Mind Management

Get­ting your mind to work with itself is like expect­ing com­puter soft­ware to fix its own glitches. You will not have much luck at it. It will go in one loop after another. You will obsess. Until you real­ize your spir­i­tual nature, you will go in one mind cir­cle after another. Spir­i­tu­al­ity begins when you learn from a friend or an inspired book to have the imag­i­na­tion to step away from your own mind and observe it.
We humans are not entirely crea­tures of instinct. We have the capac­ity to reflect — espe­cially after we learn to set our will power and will­ful­ness on the shelf every now and then and just kick back. I mean, how many times do you have to make the same mis­take until you real­ize that you are doing to your­self?
Spir­i­tu­al­ity is an almost angelic qual­ity within us. For brief moments we can look at our­selves, like we were view­ing some­thing from a moun­tain­top. We can even stand along­side our­selves and learn to treat our­selves like a kind friend — rather than a demand­ing taskmas­ter. Bet­ter yet, we can laugh at our­selves as crea­tures that learn only by mak­ing mis­takes. That laugh­ter is not one of deri­sion but of tran­scen­dent insight.
Work­ing with your­self takes a lot of love and patience. It also takes the courage to recon­sider your most rou­tine avenues of thought. Those very com­mon processes may con­tain the very illu­sions that cause you the most pain. There is noth­ing worse than hav­ing your mind pit­ted against itself — and noth­ing bet­ter when it is not.