Mind Matters Most - Preface, Introduction and Chapter One

Preface

What do you really want?  Will you discover it in the words written here?  Will a reading of this text change your life for the better?  

I wish I could say a definite yes to these questions.  I cannot.  What I will say is that they could point the way to a valuable insight or two.   The messages contained here could help you change your life for the better if only they provide an impetus for your personal resolve to know more about yourself.  However, you are the one to make the resolutions which can change your life.   You provide the action.  You are the one to take the necessary steps.  No one can do that for you.

In the initial reading I ask only that you keep an open mind.   Read and digest.  Let what is said here sink deep into your subconscious mind.  Study it.  Reflect on it.   You might feel inclined to read it more than once.   The reading might draw you to books of a similar ilk.   Works of a spiritual nature written to help others are nearly always worth the read.

Do not expect to find all the answers here.   Hopefully you will find a few.

My love to you.

Arthur Thomas Ware.
MMM 0001

Introduction

It is said that the most important question we can ask ourselves is: What am I?    This book has been written to help you to get a little closer to an answer.  In its contents you will at learn what you are not.  This is very important, for once you begin to get a glimpse of ‘what you are not,’ you’re on the path to a level of freedom you never had before.   This is a freedom not only of the mind but from the mind.  It is also a move towards non-identification with so many aspects of our lives that cause us trouble.  When we start to realize the implications of ‘what I am not,’ a part of us begins to open up and we begin to comprehend in some inexplicable way that we are much, much more than we ever imagined ourselves to be.

The freedom which comes to us when we learn what we are not can bring with it not only an immense sense of relief but a feeling of real adventure.   We begin to understand that there are few limits on what we can do and, even more important, what we can be.  We can systematically shed the habits which have held us in their grip.  We can move towards much improved health.  We have options that are so big and wide that only our lack of imagination can hold us back from achieving anything we desire.   The expression ‘Mind Matters Most’ does not mean mind is the ruling element of our being.   Our mind is only one aspect of what we are.  Indeed, it is the combined label used for many parts of our being: verbal thoughts, imagination, sensation, impulses, desires, emotions and feeling " even intuition.   But these are not us.

It is not my intention to go into a lot of detail in this introduction as to what we are and what we are not.   There is plenty of material within these chapters that will deal with that.   Be it enough for me to say that Mind Matters Most because we can either rule over it or be ruled by it.   Too many of us fall into the latter category.   This book will, among other things, show you how to bring this incredibly powerful part of yourself under your control.

Enjoy the read.

MMM One

A Moment of Fear

The Sydney Funnel Web spider is deadly.  One bite untreated without an antidote for its venom and you will die.   Imagine then how I felt then when one climbed onto my neck.  It was the summer of 1986 and during my third ten-day meditation retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Centre, Dharma Bhumi, in the Australian Blue Mountains west of Sydney.   It had been raining all through the day and that night and at such times the underground dwelling Funnel Webs are flushed out of their waterlogged nests to find somewhere dry.   They seek darkness at all times.   Consequently, people have been bitten when pulling on gardening gloves or boots placed on open porches.   They’ve even fatally nipped children who have donned clothes left lying on the laundry floor.    My immediate reaction when one climbed off that mediation blanket and onto my neck was one of absolute terror.

I knew it was a Funnel Web spider because they were the only sort ever sighted in the pagoda’s meditation cells.  On a rainy night it was easy enough for them to climb the slight concrete incline which led to the Pagoda’s door.   The gap under it was certainly high enough for them to crawl inside.  It was absolutely dark in the tiny well; windowless, door closed with a towel along its lower edge to stop even the faintest chink of light getting in.  I liked it that way when in deep meditation.  So, obviously, did this deadly creature.   As it was my mind had, up until that moment, been absolutely still, no thought, my meditation absolutely focused, attention razor sharp " stillness…and then…

I froze!   At the same time an icy cold sweat broke out all over my body.  I dare not move.  Yet it seemed I trembled inside.  One bite and I’d be finished.  You can’t place a tourniquet around a neck.   And then the spider moved.  I felt its legs distinctly.  Ughh!   It climbed completely off the blanket’s edge and onto my right cheek.   I could feel my body inside trying to pull back and yet at the same time remain perfectly still.   Then the spider moved again.

It crawled onto the centre of my face.

The feelings of absolute horror and loathing can hardly be described.   It was probably the worst moment of my life - and then something happened…

A second spider climbed off the blanket onto the left hand side of my neck.

Snap!  

