| 
You should read Ouspenky's The Fourth Way...Very interesting theory of the human mind...According to Ouspensky, the human mind is composed of thousands upon thousands of little "I"s, each struggling to gain a foothold upon the the driver's seat of the human mind...You can understand how this might be when you promise yourself your never going to do something, like smoke again, and you are completely convinced that you will never actually do it again and can bring to mind all the reasons why you will never do it again and why it's such a good thing that you've quit...And then, when then the body starts sending signals to the mind...little thoughts creep in asking why you want to quit smoking...You can't remember all the good reasons...and, before you know it, little "I"s start telling you reasons why you should smoke and even why it's good to smoke and, boom, before you know it, you're smoking again....and suddenly all the reasons you wanted to quit come flooding in again and you feel like crap!...Just a case for the existence of opposing "I"s...Oftentimes these "I"s serve no purpose, appearing out of nowhere with certain external cues we are often unaware of...Some are connected to other "I"s from different "centers" of mental activity, whether physical, mental or emotional....According to Ouspensky, one may be able to create a ruling "I" which may result in a kind of center of gravity that attracts other "I"s of your "own" choosing, and together these "I"s are able to observe and study the rest in order to sort through all the various "I"s and, thus, keep and absorb the wanted or needed ones...Pretty wild concept...He had this experiment where you concentrate on "I" and say "I am here," without the actual words, of course, and attempt to stop your thoughts...Keeping only "I" in your mind, and suddenly you realize your thoughts flow randomly and by themselves...If you actually succeed in maintaining this "I" for any real length of time then you may experience a kind of internal illumination, as if someone has turned a light on inside your mind and you are entering it somehow...You realize that most of your life you are asleep, and the only real memories you have of your life are these brief moments when it seems someone has turned a light on in your past...Those breif moments of the past when you remeber details--sights, smells, sound, sensations, etc.---Those are the moments you were awake!...And so few!...It's amazing...Also, he alludes to the fact that the external world is coloured by thought and emotion and that certain what may be called negative thoughts may transform your experience of the world into something that is not so horrifying...Once you recognize that the negative sights and experiences you percieve in the world and people around you are nothing more than the "paint" of your own psyche, you can delve deeper into things to discover that you have repainted your reality into something more beautiful...The only way to do this is to not suppress your negative thoughts, but to experience the negative emotion and study it, live in it while letting you higher "I" take control of thought process (emotions move much quicker than thought and completely blind the mind in those moments of extreme emotion...other times negative emotions simply generate negative thoughts that have no basis for existence...It take a ruling "I" who is willing not to identify with these emotions to overcome them...They simply just dissapate...disappear)...That Ouspensky guy is pretty interesting...
"Each conscious mind is alone in the universe!"
|
