Intro - The Forest of the Mind & The Mirror of the World

Hello, my friends!

Today I'm sharing a bit more of the Pathways in Consciousness course.

This is a portion taken from the introduction to Week 13, where we begin to extend consciousness into the mental space.

It's just a bit lifted out of sequence, as you'll see when you get to reading this. But it will offer a proper introduction to my shares throughout the coming week.

I hope you enjoy!

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"Hello and blessings, beautiful beings!

Thank you for joining me for Week 13: Clearing the Thought Trails.

Over the last three months, we’ve been building up a foundation to this point.

Attending, in turn, to breathing, emotional processing, mindfulness, acceptance, and reclaiming personal power.

Now, we explore the art of vision.

This week, we’ll be focusing on the tools you need to refine perception, cultivate clarity, and build a conscious relationship with your stories.

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We use stories to make sense of the world.

And we perceive and interact with the world that we have constructed in our story.

“Reality is constructed in the ajna.”

This is from the yoga sutras of Patanjali, and it points to one of the most amazing qualities of the human being: we are the animal that dreams.

And, in our dreaming, we can conceive new vision.

And we can act in the world in alignment with this vision, creating in the world as the dream has inspired.

And story shapes and frames our creation of reality.

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This is not the first time you’ve heard this, in some form or another.

It’s an easy lesson to misunderstand.

It doesn’t mean that the world is any less real that it’s been this whole time.

But it means that much of our experience of the world is an internal overlay (interpretation) upon the actual experience (perception).

We’ve been taking the world to be as we have unconsciously interpreted it.

And, once we start to interpret a bit more consciously, we perceive a different world.

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This is a beautiful space to work in.

And it’s a challenging space to work in as well, because our unconscious stories have gotten rooted so deeply that they appear to us to be the nature of the world.

In order to refine the function of the mind, we have to root out blind spots.

Now, everyone, right now, whip out a pen or pencil, and make a comprehensive inventory of your blind spots…

And, if you can’t hear me, please raise your hand!

Lol.

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We can’t consciously inventory our blind spots. If we could do that, they wouldn’t be blind spots.

We are not conscious of our unconsciousness. ;)

So we can’t rightly just list it off based on our self-narration.

It takes a bit more reflection.

And reflection is exactly the principle that we’ll be exploring this week, as our experience of the outer world is used as a mirror to see more clearly the unconscious inner world.

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There’s this beautiful quote by Anais Nin: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”

The mind is a phenomenal aspect of human experience.

We can form inner visions, conceptual models that allow us to work in the world with great power and precision.

And we do this, unconsciously, throughout our whole lives.

Constructing inner visions based on our experiences, what we have learned, how we have come to understand things, the emotions we remember in connection to them.

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This is a beautiful ability, when used consciously.

But the strength of our inner vision is such that it can blind us to what is happening around us, without us even realizing that our perceptions are out of sync with our experiences.

We tend to see in the world what we expect to see, and if we don’t stop to think about it, we just react along with the script.

So the first step is to cultivate awareness around our existing stories, and to enter conscious relationship with them.

And the next step is to learn how to swim in the sea of vision and information, clearly attuning to what you need when you need.

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This is a big journey, because you are incredibly powerful, and because you have the ability to attune to any bit of knowledge or any vibration, anywhere.

The whole spectrum of all potential thoughts and experiences.

The mind is often thought of like a bottle, but I see it more like a lens.

It’s not that you have to put things in there (bottle), but that you can use it to focus on specific thoughts, ideas, stories, and relations that exist within the realm of thought (lens).

The mind is an organ of perception that roams through the field of consciousness.

It is a deep and exacting journey to learn to purposefully move through this space, attune to specific knowledge, and learn to trust what arises from within.

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And, before we can get there, we need to do some housekeeping.

It’s time to review your thoughts and words, so that you can cultivate a more conscious relationship with what you know, with your stories and ideas and view of the world.

When we’re not conscious of our stories, we unconsciously perceive the world in a fixed manner that may or may not reflect what’s going on.

Simply: Fixed interpretation introduces distortion.

Fixed unconscious interpretation introduces unconscious distortion.

Which means we will not even be aware of our tendencies to project, assume, or otherwise see what we expect to see.

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When we begin this inner journey, our thoughts are tangled and overgrown, linked together oddly and inefficiently.

As we go inward and review, spend time in contemplation, journal, and strive to communicate consciously, with right speech, we cultivate awareness here.

As we spend time stilling the thoughts by deepening our rhythm, we begin to move past the surface chatter.

And, from the place of the inner witness, we can observe our thoughts and actions, as if from a distance, and learn about this Being that we are now being.

Noticing the patterns of story and thought and refining, reconsidering, clarifying.

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It is a lifelong process to tend and cultivate your relationship with thought and knowledge.

And we are truly remarkable in our potential, as human beings.

Just consider the abilities of memory artists to remember long strings of numbers, and imagine that applied to arranging and recording the core insights of your life.

Said another way, what if you were always able to access the things that you learn, instead of forgetting them?

When we become more conscious in our relationship with thoughts, and with their interconnection and association, we find that we know much more than we ever realized.

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So, we have a few steps in working with the inner vision: first, clearing the thought trails and becoming more familiar with the inner space.

Learning to view ourselves from within, and reconsider in the moment, rewiring as we go.

And learning to attune the mind to a specific thing that we would like to know – and then actually receive this knowledge in terms that we can work with.

These are not easy steps, and they will require a deep level of self-awareness.

Which means that they will cultivate in you a deeper level of self-awareness as you retrain yourself in relation to your inner space.

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But, before we get into the nitty gritty of it, let’s call the very foundation of knowledge into question.

(Warning, we’re about to get pretty philosophical here.)

Some of the deepest shifts in the realm of vision come through the means of story, through a change-of-frame that shifts the meaning of something we perceive.

So, let’s turn this lens upon knowledge itself, and see how to stand in right relation with what we know.

Let’s look for a moment at the illusion of the objective world…"

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And, if that has you eager to hear more, I've got plenty coming.

Or, if you don't want to wait, feel free to reach out.

Thanks and blessing, beautiful Beings!