OneMinding - A Revolution for the Mind

Ep41 - Finding Light in Dark Times

January 16, 2023 Molls & Gem
OneMinding - A Revolution for the Mind
Ep41 - Finding Light in Dark Times
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, we explore what it means to go from the darkness to the light. We look at The Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, and how they are always creating our experience and how knowing them can help us through our darkest times.

When we see who we are, we begin to understand our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in a new way taking us from the darkness to the light.

No matter how challenging life can be, it is the darkness from which the light shines.

Enjoy the show.

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In this episode, we explore what it means to go from the darkness to the light.

We look at the three principles of mind, consciousness and thought, and how they are always creating our experience and how knowing them can help us through our darkest times.

When we see who we are, we begin to understand our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations in a new way, taking us from the darkness to the light.

No matter how challenging life can be, it is always the darkness from which the light shines.

Enjoy the show!


Hello there.

Hello, Gems.

How are you today?

Really good, how are you?

Yeah, really good.

Looking forward to this evening, getting everyone together and finding the light in the darkness.

Yeah, great title.

I love this title and I love the exploration of digging into what that means and what that looks like for everybody.

So that's really cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we would like to welcome our new sponsor, V-Empire.

You can check them out at  https://www.vemp.xyz

Really happy to have them on board.

For some reason, it feels like ages ago that we did the last space.

Okay.

I feel really Zen about tonight, so it probably means I'm going to fuck it up!

Brilliant.

And if you do, we just won't put it online.

That's true.

We have veto.

Rights.

f there's an episode that we don't like.

We're like.

Yeah.

Either of us can veto it.

So if all of a sudden the space goes dead and the recording is deleted, it is for exactly that reason.

Tonight is going to be really, well.

I say that every week is going to be a really good one.

But lots of people, obviously, with the fallout from FTX and with what's going on with the markets, I think trust is very sparse at the moment.

And just going back to your roots and who you are rather than looking at all the craps that's going on outside, is going to be really beneficial.

Yeah.

Just finding a bit of the piece that's inside of us as we uncover every week.

We've been doing it for over a year now.

Some of you are within this most weeks, so you know all about it.

And it made me look back at one of our older episodes.

We always get maybe 100 on the actual live call, and then I look back at one of them a few weeks ago and it had nearly 1000 listens, so it was like, wow.

Okay.

So what I love about this space is you've got the listens after we've recorded it, and then you've also got the podcast that they'll be out there forever.

So it's really building.

I'm really excited for where this is going and I'm really enjoying it.

So that's a really good thing too.

Yeah, it's brilliant fun.

And the people that we've connected with, some people won't come into the spaces because they don't want to be seen to be in a mental health space, and that's absolutely fine.

I think we do get a lot of listens afterwards in the spaces before we put them onto the podcast, which is amazing.

It doesn't matter how people listen as long as they're enjoying it.

Yeah, I would say we're not really just a mental health podcast.

We all need to understand what we teach.

Every human being should know what we teach.

It's kind of the fundamental building blocks of the human experience.

So it's just about waking up.

It's just about seeing beyond their own thinking.

It's incredibly helpful if you're having a tough time mentally, but it's also amazing if you're not just to be able to see things in a different way.

Not all of my clients come to me because they're mentally in trouble, actually.

Some just come because they want to find out a bit more.

They've heard about it.

They may just want to dig into their experience, where it's coming from, and kind of have a new way of seeing the world, which is what it gives us.

But if you're new on here, then go back to some of the old episodes and listen to those and it's kind of not making sense.

Just stick with it because it will there'll just be a moment of clarity when you'll go, oh, okay, I get it, and that's what you're talking about.

And if you're someone that's been with us for a long time, then you're already seeing it, which is great.

And today is going to be a really relaxing, wonderful episode.

I've got a few things that I'd like to bring up later about my funny week.

