You’re not your mind and your thoughts
7th October 2021
When your mind starts telling you what you have to do to make everything inside okay, don’t buy into what’s telling you
Michael Singer ‘The Untethered soul’ p.152
The mind has carved for itself such a prominent place in our experience of the world that we think we’re our thoughts. But I would like to argue otherwise.
I’m not sure about yourself but I’m absolutely not in charge of what my mind spews out on any given moment. It could be absolutely everything and anything. I believe that most of the stuff that the mind comes up with has most likely been determined by our prior experiences of culture, gender, parents, upbringing and general life experiences.
So most of the time, the mind has a tendency of ordering our body about telling it, what it needs to do, so that the mind can feel more calm and rested…but that calm never lasts long. It always has something else to say, so the jobs never end. I guess that’s what the mind does, otherwise there’s just no point for its existence.
So as Michael Singer argues in his book the Untethered Soul, we’re not our mind, but the consciousness that witnesses the thoughts but that is also capable of witnessing the lack of thought, or be totally at one with witnessing a sunset or the beauty in the smile of a child.
But it’s a difficult concept to grasp, as we’ve always experienced ourselves through the lens of our mind, believing absolutely everything it says and being taken from pillar to post looking for that feeling of calm and joy that we’re all searching for. But what if that was not the way, what if the right way to achieve that feeling would be the not attending to the mind but falling behind it, just watching it come and go with it’s needs and desires but doing nothing about it. It’s a simple idea but not an easy one to execute as we’re so conditioned to see the world from our minds eye. Try it, try just for one day to watch your mind, what it says, what it asks you to do, what it says it needs to be okay. Do you think you can do that? Let me know how you get on in the comments