though we are only aware of a fraction of them. My father referred to such thoughts as drivel. Carlos Castaneda referred to this "mind chatter" as internal dialogue (2). In the below quote he does not refer to power directly, but he is implying it because one must have it to enter "the world of shamans."

 

“The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such and so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue” ~ Carlos Castaneda (3)

 

It is not like what I have mentioned is some strange, mysterious and dangerous secret that has been kept hidden, though some of its subtler aspects have been and still are viewed this way by many. We all know from our own personal experiences, or should, that we do our best work when we give a task as much of our attention as possible. What helps us focus our attention is reducing distractions, be they external or internal, in order to fully isolate the matter at hand. However, our minds are almost continually busy doing not one or a few things but many, many things, most of which we are not aware. These internal distractions make focusing our attention a challenge.

We can usually do some things to reduce external distractions, the internal ones are another matter. In a very real way our thoughts, and the considerations and deliberations they are involved in, take many forms and become a convoluted tangle. This makes it difficult to silence our minds conscious and non-conscious deliberations so we can focus on whatever matter is before us. All the active thoughts, even our non-conscious ones, take power. This means that the thoughts that do not benefit or serve us waste of our power.

To deal with how we waste our power there are three two questions we need to explore...

 

  • How is power wasted or dispersed?
  • How do we find out how we waste power?
  • How do we deal with what we do that wastes power?

 

I cannot possibly cover all the ways we disperse our power in this one essay, however, I will look at some of the main ones. Fortunately, while there are many ways we do this there is only one thing that prevents us from harnessing more of our power: our minds. Well, it isn't our minds per say so much as their having been poor programming and the mass of thoughts we acquire and hold onto. No one wants to think that their own worst or most challenging enemy is their own minds. But, this is actually neither here nor there, it simply is.

It is poor programming that has our minds knotted up. Poor programming can have us concerned with, among other things irrelevant and inconsequential thoughts, unresolved conflicts and "what if's", many complex and convoluted thought streams and the emotions they give rise to. What makes it challenging is that the bulk of our internal dialogue is chatter that does not reach our conscious attention. It occurs either below the conscious level or deeper in our non-conscious mind (which is most of it) and can be illusive. This inner chatter arises from how our minds react to and try to integrate our experiences.

 

"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task." ~ William James

 

So where does all this chatter that interferes without our ability to focus and think clearly come from? Well, it root source is a result of how our minds integrate our experiences. To develop an understanding of the kind of mental activities that waste our power we need to consider how our minds do what they do. For example, what does our mind do when it lacks sufficient information to accurately integrate experiences or struggles to determine all the possible outcomes of various scenarios their consequences? Well, unless we consciously intervene, which means we must be aware it is doing this, it will continue to try to resolve them. When the mind does this the chatter, the internal dialogue, will go on.

Our minds react to every aspect of our experiences. However, its perception of them is not hard coded, it is programmed by our reactions to them. Part of their reactions are related to mundane things that we need not be and typically are not consciously aware of. I am referring to such as mapping our bodies positioning, interpreting distances, spacial relationships and object recognition (object within its "field of vision") and so on. Of course, much more are related to substantive things such our reactions, both thoughts and feelings, to what we perceive. Again, we are only consciously aware of only a fraction of our reactions to our experiences.

For instance, we perceive all aspects of a room, but we are not consciously aware of how we have reacted to all the elements of the room or what is in it. We may like the way the room is laid out or certain objects in it do not appeal to us and so on. Rarely would we be able to articulate our reactions as most happen at the non-conscious level. We may be conscious of whether we feel comfortable in the room or not or notice certain objects in particular. However, it is unlikely that we are aware of their doings in this regard nor why we (our minds) reacted the way we did.

For the most part, low level mental activities such as those related to the mundane ones mentioned earlier do not take much power at all. Though our minds are aware of these activities they are dealt with very quickly, mostly by the brain (what is referred to as the etheric web plays a significant role in this). As a result the mind does not spend any significant amount of time integrating them unless something has gone wrong before or does goes wrong and this matters to or affects us. For example, say we go to place our foot down and misjudge the distance leading to our slipping or falling. In this case, we would likely to try to figure out why we misjudged the distance. If it was merely a perception issue such as mentally misjudging the terrain we will likely pay no further attention to it. If it occurs regularly then of course we will think about it and our mind will spend more time reacting to and integrating every step we take to compensate for it. 