To start with, we're just going to go into relax mode and forget everything that you've heard, forget everything that you know and enjoy this with us.

And thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you, everyone, for being here.

And as Gem says, leave everything that you think you know, everything that you think about how life works, how the mind works, how you should feel, how life should look.

If you can just drop that for the next hour and just be with us.

And just as I always say, listen like you're listening to music.

Listen like you're listening to the rain falling.

This isn't about working anything out.

This is about letting things go.

And there's not even a you to let them go.

It's just allowing them to fall away and they will fall away.

Just be here.

Just be here.

Just try and be present in the moment.

Not something that people are used to doing.

We're so used to rushing around and being anywhere but here.

And just know that you're always one thought away from everything looking different.

So no matter how tough the world may look right now, no matter how wonderful you may be because of what's happened lately, no matter how much life may look like it's going against you, that hope is there.

There's always a possibility for a new experience that's guaranteed.

I know that, I've been there.

Gem has been there, most of you have been there.

You've gone through dark times before and you've always come out the other side.

You've got 100% success rate of making it through every day and you're here.

And that's what's important.

And what I want you to think about at the beginning of the call is what is dark to you and what is light to you?

What meaning have you given to those two concepts, the light and the dark?

And just over the next hour, see if they look different.

See how maybe you've made up how they may look to you, how the experience of light and dark are personal to you and the way you see it and different for everybody else.

What we teach every week is that salt is the creator of that experience.

So if you're experiencing light in your life, if you're experiencing darkness in your life, it is actually coming from you.

And that can be tough to see it, it's actually really liberating.

But I know it can be quite tough to see at first.

So I'm really going to over the next hour, explore this light and this dark concept, this creation of thought that we're always in, that we're always having the experience of life coming from us.

So if you just sit for a moment, you'll notice that everything that you're experiencing, even listening to me, it's your own thinking that's connecting to it your experience.

What you'll hear from what I'm saying will be different from what somebody else will hear because it's what you're connecting to.

It it's your experience coming from you.

So I always say that life is coming through you, it's not coming to you that allows us to have the experience when life is contracting when we are in what looked like tough dark times in our life.

Because I'm not going to deny that we do go through contracting experiences.

We can have a different experience within that.

If we catch ourselves, if we begin to see that actually, my thinking is adding to this in a harmful way, in an unhelpful way.

And actually if I can step back behind my own thinking and see the neutrality of experience, I can have some room to breathe, I can have some space from all my own thinking, from all this experience.

It's really interesting.

Obviously I work with a lot of people and they can go, through some really dark things.

They can come to me with some really awful stuff happened to them and some really traumatic experiences and it can really look like it's going to be impossible for them to see the light again or to feel happy.

And there's some points even very early on during our conversations where they have access to that because they've fallen out of their personal thinking, they've fallen out of their concepts about how life should look.

And they've typed something deeper within them which has allowed this experience of light, of peace, of well being to just be present for a moment.

Because it's always there, no matter what the experience, no matter what the thinking, and no matter how heavy it may look.

Underneath that is peace and love and wellbeing, because that's our true nature.

That's our well-being.

And exploring that, I mean, as far as I can see, will always make the richness of life a better experience.

It will always allow us a healthier and more present experience of life because we're not running away from it.

We're staying in the experience of life because we're no longer scared of it, because we understand what it is.

We begin to see that whatever is going on is our reaction, our response is us, is our thinking.

It's our state of mind, it's where we are.

How are we showing up?

What are we seeing.

So that's why in these times of contractions, in these tough times, when it looks like we can't see a way out, it's not in the overthinking, which is often what we do, that we're going to find a solution.

It's in the slowing down, it's in the coming before the thought that we begin to see what's really true.

It's like when things go wrong, it's like we feel like we need to do more, but actually to stop and be present and stop spending so much time in our heads about what should happen, what shouldn't happen, what has happened, what will happen, and getting completely consumed and getting frantic.

