mind, body and self
February 6th, 2009
I forgot to mention that two days ago I went back to the free meditation class on nithya dhyaan and had a pretty good class. since the previous weekly course was canceled due to the severe weather here in columbus, that course had to pack twice the info. in the end, i felt pretty good and was apparently successful in ‘unclutching’ or letting go of my thoughts. there are some interesting concepts in the first class that i also wanted to bring up, maybe i did in a previous entry but i dont remember.
i dont think this is the first time i bumped up against this concept, but it’s interesting how in this class they model a person as body (of course), mind and self. now at first, it was a little awkward and didn’t fit. but the instructor went on to point out some examples. i don’t want get this wrong but i think it was along the lines of your mind is responsible for your thoughts and it develops its own patterns about thoughts. but most importantly, your mind is not your self.
now this is interesting for a couple reasons and it makes sense to me independently of any meditation or ‘new age’ stuff. some common examples have to do with expressions like “be honest with yourself”, or “lying to yourself”. if you stop and think about that, it is a really weird idea that you can be not honest with yourself because that implies there is another self not being honest with your self. i actually ran into this experience many years ago when i caught myself lying to myself about video games. at the time, i thought it was surprising and ever since then learned to keep an eye on myself. probably one of the most useful experiences i’ve ever had.
anyway, going back to their model for body, mind and self reminded me of all of this because the other self was the mind (don’t know how obvious that is to point out). so, sometimes our self has to keep an eye on our mind. interesting and useful.
p.s. i almost put a corny title like ‘mind your mind’, but i thought i’d spare you all.
1 Response to “mind, body and self”
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February 8th, 2009 at 06:09 PM yeah, the brain the prolly considered the "hardware"..and the mind is the "software" so to speak...as for the notion of self, that's a hard one...Interesting to note that some drugs, like LSD, are known to dissociate a person from their notion of self... people forget who they are, and what they are... crazy stuff.... but then again, if the notion of self is somewhere in the higher levels of consciousness, what does it mean that a drug can influence its existence....hmm, just a thought, hope that makes sense...