Mind Forming 101
The conversation on this subject started off from me (John) with musings but gradually morphed into input from a broader source. For those of you familiar with this kind of connection, you may recognize the difficulty; that is, losing track who’s doing the talking. I am working on myself to make the attribution issue matter less and less, and I hope the same is true for you.
It is helpful to me to just start typing out my thoughts on the subject, perhaps formulating a specific question, and this process “primes the pump” for my greater mind to kick in and flow. (More likely, that process removes the barriers that I naturally erect to the flow.)
This time I could feel my greater mind taking over the conversation, and turning the conversation in a direction I had not anticipated. I went with the flow, but after rereading the material the following day, it confused me, and I had to go back and seek further understanding.
Rather than subjecting you to the content as it first came through, I am sharing what I hope is a more coherent version that includes that further clarification.
By all means, do not believe any of this because it’s seemingly coming from another source (me or Me). Trust your own thoughts on the subject, and hopefully you will be motivated to share them as well.
DeMarco, Frank; Warren, Rita (2009-06-01). The Sphere and the Hologram: Explanations from the Other Side (Kindle Locations 1560-1564). Hologram Books. Kindle Edition.
Now, when the body dissolves and the spirit returns to us, the content of the mind goes with you. In other words, the content doesn’t get destroyed. But the mind itself is more of a habit than a living function, if you can understand that.
R: It’s hard to understand that the mind is a habit.
TGU: You are familiar with the concept of ghosts. You could look at the ghost in the bodily form as a sort of a habit of the body. It can’t eat, it can’t function – although it can touch things – but you understand, it’s more like a habit of the body than the body. The mind when it is divorced from physical associations that hold it into certain patterns – the neural synapses, the habits, the real, the actual connection with the body – is brought as a memory back to us. And so if you were then to talk to “me,” whoever “me” may be, when “me” is dead, it would have the same flavor but it wouldn’t be the same thing. Let’s do this way. Frank dies today; tomorrow you go upstairs to talk to him; you talk to his spirit through the habit system of his mind, but it’s not the same as his physically connected mind is now. The spirit’s the same. We’re not saying it’s a delusion, but you aren’t dealing with quite the same mind, any more than you can hear with your physical ears his voice, once he’s over on the other side.
(John)
From My Joint Mind
Imagine getting the United States Congress to decide by consensus and then act on any given requirement in less than one second. You would immediately say, “Impossible!”. Yet that is what your mind does, over and over every hour of every day. How did it learn how to do that?
When we want to go somewhere we get up and move, or we jump in a car, a train or plane. If we want to connect with others, we pick up the phone or we get on the net, and most of the time we don’t give it a second thought. We are aware of ourselves, our surroundings, others around us, as well as the means to travel and communicate. With that awareness, all we have to do is set an intention and take action, and eventually it materializes. Do you have to think about all of the details that go on from the point when you set the intention to go to the grocery store and when you arrive, other than perhaps the driving itself?
We take so much for granted: you have an intention to type this message, and the fingers move to accomplish it; or, you want to take a drink of water, and it happens seamlessly in parallel with whatever else is being attended to. If we had to consciously make every cell do its job, we would never make any action happen. All these decisions and events going on and we don’t even realize what we are learning or the value in the lesson.
Anyone who has had a stroke or a paralyzing accident can appreciate more fully than the rest the complexities of what it takes in this physical world to go from intention to action.
What almost everyone doesn’t appreciate at all is the bringing together of the many previously individual minds to make a choice or a decision in the first place. We don’t see our day to day lives as training our mind and all its constituents to work together, to make decisions, to learn that it can create action.
How do we really create the result of our intention? For the sake of thinking about this, let’s take two different perspectives. The first assumes we are physical beings in a physical world that has progressed (granted some might say retrogressed) over time to have humans with a capable body, brain, as well as many other developments, such as automobiles at our disposal. Some part of the body says, “I’m hungry!” And then the brain decides to tell the body to get up and go to the car, drive it to the grocery store and pick up some food. Growing up we learned the art of walking, driving, doing things, all as a result of our terrific brain and body. We might call it something mundane, like “functioning”.
Take an alternate view. This physical world is a construct of our minds, many other minds like us, and greater minds as well. Every moment, every possibility already exists and we are flowing our consciousness through or over a selection of elements to make those possibilities a reality, to bring them to life as an experience that becomes a part of us. Our minds, which exist beyond our bodies use that portion of its consciousness bound to the body to create and experience this reality. It’s a part of us because we made it, we created it from the inside out.
Which of these two scenarios is real and which is the illusion?
In either case, the process forms habits. That is, without having to micro-control the millions upon millions of events that have to occur, the intention and the execution just “happen”. If you are one that sees this as a purely physical event, you might believe you can trace the chemistry and physiology, the geology, the geography and the mechanics, including how man invented the automobile.