It's in the slowing and the peace and the stopping that actually what you're looking for will be there.

It will come through.

Because we have an innate intelligence that is always guiding us and we have an innate intelligence that is always responsive in the moment.

It's like nature knows what season it is.

It doesn't have to think about it.

It's built into the design.

So within our design, if we understand the design, which is what the Unminding project is teaching you, if we see that design, we are able to see in those tough moments that we all experience that, hold on, I know what I've got to do here.

I've got to stop, I've got to step back.

I see that I'm designed for life.

I'm not designed to overthink.

The burden of overthinking is actually what takes me away from my well-being, it's coming home to who I really am and the peace within me that will give me all the answers that I need.

So it's always there.

So this is what we're pointing to.

That darkness that you may be experiencing, that you may be contracted into, can change at any moment because you can slow down and see things differently.

You can have an initial, a site from within, which will allow everything to look different because it's back to who we are before thought is light.

We are the light.

We come from light.

If you think about, there was an explosion, there was nothingness, and there was this explosion, this big bang, and this light came out.

And we come from there.

This matter, this form that we are is connected all the way back there.

When we think we've got to try to become the light, we've got to be better, we've got to find peace, we've got to find happiness.

But you can't become what you already are.

Can you see how the seeking can take you away from it?

The wave will never find the ocean.

It is the ocean.

There's nothing to look for.

We get so consumed in this seeking a better way, a better life, a better mind.

And it doesn't mean to say, when you understand this, you don't do that, but you do it with a lightness.

It just changes our experience.

Go back to that ocean analogy.

The wave is always the ocean.

So that's us in our separation.

We're always part of this shared being, this light that came into form from nothing.

And in that experience that we're having, that wave can look like a good time, a bad time.

It's all made of the same thing.

So seeing that everything's made of this one material, this energy behind life, we can go, okay, I can't not be the wave.

It's what I'm here to be.

I don't have to fight it.

There's something really deep in seeing the acceptance of it, in being in the present moment.

It's an, okay, I'm not going to go into resistance.

I'm going to be here now.

I'm going to have this experience.

It's going to teach me what it needs to teach me.

And again, I truly believe every time we go through these contraptions, through this darkness, there's lessons within it.

There's this new vision of life as we come out of it because we don't want to go through the movie of our life without story arc.

We're always going to have dark times.

But it's from the darkness that the light shines.

I know that my dark seven years that I've spoken about before, and I may speak a little bit about on this call, but that contraction of that seven years of darkness allowed me to come out and experience more light, to be more light, to give more light.

This is what I do.

I wouldn't have been able to do that, I don't believe, without that seven years of going through that intense contraction of my mind, kind of all feeling like it was against me, living in that absolute darkness.

But for me, it was necessary for my evolution.

It was part of my experience.

I fought it for seven years.

When I found this, I saw, felt, and I accepted it.

And everything changed because my relationship with my thinking changed.

And the dark night of the soul is a term that goes back a long, long way.

It can be different from different people.

It can be caused from loss.

It can be caused out of thin air and mental illness.

It can be caused by trauma.

I mean, there's so many ways that we go into that dark night, but if seen from within, it awakens us to something deeper.

And that depth is no longer based on your intellect or your ego.

When I look back, it's like my ego got completely destroyed.

Now, I've still got an ego, but there was a lot of it that just got wiped away.

It was decimated in the experience that I had.

And there's still an ego there.

I don't think we can be human without an ego.

But I'm definitely different to how I used to be.

So that dark night of the soul gave me a deeper sense of who I am.

It gave me more of a connectedness with life.

If anything, I think I'm more in life now than I ever was before.

I felt like I had to escape life and now I see that I just have to be in it.

It's not something to escape and be enlightened and ascend life, actually, it's like, oh no, be alive, feel life.

The darkness can lead to a rebirth.

We go beyond the concept of life to the meaning of life, which, as far as I can see, is pretty simple.

