h8ful8, glad you liked my words, my wife and daughter are also scared of spiders, my daughter is only 6 so I don’t know if it’s social conditioning / learned behaviour or if deep down on some primal level she really does fear them. I catch spiders and throw them outside, I don’t kill them, so I thought my daughter would be less fearful seeing this, but she is still scared!!

Mike, you’ve written some very deep and profound stuff there, I think I like your interpretation of ‘on the edge’, an awakening/realisation/growth is about to happen.

I had to mental shifts of perception today which I would like to share. I was ironing new badges onto my uniform, which took a long time, then I ironed my daughter’s 4 cotton white shirts. An automatic thought popped into my head “damn, I’m sick of ironing now!”, (with the associated tension in the face), then pretty much a few seconds later another automatic thought came into my mind “I’m thankful that I have a uniform to put badges on, because it means I have a job” and “I’m thankful that I have my precious little girls shirts to iron, and I can put sharp creases in them to make them look smart”. This total shift totally changed my mood; it was free, easy and effortless, with massive benefits. I was also getting a drink in the canteen, when I noticed all 3 flavoured drinks dispensers were not working, the only one left was plain water. Again, the auto-thought was, “damn, why aren’t these working properly”, then a few seconds later “I’m thankful that I have clean water to drink”. I’m enjoying these auto-thoughts!!! The interesting thing is that external reality did not change, it was exactly the same, neutral, it was just my perception that changed, the cognitive lens through which I see the world.

Dear Anita,

Yes it was a unique experience and I felt I wanted to share it, because after that I felt a very deep inner joy, which from a cognitive perspective, like you say, created a totally unique and unprecedented experience or pathway, different to the same perceived repetitious daily routine, which is actually a constant stream of unique events, we just can’t see it properly. I have recently been reading ‘The Stillness Speaks’ which is part of the Power of Now Series by Ekhart Tolle. It’s really helping me to realise the chatter of the egoic mind is not really ‘me’, it’s just a stream of words and my mind has spent 40 years constructing what it thinks it is, identifying itself with what has happened, ‘my story’, but this is not me. I had read ‘the power of now’ years ago and it really had a revolutionary effect on me, but its effects wore off, which I can only put down to the world re-dominating my mind with its
‘shoulds / shouldn’ts’
‘likes/dislikes’
‘I don’t want to be here/I want to be there’
‘I need this or that to be happy’
‘I will be happy when….’
‘what can I do next to bring me closer to that goal’
‘I’m labelling that person with that label, and that other person with another label, they are now in a box’
‘this bad thing is happening or happened to me, it’s unfair, I want fairness and justice for this, the universe owes me’ (which leads to a underlying resentment to nothing in particular which bubbles under the surface).

It’s so easy to get caught back in that invisible prison of the mind, it takes a book like this to awaken you again, if awaken is the appropriate word.

I watched a very interesting programme on BBC2 ‘what’s the smallest thing in the universe’ and it was fascinating to see scientists trying to get right down to the sub-atomic level of matter, beyond quarks. It reminds me of a television screen; what we perceive biologically are images projected onto our retina through the iris, which obviously travel through the optic nerves to our visual cortex, but it’s actually just millions of pixelated coloured dots flashing on/off in a zero/one binary fashion at a tremendous speed. When I look out of the window, I see a view of some kind, but it’s actually a huge matrix of atoms. I think when my daughter is older she will laugh at how we managed with such slow computing/internet speeds, because possibly she will be operating quantum super computers. I also think those quantum super computers will be able to mimic human behaviour to a point where we will think they are concious. I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just rambling.

Thank you, I like the idea of a ‘theatre’ of the mind, I’ve often thought it’d be great to sever the artificial nature of who I think I am, and I have on occasion viewed my mind as something constructed, which lead me to the Way of Zen, and I have occasionally experienced the state of ‘no-mind’, but as soon as you realise you have experienced it, you want to grasp it (with effort) but as soon as you grasp, it vanishes, then whey you try to get it back you can’t, it takes no effort, but even putting in no effort is still effort! when I used to meditate a lot, I used to feel like I was in some kind of observatory, some kind of central control room, observing what the mind was doing but totally detached from it, like I was watching someone or something else, which in fact I was. I will look at the article, thanks.

I have been looking at this from all angles (I think), the neurological pathway side (neurons that wire together fire together) (the more we repeat a neural pathway the stronger and more dominant it becomes in the concious mind) and the spiritual side (yes I have always been guided to spiritual books like Paulo Cohello and The Power of Now and started Transcendental Meditation from the age of 14) (and I joined the church in 2008 because of the crisis I had but now only attend church now and again), I have come to the conclusion that my entire focus needs to be my daughter – obviously I don’t want to mould her like a piece of clay into what I think she SHOULD (hate that word) be, but I want to try and use all my anguish and mistakes to guide her, so that hopefully she will not make the same mistakes as I have, but therein lies the paradox – we read in the Bible for instance that it’s only by ‘Trials by Fire’ and ‘Tests’ that we are purified and made as gold. All the painful experiences I’ve had have made me more ‘impervious’ to pain than before, but at the same time I don’t want my daughter to go through the things I have, but then I want her to be a strong confident and balanced person who will make a positive contribution to society, people and the world as a whole, in her own way. From an astrological point of view, I used to very much believe in the Zodiac, and when I read about my own star sign (Pisces) I was shocked at how accurate the personality profile matched my actual personality (I’m pretty much a classic one). I actually used to wish I could escape from it all and become a Monk in a Tibetan monastery, and although I can see the positive benefits of it (I have also been reading a book called The Way of Zen which has been interesting) I am a man of The West and feel that I am supposed to be contributing rather than sitting in the mountains in contemplation, although I can see how tremendously beneficial that would be, but I do have responsibilities here that I can’t just walk away from. Thank you all for your advice.