mind - Toltec Spirit

Controlling Your Attention

We don’t learn to control our attention when we are young. We have to learn to control our attention when we are adults.

When we are young we were told where to put our attention, who to put it on, and how long to keep it there. We learned to put our attention on what other people told us to. Since adults taught us to put our attention on them, or on what they wanted to put our attention on, (school work, chores, minding our manners, following the rules, etc) by default we learned not to put our attention on our self. We became automated to have others control our attention.

Indirectly we learned not to pay attention to our emotions, what we were feeling, or what we wanted.

When you become an adult, and you realize that your attention is still governed by all those rules you collected, or that your mind is looking for other people to direct your attention. You might even feel uncomfortable if it is your own hands with no one telling you what to do. You may find your self trapped with your thoughts and beliefs controlling your attention. Realizing that you are trapped, and don’t have control over your attention is one of the first steps towards freedom.

It is only as adults that we have the opportunity to take control over our own attention, notice how we feel, and direct our life in a way we want. This is something of an opportunity not typically available to us when we were children.

Oh,,, and it will take work, and many attempts to free your attention from limiting beliefs and fears.

Such is a spiritual warriors training ground.

Specific exercises for gaining control over your own attention can be found at my Self Mastery Course at Pathway to Happiness.

Having Things In Your Mind Under Control

I used to think I had things under control. That is I believed I “knew” what was going on. As I became more aware I realized that everything that I knew was just information that I had learned from other people. I had unknowingly agreed with the ideas of other people about how the world worked, how people behaved, even what I was and what I wasn’t.

My next wave or realizations involved learning that what I knew wasn’t true. This was humbling. It was also unsettling to realize that what I thought of the world and other people wasn’t true. It was somewhat fearful to realize that the authorities that I looked to for direction and understanding of my world,,, didn’t always know what they were talking about.

Teachers didn’t know everything there was to know about life. Professors of physics couldn’t explain why any particles were here, or what was the force driving the ones they could see. Wake up in your adult years and learn that there may not be such a thing as gravity. Clergy weren’t always living a life of respect, love, and happiness so how could they guide others.

As I became more aware I noticed that more and more of the ideas in my own head weren’t true. I had less to say because of this.

There was temptations to grab hold of a theology or philosophy for safety and claim it is what I believe in. It will guide me. But something within was holding out for Truth.

In the process of letting go of what I believed I knew that I knew less. Over time I moved through the uncomfortable emotions that arise as we dissolve the chatter of internal dialog in the mind. Embracing humility was liberating me from my Self Importance (ego). There was freedom in not knowing. What was a fearful process was becoming a quiet and peaceful mind.

For the spiritual warrior one of the challenges is to control the knowledge that is in their mind. For ordinary men and women this doesn’t mean anything. That is because knowledge and ideas run around in their mind uncontrolled and they don’t even notice.

This post on Having Things In Your Mind Under Control originally posted at:

https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/07/under-control/

Fear and Power

My friend studied political science. He said politics was basically a scramble for power. But power is a need to control,,,, and a need to control is only necessary if you are afraid. So the scramble for power is really just a reaction to fear. If we really want to study political science we need to understand fear. Power is just the tail being wagged by the dog.

The irony here is that those that seek power often do so because they are powerless over their fear.

As a spiritual warrior,,, you will not develop real personal power until you develop awareness and win over your mind from fear.

The Law of Attraction Is A Myth

I don’t buy into the Law of Attraction. You don’t always attract what is in your consciousness. You only need one instance to prove a law invalid. Christ had his body beaten and crucified but it wasn’t something he attracted because he had it in his consciousness. He was treated that way because of beliefs other people held in their consciousness

Nelson Mandela spent years confined to prison, but not because it reflected his consciousness. He was held in prison because other people held in their consciousness beliefs of apartheid. You don’t always attract what is in your consciousness. Sometimes you are the recipient of what other people express from their belief system.

If something is a law it operates all the time everywhere. The law of gravity is a law because it applies to everything we know everywhere we can measure and test it. If it only worked sometimes or in some places it wouldn’t be a law. The same with the Law of Attraction. It’s too inconsistent. It’s only a theory that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s not a “Law.” It’s a Myth of Attraction. If it really worked a lot more people would have what the want.

Originally posted at The Law of Attraction is a Myth

Where you can find Guidance and Wisdom for the Spiritual Warrior based in the Four Agreements

Cleaning House and Cleaning Your Mind

It seems we spend more time cleaning our house than cleaning up our mind. It’s nice to come home to a clean house. But you don’t spend all your time there. You spend a lot more time with your own mind than you do your house. It makes sense then that you would spend some time making it a nice and enjoyable place to be.

For practical steps and exercises on cleaning up the fear based beliefs in your mind do the exercises in the Self Mastery course.