If you are a metaphysicist you might be able to explain how the reality came to be and how we experience it quite differently.
The important element here is that there is a habit that is being formed. This consciousness we call your soul, learns over and over and over again that a) it is, and b) it can. It can think, it can act, it can create, and it can do that in a way that can be a habit for eternity, well beyond the physical world.
This is so simple and so subtle at the same time that we simply overlook the fundamentals of habit forming, a very significant aspect of soul creating.
How many times have we heard that one of the benefits of being in this Earth physical reality is “delayed consequences”? That is the apparent time lag between our intention and the event. Why is that a benefit to our learning? What do delayed consequences have to do with mind forming?
The illusion of cause and effect provides to you a certainty. You have no doubt that your intention resulted in an effect. Your intention became an action (even if it was a thought creation), which is then sensed by your physical being. That is a habit that reinforces you being you. For the sake of this “learning” or “mind reinforcement” it makes no difference if you take the physicist or a metaphysicist viewpoint. There is of course irony in the fact that cause and effect are not at all what you think they are, but that gets us back onto physics and metaphysics again. Delayed consequences enable a feedback mechanism that allows you to reinforce your own way of being.
We have said the mind is a habit system. We didn’t say all potential functions were possible, like a paraplegic running a marathon; or that all habits were productive, like blocking guidance with beliefs that it is not possible. What we said was you form your habits and those habits reinforce your being, whatever the characteristics of that being are. The system of delayed consequences is an enabler to reinforce to the mind that it has function; that it has perspective. The formed mind doesn’t only think, but it thinks from a unique vantage point, based on constitution, time, place, circumstances, accumulated experience and knowledge.
Your mind is being exercised, it’s making choices, it’s thinking, it’s forming a perspective, and it’s knowing naturally that it can do that. Now you might think that isn’t much of a feat. But now consider that your mind’s starting point was many, many minds previously formed in their own time, own place, own circumstances, all different. Throw this enormous committee made up of “minds of their own” into a new life with an ego as an externally oriented conductor.
The ego says, “Hey all, we’ve got to make a decision here. Form an opinion, create a thought, take some action!” And the committee responds. Very quickly. Repeatedly it is called upon to function, and it responds, and eventually it gets into the habit of being and functioning (in most but not every instance).
You don’t even notice it, yet we are always a little awestruck.
Via John
For much of my life as a scientist and engineer, I’ve depended on inspiration to get to the heart of the matter without having any idea how so; good decisions arrived without my brain being capable of knowing the details. Then, a while ago, began noticing a curiosity. I’m bald and my wool night cap serves well. Given my age, I typically must rush to the toilet in the almost dark and the cap goes wherever. When I return to bed, my arm quickly and seemingly automatically stabs the cap behind me, under the pillow, on the blanket almost anywhere on the bed, or on the floor and regardless of the darkness and where I end up sitting. How does it know? Once I noticed this happening, I began to notice similar knowings popping up all over. For instance, almost as soon as I get the urge to find an object, my eyes tend to focus on it, even on a cluttered table and situated where I’d never seemingly have guessed.
After lonely a little awareness tuning, it has become clear to me (and reportedly many others) that thoughts, knowings if you will, bubble up and pop into the brain and are only afterwards captured in words and various other brainy ways, mostly clumsily. For instance, Mozart reported that whole symphonies would instantly pop into his awareness in their entirety without any apparent serial order. Later he would need to laboriously transpose those knowings into scores.
Jane Roberts’ Seth describes this knowing process in some detail and said that this is the way All That Is thinks, that each of us little beings in some way are inseparable yet individual sources of experience and creativity in constant touch with All – Thou art That. My conclusion: each being, each point of awareness and thought, is lived by the All Knowing.
My present understanding is that we grok things (right-brain, holistic. gestalt) and then have to translate it (left-brain, sequential, detail-oriented). That seems to go with what you’re saying here. BTW there seems to have been a scramble in your note. What did you mean to say, instead of “After lonely a little awareness tuning”?
Dan, what you said reminds me how smooth the process is, and and it often goes completely unnoticed. First, I had to make the leap to recognizing thoughts were not originating between my ears. Then I began to be more receptive to them coming from a greater part of myself. Then it became even harder to put any name on them.
John
I have often read from Yogis that there is the habit mind which I believe you are referring to here that makes automatic responses easy and our greater mind which attunes to the vast aspects of our being and guides us or ties us to our more cosmic aspects; a mind that can enter a bird in flight or a blade of grass. This mind is tied to our creative work and isn’t limited. It can travel through time. Does this mind join us also in the beyond life? Any thoughts on this?
Louisa,
In my opinion, and experience so far, there really is only one mind, even though our awareness limits us often from experiencing it that way. It’s only our beliefs that get us thinking of ourselves or sub parts as separate.
John
And then, on top of all this, I think about how connected we all are. I woke up this morning thinking about the mind as habit and pondering what all that could mean. I pick up Rita’s World, and that’s what she’s talking about, and I get your post in my email box. Bigger committees!
I’m nuts and bolts, probably with emphasis on nuts. I set out to grasp the how of healing, asked “the other side” for help, and got blasted with synchronicities beginning with the instruction that I need to break down the barrier between this side and that. Monroe was quit helpful, body asleep and mind awake. So did qigong, actually nei gong, with body relaxed and flowing, but with a diferent mind sense. Master martial artists are adept at moving their point of awareness, some call it their witness, their “camera” if you like, around in their bodies, which is not difficult to learn, actually surely remember. As Bob insisted, “You are not your body!” I’m now finding it increasingly easy to move across by simply relaxing and shutting my eyes. Almost immediately the energy buzz starts and I am lucidly wandering in a hypnogogic, dream world. One of the deeper Transcendental Meditation practices is to watch your thoughts arriving in bursts before they are transformed to the usual brain forms, which I learned way back in those sixties. Those traveling on the other side tell us that communication there take this form, which out-of-body traveler Kurt Leland calls an energy information packet. This I find to be true with my communications with “the other side”. Insightful knowings simply burst into awareness. Telepath, which my other and I are perfecting with each other, has this form.
A new skill is now appearing. The other night, I had fallen asleep after and was (dreaming that I) was sitting in front of a teacher with a folder of large work sheets of some sort on his lap who was discussing them with a student on his left. To me the sheets were upside down. There were what seemed to be Latin letters and other symbols here and there, but I couldn’t make sense of them, Somehow, my body began to awaken and I began to tell my wife in the other room what I was seeing. The “other side” image stayed bright for several minutes until I decided to wake up.
The difficulty that I and I suspect from my reading we all have is that those energy information packets are so dense with information, so complex, that they are generally far, far beyond our abilities to capture in brain constrained forms, words if you like. This has surely been my experience. “A map is never the territory mapped”, but almost always a grossly simplified abstraction, a metaphor that may miss the point entirely. I conjecture that we, over the long ages, have learned to capture and communicate insights quite well by in person “word play” with those with whom we are closely connected, as Wittgenstein described it. I have a lot of distrust of the printed or electronically broadcast word.
I stated talking about healing. I think I’ve been taught a larger one. Dean Radin and Lynne McTaggart have described how there is much more solid scientific evidence of psychic abilities than most of what passes as scientific truth. We each create our worlds, as Frank’s GUS have told us over and over again. I clain that that “I” which is so capable is that watcher “I”, that consciousness that remembers who it is in essence, not the one that is buried in beliefs. As the Buddha pointed out, the ego “I” is nothing but a pile of beliefs and habits. Seth said that this flow of creative energy is broken into mindless, distracted counter currents by these barriers. Hey, isn’t time we awoke to that wonder that we truly are?
Don, this sounds like the gist of a fine post, which I will post if you will write it.
Don, thank you very much.
You have said it nicely more than once, and describing it for everyone to understand ! Of course there is “nothing new under the sun” (the old saying). It is a title of a novel done by Agatha Christie (the famous, and excellent, late English crime-author) once upon a time as well.
“We are all in the same boat together”.
btw: Please, I wonder if you have read the very old book (one of the classics in theosophy) titled Through the Curtain ?
Two ladies, Viola Petitt Neal, Ph.D, and Shafica Karagulla,M.D., did the very same research as Frank and Rita did. Though the two ladies were more doing it in the same manner as Edgar Cayce in their works. Viola Petitt Neal sleeping while Shafica Karagulla sitting beside her bed and tape-recording the material (asking questions and taking notes while the other sleeping).
I have the particular book translated into Danish. Hm, wonder if to have told about it once before ? Hopefully not to become senile…on the other hand…I do believe it is about to change the focus “elsewhere.”
B&B,Inger Lise
I have developed a hunch that the only people who worry about becoming senile are those who aren’t. I wouldn’t worry much about it, if I were you!
I am thanking you from the heart for the encouragement Frank, and I will try to recall it (hopefully that is)! But I cannot find the funny “face-icons” at the website here…that`s too bad.
….or else I am working with keeping up with the high spirits (hard as it is).
As usual am reading 4 books simultaneously, and here comes something from a book titled: “The Journey Home” by Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. (he died last year, 71 years old, and he was a Acim teacher) from the chapter called “Lifting of The Veil”… and it is on page 458 (a rather heavy book):
“There has been much confusion about what perception means, because the word is used both for awareness and for interpretation of awareness. YET YOU CANNOT BE AWARE WITHOUT INTERPRETATION, FOR WHAT YOU PERCEIVE IS YOUR INTERPRETATION… BELIEF DETERMINES PERCEPTION…” (the sentence underlined in the book).
