Those of you who have been around here for a while and know how I roll, know that part of my life is exploring how deep the rabbit hole goes.
It’s “crazy” to tell a “normal” person that you do meditation and hypnosis a couple of hours a day because you perceive that world to be deeper than this one, but that’s the truth of how I live.
I’m not into wasting time reading the news or Facebook or some other crap that people waste their time on.
I avoid their programming. I’m into programming that makes my life better.
And I know that those of you who are serious about evolving beyond this monkey brain and body that we find ourselves shoved into feel the same.
So, I invite you to a game I’ve been playing with myself for a couple of months.
Many of you guys know this core question of mental conditioning, and once you get into this practice, you much more easily live it.
For those of you asking wtf is that question, think of it this way.
When you are hungry, who is the “I” that is hungry? You might say, “Well, the I is me, I am a biological machine that has an impulse to eat.”
True.
But, when you are hungry, who is the “I” that knows you are hungry? You know what I mean. Somehow you get that feeling in your stomach, and think “oh, I’m hungry.”
Who is that “I?” which all of a sudden becomes aware “you” are hungry? That part of your consciousness that before you were thinking about being hungry was consumed in some other thought.
In meditation you might call that part of you the “observer.” “You” are both the “experiencer” of your thoughts, and the observer, not only able to think, but to think about your thinking…
As you become experienced at watching your thoughts, you better distance yourself from them, learning through experience that you are not the body-mind. “You” are separate from the thoughts and feelings the body-mind is experiencing.
In hypnosis, you learn to call that part of you that can tell you to “get out of bed and go to the gym in the morning, lazy bones,” the controller. And, yep, “we” are controlled by it, or the existing programs (e.g. the hunger program) running in the body-mind machine.
In my favorite Eastern religion, the Vedanta school of Hinduism, “you” are referred to as “the doer,” or “the worm,” that thing that decays and dies. The other part of you that observes the “doer,” is called the “self.”
Christians might refer to “self” as the soul, but they’re all talking about the same thing: That spark of intelligence inside each of us, that appears to observe the monkey.
I had to set this up so I could share with you a cool exercise I suggest trying.
In keeping with the Vedanta teaching I call it, “The doer thinks.”
So, whenever, “you” catch yourself thinking some stupid thought. Like mouthing off an opinion about someone. Or wasting your time talking about the propaganda in the media. Or throwing some hissy fit about this or that.
Instead of saying, “I think,” you start saying “the doer thinks.”
This way, you are reminding yourself that “you” can always choose your thoughts. Irrespective of the past habitual thoughts and feelings that have been running in the body-mind machine, you can always choose new ones.
After all, it’s not “you,” or at least all of you. Just like talking to your dog, the doer is just an animal that operates according to its conditioning, and requires adult direction.
And by playing around with this exercise you are training that puppy to stay on its leash.
Geoff Blades Is an advisor to CEOs, founders, and leaders in all industries. He is the author of Do What You Want: A Career Guide For Professionals Serious About Winning, and is a former VP at Goldman Sachs and The Carlyle Group.
You can find more of his writing at www.geoffblades.com