Minding the Body, Mending the Mind by Borysenko Joan

Author:Borysenko, Joan [Borysenko, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2007-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

The Dirty Tricks Department of the Mind

In Chapter 4, we discussed the four parts of the mind. You probably remember the ego, which I characterized as a merciless judge who forever divides the world into good and bad, vigilantly sizing things up to make sure that we get what we want and avoid what we don’t want. In the process, there’s a trade-off. We won’t be happy, the ego says, unless we get what we want, but the ego often sees the world in terms of scarcity, danger, and loss. This view taints with fear even those moments of satisfaction—since some unforeseen danger may come along and ruin our happiness. This is how many people think. Like Esau, we sell our birthright for a bowl of porridge. The porridge is the trap: “I can be happy if I get what I want and avoid what I don’t want.” Our birthright is the inner Witness—the unconditioned awareness that is already fulfilled and happy, regardless of outer circumstances.

All of the mind’s machinations spring from this single mistake. Our ego churns out an endless stream of mental movies, glittering images of our likes and dislikes, and the more we grasp or recoil at these images, the more estranged we become from our Witness, our only real source of peace.

As we saw in Chapter 4, most of the old baggage that gets transferred onto immediate experience contains stored memories of the ego’s basic desires: getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t want. The ego, confusing happiness with the fulfillment of these desires, perpetuates our suffering by creating a series of mind traps based on fear. Ignorance, the ego’s dynamic, is our primary obstacle to freedom, our greatest hindrance to letting go.

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