Cheat Codes To Life

• 5. You are not your mind

What’s the common denomination between the people who are considered to be ’crazy’ and the ones who are considered ‘normal’? We all have an internal dialogue. Have you ever wondered why it seems that there’s at least two voices in your head?

One is predominantly criticizing yourself or other people, judging, worrying, replaying old memories and so forth and the second one is usually either observing the first voice, engaged with it or countering it. Here’s a simple question, when you ‘catch yourself thinking’, who’s that doing the noticing and the one being observed or getting caught?

One is your awareness and the other one is your ego-mind activity. From the moment you were born you developed an ego, It operates mechanically by replaying the memories and the emotions attached to them, subconscious beliefs/programs, learned experiences and even weirder, inherited cellular memories through epigenetics etc.

This is where your identity and personality come from and is the source of the incessant chatter in your head. This voice is always judging and replaying memories against your current environment.  You cannot stop or control this voice just as you cannot control or stop your heart-beat as Emily Fletcher brilliantly puts it in one of her lectures about meditation on mind valley.

The other voice that’s doing the noticing and observing is your awareness, the I AM presence or the ‘witnessing presence’ as Eckart Tolle refers to it. The ego is a double-edged sword, think of it as an avatar for your consciousness, or better yet, think of your consciousness as water, it is shapeless without a container and it will take the shape of whichever container it is put in.

The ego is a ‘container’ for your consciousness. Whatever beliefs you adopted, negative or positive, you developed a personality, habits, character traits etc. to defend these beliefs which became the ego or the ‘container’.

You are not your mind. Your mind is a tool, but most people mistakenly identity themselves with the mind. Picture this, if you own several cars all from different manufacturers, let’s say you have a range rover, an Audi and a BMW, which one of these three models can you say is the real you?

None! Because you know you just drive these cars and they can be replaced. Same thing with your ego. The observing awareness is the ‘driver’ and the car models is your ego. But unlike owning cars, you cannot have more than one ego at once. You can only reprogram and change from one ego to another, that is, from one personality to another.

When people say they have changed or they are no longer ‘that person’ this is what exactly happened. They adopted a different persona just as replacing a car but the driver/the observing awareness still remains the same.

Imagine being in the middle of a vast ocean on a boat floating aimlessly without a sense of navigation. Let’s say, you have no idea you have the ability to navigate the boat to the direction you’d like to go to. Instead, you have resolved to letting the currents sway you wherever.

In this case, you have become the tool, that is, the ‘boat’. You have no idea you can take control of the boat and sail to your desired destination instead, you let the currents determine your course, when the boat goes left you become very happy but when it changes direction and is headed for the rocks, you’re sad and miserable. That your state of being is determined by something outside of you that you have no control over.

The ‘boat’ is your egoistic mind, it is a tool for carrying you through the vast deep ‘ocean’ or consciousness and the one riding on the boat is the real you, the observing awareness. But does this realization change anything?

Not at all. Once the ego is developed, that is, you have accepted this persona as your identity; you form behaviors, habits and a mindset to defend this identity. Your awareness and identification with this voice fuels the ego, which gives it a powerful momentum and because of this, the moment you make an attempt to change, it will fight you. Everything in nature fights for survival and your ego is no different. It becomes like a self-driving car that has gone ‘rogue.’

We all have a unique ego depending on the environment we were exposed to as children. In this sense, some people may have fast yachts (empowering beliefs) and have no problem easily navigating through the ‘sea of consciousness’ but some have weak wooden canoes sipping in water (limiting beliefs) and it seems they can’t get anywhere (self-sabotaging behaviour).  

In these both instances the problem does not lie with the person riding on the boat aka the observing awareness, but the vessel they are using. But what determines the quality of your ‘boat’/ego? The quality of the subconscious programs/beliefs you acquired as a child.

But how does the person riding on the boat take back control so that they can sail to their desired destination? One word: MEDITATION. If your identification with the egoistic voice reinforces and fuels it, then observing the voice through meditation is what weakens it.

Contrary to popular belief, meditation is not about quieting your thoughts, that’s like trying to stop your heart-beat. Instead, meditation is about practicing to observe your mind without judgement. When done consistently, you’ll start to notice that the voice that doubts, worries, that is pessimistic, judges, criticizes yourself and others and so on becomes significantly weaker and starts to lose its power over you while your will gets stronger. This is from personal experience by the way!

