I've been asked to speak about the cultivation
of mental and emotional balance.
Which I imagine many of us
perhaps all of us here are interested in already
But I'm quite sure everyone is interested in
having a clear mind, having mental well being
emotional well being, a sense of health.
And the implication in the title here is that balance
is a key to both mental and emotional balance
so how do we go about cultivating that?
I would suggest the key is attention.
I think we all know from our own experience
that our own minds
can be our worst enemies
they can drive us mad
while sitting quietly in a room with no stimuli from
the environment at all, we can be abjectly miserable
just by the rumination, the thoughts going through our minds
getting caught up, snared, in the grip of
which i call rumination.
In other words we know we can
miserable all by ourselves with no help from outside
it's an inside job
and many, but perhaps not all, people know
that it's also possible
to be sitting quietly in your chambers
quietly in a cave, quietly in a serene place in nature
and with little or no stimulation from the environment
to have a sense of being truely well, happy
and you look around, and think, what's making me happy
and you can't find anything outside
that sense of well being is coming from
inside
so we should be sherlock holmes
here
tracing this to the source. now in this marvelous
presentation I have the luck of being to listen to off stage
causation the agent was uniformly attributed to the brain
and there's no question the brain is implicated
in all of our subjective experiences
but the notion the only true explanation is a neurological one
and i never heard the speaker say that
i think, is limited.
Sometimes i think we have a brighter light shed
on what's going on in subjective experience
by looking into subjective experience itself.
looking for a psychological explanation
so i suggested that attention is the key
a person who can control his attention
his or her attention
can control the type of reality that person has a sense of
experiencing and living. for after all,
as William James, the great pioneer of modern psychology stated
for the moment what we attend to is reality
we take seriously, we count as real, only that which we attend to.
so when our minds are caught up
in attention hyper activity, whether or not it's clinical
diagnosed, i think we all know what it's like,
when the mind is like a runaway train
like a elephant in rut
to use on of the great indian
classic metaphores
it can give us
an enormous amount of grieve, especially
when this rumination
this obsessive compulsive flow of thinking
is negative.
dwelling on passed misfortunes, the misbehaviour of other people
negativeness of once or another and they
catch us in their claws
we really become victims of our own minds.
so negative rumination. If we're looking for
mental balance, emotional balance, in so far
that our minds are still prone to do
such negative rumination, such attention hyper activity
where the mind really is out of control
and we're kinda just being dragged along in its wake
then, as long as we are prone to that,
or to the extend that we are prone to that,
mental and emotional balance will be an unreachable ideal.
I call this OCDD
this tendency.
Not to be confused with the OCD obsessive compulsive disorder which is clinically diagnosed,
the OCDD will not show up in the current version, the 5th version of
the encyclopedia of mental diseases.
Probably because all of the editors of DSM have it,
as do most of us, if not all of us here in the audience
i call it obsessive compulsive delussional disorder
but see how familiar it sounds.
obsessive and in the sense that you would like to be just quiet
nothing to think about, nothing you need to think about
you'd like to be quietly present
simply attending to... your body, your mind another person
you can't because the mind is like a chatterbox
it always has something to say
obsessively thoughts are flowing out, one after another
and as much you would love to turn it off,
at least have a respite once in a while
a bit of quiet in the chamber of your mind
it does not give you that option
it always has an answer
you want to be quiet. Good let's talk about it.
It's obsessive.
If you think you have control
try to not think for one minute while your still awake
and that's obsessive.
well and if that's not enough
it's also compulsive, that is the thoughts arise
but don't just simply arise
like images on a television screen
they arise and we generally are compulsively drawn into them
it's a syphon, as if it sucks our attention in
and our focus is on the reference of the thought
we are there and then thinking about this and that
there was a really awfull image in that movie "little miss sunshine"
remember where they tied the dog to the back of the station wagon
and then forgot?
yeah, it was a comedy so no animals were harmed in that sequence
but nevertheless, we're the dog
and the rumination is the stationwagon
it draws us in, it drags us along.
does that resonate with your experience?
but it's worse than that.
obsessive would be bad enough.
compulsive is even worse
but it gets worse
it's delusional
and that is when we get caught in the vortex of this kind of flow
of rumination
the general tendency
and see for yourself, i'm not trying to tell you what your experience is like,
i'm making a generalisation
see whether the shoe fits.
we tend to take seriously whatever we're thinking
eventhough we're not thinking it
it is thinking us
the dog is not driving the car.
but is it not true that when we're thinking about something
fixating, ruminating, obsessing
about something
that there's a general tendency to think
i think therefor it's true
psychologist call that refractory period.
where the mind gets caught in the grip of an emotion
a memory, a desire, and we can't see outside of that filter system
if i'm ruminating negatively about some person
resentment is arising, maybe contempt or disgust is arising
towards that person
in so far as i am in the flow of that rumination
that obsessive compulsive delusional disorder
i cannot imagine that person has any good qualities
or even any neutral qualities