It continues: “Yet different experiences lead to different beliefs, and with them different perceptions.For perceptions are learned WITH (underlined) beliefs, and experience does teach.”
And on page 459,
“Perception has a focus. It is this that gives consistency to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly.”
Hm, well, it is the same as what Seth says but without the biblical references.
btw: OH MY ! It is absolutely a fantastic winter-landscape outdoors today, a winter wonderland… the sun from a blue sky and the pristine snow-kept hills and trees. And the neighbours’ kids with the skiing and snowboardsup and down the hill crest.
Sometimes it is Heaven in the world (small pockets in the earthly atmosphere).
Bliss & Blessings, Inger Lise.
I would say your winter wonderland is a good example of how beliefs focus perception. I’m sure it’s beautiful, but I hear “cold!”
🙂
BTW to make a smiley, hit colon : minus-sign or hyphen – and end-parens ) then hit enter. You’re welcome. 🙂
Inger Lise, your comments and my thoughts seem to be in alignment. I just sent a new blog to Frank that has been developing for a while and an important piece is how we change ourselves with our will and beliefs. Thanks to you for sharing your mind with us!
John
A very interesting series of comments as well as Frank’s apropos setups. Thanks John and all.
I read somewhere that a experienced OOB realized he was creating his own reality on the other side as well, as have Frank’s TGU repeatedly. Thus, we create after death heavens and hells for ourselves that we construct from beliefs and habits. The question underlying all of this is “Who am I?” It seems to me that a tight little community can form an “I”. The “I” that creates the incredibly complex natural world that is experience is, it appears to me, the imaginal creation of all composite “I” consisting of all the being present. I can assure you with volumes of examples that we are not separated – think telepathy if you like. What Seth says about myths and Jung about architypes is as surely true upstairs as down here; that is they have characteristics of beliefs and habits and can bind the flow of creative energy.
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Koh is not an easy read, but quite mind opening. Kohn describes thing as a continually recycling three step process: perception of pattern -> insightful knowing and imagined response -> creative action (my interpretation, of course). The first arrow assigns meaning to the pattern. Sometime later, I learned that Seth described this as the way All That Is thinks. This essentially describes the “inner game” practice. It does give rise to an interesting mindfulness practice that knocks verbal interpretation on its head.
Seth describes two frameworks that typically bracket human thoughts. The first is that “Modern” one prescribed by “correct” language, proper behavior and styles, cause and effect rationality, and lawfulness. The flowing motion of an end-the-zone athlete, hunting hawk, or forest is the second. He tells us that there are a multitude of possible frameworks, that he can easily pass between many, and that we humans will never escape either, but can be much more proficient and active in one. I think of them as somehow generalizations of languages and culture each with particular shared patterns and meanings. Framework 1 packages our present problem: Reality is simply too complicated for rationally capturing it and we are left with arbitrarily picking and choosing and making do, which is not working. We hardly notice inspirations and are constantly pushing strings. This feels right to me.
Seth speaks of myths, as I read it, as frameworks in a vast sense constructed “up there” to guide us down here. It appears that a Framework 2-like myth is being implemented as we speak not only for we humans, but for the natural world and the Earth itself. Lots of personal experiences come to mind.
I likely could have found all this in Frank’s writings, all og which I believe I read not long after they were published, Seth’s massive stack of material is far harder to grasp. Yet, My Guides Upstairs have been pointing at Seth and related material from and leading me through it from the seventies, without me understanding much of what I was reading. I was too busy and scattered. Little by little, pieces fall into place. Rita has been a great help, but wish she’d been on the other side years ago.. That’s just the way it is
Shri Ramana’s heart-centered contemplation of “Who am I?” attracted me way back in the sixties and a stream of inspirations have resulted, most of the designated actions I interrupted as not being sufficiently proper or rational. That mindset is now changing rapidly.
Very interesting. Any time you’d like to write a blog post. Don, I’ll put it up as I have with John and Jim.
Thanks, Frank, for the offer. But, when will there be time? It is raning on the West Coast and what energy I’ve got left is gong into planting fruit and nut trees – 20 at last count – and kiwis, digging potato and onion beds, and misc. other gardening – essentially living with the living Earth. I was 80 the end of the year and taking time for writing and even reading is becoming a burden, so I generally I don’t. It’s all same old, same old anyhow, I did happen on something last week that blew me away the other day that I must drop on you when I get time and energy. Don
Well, the offer is open, in case some rainy day you get the urge. The difference between you and me apparently is that you have a life! I had one once, it was a lot of trouble! 🙂