Observing the mind

I had an opportunity a couple of weeks ago to view up-close the behavior of the mind when confronted with a glimpse of who we really are.

I attended a “salon” at the home of dear friends at which I was invited to present the main ideas in The Seer’s Explanation. I decided to invite my fellow attendees to suspend judgment and simply look out at life from the idea that the world behaves as if it is a reflection of our beliefs about and expectations of the world.

I didn’t get very far. Almost immediately several guests began to argue with me as if they had not heard my invitation to just take a look at that possibility.

I AGAIN PROPOSED THAT WE SIMPLY SUSPEND OUR AUTOMATIC REFLEX TO COMPARE A NEW IDEA TO WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW.

This, too, went unheard, as if the notion that one could just consider an idea without judgment was too abstract to even consider. And yet I know that these are very intelligent people. I was simply stunned by how quickly the evening which I had so carefully planned turned into a free-for-all.

The idea that the world behaves as a reflection is obviously a significant threat to the mind. Werner Erhard, the founder of the est Training, used to say that while the purpose of the mind is to allow us to insure our survival, in fact it behaves as it does in order to insure its own survival.

The Seer’s Explanation says that consciousness was, is, and always will be, and it says that consciousness, or conscious, aware energy, is what we really are.

From that viewpoint, we can begin to see that who we really are can’t not survive!

But the mind, or rather the coping mechanism that characterizes the mind, is what is at risk. And so it fights back against the (imagined) threat. I was told what else I should read – as if my ideas weren’t fully formed and informed – and I was assured that my critics were much better-read than I. Now, that last may well be true. But what these otherwise-well-behaved folks missed was the opportunity to glimpse a possibility that makes their carefully crafted and maintained coping mechanisms unnecessary. To paraphrase Carlos Castaneda, we trade the possibility of living in a magical world of continual renewal for our soft, boring lives.

It was a good lesson for me, and for others who know they are much more than “meets the eye!”