Cleaning Your House and Cleaning Your Mind

Making Personal changes

How do make personal changes in your life?

Sometimes making changes in your beliefs, emotions, relationships, and elsewhere in your life is counter-intuitive.

When you are riding a bicycle,,, how do you turn the bike to the right? You turn the handlebars to the left. How do you change the negative thoughts in your head? We’ll maybe you get the best results in a similar way. Don’t try to push more positive ones on top of them. Sometimes when you do you end up going in a negative direction.

Turning the handlebars to the right in order to turn the bike to the right makes logical sense if you aren’t aware of the other factors like the gyroscopic effect of precession. Don’t know what you are doing when it comes to changing your beliefs or emotional reactions and you are likely to end up goring in the wrong direction.

The Self Mastery Course can help steer you in the right direction. Some of the things might seem counter-intuitive, but they will make more sense when you have more awareness of how belief systems operate.

Originally posted at Making Personal Changes

ToltecSpirit.com, a resource for living by the Four Agreements.

Free Your Mind

The challenge is not to free your mind.

The challenge is to free your self from your mind.

This post by Gary van Warmerdam at https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/02/free-your-mind/

Where you can find Wisdom of the Four Agreements for Spiritual Warriors

For practical steps and exercises to inventory and change your own beliefs/agreements there are exercises in the Self Mastery course.

The Four Agreements – Why is it so Hard?

Living by the Four Agreements,,, why is it so hard?

We read the book the Four Agreements and feel better by the simple clarity it presents. It tells us something about our self, other people, and the world that we have always known, but not been able to put into words. With that clarity we have a sense of hope and excitement about changing our life and our relationships. It is possible to end the drama of emotional suffering and be happy.

We take the next step and adopt the four agreements as principles and practices that we continually live by. We are excited about the possibility, but then the reality sets in. Living our lives by the Four Agreements is challenging. It can even appear impossible. Why is it so hard when they are so simple?

We Make Endless Assumptions

It is because we have been practicing doing the exact opposite for almost our entire life. From the time we were 2 or 3 years old we have been making assumptions. We do it so continually we aren’t even aware how automatically we do it so often.

We Take Everything Personally

We also assume that we are the center of the world. We assume that people do things because of us. People react to what we say or do and we think it is about us. We aren’t aware that they have their own beliefs and interpretations that cause them to react. This assumption blinds us to personalize everything to our own point of view. We have done this for years and practiced it until we do it automatically. We have become masters of taking things personally.

We don’t believe we do our best.

The judge in our mind has been hard at work telling us what to do for years. It has been a constant reminder of what we should and shouldn’t do. In our child hood we learned to follow it as a god like authority in our life. We wouldn’t dare question what it tells us we should be. Because our obedience to that inner judge we never feel like we are doing our best.

Living by the Four Agreements is a Life Changing Commitment

All of this, making assumptions, interpreting everything from our own personal point of view, and living by the voice of the inner judge is the exact opposite of the Four Agreements. And we have been doing it for years. Practicing it every day for years,,, the exact opposite of the Four Agreements.

When you decide to adopt the Four Agreements you are changing the course of so many of the habits of your life. You will not make these changes in one day, or even one week. However, if you work at it over time, you can make extraordinary changes in your life.

If you decide to adopt the Four Agreements as a means to change your relationships and your life, don’t do it for a day or a week. Decide to do it a little bit each day for a year. Then see how much you have changed. To attempt to measure your results in a week, or a month is to make a gross error assumption in the magnitude of your undertaking.
For practical exercises in implementing the Four Agreements take advantage of the free sessions in the Self Mastery Audio Program.

This post originally posted at The Four Agreements by Gary van Warmerdam

The Mitote

The “mitote” (me-toe-tay) as described in The Four Agreements, refers to the cacophony of voices in your head. They are all talking but none of them seem to listen.

The mitote is driven by all those false beliefs, self importance, fears, layers of denial and justifications. As you become aware the mitote can appear to be an endless stream of useless chatter talking over itself. Try to turn it off in the beginning and you get a lesson in humility. As you learn to observe it with neutrality, which is a critical step in dissolving the mitote, you find that it often tricks you by pulling your attention into the conversation.

Yes,,, it is a matrix of illusions. But you can keep it all straight when you are aware that the truth is simple, so simple that it doesn’t need words.

Awareness is Different than Intelligence

Awareness is not the same as intelligence. And intelligence is no substitute for awareness. One aspect of awareness is that it allows you to see things clearly, including how your beliefs and assumptions distort your perceptions. With awareness of this distortion you can make changes in your conclusions.

Intelligence is how you process and analyze what you see. But if you don’t have awareness to see things clearly, no amount of intelligence is going to help you because you are starting with a distorted set of assumptions.

A good article on how beliefs distort your perceptions, and therefore you analysis and conclusiosn.