School of Awakening: Become Free from the Overthinking Mind (Part 2)

[Music] what else is absolutely essential that you don't learn at school well it is uh also connected with awareness and that is awareness of your thoughts if you do not learn that you can be aware of your thoughts then you are trapped in your thoughts and by your thoughts and uh that is the fate still of many millions of humans on the planet uh the they are so identified with their thoughts that that's all they know of the world and of who they are so there is a dimension of consciousness in every human that is

beyond the thinking mind and why don't they teach that at school it's so basic and simple you can think a lot of the time you think many humans think almost without interruption they have a voice in their head that never stops talking in other words thinking and yet there's the possibility of realizing another dimension of consciousness that's one could say it's behind all your thoughts or it's a canvas for your thoughts or can say it's the space in which your thoughts arise and into which your thoughts subside whatever you call it it's the dimension of

awareness or presence and we live in a civilization that has been one could almost say completely taken over by thought by mental concepts and there's been a loss of the tragic loss of that deeper dimension that is in every human being in that sense it you do not need to achieve it you only need to discover it there's a big difference between achieving and discovering to achieve something you need time obviously but to discover some discovery is of something that is already here so you discover that dimension of consciousness in you that is awareness in

between two thoughts for example at this moment when i stop speaking and then i speak again so there was a gap and that gap was you were just aware and it's happening again in that gap if you are alert you are not thinking in these these gaps you notice you're conscious but you know there's no conceptualization and again now and this is so natural and so but so vitally important to have to be in touch with that dimension to be rooted in that dimension it's amazing that it is not common knowledge that that this is

the most vital thing that there is in any human life the great teachers pointed to it it's the the emptiness of the buddha the kingdom of heaven of jesus that is within you here now different words and it can happen naturally it's perhaps more likely to happen when you look at something natural again a tree the sky in the first moment of looking at the sky in the first moment of looking at a landscape or at a tree or the flower you may find in the first moment of looking you are not conceptualizing it there's

two or three seconds when there's just sense perception and an awareness of the sense perception look at this guy two three seconds then usually the mind comes in and says something about it it conceptualizes it that's fine but kept if you can catch so to speak always the first moment when something arises in your senior sensory field sensory perception catch the first moment until then you will notice for brief two three seconds there's no conceptualization you're just there's a perception but what is behind the perception awareness the light of consciousness without which there would be

no perception so you whenever you look at something new or you pick it or as a sound that suddenly arises and you may not know what it is so you have to listen carefully a sound is arising the mind may want to interpret it but in order to first you need to be alert and listen and there's a sound and for the first two or three seconds the mind is not saying anything about it because it is only the perception of it then comes the interpretation uh now if you are completely trapped in the conceptualizing

mind these these moments are so short when you're just perceiving you're hardly aware of it and whatever you're almost immediately labeling it or you're not even aware of it or just peripherally aware of it because all your attention is absorbed by the voice in the head by the by mind activity so the there's a consciousness you are this consciousness the consciousness gives rise to thought in the same way that the ocean gives rise to a wave and that's fine it's been it's an incredible thing that conceptualization happened in human beings it was a an evolutionary

step forward but there's great danger associated with it and the danger is that you lose yourself in it there's a power that came with focused thinking is a great power being able to memorize and anticipate and all these things are amazing we could make amazing things then science developed just as an extension of the of the human mind the focused application of the human mind and that created new incredible things but then uh the something dangerous happened we we got increasingly we got taken over by that which ultimately is only an instrument and we got

taken over by it completely so that many humans are basically uh imprisoned imprisoned in their minds which is a conditioned mind which is all the content of your consciousness conditioned of course by the past and most humans are still completely imprisoned in that so you derive your identity from the movement of thought so you don't know who you are beyond the move whatever thought is telling you about yourself whatever the story of you is telling you about yourself that's where you derive your sense of self from that's normal in this world but it's extremely limiting

and then it happens that quite often uh certain thoughts invade your mind can easily happen so you your mind becomes colonized by certain thoughts that take over sometimes almost the totality of your mind obsessive thoughts it can happen to individuals where your one obsessive thought suddenly takes over and then you perceive the whole world through the veil of one obsessive thought which has all the answers but it can also happen to collectives it can happen to a collective civilization that collectively certain thoughts arise in the collective and they invade every individual's mind and take over

the way in which you perceive they perceive the world that can that happens for example with totalitarian regimes when wonderfully described in the writer who took it to an extreme or orwell described in 1984 where you get completely taken over you have a thought police uh you're only allowed to think certain things it's a collab collectively the collective mind becomes completely uh possessed by certain thoughts now thoughts are lit it's perhaps helpful to look at thought as they are little beings they are energy forms everything like you are and everything is an energy form and