Our minds do not quickly move on when they remain concerned about what is perceived, cannot determine what to do to resolve negative consequences or ramifications of it or do not care for the outcome. When this happens our mind continues to try to either integrate it to resolve any issues it perceives. Complicating matters is that our thoughts continue to stir up emotions and will do so as long as the matter remains a concern. In this situation the loss of power can be significant, especially if our emotions are strong. To grasp this fully let us step back a bit to consider what our minds are doing during every experience we have. 

At any given moment what catches our attention depends on many things. The factors include the obvious things such as visual queues, movement, bright colours and so on. But no aspect of the experience goes unnoticed by our minds. They react to every aspect of it, mostly at the non-conscious level. Every thought in our minds that have any correlation to the experience are activated to varying degrees. The degree depends on such things as recent events, how prominent they are and ALL our past experiences that have some commonality with it, some of which can be rather tenuous or obscure. 

When you stop to think about all it is easy to see why we, or more specifically our minds, are distracted by a number of different aspects of our experiences on a continual basis. To bring this back to our power, imagine a container with a many small holes in the bottom and how the water flows out of it. Compare this to how it flows out of a container with only one hole as large as all the small holes combined and you get the idea. This is how we waste our power, it literally is the death of a thousand cuts. 

The reason our minds have all those "small holes" is that we have too many thought processes going on and have made far too many things important that are of no benefit or value to us. The fact is virtually all of us do this far too much. Making many different things important to us is one of the main drains on our power. The question is "Do we know why?" I would hazard a guess and say that typically most of us do not. In order to know such things we need to become more mentally conscious (4). Figuratively, the path to reducing how we disperse our power lies in reducing number of holes in our mental bucket by first noticing them then working on understanding them so we can deal with them. To do this we must learn more about ourselves. 

There is an old adage "out of sight out of mind", which means if we do no see someone or something frequently we will forget about them or it. It sounds reasonable and in one sense it is. The sense I am referring to is consciously, but it does not apply to our non-conscious mind. This is partly because even though we may not be able to consciously recall something or someone our mind never forgets. We see this in people who have eidetic memory or hyperthymesia (5) and what one can do we can all do. It is true that they can be hard to access, but they are there. 

Our original experiences remain because the vibrations we perceived and our perception of them cannot be destroyed. The reason we forget virtually all but the most prominent memories because as time goes the thoughts and memories that arise from new experiences gradually overshadow and bury and even change older ones. How quickly varies based on the energy associated with them and the minds assessment of them. But our loss of power is not directly a result of the mass of memories and other thoughts contained within our minds. The primary reason is the number of memories and thoughts, and the streams that arise from them, that are active because our minds deem them as important or they remain unresolved.

 

 

 

Other significant contributors are how our thoughts affect how we interpret perceptions and the very way we think. This is because how we think and process what we perceive, our very reasoning skills, are also "encoded" in thoughts. These are thoughts related to our objectivity and how we observe, assess and analyze what we perceive. For instance, our ancestors were very superstitious, they routinely explained outcomes by making up notions they felt could explain it even if their reasoning was erroneous. Often the reasons were attributed to supernatural phenomenon. A modern analogy to this is found in how we attribute qualities to people based on how we feel about them rather than on any particular facts we know about them. We then go on to make assumptions about they think or what they will or will not do based on our faulty reasoning about their nature. We ought not concern ourselves with how others think. Besides it is highly unlikely we know and it is better to simple accept we do not rather than waste power with on contrived ones. 

Our minds do not start off with good reasoning skills and able to deal with complexity nor are they by nature observant. These are skills that must be developed. We do not remember developing them let alone how we did, though we may remember noticing that we did. They develop as a result of what our minds are "fed" and what it learned based on our choices and outcomes. How we feel about these things factors is. When it integrates all these things it will use what reasoning it has developed and in the process will change.

