List of Health Practices

ow conditioned you are

mental environment

Chapter 12 SELF-EXPRESSION & THE MENTAL ENVIRONMENT

you can sit and be totally involved with your own mind and be totally uninvolved with everything around you, unaware of forces that are influencing you-forces that are helpful for you and forces that are not helpful for you. This is a profound disadvantage! This is why people are having problems. There is not a problem with reality, but there is a great problem with interpretation and self-absorption. At the very beginning of true learning, then, each person must become aware of their self-absorption-how much they are involved with their own mind and how little they are involved in life. Often it can seem very upsetting or disappointing and even insulting when you find out that you are actually experiencing very little of life and thinking a great deal.

When people begin to practice inner listening, the first thing they encounter is all these terrible things, these thoughts they could never think. "God, I had this terrible thought! Only crazy people think thoughts like this!" Or they have terrible images. "Oh, God! I am the source of these images! I must be an awful maniac!" Your thoughts reflect what you see outside, the best and the worst, the most loving and the most hateful. But your Knowledge is beyond all of it and you are not apart from God.

The world, like your mind, can be a terrifying place to be. Its appearances are frightening and threatening, and it is in chaos with great, insurmountable problems-just like your mind.

When you listen, you will hear things that come from beyond the web itself. You will realize, in time, that your thoughts and your thinking are no more than a web that you are caught in-a web of your own design, a web that you have designed with others and that everyone is designing and reinforcing constantly. But the web is transparent. You can see through it, you can hear through it and you can feel through it. But you must become very still to do so.

When you begin to listen inside of yourself, you hear the chaos of your own thinking and begin to feel your discomfort. If you are patient and observe these things without running from them, you will pass through them because they cannot keep you from what lies beyond. What keeps people from being free is not their external circumstances. It is their own mind and their own thoughts. They are prisoners to their thoughts. They cannot stop watching their thoughts. It is as if you were watching a movie on a screen and you could never tear yourself away. The screen then becomes ever more real to you, for you have no contrast. You have no experience to remind you that it is just a movie you are watching. As a result, it has greater and greater impact upon you, and you are become a more captive audience with every moment. These things which make you suffer, cause you pain and drive your behavior are only thoughts. They are vaporous things. They have no substance. But for you to look beyond, you must not be afraid of what lies beyond them, for what lies beyond them is a wellspring of tremendous love. What lies beyond them are your true Teachers.