Conscious Mindsets, Part One

March 5th, 2010 . Posted in Understanding Dualism | 4 Comments »

As you explore and ponder your pathway toward Awakening, it can be lots of fun to play around with different “mindsets”. Usually, we operate with a default, Unconscious Mindset, based on the Standard Dualistic Model of the universe. However, you can adopt a Conscious Mindset — a mindset that you create in order to ‘frame’ the world in a way that is more fun, more productive, or more compassionate — anytime you want.  Adopting a Conscious Mindset can take a little work, since we’re pretty conditioned to our usual view of the world. But if you wake up each morning and devote ten or fifteen minutes to reinforcing your Conscious Mindset, you can have some real fun with this. Best of all, you can use and discard mindsets as you would put on and take off clothes — one day you can choose one, the next day you can choose another. This four-part series will suggest four different mindsets and tell you how to reinforce them in your thinking. Of course, you’re free to create your own as well!

Also read:

Conscious Mindsets Part Two, The Tourist

Conscious Mindsets Part Three, The Magician’s Apprentice

Conscious Mindsets Part Four, The Adventurer

Conscious Mindset #1 The World Temple

In this mindset, we stop looking at the world as a place where we’re trying to provide for our own security or always trying to manipulate events so that things happen in a certain way. In the World Temple, you are a monk, and every experience and person is a teacher that can enrich our spiritual lives.

To create this mindset, consider that perhaps the meaning of life isn’t to acquire tons of stuff or to make things happen perfectly. Maybe the meaning of life is to grow and experience. Looked at this way, the world is a perfect temple, providing us with all sorts of fellow monks and various experiences to challenge us on our journey. You are a monk, and the world is your temple.

— Affirm each morning that you want to intentionally hold this mindset using the following thoughts —

Other people are my temple teachers. No matter what they’re like — friendly or mean, stressed or calm — they are teachers from which I can learn.  I don’t need to change anybody — I only need to observe them and see what they can teach me on my spiritual journey. If it seems that someone has nothing to teach me, I’ve missed the lesson that is hidden within them.

This point of view gives us a deep respect for others, and also helps us to increase our ability to recognize life lessons in others. Seen this way, someone who calls themselves ‘teacher’, and is willing to feed us lessons, is not nearly so great a teacher as the mean grocery store clerk who, like a wise Zen master, is making sure that any lesson we discover is found via our own inner wisdom.

Experiences are delivered to me in the temple in order to increase my spiritual understanding. I need not seek out happy events or disappointing events, since all events and experiences hold equal ability to enrich my spiritual journey.

This point of view allows us to see all experiences as equal. If we get in a car accident or our boss yells at us or we lose our keys, these are valuable experiences that we can approach with openness and curiosity. Likewise, if something very  happy occurs, this is not an experience to lose ourselves in — it’s an experience to observe with openness and curiosity. Nothing ‘bad’ can happen, since we eagerly open ourselves to every experience that emerges in our temple.

Developing This Mindset

This mindset can be refined and evolved if you choose to play with it for more than a day or two. It will begin to beg questions such as: “If I am open to every experience that emerges in my temple, why am I still seeking out certain experiences and avoiding others?” or “Why do I usually see other people as faulted when it is so easy to see them with respect and curiosity?” As you answer these questions for yourself, you’ll come to some interesting realizations.

Next time we’ll explore another fun and interesting mindset to play with. Until then, give the World Temple Conscious Mindset a try and see what transpires. =)

  • Share/Bookmark

Get Wild!

February 18th, 2010 . Posted in Nature | 12 Comments »

Often people ask what is the best way to achieve their spiritual aspiration. Should I meditate? Do yoga? Read self-development blogs?

My answer is usually this: Get Outside. The reason is simple. Humans don’t usually give good advice. It’s not beyond our capacity, but more often than not our advice is tainted by the particular biases and preconceptions that  have created our lives. It’s immensely difficult to correctly understand another person’s life situation and to give them truly valuable advice.

Getting out into nature is different. It’s just you and the woods (or desert, or mountain, or seashore, depending on where you go). Once you’re out in nature, away from the constant distractions and sensory input of cell phones, advertisements, televisions, traffic, and social demands, our minds have a chance to settle. Like a jar of dirty water that is let to sit, the impurities settle to the bottom and our mind takes on more and more clarity with each passing moment.

In this way, it’s not so much nature that is the teacher, as YOU. Nature serves to unclutter our minds, and our uncluttered minds can’t help but begin to exercise their natural awareness. As our natural awareness emerges, all the Zen nonsense about awakening will begin to come clear.

This is Wild Zen — it’s not about robes or chants or a certain number of hours of meditation per day. It’s the pure enlightenment found in birdsong and clouds. It costs us nothing except for the minor discomfort of breaking our usual routine and finding a tree to sit under. Sitting, our minds remember the ancient songs of wind and rain and living soil.

