Mind Matters Most - Chapter Fourteen

MMM014

Body, Mind and Spirit �" Who is really in charge?

I was recently reading how ‘gut feelings’ can affect brain function and, of course, how the reverse applies.   How our emotions affect our physical well-being has been known for millennia.   ‘Science’ has been finding out more on this of late.   However, I’m of the opinion that it is far more complex than a brain-to-body and body-to-brain matter.  I convinced a person’s individual soul comes into it as well.  To explain:

We are made up of body, mind and soul; a very vague and nebulous definition to say the least.  Today’s scientists and the medical fraternity in particular, now understand quite a bit about our physical bodies.  Psychologists and psychiatrists know a bit about our human mind, particularly as it refers to our behavior.    Yet it seems to me that the part of us we regard as our centre, our ‘I am,’ still gets pretty well ‘short-shrift.’  It is my contention that the mind-body-soul influences are integral, each affecting the other.   There is no insulation or isolation between the three.

For example, if we believe we are our minds, we will accept the endless day-to-day conditioning that goes into them as part of what we are.  The erroneous, “I think therefore I am,” is a very commonly held belief.   Of course, this little ‘I am’ we react from is not the real us.    It is a conglomeration of ideas about ourselves.  Psychologists call this the ego-self; the ego-self being malleable and changeable, subject to the thoughts which are compatible and acceptable to it.  We often build our beliefs on a very shaky foundation.   Also, many of those ideas come in subtly and without analysis.  They are then be accepted and integrated into this ego-self, thus creating a self-image of what we believe to be true about ourselves.   There is identification with this self-created image.   We think we are the image.  We identify with it.   In actuality is made up of some of the content in our minds.

Our knowledge, erroneous or true, is mind content.   Our opinions based on that knowledge is also content in our minds.   That knowledge is to a large extent molded by the intentions of our egos.   The ego, as we have been told so comprehensively by such writers as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, the Dalai Lama and many others is an imaginary us.   It is a figment of our conditioning.  That conditioning could have been inadvertently or deliberately created by our interpretation of our relationship to others and the ‘world out there.’   But the ego is a part of us that abhors the very idea, fears like death itself, our discovering that it is not the real us.   It sees itself as a ‘stand alone’ in a hostile universe.   It fears diminution of any kind, for any lessening of its autonomy is a lessening of its influence over us.      

We judge ourselves by our thoughts, others by their actions

From our point of view, when we consider another’s character, we judge them by their personality and, for a more in-depth analysis, by their character which, of course, hinges on their observed behavior over time.    This interpretation comes from our own personal bias.  It is the interpretation of done by our ego.   It is a subjective evaluation.

For example, you might think that other person to be a happy, outgoing, and an extravert. Or, conversely, as a very unhappy introvert.   You could think them honest, or as a thief; trustworthy or not trustworthy.  Coming from your ego you might think that.   However, the person being evaluated and button-holed probably doesn’t see him or herself that way at all.   They will see themselves in some way determined by their own ego.  They, too, possess a self-image.  So in most everyday relationships people do not communicate soul to soul but ego to ego.  They role play.   Real intimacy is a rare thing indeed.

All of this is already fairly commonly known.  So what has this to do with the interrelationship between our trio of what we’re told we are: Body, Mind and Soul?  The answer is that the ego is not the ‘I am’ at all.  It pretends to be.  It is insistent in this.  But in actuality it is a part of the mind-patterns of which we’ve made up.  It’s the semi-permanent idea we have of ourselves.   It is the configurations of thought-patterns which generally change very slowly through the years �" unless something really drastic happens to change them.  

It seems to me that the reactor is the ego-mind or self image, that is, the base from which so much of our negativity springs: our physical health, or mental health, and our general overall success or otherwise in the world.  This success refers not only to worldly acquisitions but relationships and identification with others.   In a nutshell, our happiness or unhappiness depends almost wholly on how our self-image is perceived by us.   If we see ourselves in a positive light, then life is generally good.   If we see ourselves in negative terms, then often our life will be one of unhappiness.   It is the habitual reactions of our self-image which is determining this.

Who is doing the seeing?

Now comes the crunch.  Who is doing the seeing?   What or who is doing the interpreting and feeling the feelings?   It has to be something that can stand back and observe.   It has to be a witness to and experiencer of, what is happening �" of what is going on.   It is not the personal mind, or even the self-image which is doing this.   So it becomes clear that we, the real ‘I am’ is not the self-image.  It is not the conglomeration of thought-patterns which make up a fairly consistent ‘this is me’ idea from which most people run their largely reactive lives.   It is their real self, the little bit of the All Mighty, the real decision-maker, I suspect, from which we are privileged to be gifted a physicality and an interpretive mind to experience our lives on Planet Earth.

To get back to this matter of the condition of our stomachs and abdomen influencing the way we think and feel about life.   Of course it does!   We are an integral whole.   The brain is not where we live.  We might feel that we reside somewhere in the centre of our heads but I can assure you we do not.   Neither are we our physical bodies.  Take away any part of it barring perhaps the brain �" at this stage of our scientific knowledge �" and we are still there.  We can have false limbs, transplanted organs, et cetera and still be a human being.   I suspect that one day even that fascinating and incredibly complex part of our physicality known as the brain will be accepted as an organ through which we can live and breathe and have our being rather than it being our being.

We are, I’m becoming more and more convinced, a precipitate of something beyond our ken.  Like water droplets that appear to come out of nowhere as they condense into the cloud which we can see, I’m more of the opinion we are all part of a Whole and that we are precipitated into individuality.   Likewise, we go back to another dimension, perhaps that from which we have come, when we die.    Our physical senses when we’re alive dictate the parameters of our physicality; a person born blind does not experience the universe with the fullness of a sighted person.    The earthworm does not experience the same world as the eagle.    We, the Observers, can only observe that which is observable to us through the life form we at presently inhabit. 

‘At presently inhabit,’ is the crux here.  We are the life in the form.  The form allows us to be in this particular dimension experiencing life as, in this case, a human being.   It is our spirit which is really in charge.   If we are to get a ‘handle on life’ it is surely by knowing �" or perhaps having sufficient faith �" to realize that we have physicality but it is not the essential us.  We have personal mind content, but it is not us.  These belong to us.  They are given to us, and accumulated by us, for a certain period �" our bodies’ lifetime.   But we must eventually release them.   They go their way we go ours �" dust to dust, ashes to ashes.   They are forever changing �" whilst we go on forever.