by Buddhakrishna (Gary) Newton
You can end your suffering when you (“Self”) see how your mind (“false self”) tricks you into believing the stories it uses to control you.
The mind wants to connect to whatever it can in order to hold on to its own false sense of control. It will take what your senses see, smell or feel, subjectively filter out most of the truth of what’s actually there and store what’s left as a memory. When a new situation arises, it compares this newly filtered and incomplete sensory information to your imperfect memory about the past and creates an illusion that the two are related. Now we have a story to attach to: a filtered experience attached to a subjective memory wrapped around an illusion.
Since the mind needs to make this make sense, it will find a way to do so, lying if it must. It will make up whatever it needs you to believe about yourself or others. These thoughts can create unhealthy reactions before they even manifest as thoughts. You listen to the illusion in your head and feel it in your body. You react to what going on inside. You automatically form an intention to have another thought that reinforces the story. This sets up your next reaction.
But it doesn’t stop with you. You only pick up part of the intention, the rest of this energy goes out into the atmosphere where the universe, following your instructions, manifests it further and brings the reaction you just dreamed up right back to you in the form of yet another miserable experience. You have just recreated your misery and proven again why you should be miserable. This feeds your illusion and sets up a viciously self-perpetuating cycle that reinforces the mind’s false sense of control.
You can interrupt this cycle right when you begin to notice these seemingly automatic reactions. Ask yourself, “Who am I?” When you get an answer ask, “Who is it that is answering?” Then ask the same question again. And again. And again. You’ll eventually get to a place where there is no answer that makes sense. That’s because the mind cannot go where the Self is. The “Self” is now seeing the “self.” This is where your suffering ends because you can see the mind which has a story about an illusion based on faulty information. It doesn’t even matter what the content of the story is – what’s important is realizing it’s just a story. When you drop the story, you release the suffering.
