You said, “At different times, your mind forms a differently charged field, attracting different potential and thus effectively living in a different world.” I feel like I almost understand this statement as it stands, only, not really.
It’s simple enough. Spatially-oriented analogies leave the unnoticed impression of being more solid, more permanent, less volatile, than the reality. Beyond limitations, analogies often have unnoticed tendencies to distortion, and every once in a while it is well to have them corrected. Thinking of yourselves as charged fields will lead you to associations more dynamic, more transient, and just as effective and transformative as thinking in terms of physical movement. The idea of a polarizing or attracting electrical field will tend to have you thinking of attraction from various directions, directions that may change often and rapidly, rather than the somewhat straight-line movement other analogies suggest.
The field changes, and as it changes attracts different kinds of things, not merely different samples of the same kind of thing. And the very vagueness of my description here ought to show that I don’t really have a handle on any of it, just an inkling.
But you were moved to ask about it, so you aren’t exactly in the dark. More like in the twilight.
Leading me to think of the movie “Twilight,” and the fact that it did reminds me that our detours are as meaningful as our pursuits of an idea or an argument.
The interruption caused by using the word “twilight” served to illustrate a natural process of the mind. But, be slow to decide the implications of this. Give us time to explain without your pre-judging. Pre-judgment will result in your needing to revise your judgment or – much more seriously – will result in your being unable to receive what does not fit in with what you will have decided. (This is what prejudice does, after all; it defends against revision.) If you think of things one way, certain conclusions will suggest themselves so strongly as to be seemingly self-evident. Think of them another way, or a third, and what is self-evident may be entirely different. So it is important not to create unnecessary obstacles for yourselves.
First, here is our statement. Try to receive it neutrally.
As you process life moment by moment, your mind functions as a charged field, attracting certain objects of attention.
- The mind attracts certain kinds of thing, and the kind, as well as the specific content, can vary from moment to moment.
- Through interaction, the thing received and the mental state that had received it will alter. The mind will go on to the next “thing.”
- An uncontrolled process (“monkey mind”) will produce a long chain of associations without direction or purpose. The person living in monkey mind may have a very active mental life, but the mind’s contributions to the life would be mere chatter, sometimes entertaining, sometimes annoying, sometimes maddening, sometimes neutral, but in no case directed by the 3D consciousness.
- The 3D consciousness experiences the monkey mind in the same way it experiences the “external” world, as something that “just happens” for reasons and purposes unknown, by mechanisms unknown. The 3D person may seem to be a consumer, or a prisoner.
- Any day’s consciousness is a chain that diverges, slowly or immediately, as you choose among the bright shiny objects that present themselves. If you train yourself to think high thoughts, or to think low thoughts, the paths you choose in terms of relatively free association are going to be quite different!
- A word about “monkey mind.” There is nothing wrong with the mind functioning as an association-machine. That is how you get ideas, how you move into new territory. The “wrong” is in using a hammer as a screwdriver, or in letting a high-powered car drive itself. You are there to drive it. Do so.
Which means, I take it, choose what the association-machine chews on.
Well, in practice, isn’t that what you do, directly or indirectly? If you choose a movie or a book, or you meditate or go for a walk in soothing circumstances or surround yourself with raucous music, are you not providing alternate beginning-points for chains of association? Only, it may be done more consciously or less, and it is to your advantage to make it “more.”
Anything that gives us more control of the starting-point, or the volume-control, or the on-off switch, indirectly gives us more control of how we experience the external world, because the external world and our magnetized inner world are the same thing. Hence meditation is not a goal but a halfway house.
Clearing the mind is one thing. Trying to live with it empty would be another. Similarly, learning to recognize the association-machine is one thing. Trying to function without it would be another.
So, it isn’t a matter of “our” affecting “your” mental processes. We don’t force any card on you. Often we say, in effect, “Choose this thought; the resulting chain is better for you,” but nobody can choose for you. That is what you are in 3D to do.
Now perhaps you can see that your choosing is not among paths of action, but (usually) among paths of association of ideas. It is about what you want to attract to yourself.
If we choose different paths of mental association, the “external” world we magnetize to will be different. Just as Thoreau said in Walden: “I learned … that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him … and he will live with the license of a higher order of being.”
Yes, only now you have a way to see why it should be so.