How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You're an Adult by Ira Israel

Author:Ira Israel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

Chapter 7

What Are You Doing on Planet Earth?

Let’s reflect on whatever part of us is able to observe our thoughts. All of us have been around pets and other animals who simply exhibit “doingness” — playing when they feel playful, sleeping when they feel tired, defecating when their bodies need to defecate. They don’t need to think about or plan their lives very far in advance. Aside from responding to the natural rhythms of the day and the seasons, undomesticated animals do not consciously put themselves on a daily schedule. Nor do they appear to tell elaborate stories about their pasts or imagine their futures. I am willing to bet they also do not ponder their own mortality and possible future suffering. The ability to conceive of our own nonexistence while we exist, and to imagine the various ways we might die, is apparently exclusive to human consciousness.

Before we explore Advaita Vedanta, let’s arbitrarily categorize human consciousness in terms of levels:

•Level 1 is “doing,” or “doingness” or “doing, without thinking about what we are doing”: “being in the zone” and not second-guessing ourselves — the way animals act.

•Level 2 is “thinking about what we are doing before, during, and after we do it”: having thoughts about our activities rise to consciousness, such as “Oh, I am walking now. . .” “I have to wash clothing later. . .”

•Level 3 is “thinking about thinking”: being able to observe our thoughts without actually acting upon them.

•Level 4 is “thinking abstractly”: being able to cogitate about things such as laws of quantum mechanics, calculus, and so on.

I love all meditations and relaxation exercises that guide us to observe our thoughts, because when we learn how to watch our thoughts float through our mindscreens like clouds passing through the sky or leaves floating down a river, we can gain insights into their absurdly repetitive and irrationally negative nature. In other types of meditations, we can learn to categorize our thoughts according to whether they concern the past, present, or future, and whether they are positively or negatively charged or neutral. Or we can watch the segues between thoughts and how parts of them morph and stream into others. Also we can make a distinction between discernment and judgment. An example of discernment is: “Look both ways before crossing the street.” A judgment occurs when our mind extrapolates, overgeneralizes, and tells us: “Cars are bad (because they can hit you and harm or kill you).” As noted earlier, I believe that the primary function of the mind is to keep us alive and stave off future traumas. The mind creates loads of judgments and prejudices in its attempts to keep us safe. Guess what? They work! If you are prejudiced against roaring wildfires, exploding cars, loaded unlocked machine guns, oceans, landslides, high places without guardrails, flying airplanes, and swords, that is because being around them exponentially increases your chance of being harmed or killed.

One of my goals in writing this book is to bring some

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