Three days ago I was miserable, feeling about the worst I have in a long, long time. Today the world can do no wrong. What has changed? Well...nothing, not really. Put more precisely, my physical reality is identical to what it was two days ago; my location has changed for a couple of days (to Portland), the weather is about as perfect as weather can be, yet the things that were causing me such misery two days ago have not changed one bit. Except they have changed entirely.
I could not have willed such a change into being. In fact, it is in our nature as humans to cling to such mental states, the analogy being clutching tightly to a hot coal. It's not that we wish to cause ourselves harm, we just really can't help it. When we are in the middle of darkness it seems like the only reality there is. How do we so easily lose the memory of the light that was ours just days before? I suspect it has to do with that basic impulse I have spoken of several times here, the urge to catastrophize as a talisman against the Danger which is always lurking. The belief in this danger is as ancient as the species or more ancient yet. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it feels intuitively right.
Because, you see, nothing was really Wrong wrong. I was tired, I miss my wife (still in Milwaukee), life sometimes feels like one big chore, I'm sorry my mother-in-law had to die, my parents are aging and in need of care I am in no position to help provide (God bless my siblings!). Yeah, yeah, yeah. But these become a Problem only if I define them that way. Inherently they have no emotional weight whatsoever. Above all, if I attempt to solve them, they become a project of the small mind, which tends to make a mess of things.
Now, the small mind has a legitimate function in these situations, of course. Many problems have solutions and I would be foolish to ignore the advice of the small mind then. When I am hungry, the small mind tells me to eat. When I need sleep, it tells me to rest. When what I must do is make one choice or another, the small mind is useful is prodding me to do that. In fact, it has made some very worthwhile practical suggestions, many of which I will no doubt write about here at some point.
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I wrote all of the above while sitting on the porch swing outside The Painted Lady, a Portland bed and breakfast where I am staying this weekend. I was driven inside both by a dying battery and a hostile crazy man walking down the street with a grocery cart. Not that he was hostile toward me, except as I represented one of the people of the world, who are, it seems, all arrayed against him. I was not aware of this, but did not wish to debate the point with him.
The delusion of the truly insane differs from my own only in degree, not in content or type (or so it seems to me). Because of this, insanity inspires in me awe and curiosity rather than discomfort. (It helps that as part of my work I deal with at least one certifiably insane person daily). I remember a comedy bit from years ago in which one person is remarking to another how sometimes he thinks he is the only real being in the world and all the rest are androids or illusions. At the end, the one he is speaking to looks up to the sky and says, "He knows." I have these thoughts. What if I am living in utter delusion and am in fact strapped down in an asylum somewhere merely dreaming this world? You might tell me I am wrong, that you have proof, but you would say that, wouldn't you? Welcome to my world.
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To continue: where the small mind is not so useful is in the damned perseveration on anything and everything. I know I have written of this before, so won't belabor the point, but how is it helpful to keep mulling the same question over and over again? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Yet it seems to me that, left to our own devices, this is precisely what we tend to do. We are worrying machines; there is nothing we do half so well as fret, as far as I can tell. And the small mind is so godawful irrational in the solutions it finds. An example: it amuses me to see someone (sometimes myself) who is late for class or work or some other appointment running to get there. The math is simple: over a short distance if you run you will gain only a matter of seconds (if that) compared to going at a leisurely pace. Yet, of course, by running we will appear, to ourselves and others, to have made an effort to get there sooner without really having done any such thing. (The true effort would have been in leaving the house earlier). In the process, we make ourselves anxious and flustered. And, of course, all of our addictions speak to these irrational solutions to what worries us. I have been known to overeat in my concern about how much I eat. How is that more sane than the hostile man with the grocery cart?
So, what's the point? Simply this: given the chance, the small mind will overwhelm the entire capacity of the mind. There will be no space for reflection or the deeper consciousness of the Large Mind. What is required is derailing that small mind, seeing it for what it is, pulling back the curtain and seeing that the Wizard is a frumpy little man (thanks, Toto!) I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL SMALL MIND!! Uh-huh, yeah, not so much.What we need are tools.
I have the good fortune to be connected with a wonderful spiritual teacher, (though I wonder if she would be embarrassed if she heard me describe her that way), who gave me some guidance when I told her a few weeks ago how my life was going and what I was facing. First of all, she urged me to sit in meditation every day. Second, she reminded me about Pema Chodron's wonderful book When Things Fall Apart. Third, she encouraged me to stay embodied, which is to say, to feel what I am feeling in my body, to pull myself away from the constant churning of thought. Fourth, she brought to my awareness the fact that the small mind always tries to convince me that I can think my way out of what I'm feeling. Rather, she suggested, I might want to allow the grief (the pain, the uncertainty, the discouragement and so on) and hold myself in it, hold myself as I would a wounded child. Last, she gave me a metaphor I have found useful: when we are living in the present moment, boulders turn to gravel—the same overall mass, but much more workable.
Was I able to incorporate these into my process immediately? Well...no. I could have used many of them while I was with my mother-in-law and my wife and their family, but the small mind had taken charge and I did very few of these. But since then I have embraced them all.
And all of these actions serve the same purpose, don't they? They remind us that we are in possession of a larger mind, a consciousness, and if we are in contact with this, the small mind cannot dominate our awareness. This is no small thing. The overwhelm of grief, the roiling agony of pain, the chasm of loss, the conflagration of anger, the gaping maw of despair, the drear vacuity of hopelessness—all of these are the machinations of the small mind. Not that these are not perfectly real; in fact, while we are in them the larger mind's job is to validate and enfold them. But to let any of these be all is the fundamental error; to allow the small and worried mind to be in charge is to create and nurture suffering. Though most or all of these states are unavoidable at some time or another in our complicated lives, there is no requirement (show me where it is written!) that we must clutch them to us and wallow in them. It is almost as if we feel we would be disloyal to drop grief for even a moment, or perhaps we believe we do not deserve to feel good. But we do. We can. These are choices.
