Mind Matters Most - Chapter Two

MMM Two

Change our thoughts and we change our health

We are told that there are many ways in which we can become sick.   But primarily we get sick in only two ways: from the outside, and from the inside.  We ingest into our body something from the outside, or something arises within us that precipitate an illness.  Outside ‘invaders’ can come in the form of bacteria, viruses, virulent substances such as poisons, ranging from snake venom, to lead poisoning to asbestos dust in the lungs.   Moreover these can come to us through our mouths, noses, any bodily orifice for that matter, and even through our skin.   If we not able to overcome these invaders with our natural immunity, then we’re sometimes able to take medicines such as antibiotics to fight and destroy that which has invaded us.   But what of those things which arise from the inside?

Now, I am not talking about those illnesses which can come about through an imbalance in our bodily makeup; too much of one thing, or not enough of another.  Yin and Yang imbalance.  These have really come from the outside and accrued within.  We know this accrual can eventually build up to undermine our health.  We’re aware that this can come about.   A long-term imbalance can result in cell failure and such can prove to be fatal.    Many of the terminal illnesses we suffer later in life, it is believed, come from too much or too little of something over time.   But I’m concerned here with something quite different.  I referring to those illnesses which arise directly from our thoughts.

Illnesses that arise from our thoughts!   This was an idea rejected for a long, long time but is now beginning to receive much serious consideration.   Still, when the majority of us think about ‘thought’ and ‘thinking,’ we are generally considering our habitual thoughts, what is going on now, what our habits-of-thought are now.  

Changing your thoughts is only part of the answer

‘Change your thoughts - change your life’ is the title of one of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer’s books.   It is a sentiment with which I thoroughly agree.   But changing our thoughts is aimed at changing the way we’re thinking now and how we intend to �" if we can �" think in the future.   Positive thinking will turn our lives around, many proclaim.   And it will.  But that change might still not be of sufficient power to overcome the damage that has already been done.  That damage having been done by thoughts that we’ve previously had; thoughts that have now fallen below our level of consciousness.   Deep below, in those layers of the mind beyond conscious recall, these thought-provoked reactions are doing their insidious work.   They are undermining your health and you have no knowledge of that.

As described in the preceding chapter, these repressed or suppressed thoughts, along with their attendant feelings, are held in the subtler regions of our mind-body.   It is not so much the thought but its accompanying emotion that is the problem.   The emotion was suppressed for some reason.  It might have been from fear, guilt or shame �" anything.   But that emotion is really a feeling, a sensation.  It has tangibility.   It is a sensation or feeling so repulsive, so repugnant to the conscious, “I” or “me” with which we identify, that it has been pushed below so that it cannot be consciously felt or looked at.   It has been deliberately buried by some part of our ego or self-image, which could not bear to put up with it.   It could be likened to sweeping dirt under the carpet.   It’s still there, but the conscious mind has forgotten about it.

What causes a sensation?   We know that if someone touches us we feel it.   We experience sensation through our sensory organs and these are attuned to the ‘outside world.’   Our sensory organs respond to stimuli coming from outside of us. But what if the sensation arises from within?   Obviously there are parts of our physicality which feel from within the physical.  If we couldn’t do this we’d never experience a headache or a stomach ache, or feel the pain of appendicitis.   There’d be no such thing as arthritic pain, or any pain or sensation for that matter.   So it is obvious that every part of our body is able to feel sensation if the intensity of that sensation rises to a sufficient level.

There is sensation in every part of the body

To go further I will state categorically: there is sensation in every part of our body.  There is not one part of our physicality that does not experience sensation �" albeit, most of it below our threshold of awareness.   However, our level of awareness can be heightened.

This is a key point to remember.   If the intensity of the sensation is insufficient the sensation stays below our level of consciousness.   If the intensity of the sensation is sufficiently strong or pronounced, it is consciously felt by us.    If we our contacted by a stimulus that results in a sensation either from within or from outside of the body, unless it is strong enough to be felt by us it is not only ignored, it is �" as far as we’re concerned �" nonexistent.  But if our level of awareness to sensation is increased, we feel more sensation more often and in more parts of our body.   The continued practice of certain types of meditation develops this, but more on this in a later chapter.

Let us now to return to our subconsciously held emotions.   Bearing in mind that every thought we’ve ever had has its emotional component, it follows that each of us has a seemingly bottomless storage of emotions �" that is feelings and sensations �" held within us.   There are so many thought-sensations it would seem that the number and content would be just about limitless.   The proviso, of course, is that most of our thoughts are not subject to long-term memory.  So for all practical purposes it could be said that those thoughts, along with their attendant emotion at the time they occurred, are those which went into our long-term memory and were not allowed to re-surface. They were not allowed to run their course.  They were buried.

Unfortunately, buried or not, they are not dead.   Thoughts below the surface of our consciousness are every bit as alive as those above.  They still go on doing their automatic ‘thinking’ or ‘reacting’ but here they are doing so without the discerning, critical, and analytical parts of our consciousness.   They’re not subject to our intellect.   They automatically ramble on, building, growing, and gaining in strength.   Like legumes beneath soil, they’re not noticed until they poke a shoot or two out into the light of day �" the light of day being our conscious awareness.