The mind actually programs itself, including its version of logical reasoning. We tend to overlook or be unaware of this because we rarely spend much time considering how our minds actually do what they do. Faulty observation and reasoning skills lead to the mind have additional challenges and hence we do. For instance, if our reasoning is faulty and we base an entire chain of thought on it all the power and time we vested in it is a waste. Further, the less developed our reasoning skills are the more our mind churns away over unresolved matters or complex matters. To stop it we have to learn why and what it is busy with. We then break the complex problems into smaller, more manageable ones. Each and every thought stream involved as minds churn things over take power.

We also need to remember that old issues never die on their own, they simply "disappear from sight". For example, years ago I was having a fairly personal conversation with someone close to me about letting go of things from the past and why and was told "I do not hold onto the past". I was a little surprised as we all do this to varying degrees but the claim remained. Since "knowing thyself" was what we were discussing I brought up an incident that had happened over twenty years earlier. When I did the person exploded in anger as if what happened all those years ago had just occurred. The thoughts that led to the anger all those years ago had gone nowhere. Not only was it still very much empowered, it would have continued to influence how they reacted to their experiences over time.

My point is that the minds holding onto unresolved thoughts that lead to such strong emotions also take power. Also, such thoughts have a certain degree of prominence in the non-conscious mind and as so tend to be noticed and activated when there is a commonality with what is going on the present. This is how we can become more emotionally charged and react strongly to something that should or normally would be trivial. Not only does holding onto things take power, it "mucks up the works". 

Another significant power loss arises when our minds get "get stuck" in the process of integrating too many aspects of our experiences. This happens when it fails to resolve aspects of them to completion and tries to "dot all the i's and cross all the t's" . When you mix chemicals they will continue to react until the process goes to completion. It is the same for our minds though in our minds case there can be many thoughts involved in process and new elements can be continually introduced so sometimes the process never goes to completion. One reaction becomes another experience and the mind can create yet more "what ifs" notions each of which much also be resolved. It is no accident that these kinds of things rob us of our power. They also keep us further away from the present moment, the now

Essentially, power loss occurs when our minds are engaged in matters that do not benefit us or have no substantive value. Our mind may have convincing itself that they are important, but that does mean they actually are. So far in this essay we have looked at number of things we that waste our power. Below is a list of some of the primary ways we waste our power:

  • Unresolved conflicts
  • Poor reasoning skills
  • Challenges of complexity (related to reasoning skills)
  • Superficial observation
  • Subjective observation
  • Strong lower emotional reactions
  • Focus on matters of no consequence
  • Expectations for the projected future
  • Clinging to the past (regrets, old hurts etc.)
  • Not being consciously attentive
  • Erroneous thoughts
  • Irrelevant and useless information

              

 

The above list shows there are ways to disperse our power. Consider them in turn to and you can see how they disperse our power. Realizing this we are then able to see and work on reducing the chatter in our minds and conserve our power. In this case, when I say chatter I am referring to all activities of mind that can lead to empowered streams of thoughts that serve no meaningful or beneficial purpose. The source of most of them is the non-conscious level and they are often elusive. Hence, if we want to plug our power leaks we must turn our attention on ourselves. 

It is quite challenging to turn our attention within and upon minds below the conscious level. We know little of what they are doing on our behalf. We rarely even consider how busy they are churning away on various things and reacting to every aspect of our experiences. Nor do we realize that it controls what we notice or observe. We tend to think we notice what is going on around us, but we do not. We only notice a fraction of what is going on because we not nearly as observant as we think we are. Our minds filter out parts of what is going on and focuses on others based on what we have tended to pay attention or made important over the years. This also contributes to our tendency to focus on what is going on without.

The outside world and our interactions with it are a compelling movie. Our minds also react to every element of our experiences, reactions that come in the form of thoughts and from them emotions. Figuratively, activated thoughts weave and wind their way through our minds interacting with other thoughts as they do. Thoughts that share commonalities of of varying degrees resonate intrinsically. The mind may "notice" these associations with existing beliefs and thoughts depending on what it has been trained to. Where there is a commonality with another thought, be it a memory or belief or any other kind of thought, that thought can also becomes activate. This is part of process by which the mind integrates experiences. When it does this it can confirm or negate prior notions and assertions, shift them or create new ones and so on. These connection, I have figuratively referred to them as thought streams, carry on as long as they have the attention of any aspect of our consciousness or minds. All of these activities take power. 