In that split second I knew that this could not be true.  One spider, yes, there was a chance.   Funnel Web spiders were seen in here from time to time, especially after heavy rain.  But two!   A million to one chance.   It could not be.   And as that thought crossed my mind I suddenly felt the ends of spider legs all over my face, neck, shoulders, and upper torso.   The feeling was one of absolute horror and yet " steeped as I was in my action not to react to anything no matter what " I did not move.    The feelings of loathing rose to a crescendo.  It was incredibly intense. Then, gradually, it began to die away.  Less and less these feelings became until they were completely gone and I sat there, crossed legged on my mat, blanket around me and covered in a lather of sweat which was now becoming icy cold.

So what had happened?

It was an illusion!    A longtime phobia, a fear of spiders had arisen in me, come to the surface, been observed as impartially as I could do so without reacting, and it had passed away.  The technique of Vipassana Meditation had worked.  It had worked well.   The link between thought and emotional reaction had been broken.   In that moment a fear which had been held within me for decades had fallen away.   The dread of those big hairy spiders, and the little ones, and all of them for that matter had largely gone.   It would be fair to say that I’d lost around ninety-percent at least of this phobia in those few moments.

How do I know?

The very next morning I came into my meditation cell, switched on the light, and there was a real Funnel Web spider on the concrete floor in the corner.   It reared up at me in the typical way of such spiders, ready to bite.  I simply went outside and got the dustpan and hand broom that was conveniently left outside the pagoda door for cleaning purposes, came back and brush it onto the pan.   I then went outside, walked a little way into some scrub and banged it out onto the ground.  With hardly a further thought I went back to my cell, sat down, wrapped the blanket around me then, switching off the light, continued with practically no further thought of what had happened.

I learned some very significant lessons from the imaginary and then real episodes with the deadly Sydney Funnel Web.   The ones in the mind are every bit as frightening, probably more so, than the real ones.   I learned that I have " and from this it is not drawing too long a bow to assume we all have " fears, phobias, neuroses, traumas of all manner held within our subconscious minds which have a tremendous influence on the way we interpret our world.

On earlier and in later meditational retreats I experienced an amazing range of phenomena and I expect I shed an enormous amount of built in fear.   Most of what I experienced was not particularly pleasant.  Some was dreadfully frightening.  Some, terrifying.   Over the first twelve years of my twenty-eight years of experience with Vipassana Meditation I undertook fourteen ten-day retreats and a number of lesser ones.   In the first couple of years I meditated thrice daily, around two-and-a-half hours a day.  This dropped back to two hours for the next twenty years or so.  Now, it’s around forty minutes in the morning and twenty at night.   If I were an airline pilot and these were flying hours I expect I’d be considered a veteran.   I’ve spent around 25,000 hours in meditation.   I mention this simply to give credibility to what I present to you in the rest of this book.

I was fifty when I took up Vipassana.  Before that I’d had a full and adventurous  life.  However, even before that I was into deep concentration and other types of self-understanding.   But it is only of late that I am beginning to realize that it is our mind which causes all of us most of our problems.  That is why I have written this book, Mind Matters Most.   I hope its reading will be useful to you.

………………………………..

 

Did you know that extreme anxiety can cause your death?  Yes, and quite rapidly.   When we’re filled with an overwhelming intensity of fear, if it is sustained even for a day or so, our health will deteriorate.   Our fear will be reflected in our body.  We’ll probably feel dreadful.  Moreover, unless something is done to change the way we’re seeing things at that time our immune system could fail us.    Should that happen, we’d be susceptible to all manner of danger: bacterial and viral infections, stroke, even heart failure.  And yes, it is possible to die of a broken heart.

If the above sounds pessimistic, don’t fret.  The answer to the problem is simple " in theory.   Yet it is so difficult in practice.   You see, we need to have a change of mind which brings about a change of heart.  If we can do this, we’re off the hook.   Either the outside circumstances which we’ve interpreted in such a way that we’ve become extremely anxious change, or nothing outside actually changes but our attitude towards it does.   Be it one or the other, the important point to remember is Mind Matters Most.   In this case, I’m talking about our attention; what we are focusing on.  It’s simple, in that our focus of attention needs to change.  It’s difficult, in that changing that focus is not easy for the majority of us.   You see, we are such creatures of habit.

Choice and anxiety

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been subject to extreme anxiety?  Chances are you have.  I can recall one particular dilemma I was in where I had to make a decision.  That decision I knew would have a bearing on how the rest of my life would unfold.   It was a matter of choice: pick one or another of two options.   I was torn between what I knew I should do and what another part of me wanted to do.   It was a simply a yes or no choice.  Yet it kept me awake all night.  It kept my body pacing and my mind racing.   Within a short period of around twelve hours I’d become a mental wreck.   It seemed I could not choose.  I could not make up my mind.  This vacillation made me ‘sick to my stomach.’  I know it did because after a while I could actually feel the pain in there.  My stomach hurt.

Was it an ulcer?   Had I become ulcer-ridden in such a short time?   It certainly wasn’t something I’d eaten, because I’d lost my appetite completely.  All I’d done for the past hours since the news came when a decision had to be made was to chain-smoke cigarettes.   No, in retrospect, it became clear to me that my own anxiety had caused me to feel this way.