Suppressed thought-forms continue to grow

When that first little shoot comes to the surface it is often felt as a very slight and possibly neutral sensation.  It might be so slight as to be ignored.   Or you might bring up your hand to touch or scratch without even noticing it.   The body language of the person telling a deliberate lie is often accompanied by an automatically rising sensation.   A person attempting suppress an emotion might feel all manner of sensations on the body: hot flushes, pressures on the head, tingling.  But few studies have asked as to why this happens.

As a thought-form grows within us it becomes bigger and stronger.  Its influence is still an unknown quantity to our consciousness, though.    Then it pokes another shoot upwards, and this time the sensation could well be stronger, the unpleasant sensation is now annoying.   Still it’s ignored.  Then it comes again, gaining in intensity but not as yet unbearable pain.   The thought pattern that contains that emotion has grown and it is now beginning to be felt as something not very nice by the person in whose mind-body it is growing.   It’s around this time a lot of people start visiting their doctor.

Is this an idea concocted by the writer?   No, this is a concept based on the experiences of tens of thousands of Vipassana meditators over thousands of years.   The Hindus sages of India, the Buddhists of Southeast Asia, have labels for what is causing the sensations which arise and eventually cause us illness in this way.   They call them Samsaras or Sankaras.  We in The West often give such illness a label.   We might call it Post Traumatic Stress syndrome.  

But a label is a label.  In medicine it is often an attempt to describe something.  What we call this phenomenon of a pain arising in the body and making its presence felt by us as it steadily gets worse is not important.   What is important is understanding why so that we can rectify the situation.    The natural tendency in our Western culture is to attempt to clear up the symptom.   If the symptom is gone then the illness is gone.  That is often the way we look at it.  So the usual stop gap to ameliorate an unpleasant sensation is to subject it to pharmaceutical treatments of some kind.   “Take a pain killer, son. It’s just tension. Come back to see if it hasn’t improved in the next couple of weeks.”

Treating the symptom brings only temporary relief

I realize I’m sounding cynical here.   Today’s medicine goes a lot further than that.   Doctors do look for a cure.   Moreover, nowadays those ‘cures’ often work.   But prevention is always better than cure.    Prevention prevents!   If we know how to keep healthy then we never get sick.  We grow old, of course.  There is no getting around that.   But in theory at least, if we never got sick, never had an accident, we’d all live to a ripe old age and die when life could no longer be sustained within our now ancient bodies.

No, I can’t hazard a guess as to what age that would be, but we’d all live a lot longer than we’re living at present, I suspect.  However,  back to reality and life ‘as it is,’ not as we would like it to be.

We know that illness does arise in our body often from causes we don’t understand.   The health fanatic, who’s always referred to his or her body as ‘a sacred temple,’ comes down with something dreadful.  Why?    Nothing came in from the outside.    They’ve always eaten right, exercised right, rested and played right.   They appear to have the right attitude.

But did they think right!   Well, yes.  They rarely argued with anyone.  They’re very easy going;  easy to get along with.

That’s not the point.  What emotional responses to things that they felt strongly about were suppressed?   What did they hold in?   And that very rare burst of vitriolic temper, where did it come from when certain ‘emotional buttons’ were pressed?    Did they not bury, at some stage in their lives (or maybe even in a previous life, if you believe in Reincarnation) something which was ‘swept under the proverbial carpet,’ and which, long after the event, is now causing their troubles?

That chain reaction of anger

That unexpected outburst came from a source deep within them.   An outside stimulus, a trigger of some kind, caused a connection to a whole series of hurts held within and it simply formed a chain-reaction that rushed to the surface as a fit of anger.   The anger is vented without.  The pain is felt within �" most of it below the conscious mind.  

The series of hurts within are the patterns or thought-forms held within one or another of those mind-body dimensions contained in our aura.   As the airline pilots in Papua-New Guinea used to say, “Those clouds have got rocks in them.”   So, too, the aura around our bodies has lumps or denser areas �" ‘thought forms’ �" which have shape and size that have a life of their own within us.

Some call this dimension of our mind-body which surrounds and interpenetrates our physical body, the Pain Body.   Certainly it is filled with pain.   This dimension, it would appear �" and it covers a wide spectrum �" is studded with these clusters of thought forms the Eastern mystics call Samskaras or Sankaras.   The right stimulus will bring a connection to them, and they will rush to the surface, often overcoming the man or woman and resulting in a raging response which is completely out of proportion to the original stimulus

“Wow!  What brought that on?”   We might think.  “All I mentioned was…”

 

To blame is the ego’s nature

If we’re close by and it was our accidental �" or deliberate �" remark that triggered that response, we need to be aware that we are not responsible for that outburst.   The person doing the screaming and yelling will put it on us, of course.  To blame is the ego’s nature.  But the problem lies with the reactor, not the person who brought about the reaction.   It is the person who has held, and is still holding, all of this anger within them that has caused this.   But they, poor sods, often have no idea why they reacted so.

So we go through life, reacting to the comments of others.  Sometimes the reaction is slight, sometimes moderate, sometimes very intensely �" right off ‘the deep end,’ never realizing that we’re not so much reacting to what others are saying but to the various stimuli that causes the Pain Body within us to be activated to lesser or greater degree.   It is a Pain Body that seemingly has a life and a will of its own, which needs activity of some kind or another to prove to itself that it is actually in there and alive.   What sort of intelligence it has I cannot say.  I know only that it does respond to stimuli �" and there is one stimulus I suspect that it absolutely hates.  But once again, we will talk on that in a later chapter.