I could not have willed such a change into being. In fact, it is in our nature as humans to cling to such mental states, the analogy being clutching tightly to a hot coal. It's not that we wish to cause ourselves harm, we just really can't help it. When we are in the middle of darkness it seems like the only reality there is. How do we so easily lose the memory of the light that was ours just days before? I suspect it has to do with that basic impulse I have spoken of several times here, the urge to catastrophize as a talisman against the Danger which is always lurking. The belief in this danger is as ancient as the species or more ancient yet. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it feels intuitively right.Because, you see, nothing was really Wrong wrong. I was tired, I miss my wife (still in Milwaukee), life sometimes feels like one big chore, I'm sorry my mother-in-law had to die, my parents are aging and in need of care I am in no position to help provide (God bless my siblings!). Yeah, yeah, yeah. But these become a Problem only if I define them that way. Inherently they have no emotional weight whatsoever. Above all, if I attempt to solve them, they become a project of the small mind, which tends to make a mess of things.
Now, the small mind has a legitimate function in these situations, of course. Many problems have solutions and I would be foolish to ignore the advice of the small mind then. When I am hungry, the small mind tells me to eat. When I need sleep, it tells me to rest. When what I must do is make one choice or another, the small mind is useful is prodding me to do that. In fact, it has made some very worthwhile practical suggestions, many of which I will no doubt write about here at some point.
****************************************************
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| Painted Lady |
The delusion of the truly insane differs from my own only in degree, not in content or type (or so it seems to me). Because of this, insanity inspires in me awe and curiosity rather than discomfort. (It helps that as part of my work I deal with at least one certifiably insane person daily). I remember a comedy bit from years ago in which one person is remarking to another how sometimes he thinks he is the only real being in the world and all the rest are androids or illusions. At the end, the one he is speaking to looks up to the sky and says, "He knows." I have these thoughts. What if I am living in utter delusion and am in fact strapped down in an asylum somewhere merely dreaming this world? You might tell me I am wrong, that you have proof, but you would say that, wouldn't you? Welcome to my world.
***************************************************
To continue: where the small mind is not so useful is in the damned perseveration on anything and everything. I know I have written of this before, so won't belabor the point, but how is it helpful to keep mulling the same question over and over again? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Yet it seems to me that, left to our own devices, this is precisely what we tend to do. We are worrying machines; there is nothing we do half so well as fret, as far as I can tell. And the small mind is so godawful irrational in the solutions it finds. An example: it amuses me to see someone (sometimes myself) who is late for class or work or some other appointment running to get there. The math is simple: over a short distance if you run you will gain only a matter of seconds (if that) compared to going at a leisurely pace. Yet, of course, by running we will appear, to ourselves and others, to have made an effort to get there sooner without really having done any such thing. (The true effort would have been in leaving the house earlier). In the process, we make ourselves anxious and flustered. And, of course, all of our addictions speak to these irrational solutions to what worries us. I have been known to overeat in my concern about how much I eat. How is that more sane than the hostile man with the grocery cart?
So, what's the point? Simply this: given the chance, the small mind will overwhelm the entire capacity of the mind. There will be no space for reflection or the deeper consciousness of the Large Mind. What is required is derailing that small mind, seeing it for what it is, pulling back the curtain and seeing that the Wizard is a frumpy little man (thanks, Toto!) I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL SMALL MIND!! Uh-huh, yeah, not so much.What we need are tools.
I have the good fortune to be connected with a wonderful spiritual teacher, (though I wonder if she would be embarrassed if she heard me describe her that way), who gave me some guidance when I told her a few weeks ago how my life was going and what I was facing. First of all, she urged me to sit in meditation every day. Second, she reminded me about Pema Chodron's wonderful book When Things Fall Apart. Third, she encouraged me to stay embodied, which is to say, to feel what I am feeling in my body, to pull myself away from the constant churning of thought. Fourth, she brought to my awareness the fact that the small mind always tries to convince me that I can think my way out of what I'm feeling. Rather, she suggested, I might want to allow the grief (the pain, the uncertainty, the discouragement and so on) and hold myself in it, hold myself as I would a wounded child. Last, she gave me a metaphor I have found useful: when we are living in the present moment, boulders turn to gravel—the same overall mass, but much more workable.
Was I able to incorporate these into my process immediately? Well...no. I could have used many of them while I was with my mother-in-law and my wife and their family, but the small mind had taken charge and I did very few of these. But since then I have embraced them all.
And all of these actions serve the same purpose, don't they? They remind us that we are in possession of a larger mind, a consciousness, and if we are in contact with this, the small mind cannot dominate our awareness. This is no small thing. The overwhelm of grief, the roiling agony of pain, the chasm of loss, the conflagration of anger, the gaping maw of despair, the drear vacuity of hopelessness—all of these are the machinations of the small mind. Not that these are not perfectly real; in fact, while we are in them the larger mind's job is to validate and enfold them. But to let any of these be all is the fundamental error; to allow the small and worried mind to be in charge is to create and nurture suffering. Though most or all of these states are unavoidable at some time or another in our complicated lives, there is no requirement (show me where it is written!) that we must clutch them to us and wallow in them. It is almost as if we feel we would be disloyal to drop grief for even a moment, or perhaps we believe we do not deserve to feel good. But we do. We can. These are choices.
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