Sunday 6 February 2011

Healing Relationships: Part 3 - The Mind is Free (by Franco Santoro)


The awareness that the mind is free and not trapped in a human separated body is a most obvious realisation if we simply look at our own experience of the mind itself. When I speak or write, I relate with you and communicate my ideas and feelings without the need of a physical body. 

You are now reading this article, which contains my thoughts and also ideas from other people, yet you receive all this information without seeing or touching me or these people. Of course, if you have seen my physical body at least once, then you can think of me as a body, while you read these lines, yet this identification of me with a body happens in your mind, it is your mental activity.


You can also read articles, letters or books written many years ago by people you have never met or seen, and still receive ideas and feelings without using any body as reference. Images, music, sounds, movies and talks also continue to provide information even when their authors or actors are not alive anymore. In this respect there are incalculable amounts of ideas, thoughts and emotions that continue to influence our minds coming from people with whom we are not able to relate through a body.

The mind does not need the body in order to communicate and create relationships. And even when it uses the body, what it perceives of the body occurs only at the level of the mind. We take for granted that the physical form of whom we see in front of us is who is speaking or listening to us. Yet this is an arbitrary assumption, and solely what we have decided to believe. With our mind we can believe whatever we choose to believe, no matter how false and unreal. 

The worst thing that can happen is confusing beliefs with reality. Then there is no choice and all freedom is lost. Then a belief becomes our reality and we get stuck in it as long as we become aware that it is only an idea, a mental construct, and that we can decide to believe otherwise, electing what is worth believing according to our direct experience, and what truly brings benefit to us and the world. And all this process happens merely at the level of the mind, through what we think.

Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts, then, that we must work, if your perception of the world is to be changed.” (ACIM, W23.1:4-5)  

Whatever we think produces an effect in the world and in all our relationships, both known and unknown. The mind is not the victim of the body. In contrast, it is the ego mind that creates the body we see, abducting it from the collective unity of the Earth, forcing it to live in fear and isolation, and sentencing it to a preordained death. Yet, we can believe that this is not the case and that we are the victim of the world we have decided to believe in. 

There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effect will change automatically.” (ACIM, W23.2:2-6)

When two individuals meet, it is primarily the meeting of two minds, which appear to employ physical bodies in order to communicate, while the communication is indeed taking place at the level of their thoughts, conscious and unconscious. Yet, in our separated world reality is defined by the separated physical forms we see with our eyes, which in the end are the pictorial representations of thoughts of attack, fear and death. 

One can well ask if this can be called seeing. Is not fantasy a better word for such a process, and hallucination a more appropriate term for the result?” (ACIM, W23.3:3-4)

Image by Pierre Cendors

[i] God is meant here as Core Multidimensional Identity, Wholeness, Undivided Self and Unconditional Love, and does not denote identification with a specific creed or gender. What counts here is the experience of God, rather than the term we employ. Hence if the term God causes grievances, please feel free to substitute it with another word. Yet here I wish to stress that deeper healing work, as I see it, is bound  to confront us with all grievances we hold towards the term God, as to any other term, with the aim of releasing them.

CONTINUES FROM PART TWO
TO BE CONTINUED.... CLICK HERE FOR PART FOUR

© 2010 Franco Santoro, info@astroshamanism.org. All rights reserved. 

For details on individual consultations, please contact info@astroshamanism.org or click http://www.astroshamans.com/p/consultations.html.

For full programmes see:  http://www.astroshamans.com/p/events.html

If you would like to organize events, or wish to have more details,
please contact provordo@yahoo.co.uk or info@astroshamanism.org


If this is feasible for you, please support our blog with a donation. Every donation of any amount is most welcomed. Also small contributions are warmly appreciated





No comments:

Post a Comment