thoughts that arise are energy forms imagine them as little little entities you can't see them they have a relationship with your physical brain but you you can't see though their little entities that arise and there they come and one entity can act like a virus acts on a physical level which can invade the body and take over the body and live there as a parasite can even kill the body if you can also have a mental virus that enters your mind and then begins to proliferate and create thoughts that are in alignment with those with

with one central thought which may be a total to read delusion but you have one central thought attracts other related thoughts and you have suddenly you grows this you have a viral infection on a mental level now this can happen to individuals in one case and when when it when it reaches a certain point this infection of a mental virus can be recognized as clearly disease a disease in insanity when it's but until it reaches this point in an individual we may not even recognize it as a mental illness met complete mental dysfunction they need

to reach a certain point in the against analysis when you listen to this person saying let's for example in the case of paranoia then everything's in interpreters as enemies are everywhere they're following me they're listening to me they're listening devices and they're going into my mind and the entire world is conspiring to to destroy me and follow all these it starts with one thought and then if so your mind gets totally infected by the thought this can happen to an individual it can also happen to a collective when the minds of millions of people or

whatever number it may be become taken over by certain thoughts viewpoints or opinions and sometimes they can be very much divorced from anything that's real any reality but once you've taken being taken over you don't even know it you cannot nobody can question it because you have you are not really there anymore only the conditioned mind is there pretending to be you and so you cannot question it if you believe uh if somebody came to me with a delusion and said they are what's what's a common delusion uh i am i am napoleon so their

mind has been taken over by a delusion um i wouldn't it is not wise to tell this person this is a delusion you are not napoleon or um it's better to just to be present and to listen to that person ah not to say yes or no just listen that's how you experience the world and it may be possible to uh connect with that person so that a little bit of awareness comes in then that there's a possibility of healing and a little bit of awareness comes in but if you deny a delusion then there's

immediately a disconnection so i don't talk about things that i perceive in this contemporary world as collective delusions there's no point the most important thing is to bring about the discovery of the dimension of awareness in humans and then that is how they become immune to the viral infection on a mental level so the only way you can become immune to being infected by all kinds of strange thoughts that come at you in these days through the devices that you have the media mainstream media social media and all these kinds of things or we are

being flooded with thought forms continuously if you're not careful i highly suggest you reduce the amount of time you spend there and look at the plant instead or the sky so the immune the immunity the only immunity you have is awareness so that you're not taken over by thoughts and the otherwise the the ability to think even although you're still thinking about the ability to think rationally and it diminishes the more you get taken over by by dysfunctional mind patterns you can no longer deal with situations rationally and so you're on a downward slope so

the important thing then is the realization that apart from thinking there's something more vital in you and that is the dimension of awareness of presence from that dimension you can know what your mind is doing and the likelihood that you that you get taken over by certain thoughts decreases the more where you become you still have thoughts of course you still have opinions which are thoughts you still have viewpoints political viewpoints whatever viewpoints you still have viewpoints but this but they do not give you your sense of identity anymore they are viewpoints and you may

believe that this is the truth when the other viewpoint is not true but your identity is not no longer invested in it your sense of self because your sense of self is shifted to awareness you are consciousness and then you know the other the other human who holds a different viewpoint is no longer your enemy because your identity is not derived from your viewpoint your opinion your thoughts if your if your thoughts give you your identity then others who hold opposite thoughts or very different thoughts become your enemy it's it's mad but that's how it

is it's the basic human dysfunction which operates on a personal level and on a collective level so the most vital thing that to learn which again should be the very foundation of all of everything that is done at school is that there is this dimension of consciousness in you that you can access and discover you can access it by becoming alert and observing your thoughts because i'm aware of frequent thoughts that frequently go through your mind but most importantly becoming aware of yourself as conscious presence rather than as a mind made entity so very often

the practice to be engaged in is to realize that a lot of thinking that happens in your mind is not only unnecessary some of it is necessary and great but a lot of it is not only unnecessary but is actually destructive to your health your well-being your happiness a lot of thought is destructive of happiness of well-being of your ability to feel alive with your ability to feel joy your ability to be creative a lot of mind activity is destructive that so whenever you you're engaged in worrying boring boring is completely purposeless nobody has ever

found a solution to a problem by worrying about it boring means that you don't even want a solution you want to worry but when i say you at that moment you are your mind the mind has its momentum it will momentum wants to carry on the worrying thoughts don't want to seize you they don't want to die they want to continue to be worrying thoughts so or other destructive thoughts when you have very you're deeply negative let's say you are trapped in deeply negative thought patterns and every therapist knows that often in therapy you reach

