Conquer Chronic Pain by Peter Przekop

Author:Peter Przekop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616496227
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Published: 2015-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

9

Three Minds

Now it is time to analyze the mind in a different way. I have chosen to do this using a method that will help you understand some of the exercises that will come later in the book.

Most of us would agree that every thought has a theme or meaning. By this I mean that every thought has a story attached to it—every thought is about something. You may be thinking about your job, you may be thinking about your family, or perhaps you are just daydreaming. When you are doing any of these things, there is a sort of theme or meaning that runs throughout the thought process. In this chapter, I am asking you to imagine that the mind itself has three basic, very broad themes. This categorization is simply to help you understand the chapter and later go on to understand how the mind might work when it is in pain. Although there is no specific scientific evidence that these are the only categories the mind has, these categories have been used for thousands of years to explain how the mind works. They are simply a useful way to describe the mind. Let’s begin to look at how this might work.

Imagine that you have just checked into a hotel and need a break, so you pick up the remote control and turn on the TV. It is a small town, and you are not sure what channels are available, so you begin searching.

•You press the remote and turn on channel one. It is the intellectual channel! You have seen this channel and you know it will stimulate your thoughts. From history to math to physics to neuroscience, this channel offers the opportunity to learn new concepts and gain new understanding.

•You press the remote again and switch over to channel two. This is another familiar one, the emotional channel. From depths of despair to peaks of joy to long hours of “mellow,” this channel will allow you to experience an astounding array of emotions.

•On a whim, you press the remote again and a new channel pops up. Channel three is not available in your hometown. The third station is different! It is called the overself channel. This station somehow magically streams information so that it appears in your mind without the constraints of intellect or emotion. On this channel, information may suddenly appear in your mind that you have never before been aware of. Channel three offers an experience of self-awareness and reflection that does not involve an active mind.

These three channels are really different general themes of how we think or ways that the mind functions. We all have the ability to analyze (the intellectual channel) and we all have the ability to experience emotions (the emotional channel). The third ability, the overself, is an ability that you may not be aware of. You may have thought of this capacity as spirit, not in the religious sense but more like the original definition of spirit as “breath” or as a nonmaterial life force.

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