It's to live.

But the dying of the levels of the ego can be painful.

But what really dies when we think about that, what falls away?

It's the ideas.

It's the beliefs that you have about yourself, the beliefs that you have about the world, the beliefs that you have about life.

That's what falls away in those contractions.

That's what looks different there's that saying is the crack is where the light gets in.

So that ego cracks and suddenly there's this awakening process that's available.

The death of the old self when the birth of a new self.

And that's what this is.

Even if you come to this understanding and you haven't really been for a bad time, that's still available to you because we get to see beyond the limited thinking.

So you think about how everything else is looking at the content of thought and what we're teaching you and what other three principles teachers and spiritual teachers are showing you is that it doesn't matter what thought is saying.

That's just content.

You have to see that you have thought and what's before it.

What's the creator of thought?

What's that?

Explore that.

Because there that's where you're going to find peace.

That's where healing occurs.

It's not in the analysis.

The analysis of the mind drives us crazy.

It's not in the analytical mind.

It's a great computer, but it's not great in these areas that we're talking about in personal development, in awakening and seeing through what the mind is telling you and having a richer experience.

So these three principles that we teach the mind, consciousness and thought.

They kind of let us know that even in our darkest moments, we're only one thought away from insight, that relief is available, it will be available.

A new way of seeing is available.

But you don't have to make that happen with this.

You don't have to go into a doing because your natural nature is to have new thoughts.

It's the evolution of who you are is to see life with more wisdom.

So the beauty of these principles is they point to that.

So it's not in a doing, it's in a listening, it's in an understanding, it's in your own insights of where the world is going to look different.

It doesn't also mean that you're passive.

We can be active.

It just means that we're not as thrown around by life's adversities and not as pushed around by the circumstances, events that we feel may go against us.

Instead, we go back to knowing that we are nature, like I said earlier, that we are that infinite intelligence.

Our own experience of life is coming from us moment to moment.

Our own psyche is creating that.

And we're all connected to source, we're all connected to infinite intelligence.

We are all these three principles, whether we know it or not, we are one.

We are a shared being.

And the mind might fight against that.

You can have resistance on the calls.

You may get resistance sometimes listening to the podcast, but then you'll also get those peaceful feelings where you fall out of your conceptual mind.

An insight comes, you feel peaceful.

Don't try and overthink that.

Just know that, oh, I must have touched something.

To feel that, to feel that this essence of who I am can shine through and all the problems that look so huge can just melt away in a moment.

And I can sit and I can remember who I am and I can feel well-being, I can feel peace, I can feel joy, I can feel the meditative state without meditating.

And we're not saying we shouldn't get lost.

It's the most natural thing in the world to get lost.

But it's still coming from thought in the moment, creating our experience.

Whatever life looks like, it's thought in the moment, creating your experience.

And whatever is happening was supposed to happen.

That's what's amazing about this.

We stop the fight with reality and suddenly we know that there's something else, there's a deeper space, there's something more to who we are.

And in those glimpses, that's where we wake up.

That's where this light shines through the darkness.

This is where suddenly we know where to look.

Instead of going outside of ourselves to fix ourselves, instead of jumping on what thought is saying and going in that direction, instead of trying to grasp more security in the world where it doesn't exist, we'll come home, we wake up to thought.

We know that we have something more.

We see beyond the personal and we see a deeper space from which all experience arises, including your thought, that creates the experience.

It comes from a deeper place.

And no matter how dark life seems, you can come back to life in any given moment.

So it's not about seeing the light, it's about being the light.

It's your true nature.

Your being is light.

You have everything you need to deal with whatever darkness life throws at you.

You are the intelligence behind life.

We forget that.

We get so reliant on the computer, on the mind.

We forget about this source energy, this intelligence that spins planets, grows trees, make sure we have the right amount of oxygen to live this balance.

The leaves have always loved this.