a point where human being there's a possibility of going beyond and then the enormous resistance arises they don't want to go beyond because there's the the thought patterns are they don't they don't want to die if they don't they want to stay so boring destructive thoughts useless thoughts it's what it takes you come always out of the present moment that make it impossible for you to even appreciate beauty and aliveness around you that's always there so you you need to be have some minimum of awareness to realize that this is what's happening to you oh

in the middle of the night you wake up three o'clock in the morning anxiety rises why does it arise are you confronted with the problem you're in bed a relatively warm bed anxiety rises not being confronted with a problem but the mind is creating it the mind is creating the anxiety and so when you realize that you can then [Music] learn to let go of thought that you is recognized as not only unnecessary but actually bad for you and everybody else around you you don't want it you don't need it but it but it has

a momentum so how do you break the momentum of the thought it doesn't seem to want to get go away once you recognize it that you it has no useful function except to make you miserable so you've recognized it's this thought pattern has no useful function but it's making me miserable all the function it has it's pretending to be useful worry always pretends to be necessary but worry is not necessary it's unhelpful focused thinking you become still then you begin to think what is the situation what can i do about it this and this and

this okay if i do that focus thinking that's great worrying is something very different completely unhelpful and self-destructive once you've recognized it you become free by first by recognizing its dysfunctional nature then direct your attention elsewhere it's a conscious choice and that's that's is possible it's not that difficult so you withdraw energy from the thoughts and energy in this case is consciousness you you withdraw the life blood of the thoughts which is consciousness and you direct consciousness somewhere else for example sense perceptions especially things of nature or breathing you become aware of breathing and breathing

makes you aware of the inner body the the the alive presence that it pervades your body but the moment you become aware of your breathing you've taken the life blood from thought and place the attention the conscious attention into the inner body so you connect with the aliveness within and immediately the thought begins to subside it cannot survive if you take away attention consciousness from it it then will try many times it will try to get consciousness back and so it will come up again the moment you you you you lose connectedness with the inner

body or your breasts it will try to start up again and then you have to catch it again so you you and then you learn to keep thought at bay but not by suppressing it simply by being so alert and directing your attention elsewhere that it begins to subside so the vital practice is to keep thought at bay when you don't you real you recognize it as unnecessary dysfunctional and creating that it creates a lot of unhappiness so that's a wonderful practice just take your attention into your breath you breathe into the body and even

down to the abdomen and out and breath awareness means you're no longer trapped in your mind you have taken attention away from the mind simple practice of breath awareness and breath awareness can take you into body awareness and the two can go together the awareness of you you're aware of your breathing and you're aware of that your body is alive and that becomes a single thing the breathing and the awareness of the inner body and so and this when you discover that you have that power that that yeah you are more powerful than your mind

it's a wonderful liberation this is the discovery that that is not actually that difficult but you just have to know that you have that power to become free of dysfunctional thinking just breathe be feel and feel the aliveness that's who you are not the narrative in your mind that's consciousness the consciousness the end the intelligence that pervades your body that is consciousness that keeps the molecules of the body together for a while that's the consciousness that is a totality of who you are that's who you are not the story in your mind it doesn't matter

on the level of the story that becomes secondary you can try to improve your story that's fine make your life a bit better on the surface of things that's a good that has its place too but not to do ultimately to look for your ultimate identity on that level of this a better story that doesn't work your ultimate identity is here and now when you step out of the con the thinking mind but you don't become unconscious you become more conscious of the essence of who you are and become one with the essence of who

you are wow and so the the power of awareness grows in you it's so just big you become more aware of it the power of awareness of presence grows in you and then the you can still your thinking then becomes more constructive more focused and it's no longer the important thing i sometimes put it like this the mind loses its ability to make you unhappy the mind loses its ability to make you unhappy because then you realize a lot of your unhappiness did not come from the circumstances of your life but from the way in

which your mind the story your mind told to you about the circumstances of your life a great deal of unhappiness comes from the narrative in your mind and not from the circumstances and so that's enormous liberation if you've been out whenever you're unhappy right where does the unhappiness arrive where does it come from is it actually the actual situation or is it the story that i'm telling myself about it and in most cases you'll find it's the story the unobserved mind creates the unhappiness the unobserved mind creates the unhappiness the unobserved mind also creates what

we can call evil in this world because the unobserved mind is the mind of very unconscious people unconscious means the unobserved mind and the evil in this world is perpetrated by deeply unconscious people complete lack of awareness and so our we our step now is to go beyond the dysfunctional state of the humanity and so that we begin to awaken to that higher or deeper level of consciousness and the possibilities here now the possibility is here now because the if we don't awaken things will get worse and worse we have reached a critical point and

humans only evolve when they reach a critical point when there's no way forward in the old state of consciousness so change happens when it actually absolutely needs to happen and it needs to happen now and that's why it's happening you