Healing the Mind: The Healing Mind - 2

In the first part of this discourse, Healing the Mind: The Healing Mind, I stated that every thought we have has an emotional element to it, and that these emotional elements are lodged in our Mind-body. They become a part of us. These emotional elements - various Eastern religions call them Sankaras or Samskaras – are perpetually affecting our lives, often in deleterious ways. They trouble us. Whether the emotion be anger, jealousy, resentment, hurt or whatever, all stem from one basic emotion: fear .

Fear by what? And of what? Fear by our false self, our self-image, our ego. Fear of annihilation- of being discovered as false. It is fear which causes nearly all our troubles.

As said in Part One, we are made up of the real self (the Observer, the Witness, that which experiences) and the false self- the “self image” complied by what should be our servant but is so often our master – our thinking What is made up by our thoughts is exactly that, ‘made up,’ construed. It is untrue and lacks real substance. For the most part, it is nothing but nebulous verbal thought. It could be described as a conglomerate of thought-forms that have become so case-hardened over time that we often believe we are this thought. Our thought-forms have become our personality, our character, and we so often identify with these completely.

Thought forms have a life unto themselves. They care not about the real you. Their objective is to perpetuate themselves. Their goal survival. In our efforts at healing mind we need to always keep this in awareness

The ego, or self-image lives in perpetual fear. Our real self is impervious to these passing emotions. It knows its immortality. When we take a deliberate action , chances are in most instances we are coming from our real self. When we react to something, then it is very, very probable that we are coming from ego. Egos can be insulted. Egos seek power over others in order to strengthen themselves. Egos need. Egos fall in love. Egos can be hurt. Egos want, or push away.

An ego has an idea or ideas about itself. It does not see the truth. It does not see things how they are but how it wishes they would be. And as Eckart Tolle tells us, egos hate reality. They fear the Now. Unlike the Real Self,  they’re always immersed in an imaginary future, or live in the past.

Deposited Emotions Grow

All of these ego-generated emotions, usually unthinkingly reacted to and then, seemingly forgotten, lodge as deposits in our Mind-body. There, they do not sit passively. Just because they’ve left the conscious area of our mind and are no longer consciously thought about, does not mean they are gone. They are still there. Moreover, they continue in their activity. They grow. Like an underground plant or root they continue to expand where – unless they are dealt with – they will, like a plant, poke their first shoots up into the denser areas of our being, our physical bodies. If we're serious in our search for heath through the healing mind, we need to be aware of this.

What is being said here is that a thing of the mind, the ego mind, gradually expands to the extent that it can no longer be contained only in the subconscious mental area. Like a electrical transformer, the sankaras ( thought forms ) ‘step down,’ lowering their frequencies, lowering it again and again, as they come down through the layers which make up the human spectrum, until they begin to manifest in the lowest strata- our physicality.

This is one of the reasons why, say, a soldier home from a war, often appears to suffer no after effects from his battle trauma until years after the event. Ten, twenty, thirty years after he’s witnessed, and perhaps perpetrated horrendous violence, he’s found to be steadily having worse dreams, worse nightmares, until eventually he becomes physically sick. The same thing would apply to the person who has perpetually repressed anger, perhaps because of a fear, only to find that they’ve developed a terminal illness. The sankaras have grown. They’ve continued to grow, until they can no longer be contained. They have to break out! And they break out as a physical illness- sometimes a terminal one.

Treating the Root Cause

How do we deal with it? Western Medicine tends to treat the symptom. The symptom appears in the physical: the treatment is undertaken in the physical. Take out the tumour. Replace the part that’s damaged. Does it work? It appears to. Or maybe it is simply delaying re-occurrence. For the symptom is not the cause. The cause is the unresolved emotion still festering and growing within the Mind-body. And until the very roots of the problem have been removed, the problem, thought temporarily ameliorated, will in all probability continue.

So how do we remove something from deep in the Mind-body? Will psychiatry help? Maybe. Once we can see the cause, our clarity of the situation- along with acceptance and forgiveness- may cause it to shrivel into insignificance. We know that psychiatry can help, even bring about a cure. But will it always do so?

Long, long ago a fellow by the name of Siddartha Gautama worked out a way to effectively remove the sankaras from the Mind-body, thus bringing about permanent healing. Indeed, Healing Mind became his forte. So good was he at it that the people named him, The Buddha – the Enlightened One. And how did he do it?

In a nutshell, he did it by the diligent and sustained application of a technique of meditation. The technique: ‘Insight Meditation,’ or as it is known in the East: Vipassana.

I hope you're enjoying Healing the Mind: The Healing Mind series.

In Part Three of Healing Mind, we will discuss the technique of Vipassana.