Thought’s emotional component

Experiments have shown that a man’s stomach can become inflamed and raw-looking simply by prompting him to become angry, and to have the inflammation disappear with just a few soothing words, or even the sound of something which relaxes.   We all know, from our own experiences, how anger can make us tremble and tense us up " especially if we know it’s in our immediate interest to suppress it.  The all powerful boss bawls us out.  To respond might cost us our job.   The immediate reaction of our body in response to our thoughts is obvious.   These experiences are common to us all.   What is not so common to us all is the knowledge that the emotional component of every thought we have is just as permanent as the thought itself.

Thought itself - permanent?  

You might doubt this.   Like many, you may be of the opinion that once you’ve had a particular thought rise in your mind and then to fade from memory that that thought is no longer of any consequence.   It arose and passed away.   It came and it went.   “No, I can’t recall what I was thinking even ten minutes ago,” you might say.   And you’d be both right and wrong.  Right in that you cannot recall it to consciousness: wrong, in that it is ‘in there’ and is remembered.  Deep, regressive hypnosis can probably bring it to the surface again.   Every thought, every experienced is registered.   It might not be easy to bring everything to the surface, but certainly any significant events can be brought back " especially those that have a really strong emotional component.  Those that have moved you in some way; caused a deep emotional reaction are recoverable.

Same message, different reactions

What I am saying here is that every thought we have has an emotional part to it.  Sometimes the emotional part is almost negligible, so little that it can be set at naught.   The practice of pure mathematics, for example, with the symbols representing nothing more than numerals and letters, would have very little emotional component.   A comment about the state of the weather might have a little more.  The amount of the emotional content in this latter instance would depend upon how the weather was affecting or expected to affect that person.   The emotional reaction in the listener or observer might be slight or very intense.  “Goodness, I forgot my umbrella,” as against.  “Rain, it’s going to ruin my wheat crop!  If  it’s water-damaged the bank will foreclose on the mortgage!”

In the first instance above, the pure mathematics, the marking or influence of upon us might be as impermanent as a man trying to write words in water.  It doesn’t stay.  The thought never got into the long-term memory.   In the second instance where the man forgot his umbrella, the thought’s emotional content might be so slight as to be like words scrawled into dry sand on a windy day.   Quickly blown away, or so it would seem.   But there are other thoughts which arise in us which stir so much emotional intensity that their result upon us is like words chiseled in granite.    These do stay in our memory, albeit sometimes deep within our unconscious minds.   It is these that can, and often do, give rise to our long term illnesses.

Every thought is registered.   Some are held, others discarded.  The critical factor is what is held in our long-term memories.  Whether realized by us or not these affect us.  These are what influence not only our level of knowledge, or philosophy of life, but also our state of health over time.   We don’t necessarily know what those influences are.   Many are deeply suppressed or repressed thoughts, along with the emotional component that comprised that thought, that are now below our level of awareness.  They remain like ticking time-bombs.   They might not explode into a thousand pieces.  Rather they leak poisonous explosives in ever increasing amounts over time.  Certainly they will affect our well being.   Eventually they will be felt.    They will be felt first as uneasiness long before they manifest as symptoms.  But more of detail of this in a later chapter. 

The pain always arises eventually

We’ve all heard of cases of soldiers who have returned from active service in a war zone seemingly quite healthy and well adjusted, only to break down long after from post traumatic illnesses.   Sometimes this might take years.   Sometimes not that long.   Whether the time is short or long, the causes are the same: the emotional contents of the thoughts held in the mind and their resultant effect.    So to return to the theme of this book: Mind Matters Most.

Have you ever had the experience of going through a great deal of tension, only to have yourself fall into a trembling wreck once the pressure was off?    This happened to me during a learning to drive test.  I was going for my heavy-vehicle driver’s license back in 1973.   As it was, I happened to have had a traffic accident just prior to " on the way to the driving test in fact " yet I remained cool, calm and collected right through until it was all finalized, papers signed, license issued, before I found myself trembling uncontrollably now that I was able to sit down in private and ‘let go.’

Imagine if you couldn’t let go?   Where would the tension be?   Where would all that anxiety, all that fear be?   

Well, it’s not ‘out there.’   It’s not dispersed into the ether.  It hasn’t gone into oblivion.  So where is it then?   It can only be within.   It is within the mind-body of the person who has experienced the trauma, the fear, the worry or whatever it might be.   It hasn’t just drifted into nothingness.  It lies within us.

