Your Mind is a Survival Engine – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha Part 6
Most of the suffering people experience is completely and totally unnecessary. If I told you, you could be free of 90% of your suffering, would you listen? Does it seem impossible? It isn’t. You see, most of your pain is self-inflicted. There is real pain in this life, the pain of disease and death, but most of our day-to-day pain is a creation of our own minds and it is nothing but a figment of our imagination.
You don’t know that you’re the cause of your sadness because you were never given an instruction manual for your life. What is the basic dysfunction in our lives that leads us to create more and more trouble for ourselves and those around us? You were never shown what it is or taught how to fix it and so you go on creating more and more pain for yourself, like a spider getting deeply tangled in its own webs.
In order to understand the source of that suffering, it’s necessary to understand the nature of your mind. What is your mind? At its core, it is a survival engine. Everything that it does springs from this design.
It may be surprising to learn that thinking about texting your friend or taking a bath or watching TV is a survival function but it is. All of these things are designed to keep you from being destroyed or to ensure your continued existence into the indefinite future. You may think “good” and to a certain extent you’d be right. Survival is good and yet it’s the very things that the mind does to ensure your extended existence that also creates your suffering.
You function socially so that you have a support system for your emotions and spirit. You work so you won’t be hungry or thirsty and so you’ll have a roof over your head. You watch TV to relax or workout to give yourself extended longevity. When viewed through the lens of survival all of the mind’s actions begin to make more and more sense. And yet all of the actions your mind takes to keep you above ground have the side effect of keeping you constantly on the defensive, constantly reacting to the world around you. They keep you wound up in a state of anxiety and fear, even when that anxiety is beneath the surface for a time, it’s there, a constant companion.
The problem is that everything the mind does is ultimately a losing effort. Because everything around you is temporal, nothing you build will stand. Everything that the mind constructs comes to ruin. Everything the mind manifests into existence already has the build-in seeds of its own destruction. All things have their opposite embedded in them, like yin and yang. What gives you pleasure will ultimately create sorrow that manifests over time. Even the good things in your life like your children, the person you love and your pets will ultimately bring you suffering through their absence. This the nature of our lives and this transience is the ultimate nature of the universe. All things in the universe are constantly in flux, ceaselessly changing from one thing to another, some of them slowly, some of them quickly. Forms are created and forms are destroyed. Trillions of cells die on your body every day to become food for the tiny organisms that you can’t see, giving them energy and sustaining them on their mission, until they too die and feed something else. Civilizations rise and fall. All things crumble to dust. From ashes to ashes. It is only because we have such a limited window on time, since our lives are so short, that we cannot see that all things come to an end, great and small. No matter how tall a building we build, no matter how great an empire, no matter how profound a religious or political institution we craft, all of it will decay and pass away into the sands of time.
Now, while natural and easy for the universe, it is absolute agony for the mind. It’s terrifying and so the mind sets in motion a constant series of actions and events that consume all of your time on this Earth, all of them designed to ensure that you stay alive forever even though this is impossible. The mind survives by keeping the past alive and projecting what-if scenarios into the future. This is its power and its basic dysfunction. It simply cannot imagine a time when it does not exist and it cannot accept it. How can their be no me? It remembers past pain to keep you pushing forward. It plays movies to remind you of past events. It rehearses scenarios over and over and over, looking for a way to “win” the next argument that you’ve been having for years. It attacks and defends. It stores information, analyzes, and labels. It looks for ways to get an advantage, to climb another ladder socially, or to ensure that a friend continues to think highly of you or it looks to diminish the power of an opponent so it can win the business deal or get more money from a trade against another mind. The mind is obsessed with order and stability. It hoards, struggles, suffers and pushes forward to maintain this at all costs, even the cost of your happiness, which it sees as just another obstacle to be brought under control.
Over the course of human history, the mind’s desire to create a permanent existence and absolute stability for itself has accelerated. Minds worked together for larger problem solving, creating bigger and bigger institutions and more complex systems all around it. So it had to work faster and faster and faster. We’ve created systems that are so complex, so far reaching, so incessant, that the mind can never rest. It is constantly running, attacking and defending, analyzing, storing, labeling. Our mind has even invaded the ancient lands of our dreams where it is an unnatural and unwelcome alien life form. It now needs to run every single waking second of the day and most of the time you are asleep just to keep up, like a computer CPU burning away at 99% all the time. Today, almost our entire modern society is composed of constructs of our collective minds. Our institutions, our jobs, corporations, politics, organized religion, news media, economic systems, much of our entertainment, school, sports and games, all of these things are constructs of the mind and as such they have already built into them the seeds of more problems. These things are like games to the mind and yet now we can’t stop playing. For every problem we solve we create ten more and so we run ever faster to keep up, making ourselves sicker and sicker.