 

Our minds are comprised and thoughts and thoughts are "vibrations in energy" of a certain type. They are not rigid or permanent things in the phenomenal sense. When we change a thought we are not obliterating the original one we are, in a sense, adding vibrations to to it. You can think if it like vectors where the direction of the combined vibrations is the sum of the vectors involved and there can be many. The original vibration is no longer distinct, and ceases to directs things, it is the combined vibrancy of all vibrations involved that do that. This is also why clearly understanding what we are working on is important, otherwise we can "change our mind" about something making matters worse.

 

Now that we understand a little more about the sources of our leaks we can look at some of them more closely. Examples and explanations can help one to notice and identify them. This is the first step to plugging the power leaks we have because we cannot work on what we do not notice and are not aware of. I am referring to such as our concern over things that are of no value, noticing misconceptions and erroneous beliefs and working on our mental skills so our minds do not spin their wheels. Why we want to do these things will become clearer as we go along. It is also why it can take time to get it right. In order to deal with any issue thoroughly, many of which we have carried most of our lives, we need to understand it very well.

Note that the understanding I was referring to does not necessarily come in the form of words. This is because we can know what the issue is and even what we need to do from the energies we perceive if we have learned or know how to understand them without reverting to language. But this is a rare skill. Coming to an awareness of our challenges , regardless of how we do so, is half the battle. The rest comes from how much effort we put into it, how well we focus and how well we actually "know" what to do and so on. We want to have access to more of the power of our consciousness to do this. You could call this power our will. So, as we clear up little power leakages we have more power to focus on the bigger ones.

Will comes from our higher self and, figuratively, is directed down through the mental and lower planes by our intent (via our causal body). It is impulses from our causal body that manifest or activate thoughts just as our thoughts manifest or active emotions. We need to be focused to direct our power or will to change thoughts. Our thoughts can make it harder or easier to access, none the less, the more of our will we can summon the better. This is something we all can do and have done at some point in our lives to achieve a challenging goal or milestone. So, have faith in yourself. If you truly want to reduce how much power you waste you can. 

 


 

Now, each of the active streams of thought I referred to earlier takes power. When we start working on reclaiming our power getting to know these streams is a good place to focus our attention. When we do we start to get an inkling of just how many active thought streams we have going all in time. Meditation or other activities that help with mindfulness, are a good way to start to notice the streams. Most are subtle, but we get better at noticing them by learning to observe existing ones that are prominent and the new ones we start up. Fortunately, most of the streams of thoughts we come to a quick end and fade without much effort or we would be overwhelmed. 

For instance, if I have a dirty glass I put it in the dishwasher without much thought about it. Once this is done I rarely spend any more time thinking about it. By the time I walk away from the dishwasher the fact I put the glass in is not on my mind at all. However, I would certainly spend more time thinking about it if the glass I am putting in the dishwasher is a special one. In this case I would likely be concerned about it getting damaged and will continue to think about it. It could be special for any number of reasons, but what has me think about it is that it is special, perhaps even irreplaceable. Due to its importance the streams of thoughts associated with it will remain active likely involving others such the consequences of it getting damaged. It is likely to activate emotions anxiousness until I do something to reduces the risk. Where there is risk, the mind will fuss. It will do this at the non-conscious level even if I get distracted by something that becomes momentarily becomes important and consciously forget about the glass. But that does not mean my non-conscious mind will just let it go. The thought steam will remain active, though likely with less power.

 

 

 

It should be obvious how such things dispel our power. One minor matter easily resolved like my example isn't the problem. The problem is that we tend to have many of these going on all the time, some far larger and/or more significant to our lives and often do not realize it. When we are not focused we are not directing our minds activities consciously and our mind will do their own thing based on what we taught it. Plugging these kinds of leaks means bringing matters to closure. We can do this by thinking things through and making conscious decisions, if not they become loose threads and like a cat would our minds will play with them. Closure on a matter brings the thought streams and likely most of those related to its importance, to a conclusion. As a result our attention conscious or otherwise is withdrawn. 

