The Gospel Of Me
“ It was like his thoughts were dipped in a belief sauce, you know? “
( Overheard )
We learn to Compare and Contrast from childhood. The more we use our mind to “C & C” the scene, the less we “see”. Our mind bores holes into reality, establishes what it “thinks” and re-presents its preferences and denials, its likes and dislikes, according to the Gospel of Me which states, biblically speaking:
“ Verily, Life is like unto the man who said unto himself: “ I shall go forth and build my house unto mine own designs for I know what is right and good. “
And so it goes; we “make up our mind”, overlay our designs on the world and create our reality. Or so it seems! Of course, we never have and never will remotely touch upon the maker of our mind using our mind. That’s because our mind-made Me treats both truth and lies as just differences of opinion about what happened, what will happen, and what’s happening now.
All this defies what we actually know. We perceive before we conceive; that is, if we can admit it to our self, we really know we don’t know what’s going on. That knowing is translated by our minds into fear and uncertainty, which of course leads us to establish appropriate beliefs that structure our experience and help us ease into things .That’s our human nature, our born nature, our second nature. Now let’s have a look at our divine nature, our unborn nature, our first nature.
“The highest to which man can attain is Wonder.”
Goethe
Let’s open our minds to this wonder, and explore the possibilities that only a sincerely open mind can approach. Let’s start with an admission, wonderfully expressed by the physicist Eddington:
“ Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Now that’s an opener! It also happens to be true. The open mind knows it knows nothing; it understands that it can chart, mark and measure ad infinitem and never describe a thing as it is.
The open mind is open to seeing its limitations.
“ Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, and remove what poisoned it – the idea of a separate and isolated person – you just leave it alone among the things for which it is well suited.”
Then thought becomes what it is – a useful fiction. We are free to delight in its inventions. Our paranoia with a mind beside itself becomes metanoia – the mind with itself, as Alan Watts suggests. Then, we are no longer like a galley slave chained to the oar of our mind. We can use it appropriately; we can be moved beyond mental understanding by releasing the mind; by knowing that what we are is much, much more than what we think we are.
That is the wonder!