That constant stream of thoughts in your mind is not you. It is your mind gone berserk. It’s running a series of attack and defense blueprints. Your mind is a kind of game simulator, running through imaginary permutations of events with slight variations. This is a disease. Your mind is using you. It’s taken you over. Even worse, it’s gotten you to believe that this is necessary.
The mind tricks you into leaving it running with a clever trick. It makes you think that you are your mind. It tells you over and over, whether you can hear it consciously or not, that you can’t survive if it is not constantly on the alert, looking for danger in the short term and in the distant future. In this way, it tricks you into identifying with it. You think, what would I be without my thoughts? And yet, when you stop thinking for a moment, in the face of danger, or in some perfect moment when everything finally comes together for a brief few seconds, there you still are. When you meditate and your mind goes blank, there you still are. You have not disappeared. You are not your mind.
You probably don’t realize that you’re sick. When everyone around you has the same disease, the disease seems normal but unless you begin to recognize this basic dysfunction of your mind, you will get no rest until the day you die. You will constantly be battling the equivalent of a video game in your head. For example, when you are at a party and worried about something you said or did, or something going wrong, or the mole on your nose, it is not real. Nobody is thinking about you at all and if they are it is only for brief moments. In reality everyone else is trapped in the prison of their own minds as well, thinking about their own problems with money, children, work, school. This is true even for people who appear outwardly very confident and happy.
You mind is a tool that you can use, but it is not the core of who you are. In order to understand why the mind fails to build lasting happiness, you have to realize that the mind is not actually intelligent. It is cunning. When the mind is exposed to the light of your true consciousness it is shown to be but a tiny fragment of intelligence. True intelligence does not come from the mind. It comes from beyond the mind.
To see an example of how the mind fails to build things that actually work towards their ultimate purpose of making you happy, you need only look at television. Television sprang from the mind realizing that it’s working too hard and wearing down it’s host. Television is scheme to try to give you relaxation. Yet observe what happens when the mind creates a solution. It creates something that simply causes it more trouble. The mind designed television to help you “turn off” but in fact the mind does not turn off while watching television, it only goes into a kind of low level functioning mode, a kind of waking sleep. It continues to rev relentlessly, projecting endless scenarios and what-ifs again and again, leaving you exhausted even after you’ve “relaxed.” None of these things that mind built for us are inherently “bad” or “evil” they just cannot bring the true relief that you are looking for. Once you understand that, you begin to rely on them less. You might watch truly great shows on television, ones that uplift or teach you, but you will no longer watch TV just to watch TV.
Now, in order to free yourself from your sickness you need to begin to make gaps in that stream of thoughts. This is most urgent. It is absolutely essential that you begin immediately, with no delay. You should begin now, as quickly as possible and as often as possible. Make shutting off the mind the focus of your life in the near term. It’s only when you find the mind’s off button that you can begin to realize the true joy of being alive.
There are simple ways to turn off your mind. Start by focusing totally on the present moment. Accept completely the situation you are in right now. From there, resolve to go through it. Take appropriate action but create no more pain for yourself. Do not create new entanglements and obligations. Do not say the next sentence in the arguement chain with your lover. Do not dash around the highway madly, trying to get out of traffic faster. Be in traffic. When the cars stop, you stop. When they go, you go. Things become effortless. The next steps to take become obvious, as if the video game is playing itself. You know just when to turn the car, just what to say next.
The second method of increasing present moment awareness is meditation. Meditation is an essential life skill, even if you practice it for only short periods, like 15 minutes at a time. Set aside time. Answer no calls. Go away from friends and family. Sit quietly and rest your mind. Enjoy the silence. There is nothing to do or know or think about.
Another technique is to simply stop what you are doing right now and take a deep breath. In fact, whenever you begin any new activity, getting in the car, typing an email, washing the dishes, pause, take a deep inward breath and focus on this moment. This is what you are supposed to be doing. There is nothing else. The future is not here. The past it gone. As you do this more often, your mind will begin to let you breath. You’ll see that when you need a creative answer it will spring to life on its own and offer you help. It will tell you that it can’t help you if it’s off, but it is wrong. When your mind is at rest, there you still are. After it comes to life and helps you, lay it immediately to rest again, putting it down like you would put down scissors or any other tool.
As you learn to wrangle your mind and your emotions you stop creating problems for yourself. You will not schedule an activity every night of the week anymore. You will not volunteer for yet another party or get together that you don’t have the energy to deal with. You won’t care if you miss one episode of your favorite show. You won’t make a fourth or fifth phone call to a friend that day, knowing you are behind on twenty other things. You will not continue to debate the same points with your lover and think this time for sure they will understand me. The argument is endless. At any point you can put down your problems. They are ceaseless. They will be waiting for you again. You can pick them up again tomorrow but for now, be at rest.
Take a breath.
Embrace the silence.
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