Abby Eagle's Journal
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 Coming
to a point of understanding (14/12/2004)
After witnessing a series of memories, while engaged in the drop through meditation
technique, I came to an actual point of understanding, at which time the emotion
associated with the gestalt of memories disappeared. From the perspective of Neuro-Linguistic
Programming (NLP) this is quite profound. The challenge of course, is to try and
model this experience so that the technique can be taught to others.
Discovering
the 'I'. (22/12/2004)
I
was sitting in meditation last night and reflecting on how consciousness and content
equals the mind. Of how consciousness with no content (no thoughts) equals meditation.
And of how after a period of time with no content, the consciousness, which habitually
requires some object to focus on, will turn on itself. Whenever there was a period
of no thought I tried to find a way for the consciousness to be aware of itself.
It
was then that I discovered that there is a tiny bit of the mind which likes to
be present during meditation. I experience it as a soft coaching voice which reappears
after about five seconds of silence, and wants to assist with the meditation.
For me this is a good representation of the 'I', and when it realised that it
too had to disappear it felt upset, as if it should be excluded from the annihilation
of the mind, and be there to watch the process. It was as if this part of the
mind, the 'I', had not realised all of these years what meditation was really
about, until now.
(By
analogy it was like the Windows software animated help icon. Even after you click
on it to disappear it still comes back a few times. And when you give it the final
click to disappear it looks upset, before riding away.)
Using
awareness to silence the internal dialogue (26/12/2004)
If
you watch the internal dialogue very closely during meditation it will often disappear,
but in an everyday situation it is a little more challenging to quieten it. NLP has a set of tools to shift the submodalities but it takes a bit of work to bring
about the change, especially if you want to make the change by yourself without
the aid of NLP Master Practitioner. Awareness, however is something that can be practised
constantly, 24 hours a day if you wish, just as long as you bring some energy
to it.
I should
also mention here, that I have been wondering for sometime about the mechanisms
that actually generate specific types of thoughts and feelings. For example, what
is the mechanism that generates fear based thoughts and behaviour? NLP has tools
that help us to elicit the strategies that generate an emotion; and techniques
to let go of a negative emotion; and other techniques to lessen the emotion or
direct the unconscious mind to create a different type of emotion, but NLP still
has no way to stop the mind/body organism from actually generating fear or any
other emotion for that matter. I don't dispute that feeling and expressing emotions
are an integral part of being human but no matter how much NLP'ers like to think
that they are working at meta levels, they are still working with and within the
confines of the mind.
Meditation, on the other hand provides a way to go beyond the mind and gain an
understanding of the mechanisms of the mind at its most fundamental level. (I
should mention here that meditators see the mind as being a manifestation of the
first five subtle bodies interacting with each other, in the same way that the
'tick' of a clock is generated by the all the components of the clock.)
Meditation,
as taught by Osho, uses awareness to 'see through' the mind. One does not have
to analyse the mind or make changes to the mind, just the simple act of seeing
what is there is enough. (One can look at a tree using the mind as a filter, which
has all your accumulated knowledge about trees, or one can just see the tree as
it is here and now.)
Anyway
the point of this diary entry is that for ages I have suffered with an internal
voice that would rave on in my head at any opportunity, on a particular aspect
of my business. When I reflected on this it seemed that there was always a good
reason why the thoughts should be there. Recently I started questioning the reason
for the thoughts of work, especially in view of the fact that I was on a Christmas
break. (What was the mechanism that created this internal dialogue and its content?)
So over a period of weeks I brought as much awareness to this internal dialogue
as I could muster. At first I caught the internal dialogue after I had been listening
to it for 20 minutes, then after 10 minutes, then 5 minutes, then 2 minutes. Eventually
I caught the internal dialogue just as it was starting. Then I felt as if I had
just woken up, or come out of a dream. I started yawning and stretching my arms
and legs. I became aware of tension in my shoulders, neck and head. I felt energised
and motivated to have some fun.
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