When the leaves fall from the trees at the perfect moment, no one's out there shouting at the trees, drop your leaves now.

No, the intelligence is there.

So we go back to that.

We come back to this knowing, to this being.

So it's not about fighting the darkness.

It's just about remembering you are the light.

And it's such a beautiful exploration.

You don't have to take my word for it.

Go explore.

Go see for yourself.

Listen to old episodes.

Find other ways.

Look up the three principles.

Look up sydney Banks, the founder of the three principles.

Watch his videos.

Begin to uncover who you are.

Know that you have everything you need to cope with life exactly as it is.

If you think about every great story that you've ever loved, it's probably been about overcoming the darkness.

The hero's journey.

There's always an ordeal that's the archetypal stories, well, they come from us.

They come from who we are, how we've lived, what humanity has been through throughout the ages.

Every good story, as I said, has a character arc.

And life is much more like a movie than you realize.

And we learn so much from the tests, we learned so much from the contractions, far more than we ever do from the good times.

It's a lovely Paul Coelho quote.

And it's maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything.

Maybe it's about unbecoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you are meant to be in the first place.

And I think that's what these contractions and these dark times do.

They take us back to who we really are.

A lot of unnecessary thinking, a lot of ego falls away.

And there's another Alan Moss one.

And then I'll hand over to Jen.

It's when you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of.

Nothing is left but love.

Gem.

You are very zen.

You did really well.

Then you said that you're really zen tonight, so you're probably going to effort up.

No, that was Britain.

And I've written down quite a few things that I just really connected with.

And it's so true.

What you say about learning more in the darkness than the light?

We really don't learn very much at all when we're feeling great because there's no challenges.

And also when you said about there's no one out there shouting at the trees, saying, drop the leaves.

I kind of want to do that now if no one's doing it.

There is so many stories that we tell ourselves and I was thinking, I don't know whether to tell this story or not and obviously only really say things that I think they're going to help people.

But when you were speaking about just sort of accepting things for what they are, the thoughts that you're having and things over the last probably about three weeks now, I'm nearly out of it, but I've just had literally no energy, I've had no interest in anything.

And this is something that I suffered with pretty much my whole life.

So it was real highs and then real lows.

So it would go on for a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, but I was absolutely exhausted.

I would do my job fine, but as soon as I got back from working away, I'd close the door and just basically eat and sleep and then go and do it all again the next week.

Whereas before that, when I was sort of normal and inverted commerce, I was the life and soul of the party.

A million miles an hour, always going out, always doing things, and there was no real balance.

Those periods would last for maybe six months, a year, sometimes two years, but then I would always get this crash and feel like I'd lost my personality.

I didn't know who I was.

And that's kind of happened over the last couple of weeks, not anywhere near as intense.

But the difference has been is that as soon as I felt a bit different, like my thoughts haven't been intrusive or bad or anything, but I just felt flat.

People that I normally chat to a lot, I just couldn't be bothered, didn't know what to say.

So just sort of ignoring people.

And I just thought, okay, whatever's happening is happening.

I've not really been up too much.

I've been just working on things for unminding.

I've been sat on my computer, not socializing, not been going out into nature, which I should do, but the last couple of weeks have just been like that.

And for the first time ever in my life, I'm just like, okay, cool, whatever is fine.

And it's such a huge, huge thing because I know I never need to be worried about having these mood changes or beating myself up about it.

There's absolutely nothing that I can do.

And previously I would force myself to try and have more energy or be happy.

I would change, like the foods I was eating.

I would book things and plan things with people knowing that I didn't want to do it, but thinking oh, no, that would be good because that's what you're normally like.

Whereas now I see everything in such a different way.

So, yeah, I wanted to share that because, one, if anyone else has those sorts of moods, if there's really nothing you can do, then try and not force yourself.

Two, to all the people I've ignored for the last month to say sorry, but I felt the last couple of days really different, excited.