Using the previous example, my anxiety will persist if I do nothing about or cannot figure out how to resolve the risk and still plan to put the glass in the dishwasher. It could even grow beneath the conscious level as the mind pours over the possibility of of it getting damaged. My anxiety is likely to continue unless I make a conscious decision of some kind to sufficiently mitigate the risk such as not washing the glass or let go of caring whether it gets damaged. 

In this example it is easy recognize and choose the simplest way of reducing the risk to the glass and the solution is within my control. Bigger challenges arise when we there is uncertainty in what the options are, and there potentially being many, as well as the possible consequences of choosing them. Toss in parts being beyond our control and the uncertainty grows. Further complicating matters are own own thoughts and resulting feelings about the options and outcomes. If the mind is conflicted or the risk indeterminable in all scenarios it will continue to churn away. This is because our minds essentially use decision trees (6) to evaluate situations. If you are not aware of decision trees you can learn more about them by following the link provided.

Using the example of the glass in the dishwasher, The first level of the decision tree consists of node, two leaves and the connecting paths between the node and the leaves. The node would represents the question "Is the glass safe in the dishwasher?" The connecting paths would be the answers of either "Yes it is" or "No it is not". For simplicity I am skipping the possibility that I do not know if it is. So, the leaves of the tree are what I do depending on whether it is or is not safe. At level one the only question is it safe and let us assume I have decided it is safe and that I can put the glass into the dishwasher. The decision to put it in the dishwasher is the first level of the tree. 

There can be second and third questions that follow such as "Is the glass valuable or important?" and then perhaps "Is it safe enough?" and "Can I make it safe?" Each of these would be a new level or sub-tree and the leaves in turn become nodes. . If the glass is not valuable or important then I put it in and am done. My mind will let go of the active thought streams and move on. If it is valuable then we add levels or sub-trees. At each level I must determine what I need to do depending on the answer to the question and follow through on it. As you can see decision trees can get quite complicated.

Decision trees can have many options, at each level, and form layers and loops (inter-dependencies) making the process the mind goes through longer and more problematic. My mind will cease churning over the safety of the glass if the decision tree leads to a leaf where I am done, namely the glass is safe. If this is not the case then I have not reached closure on the thought streams and they will remain active. My mind will continue to try to get to such a state where the glass being safe. Of course, my mind may decide that it is not worth worrying about either consciously or non-consciously and again I am done. Alternatively, I may consciously think things are okay but my non-conscious mind does not. In this case it will continue to remain concerned though I may not be consciously aware of it though I might notice feeling a little unsettled but not why. How concerned my mind remains depends on such things as how important the glass is and the risk of damage.

Now, the above problem is easily resolved by hand washing the glass. This eliminates the risk ending the matter. In many other situations the risk of negative outcomes will be far more problematic due to complexity and other factors. For example, more active and connected thought streams increases uncertainty and risk (do not think of these streams in a spatial sense) partly because the number of unknowns increases . On top of this are our emotional responses to our thoughts. These make it hard for the mind to go through the process of determining all possible scenarios and options, their likelihood of occurring and their outcomes along with the risks involved. If our perception is that there are significant risks of negative outcomes our uncertainly can lead to strong emotional reactions. Our minds can even invent scenarios that have next to zero chance of occurring and then become concerned over them. When this happens our mind will remain thoroughly engaged in trying to resolve the dilemmas it perceives. This complexity means our thinking processes will have a significant impact on how well we can navigate such tangled webs. Obviously such mental activities take more than a little power.

It should be obvious that good thinking and reasoning skills benefit us. When we struggle with these skills our minds can churn, all the while stirring up our emotions, hampering decision making. This becomes more challenging when we do not have good thinking and reasoning skills such as those needed for decision analysis. We tend to think in vague terms, which doesn't help our minds at all. When information is vague you never know what they will do with it. This can lead to even more anxiety and worry and other reactions as our minds pour over ramifications and "what ifs". It should not be hard to see how this leads to an entire host of other thought streams and emotions being active and dispersing our power. 

