Sekhem: The Mind as a Portal to Awareness

The Mind as a Portal

Is there anything you would like to share? Any questions? Someone asked about questions for tomorrow. For now, is there anything to share?

We were talking about the four bodies: your physical body, your emotional body, your mental body and your spiritual body. The energy works on all these levels, and we want it to work on all these levels.

Remember what we said about the mental body. It is very good at blocking everything. It can block the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. If we could learn to leave the mind open, rather than letting it be the general of the system, the spiritual part could open. It is like a portal.

Someone asked why the mind has so much power. Who gave it that power? You did.

“But I am not my mind.” You say you are not your mind. But is that something you have learned, or is it something you live?

The difficulty is that we tend to identify with our minds. Are we able simply to observe the mind?

Where You Put Your Energy

Let us take all the phones out of the room, as far away as possible. We cannot control those other sounds, but here in the hall we can keep the phones silent.

This is part of the lesson. We cannot control what people are doing farther away. Sometimes we can try. We can go over and speak with them. We have already done that, and sometimes it works. But in this case, we do not have control.

We do have control over the phones here. It is about where you put your energy.

Now, coming back to what you mentioned about the mind, this is the question I ask: are you able to observe your mind and your thoughts? Perhaps for a while, but not continuously?

Observing the Breath and the Mind

The mind and thoughts are a little like breathing. Until I mentioned breathing, probably nobody was remembering that they were breathing. You were not paying attention to it.

Is everybody breathing? Everybody is breathing, but we are unconscious of the breath. Now that I have mentioned it, most of you are probably noticing, “I am becoming conscious of my breathing.”

Breathing is one aspect of the body that can be automatic or conscious. Unconscious breathing. Conscious breathing. I also spoke of separate nervous systems for these two modes, referring to both as parasympathetic.

We have this ability to control the breath because sometimes we swim and go into the water. Animals that live in the water particularly need to be able to control their breathing. It is important to be able to stop breathing when you go underwater. As humans, we have that ability too.

Now I want to connect this with our minds and our thoughts. We have conscious thoughts and unconscious thoughts.

You have all been breathing for most of the morning without being conscious of each breath. There is nothing wrong with that. It is normal. We have also had unconscious thoughts for much of the morning. Sometimes we notice our thoughts.

If I ask you now, without making any conscious effort, just to feel and observe your breathing, what happens? Try it now.

You are not breathing, right? It is as though you stop breathing. Can we sit and observe ourselves breathing? Unless you are a yogi with a lot of practice, simply observing yourself breathing can be very difficult.

Is that not interesting? What do you think would happen if you could sit and say, “I am just going to let my breathing do whatever it wants, and I am only going to observe it”? Do you think you would die? Someone answered no.

We talked about how uncomfortable this can feel, and about consciously breathing again. I used fainting and the return of unconscious breathing as an illustration, describing the body as saying, “Hey, silly, you have to breathe.” The point of that illustration was the body's automatic breathing, not an instruction to make yourself unconscious.

Now, what would happen if you became conscious while you were unconscious? That does not make sense? Let me explain a little better.