I don't feel all the energy now, but my mind is more creative.

I think we may have lost Jamie there.

I can't hear Jim.

I'll come in and out.

Okay, my darling.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting that you've pointed to that.

It's that acceptance, because the fighting, as you clearly knew from before, didn't make any difference.

So it's actually in the acceptance for all of us.

It's in the acceptance of how we feel that actually allows us to get over it.

Think how much we can fight our experience instead of just accepting it.

It doesn't mean to say we just accept it and nothing changes.

It's different from that.

It's this acceptance where, okay, this is how I feel, but actually I'm still going to get on with doing the things that I need to do.

We're not wallowing so much in our feelings with this understanding because we see that they can't hurt us.

And actually, they're quite transient.

I say every week, feelings are just visitors.

They come and they go, they appear and they disappear.

But like the wave analogy that I've used tonight, the wave appears and then the wave disappears.

It goes back into the ocean.

Our feelings are that that they appear and then they fall away.

Just like our thoughts, too, and our experiences and even us, we've appeared in life and we will disappear from life.

So we begin to see this nature of things exactly as they are.

It's so much easier when we're in flow with nature instead of fighting.

It can spend so much time in unhelpful resistance.

So, Jen, are you back?

I am.

Can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

Brilliant.

I don't know where you heard up to, but the point was that shit happens sometimes and literally nothing happened.

All that happened was I didn't want to do anything and I didn't feel bad or that I should change it.

And I felt a bit tearful just a second ago, so it's probably good that I got cut off, but I just felt really proud of myself because it's been a long well, probably since 1314.

I was, like, going through that cycle constantly and I put all of my energy into work.

Well, I'm glad I did it when I was young, but I could never do those hours and those miles and everything now.

But I just remember having that feeling when everything was going so well, having that daunting thinking, wow, you're going to crash soon.

You're going to crash.

In and it was almost like I was always trying to hold on to that one moment that I always thought I should be like.

And it can't be like that, but you're told be a certain way and show up to the world and especially when people expect you to be a certain way with work and in your friendship group or whatever it may be.

But you just got to take that pressure off yourself because sometimes you just have to do nothing.

I've spent so much time in bed, I've eaten loads of ice cream, I've done loads of things of unminding, but a couple of things that I'll say now, I know that it's when I get serious or things become serious that I know I'm not on the right path because I'm normally laughing.

Everything's really easy and flowing.

And this week I just thought, I'm just going to get on with the unwinding stuff.

I've been designing newsletters and basically just making us more not professional but more contact with everybody because we've had some really lovely messages on our website and yeah, I just want to have something regular. https://www.theunmindingproject.com

So I've been putting my head into that and made me laugh so much because I was doing this newsletter yesterday and it took probably about four or 5 hours and it looked shy.

It looks probably like a ten-year-old has done it as a computer experiment at school.

But after taking so long I thought, oh no, it looks okay.

And so I sent it to Moles and said, it's not amazing, but it's getting there.

What do you think?

And you're like, that's not great.

And I was like, okay.

Amazing.

Then you said, Give me the login details and I'll see if I can change it up a bit with the fonts and things.

So I sent you the login details, you logged in and two minutes later he said, yeah, let's not do this, it's way too complicated.

The program doesn't work very well.

Let's see if we know anybody that can help us with it or find someone on fiverr or whatever.

And I just was so gobsmacked, I was thinking, I've done this for so long and I know I was battling with myself.

It wasn't particularly easy to do.

I've got no skill in that department and for some reason I just kept on trying to do it.

I should have probably said, we have to outsource this, this is looking rubbish.

And you just said, well, yeah, no one told us all stuff.

And I loved so much because I was getting myself in the tie about everything, so I knew I had to just, you know, remove everything and editing.

A couple of weeks ago.

The birthday episode was quite tricky because we had loads of different guests and, yeah, it was just all over the place and it took me probably about 8 hours in total, but we did it over three or four.

