A thought.

Take a little trip with me.

Does the mind feel?

It thinks.  That’s how it experiences itself.

So does it, the mind, interpret the physical reactions of the body and try to describe the experience with no first hand knowledge of what it’s like to feel?  The mind measures and identifies with words it creates from sounds made by those physical reactions,  and gives the words their meanings so they can be utilized at a moment’s notice. The mind even attaches stories to those meanings. Some are stories that make you feel good, and some make you feel bad. Some take you by the hand through a dark forest, and when you finally get to the other side, the sun is shining and all is well. All feels good. If your mind could feel, it would like that result. All systems are a.o.k..

The world of feelings must be so alien to the mind. So difficult to understand, and understanding…knowing is the mind’s compulsion, it’s reason to exist: to do. How can it not know? How can it not measure and control, judge, amass and assert power and ascribe the most elaborate rationalizations to justify its need to do.

Feelings? The mind finds more stories than exist, more permutations in an effort to find a way to control those feelings. If that’s the only way the mind can ‘know’ those feelings, then control it will be. Anything to avoid having to experience something that even approaches that feeling of ‘not knowing.’

Enter ‘belief’s.

Belief is the mind’s answer to controlling what it doesn’t understand. How do you believe? ‘You just do it.’ Like in the Nike ad. Do what? Believe!! How?I dunno, keep saying it over and over and maybe you’ll begin to believe it.

Belief systems are a compilation of our history of story-telling distilled into tenets, or truths that you must either accept at face value, or dedicate your life and will to studying them.  That is the only way to believe and experience faith.

Or is it?

What’s faith?

‘It’s that feeling you get….’

‘Wait a sec…hold on…you’re talking about a ‘feeling?”

‘Okay, I won’t use the word,’feeling,’ okay? See, you get this sensation…’

‘Wait a sec…hold on… Isn’t a ‘sensation’ just a ‘feeling…?”

‘Shut up, or I’ll shut down!’

That’s the mind’s ace in the hole; shutting down, then it’s a hop skip and a jump to hate, greed, sloth…murder…sound familiar?

The mind cannot explain or understand the experience of faith. I mean, it can. It can explain what faith is supposed to act like, what it’s supposed to do, as the mind sees it.  It’s just that merely ‘being’ is an anathema to the mind. If it just ‘is’ then what does it do? It don’t do.

I learned a great meditation: ‘There nothing to do, nothing to change, everything is perfect just as it is.’

So, you guessed it…that takes us around and back again in this spiralling ride of life. Full circle.

How does the mind access faith?

It doesn’t. We do.

We have our consciousness that can watch our minds think, watch our selves feel every sensation  and emotion.

We can take that huge part of our brain that remains unused and use it to focus our minds from its witness, from its consciousness. Observe, not judge…and resist the mind’s need to say everything is so or isn’t so, is right, or is wrong, good or bad…and just watch your feelings as they pass by like leaves on a stream.

At some point, from your conscious place of awareness that is joined with all awareness of which all matter is made, you will experience and know when you experience it. You will ‘become’ the stream with the leaves/feelings floating on and through you. At that point you will know that  you have experienced yourself as the recipient of the entire ancestry of man because at that point, at that moment…you will recognize yourself in everything, and everything in  you. You will experience, as you have already experienced the love and peace and warmth, the connection to all that is. Call it God, Love, Truth, Beauty, it doesn’t matter. Whatever your belief system or religion calls it…isn’t important. Only that you feel it and understand that that is the only way you can ‘know’ it. That’s what we are here to do.

Experience it, ride it like a surfer on the waves, or an Eagle on the wind, fall in love, be one with it. That is our purpose. To sound, vibrate in, be with the harmony of the heavens, to be where thought becomes matter. Yup…at that very place, or ‘space’ as a friend of mine says.

Hope you’re having a good Spring.

pmg