Psychiatrists have been practicing the alleviation of subconsciously held trauma from the minds of their patients for over a hundred years " and probably well before that.   As the Ancient Roman, Ovid, said, “The mind itself cannot be exiled.”   Ovid would have been talking about memory, conscious memory, I expect.  But what of our unconscious memory?   That, too, cannot be exiled.   The actuality of what happened in the past is not important.  It is how we interpreted and reacted to it at that time that is important.  For that is what is now locked away within us " the emotional reaction.

But where is it locked away?

Where are our emotions held?

Some might say that every thought along with its attendant reaction is locked away in certain areas of our brain.   Certainly experiments have been done where certain parts of a person’s brain have been stimulated " perhaps by touch " and memories are immediately brought back to consciousness, so much so that the person actually thinks they’re living through them as they originally happened.  They appear real and ‘in the now.’  So it might be argued that they exist in places or as traces in the physical brain.

My hypothesis " and it’s not original to me " is that the stimulation of the brain simply allows what is in the mind-body to arise through the brain.   Here, I liken the brain to an extremely complex switchboard.   When the switchboard is in perfect working order it allows the flow of information held within " and in some instances without and around  " the mind-body to flow into the ‘screen of the mind, ‘ or the conscious part of the mind which we generally observe.  We, the real us, is the Observer or Witness of what is in that screen.    The screen, of course, is perceived through a filter or series of filters which, for want of a better phrase, I call our ego or conditioned mind.

The Mind-Body

By now you might be asking yourself the question:  “What does the writer mean by the mind-body?   Surely we have a body, that is a physical body and our mind is something different again?”    To which I feel that I must write from my own experiences where it comes to this matter. 

Where does our body finish and our mind begin?   From my own observations, which include some twenty-eight years of twice daily meditation, I offer the following explanation.   My 25,000  hours plus of Vipassana or Insight Meditation augments the findings of many other meditators.  Moreover, numerous texts written by various seekers-of-the-truth down the millennia substantiate my own findings.   Our mind is simply a subtler part of our whole self.   Just as the red in a rainbow blends gradually into the orange, the yellow, the green and the blue so, too, our mind’s various layers lie right alongside " actually interpenetrating " the physical part of us.  

As we draw further away from the physical and move up through the ever-increasingly subtler aspects of ourselves, we move away from a personal self to something more universal, more all-embracing.  But once again, this will be further described later in this book.

 

The Mind-body both surrounds and inter-penetrates

What I’m saying here is that our memories of our verbal-visual thoughts, along with the emotional content of those thoughts, are held within a subtler level of our being.    This is where the memory resides. Not in the brain but in the mind-body which surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body as a whole.  

So the stimulus of a probe on the brain " or the right suggestions done by a psychiatrist, or perhaps the result of pharmaceuticals taken " acts like a lightning rod attracting electricity.   The memory is in the ‘cloud of the mind,’ a part of us that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical.  It might not be readily available to us.   It might seem intangible, nebulous to the point of being non-existent but it is there and its ramifications cannot be understated.

Is this a new idea?   No it is not.

Kirlian photography and the human aura

It has long been known to mystics and seers that the human form has a surrounding aura.  It is egg-shaped and extends well beyond our physical form.  Our physical body resides in the middle of it.  This aura can be seen by certain individuals.   Of course, there were many who found this discovery hard to believe.  Many still do.  Then along came Kirlian photography.  Now we can see the auras " or at least some densities of the spectrum " which surround the physical.   It is a strange thing that there are certainly people who will accept infra red photography as it detects body heat as a fact,  but find it impossible to accept the human aura.   Anything not fitting comfortably into their idea of the truth is anathema.

Here’s my concept.   The life within us provides the light.   Some might even say the light is the life.   But here’s something to ponder on.    We’re shown in movies " and I suspect they’re based on truth " that when a human is killed, the light quickly fades as their body heat fades.   Where does it go to?   Fades into nothingness?   Surely not.   This cannot happen.   It can’t go into ‘nothingness,’ for the laws of science say that it is simply a change in energy from one form of energy to another.   So, I repeat, where does it go?  

It dissipates, you could say.   But what does it dissipate into?

Could it perhaps go, into The Whole?”   That life is contained in The Whole as well as in the physical?   That life actually forms, and maintains the physical?   That when the physical form can no longer contain the life form for one reason or another it leaves it?

Layers within layers

It is difficult for many of us to conceive the idea that a human being is made up of myriads and myriads of layers.   That we have physical bodies is obvious.   We also have heat emanating from our bodies which can be photographed.  We have forms and shapes moving perpetually around our beings which can also be photographed by both still and moving Kirlian photography.  And by deduction it could be postulated that there are even more subtle levels beyond our sensory and instrument ranges that can be experienced " indeed, are experienced " in deep meditation.

I do not ask you to take what I write here on trust.   I ask only that you keep an open mind on the subject so that as I continue with this writing, you will continue with your reading.  So please keep that open mind because Mind Matters Most with but one exception: who and what you really are.