Days, and my attention span isn't great, so I normally do 20 minutes, half an hour, then do something else so I can't do the whole thing in in one go.

But it was probably the hardest one.

I kind of thought, I'm just not going to release this because I can't get it to sound nice and I've become a bit of a perfectionist with it.

So I was in a stroke and I messaged Molly and I said, I think you're going to have to have a look at this because there's nothing I can do about it.

It's just crap, basically.

And usually replied and said, I can't do anything because the internet is not working.

And I said out loud, straight away, as soon as I said, yeah, but it fucking is.

And as soon as I said it, I went, what the hell, Gem?

Are you crazy women?

Because that is not really what I feel.

What I think.

I know for a second you wouldn't lie to me about anything, and if you didn't want to do it, you say, I can't be bothered, but just the fact that that was my instant thought in normal times, or when I'm feeling like, why would I question that?

I'm able to notice my thoughts so quickly now.

And I thought, Bloody hell.

Probably.

I have lived a lot of my life in the victim mode and thinking that people are out to get me and things like this.

And it's so funny, but when you're in a low mood, how suddenly you can have old thinking or whatever.

But I would never have been able to notice that thinking without learning this or being around this, because thoughts to me before were just normal.

If you have that thought and that's what you're thinking, that is you.

And now I know that's completely false, but up until, well, a couple of years ago, I really, really believed that.

So when my first thought was that you were lying and your internet wasn't broken, you just didn't want to do it, I knew that, okay, you're funny.

And it was an insight because it's like sometimes you really have to question your own thinking, especially if you're in a low place.

As soon as I'd said, yeah, I bet your internet is down in the most sarcastic voice, I heard it back and I was like, wow, that's not really you.

And that's what this gives you.

It's the availability to question and realize that a lot of the thoughts that come through are not very helpful.

So fucking yeah.

It's interesting to catch our own thinking.

I think that's, again, the beauty of the understanding is we just get those moments where it's like, oh, yeah, it's me again, it's me again.

Because it always is.

It's always our own thinking.

It always comes back to this one source energy, which is us, which is thought, which is the energy before thought.

It's going back into that.

The deeper we go, the more peace we find, the more we go into our content of our thinking in the world and trying to manipulate it, actually, the less happy we feel, the more away from our truth we are.

So it's just about finding out who we are, uncovering who we are.

It just simplifies life, it makes life easier and it makes this true nature, who we really are.

This piece more accessible now.

We can't control that.

I can't decide when I'm going to be peaceful, when I'm going to be Zen, when I'm going to be upset.

I'm just along for the ride and feelings come and thoughts come, feelings go.

And there I am experiencing it, but it's away from the manipulation of it, it comes back to just being in it, just allowing myself to have that experience.

And I think where Jen was saying she just lied in bed, in it, ice cream, that's fine.

But I think even at another level, you can feel exhausted and get on with your day.

There's no judgment.

It's fine to do that, I can have days like that.

But the principles also allow us to think, well, who cares how I'm feeling?

I've got this to do, I've got that to do, I've got to go to the shopping, I've got to go to work.

And there's less focus on that feeling because it can become a little bit self-indulgent.

And I think we move away from that self-indulgence into a place of just knowing that it doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't say anything about us, it's just where we are in that moment.

They're always changing.

Thoughts and feelings are always changing.

There's always a new one along in a minute, but like busses.

So just allow yourself that.

Just allow yourself to be, just allow yourself, if you're new to this, to go on this exploration and find out a little bit more of who you are.

Jim, do we have any questions for tonight?

We do.

We've got some great questions.

The first one I'm going to read is from one of my favourite people there in the room, and they've just messaged and it's a great question and it's, how do I make thinking stop?

Yeah, you're not going to be able to do that.

That's never going to happen.

What we teach here, if you could make thought stop, if someone had discovered that, they'd be the richest person in the world because we'd all be buying it.