Other reasons why we struggle with the larger decisions are we are often conflicted and typically have more than one issue going on a time, each one a concern, and they can overwhelm us. We are not typically aware of all the non-conscious thoughts streams that are active (as in unresolved), how connected they are or their influence on our thinking processes. In conditions of higher stress we notice even less. In these situations we find our fears and anxieties come to the fore further dispelling our power.

A significant number of active thought streams relate to matters that are, in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential, not our business or over which we have no control. For instance, many worry about things such as what other people are thinking about them. It is one thing to consider how others view us (7), so long as it is in a self-reflective manner. For one thing, what they think of us in none of our business. For another, unless we are highly telepathic we likely have no idea what they are thinking about us, nor whether they are conscious of doing so. Better to go by how they treat us. But trust issues often get involved and these can run deep. The bottom line is if we stew over it and do not merely consider it and move on we are wasting our time and our power. 

It is hard to overcome the little thought streams that can gnaw away at our minds. They tend to be obscure and lie below the conscious level. When you add them all up and include the various factors we have looked at, it is easy to see why we can struggle being focused and attentive and waste our power. At the root of all our struggles lies our mind. It has developed, a form of programming if you will, based on its/our reactions to experiences and in the process establishes our thinking processes at the conscious and non-conscious levels. Deal with these "programs" starts with noticing them, nothing more, nothing less. From there is a matter of, among other things, patience, persistence and a willingness to change.

Our conscious mind will not automatically pay attention, be as conscious as possible in the moment, think rationally and logically (what Buddha referred to as "right thinking") and be objective and non-superficial in its observations. The same goes for our non-conscious mind. Both must be trained to do these things because our minds, like running water, will always take the easiest route. If we don't care it won't either. And, as we have already seen, doing these things poorly means more "junk" and more ways to disperse our power. 

A significant portion of the less than helpful programming in our minds are from our early years when we were building our mental house (8) and the earliest ones are some of the most influential. We can sugar coat it all we like; however, doing so changes nothing. Do not take this to mean we are helpless victims of our programmed minds, we are far from it. At any time we can consciously choose to work on our minds and improve its programming. Our minds are one of our aspects, but they not "us". They are a construct that arises out of the interactions between our core consciousness or "true self" (for lack of a better or more commonly understood term) and its experiences. Our consciousness, the source of our power, uses the mind to interact here. If our mind is not well constructed it acts as a limiter. 

 

Next part:  Who Pulled the Plug? Part 2

 

© 2016 Allan Beveridge   

Last updated December 12, 2017

 

Note:  - "*" denotes essays only available to site members of The Twin Powers; visit the Becoming A Member page to learn more about being a member and how to become one. 

  1. Essays referencing Law of Limitation
    • Awareness Series Part 2: Developing Our Ability to Focus - http://thetwinpowers.com/en/awareness-series-part-2-developing-our-ability-to-focus
    • Developing Our Spiritual Foundation - http://thetwinpowers.com/en/developing-our-spiritual-foundation
  2. Dion Fortune, The Cosmic Doctrine, Boston, MA, Red Wheel/Weiser-LLC (Chapter 26, page 152)
  3. Carlos Castaneda quote source: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632253-the-internal-dialogue-is-what-grounds-people-in-the-daily
  4. Becoming Conscious Series (reference to lead in page for the series - http://thetwinpowers.com/en/section-2-growth-fundamentals/becoming-conscious-the-power-of-perception
  5. Hyperthymesia: "possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory. Hyperthymestics remember an abnormally vast number of their life experiences."; from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
  6. Decision Trees; Wikipedia reference:  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree
  7. *Exercise 3.1: Describing Oneself From Two Views - http://thetwinpowers.com/en/section-4-exercises/ex-3x-taking-a-look-at-yourself/ex-3-1-describing-oneself-from-two-views
  8. Our Mental House Series (link is to the first essay in the series) - http://thetwinpowers.com/en/our-mental-house-part-1-the-dynamics-of-thought