Mind Control

I could have gotten into a practices to subdue any thoughts I had which told the story about “me”, by reasoning them away with my realisation that “me” didn’t really exist. Plenty of people do this because there are plenty of people teaching it. It’s mind control – it trains the mind to only think in a certain way and dismisses all other thoughts that arise, until they no longer are a problem.

For a mind that has been previously troubled it is a cool place to hang out. It’s certainly true that with inspection of the thinking mind that there is nothing of any substance to be found so the idea that thoughts are actually empty, can appear very real. The more the thoughts disappear the more you are left with the thought of “I am” in its root form, without any conditions attached to it. This is what we are told is at the essence of self enquiry but this is really just limiting enquiry and practice to a mental level. It’s not the complete picture and even Ramana, who taught to keep attention fixed on the root “I am” thought with enquiry of “Who am I?” also said that “Only after the vasanas have been destroyed can one attain liberation”. That’s quite a big statement in just a few words.

The tendencies we have are not just our mental thoughts but they are linked to our emotions and our emotions are mostly repressed, stored as energy in the emotional body. They cannot be removed by a mental process of quieting the mind by dismissing mental stories about “me”. As the thoughts are connected to the emotions, quieting the mind actually sedates the emotional body. With no thoughts arising there is nothing to stir up the dormant emotional energies. Life may appear very pleasant, calm and peaceful and certainly a million times better than being led around by a frantic, incessant thinking mind but in effect what has happened is a spiritual bypass. You don’t get enlightenment by thinking away the “me” out of existence just as you don’t get enlightenment by behaving in a loving, compassionate and ‘enlightened’ way. These are just concepts and mental fixes for the ego.

You don’t reach emptiness by finding emptiness in your thoughts and emotions. It’s like being parched on a scorching hot day with your body racked with thirst and every cell screaming out for fluid and then drinking from an empty glass. Mentally you may be able to reason away your thirst with the realisation that what you are feeling is just emptiness but sooner or later the body organism will win and drive you to the fullness of picking up a glass with real, wet water in it. Emptiness is not something you find but something which is revealed when you have gone through the fullness. Our emotional bodies are full to the brim of suppressed, unfelt feelings. All of them are just lying in a dormant state waiting for the invitation to be felt to their very fullest, allowing them to be expressed in the most vivid, expansive way. It’s a vibrant energetic process, not a calm sedate one. It’s about being awake, not sleeping.

Buying a spiritual bypass is not something I would recommend either but there are plenty of people selling it. Observe them for long enough and you may actually see the sleeping dog stirring beneath the facade they present. Buyer Beware.