The more you meditate, the more you deprive the ego/boat energy and the less the self-perpetuating momentum and control the ego has.  But what happens to the observing voice or the driver? It gains control of the ‘boat’ because all the energy that is withdrawn from the ego automatically goes to the observing awareness and can now choose to direct it to where the driver wants to go. Plus, you wouldn’t need to depend on any situation outside of you for you to be happy or at peace.

 6. You are an eternal soul having a temporary human experience.

Here’s an unpopular opinion, you are an eternal soul having a temporary human experience, and you’ve lived through thousands of lifetimes for your soul grow. In ancient African Spirituality, it was believed that people reincarnated within their family, that’s why up until now naming children after a dead relative is still widely practiced, it is almost an unspoken rule if you ask me.

Once a child is born, there would be naming initiation ceremonies led by the elders in the family or community where they would determine which name the child would ‘choose’. They would say a series of names of the dead relatives and if the child responds favorably when a certain name is uttered like a giggle, that would be its name because that was the relative who incarnated as that child! This is still practiced in some ethnic communities to this day.

You are the universe experiencing itself as a human. You are not separate from God just as sun rays which touch the earth are ultimately part of the sun. That’s why in the bible it says that your body is the temple of God. Therefore, your soul which is like a ray of sunshine but still connected to the sun, is eternal and cannot die it only leaves the avatar or the body during death.

By the way, reincarnation has been empirically documented by the university of Virginia school of medicine professor referred to as Doctor Ian Stevenson who and I quote “Starting in 1961, for forty years, Dr. Stevenson investigated children who spontaneously remember past lives that could be factually validated.”

In fact, everything in existence is the universe experiencing itself in different forms, the grass, animals, plants, people, trees, the planets etc. are all consciousness manifesting in different forms. The only difference is that humans have more awareness of self than animals or plants but everything has consciousness with a certain level of awareness.

There is no separation between you and the creator, the creator is the spiritual essence that animates your body. This is foundation of ancient African spirituality. Our ancestors knew that there was a holy essence to everything and that’s why we were mistakenly convinced that ancient Africans worshipped trees or mountains but they only gave reverence or acknowledged the holy essence found in everything especially in nature.  

So, if you’re an eternal soul having a temporary human experience then then why does it seem that the world can be full of misery, pain, uncertainty, confusion, highs and extreme lows, good and evil and everything in between? I’ll deal with this rabbit hole in a different blog post but for now, know that there is DUALITY and It’s because you are in school! All the lessons you came to learn are centered on love. In the late Delores Cannon’s words; You’re the director, the actor, and the playwright in your own movie!

Your soul, which is your unique personification of your spiritual essence devoid of the ego, carefully tailored the circumstances that would evolve it into love and light based on the actions of your previous lifetimes.

Just as a video game, your soul chose the ‘difficulty level’ in this life-time. You chose your parents, the country you’ll be born in and so forth, for it to learn the lessons that you needed to learn. Of course, the moment you’re born into this earth you forget all of this. Would it be a lesson though if you knew everything that was going to happen?

To be honest, When I learned about this it completely shifted my perspective on how I deal with difficult situations in my life. It shifted my mindset from previously having a victim consciousness such as ‘why did this happen to me?’ or ‘why me when other people seem to have it easy?’ – to taking full responsibility like – what do I need to learn from this? What is this situation trying to teach me?

I realized that I needed to learn about unconditional forgiveness, standing up for myself and not let people walk over me and so many others. I don’t think I am done learning the lessons that I came to learn because I believe until someone takes their last breath, our entire lifetime is the time it takes to learn and evolve into our highest selves. I believe that every single day alive is a day spent in the ‘classroom of ‘life university.

Here’s the deal, any situation that makes you feel powerless is teaching you to take your power back, any situation has ever made you feel unworthy was teaching you to value yourself, any negative situation is meant to evolve a certain aspect within you which you can only know. In short, the lesson is in the ‘problem’.

7. Your three planes of existence.

We exist on three states of being at all times. That is spiritual connected to the emotional, the mental/psychological and the physical body. Earlier I talked about how you are the universe experiencing itself as human, this means your truest and most authentic self is the subtle spiritual essence that ‘houses’ your soul which animates your body.

When our spiritual, mental and physical bodies work in harmony we experience good health, abundance happiness peace of mind etc. Most people however are only aware of the first two, mental and physical and are totally oblivious of their spiritual being yet the spiritual aspect of you is the cause and the source of your very own existence. Your life, mind and body are the effect and the cause is the spiritual essence that animates your body. Just as the saying goes where there is smoke there is fire, your physical life is the smoke and the fire is your ‘soul’ or your spiritual essence which is the source of your entire existence.

In ancient African spiritual sciences, they knew that whenever something is wrong in your spiritual essence it manifests as problems in your life such as poor health, relationship problems, addictions, phobias, depression, anxiety and on. Every problem especially a disease in your life is your soul trying to ‘show’ you the dis-ease within you.

This is why unlike in western science where they would chop off organs or give you anti depressants, in ancient African spiritual sciences, they would only proceed to treat the physical ailment after they had identified and resolved the dis-ease in your spiritual essence. This is called holistic medicine and unlike popular belief, holistic health was born in Ancient Kemet.

 Every problem in your life is the effect of a dis-ease in your spiritual plane of existence which is the cause. Just as a shadow is the effect of an object obstructing light, your entire life reflects back to you the ‘shape’ of your spiritual essence. If you don’t like the shape of the shadow that is being casted as your life, you go back to the subconscious mind which is the ‘control Centre’ for your spiritual essence and mold it into your liking.

The conscious and the subconscious minds; The woman submits to the man

Just as everything in existence, your three planes of existence have an intricate system by which they operate to ensure life and reality unfolds smoothly. The subconscious mind is the ‘control’ centre for the spiritual realm which works through your emotions while the conscious mind takes care of everything physical and how we move in the physical world which works through the mental or psychological processes. But for something to come to you in the physical you either have a subconscious program for it or it has to be relayed into the subconscious mind first. And as I have mentioned earlier, the conscious mind is responsible for 5% of our lives while the subconscious runs 95% of our lives.

The conscious mind is masculine in nature, that is, it is responsible for the seed or the initial idea while the subconscious mind is feminine in nature aka the seat of our emotions, it reproduces after any seed it is given. These two minds have to work in harmony. Just as a driver and a car or the soil and the seed, one cannot be without the other. The car being the subconscious mind while the driver is the conscious mind (masculine).

In an earlier post about why positive thinking fails, I wrote about how the subconscious mind is all powerful and very resourceful but it doesn’t have its ‘own will’. It is like electricity or petrol. Just as electricity and petrol are only forms of energy which cannot use themselves and need someone to put them into whatever use they please, the subconscious mind is a source of energy and unlimited creative power that fully adequate and freely available within each one of us. The late Bob proctor said that the universal forces within us are like electricity. The can cook a man or cook the man’s dinner.

The subconscious mind submits to the conscious mind. If we are the universe experiencing itself in human form, it means that within each one of us runs the power that created everything in existence but because we came here for lessons, one of the most important lessons is also realizing this truth. But the power within each one of us is like water, it takes the shape of whatever container it is put in.

Picture this, one person works tirelessly to develop a nuclear weapon that can kill a million people with the push of a button and another one uses the same effort to help end starvation of one million people and they both succeed, what did these people unknowingly used in common? The power of their subconscious mind! No one has has ever been mysteriously struck by lightning on their way to a mass shooting of innocent children.

It is the same mind that enables someone to plot a murder and successfully execute it or enable someone else to rescue a child from a burning building. This power is very subjective, it doesn’t know between good and bad and only submits to our conscious mind. That’s why in the bible it is said that the woman submits to the man.

The bible is said to be allegorical, meaning that the messages can be interpreted to reveal hidden meaning and I believe that the verse about the woman submitting to the man was not meant to be taken literally but rather was used to illustrate how the masculine and feminine energies or, the yin and the yang principle, which are present within each one of us and the principle through which everything in nature is based, work.

Every human regardless of gender has masculine and feminine energies within them and if the creator is within us because we are the universe experiencing itself as a humans, then this force which is controlled by the subconscious mind is feminine in nature because it seeks to reproduce after our deeply held beliefs.

That’s it for now folks! Please share, leave your comments below or if you’re up to it, buy me a coffee. Thank you for stopping by!

With Love,

Winnie.