The Difference between You and Your Mind

In the last post in this series we discussed the difference between feelings and emotions.  To summarize, a feeling is a direct sensation, or experience, that you have, like the sensation of flesh being crushed if you pinch yourself.  It is something that you experience with your senses, whether physical or non-physical.  An emotion, on the other hand, is a mental reaction to that sensation or experience that creates its own physiological sensations and can compound itself into an intense experience that is completely out of proportion to the triggering event.

We also discussed how you can’t change what you feel, but by becoming aware of your thoughts and mental reactions, you can change your emotions.  Before you can get very far with that though, you need to understand the difference between you and your mind.

If I ask you how you feel about someone, chances are that instead of telling me how you feel, you’ll reply with a story about what that person did and what you think about it.  Instead of saying “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside about her,” you’re more likely to say something like “Wow, she was really sweet to me last night!  I think she’s a really fantastic person!”  Or, instead of saying “I feel cold and tense inside when I’m around him,” you’re more likely to say “He lied to me and betrayed me, and I don’t trust him.”

Can you feel the difference?  In both cases the first answer is a real and present sensation in your body, whereas the second answer is a story about the past and a statement of the thoughts you are thinking about that past experience.  The first answer is a feeling, while the second answer is a mental reaction that has little to do with how you feel right now.  Let’s do a little experiment:

What does 2+2 equal?

Most likely you instantly replied “4,” but did you also notice the slight sensation, or pressure, in your head?

What does 27+19 equal?

Or 329+468?

Now can you feel the sensation in your head as your mind generates the answers?

Where did you go to school in the 10^th grade?

What is the capital of Denmark?

What makes you happy?

Oops!  What just happened?  Did it feel like a whole bunch of gears in your brain just jammed?  You might not have noticed, because the mind recovers quickly and now it’s probably pulling up a whole bunch of images of happy moments from your past.  But is it answering the question?  Or is it just giving you a bunch of possibilities to choose from?  Let’s try again:

What should you be doing?

Now what is your mind doing?  Did it reply with more questions?  Did it start running through all the things you could be doing and projecting their results into the future so you can decide which one is best?  Can your mind even answer that question?  Or is it simply presenting you with a selection of options to choose from?  What is the “you” that your mind is presenting those options to?

If the answer came clear, why aren’t you doing it?  Take a moment to consider that.  Don’t judge it; just allow the answers to come into your awareness.  Where did they come from?  Where in your body do you feel them?

How do you feel now?

If you hear a story, or a bunch of thoughts about what happened and why you feel, stop.  Take a deep breath, and feel into your body.

How do you feel right now?

Where is that feeling?  Where is the part of you that feels it?  What part of you is asking these questions?  What part of you is aware of what your mind is doing?

Now if you haven’t asked yourself these questions before, or maybe even if you have, your brain may be starting to hurt real bad right now.  Why?  Because it doesn’t understand.  It has always thought that it was in charge.  It thought that it was you, and now it’s having to face the fact that there are parts of you it doesn’t understand and that have answers to questions it cannot answer.

You see, your mind is not you.  Your mind is a tool that was intended only to manage your biological system and keep it functioning properly, to collect and translate data from your senses, and to translate your desires into physical action where possible.  You, on the other hand, are pure consciousness.

It’s a bit like your car.  Unless your car is very old it has a computer, or an electronic brain, inside it.  That computer takes input from many different sensors and uses that data to keep the engine running efficiently and to provide the right amount of power when you request it.  As cars grow in technological sophistication their computers (minds) are taking control of more and more functions, but no matter how sophisticated they get, that computer cannot replace you, the driver.  Even if it could steer the car and handle every other aspect of driving, it would still need you to tell it where to go.

Your mind is like that computer.  It does a fantastic job of managing all the complex biological systems of your body and of a nearly infinite variety of details that make life on Earth possible, but it still needs you, your soul, or sprit, or consciousness, or whatever you want to call that higher part of you, to tell it what to do.  But your mind doesn’t know that, for through eons of training it has been taught to believe that it is the source of your intelligence and even of your beingness.

How and why that happened is a story for another time.  The important thing here is to understand that you are not your mind, and to begin the process of returning your mind to its rightful place as your eager servant, rather than as your desperately inadequate stand-in.  How do you do that?  It’s a process, but the place to begin is to become your own observer.

Step back a little in your awareness and watch yourself.  Watch your thoughts, and your reactions to things that happen.  Pay attention to the sensations in your body, and to how they correlate with the thoughts you think and the things that happen in your life.  You’ll most likely forget to do this a lot of the time, but when you make a conscious choice to be your own observer it will start happening more and more.

As you spend more time observing yourself and your thoughts you’ll begin to see how they create your emotional reality, and that reality will begin to change and rebalance.  You’ll begin to feel more of yourself, and you’ll become aware of life at a level much deeper than you’ve ever experienced before.  You’ll soon know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is much more to you than anything your mind can explain.

As you become more aware of yourself you’ll also become aware of parts of you that you don’t like.  You’ll see the thoughts that are creating havoc in your emotions and how that carries out into your life, and you’ll want to drive them away and banish them from your mind.  This is NOT the time to do that!

This process is about awareness, not judgment.  Instead what you need to do is take a deep breath and step back again, and SIMPLY continue to observe.  Observe where those thoughts go in you, and where they come from.  Observe what they do in you and the emotions and other thoughts they spawn.  Observe the part of you that is thinking them, and why.  Don’t push for answers or for change; just observe.

Simple awareness is a magically wonderful thing.  Many years ago I became aware of several things about myself that I was not happy with at all, but they seemed so big that I had no idea where to even start with changing them, so I let them go and focused on the things I felt I could change.  Years later I was writing about change on a spiritual message board and I remembered those things.  I scanned my life and was surprised to find that every one of those issues that had seemed too big to address had simply disappeared and resolved themselves, while several of the “smaller” issues that I’d attempted to fix were still as big and ugly as ever.

In that moment I realized that trying to fix and change ourselves is counterproductive, while simple non-judgmental awareness allows change to happen spontaneously and effortlessly and in the perfect way and time.  We’ll discuss all this much more in upcoming posts, but for now just practice being your own non-judgmental observer and see what happens.

Update: After writing this post I wrote another in the Sacred Cows series that is very closely related to this one, and that goes into more detail about some of what we’ve discussed here.  It’s entitled Do Thoughts Create? and you can check it out here.