Choose in Favor of Your True Self
Imagine for a moment you’ve gone to a movie Cineplex that has 12 separate theaters in it. You buy your ticket and walk into the show you came to see. But, before too long, you realize you don’t like what’s on the screen so you decide to change theaters. Unfortunately, the next movie’s just as pointless. So you change theaters again. And again. Now as long as you remain one of those audience members who live only from the level of the “me mind” (the lower mind) your only choice is to ramble around within the Cineplex. You move from one show to the next—all the while not remembering that the film you just walked into was unable to please you the first time you saw it.
But by learning to live from the Free Mind (your True Self,) another choice comes to you. You walk out of the movies. You take yourself out of the theater complex. Now you’re free to go enjoy the rest of your day in some other way.
To help you better grasp the intention of this illustration, we need to take a brief look into the theater of our usual mind. Consider your own thinking for just a moment. Can you see how your mind loves to go over and over events that haven’t even happened yet? This mental process is the “me mind” hard at work. But let’s take a closer look at what this nature of ours is really doing.
Each time the “me mind” envisions some future event it’s actually trying to find a feeling of security for itself. But the only security this lower nature can ever know is imaginary. So it has to dream up one scene after another where somehow you’ll come out a winner. The more victories it conjures up in this way, the more fear there is that it won’t win the battles it just created. And the more agitated this low level of mind becomes from its own unconscious activity, the more it tries to settle itself with more mental movies. We can see the end of this painful picture without having to draw it ourselves. This psychological profile demonstrates what it means to be both prisoner and prison maker!
The Free Mind is always a witness to your whole mental and emotional experience, so it can’t be made a slave of any hidden desire. In this instance, the higher intelligence of the Free Mind instantly understands that no mere mental picture of security has any real power to make you feel secure.
And this realization empowers you, effortlessly, to just walk out of your own mental movie. Can you see the immense difference between the “me mind” and the Free Mind scenarios? Being able to consciously walk out of the movie- making complex of the “me mind” is the same as the power to free yourself. Why? Because once you walk out of this tiny darkened theater that your lower nature considers the whole world, you know for certain and at last: there is something outside the world of your usual mind. And once you walk into its light, you know that everything can be forever new for you.
Here’s a helpful exercise you’ll want to call upon over and over again. Watch how its healing influence brightens and lightens your days. Practicing this new action will put the power of the Free Mind to work for you. Inner freedom follows.
Make a practice of catching yourself in front of the “big screen.” One way to know you’re sitting in the front row of the “me mind” is to detect negative feelings that imply there’s nothing that can be done about the way you feel at the moment. Fear, anger, depression, and frustration are a few of the inner conflicts that the “me mind” loves to project through your psychic system.
At the moment you catch these mental crooks stealing your life within the darkness of that mental movie, remember that you always have a higher option. Instead of looking for another self- created scene better than the one you’re in, call on the Free Mind by deliberately taking your mind off of the mental screen of thoughts before you. Wake yourself up!
Here’s a good place to start. Notice the tension in your hands, or the feel and temperature of the air around you. Become conscious of the expression on your face. Listen to the sound of your own voice as you speak. Placing your attention in the fully present moment helps to snap whatever psychic spell you may have been under. Your wish to be awake and free, coupled with your new level of awareness, is the same as walking out of the theater all together.
Now, once you’re out, do your best to stay out! Allow the sunlight of your own momentarily awakened nature to gently warm you. Let the Free Mind remind you of what real pleasures are. You’ll want more and more sunlight, and less and less of the “me mind’s” dark back stage dramatics.
Excerpted from Freedom From the Ties that Bind by Guy Finley
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