Take five minutes a day if you feel you can spare no more. Or, if the spirit strikes you, venture out into the wilderness for a longer time (after you’ve learned some of the basic skills of wilderness travel and living, of course =). The transformation will happen without any effort on your part. The thinking mind will quiet, and you’ll discover for yourself what dwells in the silent places of your mind.

  • Share/Bookmark

Farmville or Realville?

February 7th, 2010 . Posted in Quick Thoughts | 7 Comments »

A friend of mine has become a self-professed Farmville addict. In case you don’t know what that means, it involves sitting in front of her computer for copious amounts of time as she tends her virtual farm. She plants crops, raises animals, and builds her farm – even though all of her crops, animals and buildings are only composed of electrons.

Some of her family and friends feel that this is a waste of time. Instead of spending time in “real life”, she spends all of her time in a make-believe world. Instead of real dollars, she’s concerned with Farmville “coins”. Instead of real soil, her crops emerge out of imaginary soil. Instead of real problems, she’s dealing with fictional problems created by the programmers who made the game.

From my conversations with her, I think she feels vaguely guilty about all the time she spends in Farmville. “But it’s FUN!” she tells me, and guilty or not, she keeps playing.

Of course, the strange thing about Farmville is that it’s not all that different from another fictional game. This one’s called Realville. In this game, instead of real goods like food, players are concerned with fictional Realville “dollars”. Instead of emerging from real soil, players’ crops emerge from the Realville “SuperMega Grocery Store”. And just like in Farmville, players are entangled in fictional problems created by the programmers who made the game, and all of the crops, animals and buildings are composed of electrons. Of course, most of us are so immersed in Realville that we think it really is real, but just because almost every human on the planet agrees on a delusion doesn’t mean it’s truth. It just means it’s a very effective delusion.

This is one of the first teachings of Awakening – to stop and look around ourselves, to see through the illusion of Maya and realize that our world bears an uncanny resemblance to Farmville. Dollars have no real value unless you and I agree they do, and yet people starve and die for lack of dollars. Daily, we deal with problems that have more to do with human convention than with actual realities. We feel compassion for homeless people when almost all of us live in houses that could shelter many. Our SuperMega Groceries throw away boxes and boxes of food every day – not because it is rotten, but because it makes “financial sense”. All around us, if we stop to look with fresh eyes, we will see human actions that border on the ridiculous, and many of these actions cause genuine pain and suffering in others or in ourselves.

What would happen if we saw the nature of this Realville game we’re all playing, and began to question some of its rules? Does it really make sense to let people starve so that we can have more dollars? Does it really make sense to experience frustration and stress because the game isn’t going the way we want it? Or might we find a certain liberation if we recognized the workings of the game, and began playing with a sense of adventure and curiosity?

This is Realville. What will you make it?

A friend of mine has become a self-professed Farmville addict. In case you don’t know what that means, it involves sitting in front of her computer for copious amounts of time as she tends her virtual farm. She plants crops, raises animals, and builds her farm – even though all of her crops, animals and buildings are only composed of electrons.

Some of her family and friends feel that this is a waste of time. Instead of spending time in “real life”, she spends all of her time in an imaginary world. Instead of real dollars, she’s concerned with Farmville “BLANKS”. Instead of real soil, her crops emerge out of imaginary soil. Instead of real problems, she’s dealing with fictional problems created by the programmers who made the game.

From my conversations with her, I think she feels vaguely guilty about all the time she spends in Farmville. “But it’s FUN!” she tells me, and guilty or not, she keeps playing.

Of course, the strange thing about Farmville is that it’s not all that different from another fictional game. This one’s called Realville. In this game, instead of real goods like food, players are concerned with fictional Realville “dollars”. Instead of emerging from real soil, players’ crops emerge from the Realville “SuperMega Grocery Store”. And just like in Farmville, players are entangled in fictional problems created by the programmers who made the game, and all of the crops, animals and buildings are composed of electrons.

This is one of the first teachings of Wild Zen – to stop and look around ourselves, to see through the illusion of Maya and see that our world bears an uncanny resemblance to Farmville. Dollars have no real value unless you and I agree they do, and yet people starve and die for lack of dollars. Daily, we deal with problems that have more to do with human convention than with actual realities. We feel compassion for homeless people when almost all of us live in houses that could shelter many. Our SuperMega Groceries throw away boxes and boxes of food every day – not because it is rotten, but because it makes “financial sense”. All around us, if we stop to look with fresh eyes, we will see human actions that border on the ridiculous, and many of these actions cause genuine pain and suffering in others or in ourselves.

What would happen if we saw the nature of this Realville game we’re all playing, and began to question some of its rules? Does it really make sense to let people starve so that we can have more dollars? Does it really make sense to experience frustration and stress because the game isn’t going the way we want it? Or might we find a certain liberation if we recognized the workings of the game, and began playing with a sense of adventure and curiosity?

This is Realville. What will you make it?

  • Share/Bookmark
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »