Dear Mind

As this journey through a second awakening continues, I’ve been sharing here and on social what I’m discovering and experiencing. One of the gifts (said with only a slight amount of sarcasm) of a spiritual experience is that it brings the unconscious into the conscious; what’s been secretly influencing in the dark into the light. My work this weekend was focused on bringing into the light the stories my mind is telling about the current experiences.

The mind tells stories. Especially about anything that feels painful. And a spiritual experience is always painful. The mind is just doing its job: to create a framework to attempt to understand a painful experience. This is a survival mechanism and an evolutionary trait. The mind is a problem-solving, meaning-making machine.

We’d like to think we are sane and rational beings. But look at how the mind can turn a piece of input and either twist into the shape of an ogre or inflate into a magical unicorn. The stories of the mind are consistently and shockingly wrong.

The mind will tell stories about the standard experiences of life. But something different happens in the mind during a spiritual experience. The mind can not comprehend it. So it treats it all as trauma and makes up stories about it. These stories produce an incredible amount of mental anguish. They are exhausting and constant. Thus, my motivation to divorce myself…