What we're showing here is the ability to observe thoughts that we don't get so caught up in it.

The ticker tape of thought is still going strong, but we're not so involved in it, we're not taking too much notice of it.

It's just what's happening, it has a lot less meaning.

So that's what we do.

Stopping thought is just, that's going to drive you crazy.

I have people come to me and they go, oh, I get what you're saying, but how do I stop thought?

I go, no.

And they say, oh, yeah.

And I go, have you ever tried to stop thought?

And that's the case you said, well, yeah, in yoga they tell me to stop my thinking.

And I'm like my mind goes crazy.

I'm like, yeah, because you're going against the tide, thoughts going to come, and you have to accept that.

But you can change your relationship to it.

So just to add a bit more, say if the thoughts were overwhelming, if they're intrusive, how would you help with that?

Well, if they're overwhelming and intrusive, I'd say, you just got to explore this a little bit more.

You've got to really listen, dig in, and just find a little bit more for yourself out about these three principles about what we're teaching here.

Because intrusive thought, unhealthy thought, negative thought, everything salt.

If you can begin to see the neutrality of that, you're not pushed around so much by your own thinking.

Now, intrusive thoughts, what happens with intrusive thinking is we become scared of it.

Now, I had intrusive thoughts when I was going through my seven years of darkness, and I was terrified of my own mind.

And how the fuck did you get away from your own mind is impossible.

So I can really relate to how awful it is, but I know I became free when I saw it.

Just as neutral thought when I went beyond it.

So that's what's available here.

It's still thought.

And it also almost by saying, oh, it's intrusive thought.

It's this thought.

Can you see how you're making it bigger thought, stronger thought, heavier thought.

It's about coming back and seeing it.

It's all one thing.

It's all the ocean.

Every thought is the ocean waving.

Yeah.

And those thoughts don't say anything about you.

I mean, I used to have really intrusive thoughts as well.

Basically thought I was a piece of shit most of my life.

And sometimes I still have thoughts that aren't good, but I know that they're not true.

But before that, I had no idea.

So it is such a shift being able to identify that if you were choosing your own thoughts, if it was you thinking them, you probably wouldn't think bad things about yourself.

And we've got a live request.

I love people that come in to ask questions.

So if there's anyone else that wants to come up and speak, you're more than welcome.

But I'll bring you up to Mengu.

Hello?

Are you there?

Yeah, I am.

Hi.

Thanks for coming up.

Thank you for having me.

I love your space.

Just a quick thought about the heading to work, but after a lot of research, thought is such an interesting concept.

It's like breathing or blinking your eyes.

It's something that happens naturally that we have zero control over.

So there's like a separation between what we think and who we actually are.

And the second you kind of identify that fact that the thoughtful mind isn't the presence of ourselves, it is more of just like this automatic recirculating, circulating trace of experience and all these various things.

Once you kind of detach from that, it becomes much easier to identify, categorize and understand the thoughts that are actually coming up, whether those are positive or negative.

We all want to have positive thoughts.

We all want to be reinforced by our own power and internal wealth.

But unless we really make that differentiation between our insecurities, which most of us focus on primarily internally, that's the easiest thing to grasp on to is like, I'm not worth this or this thing is too good for me, or I am this or that in a negative context.

The second that we're able to break away from that and understand that those thoughts are just thoughts, they aren't who we are, that we begin to gather a greater understanding of who we actually are as through a lens.

Our thoughts are something that's happening outside of us, and it's not correlated to who we are as being who we are as walking specimens of this planet.

And for me personally, once this is a lifetime development, nothing that's going to happen overnight.

But like the second that I kind of came to terms with that aspect of my existence, it was much easier for me to kind of reprogram my mind into understanding that that is not who I am.

And yeah, that's just I love you guys' space.

I love everything that you do.

I love the outreach that you guys are presenting.

And yeah, for me that's been the most fundamental change or shift in the way that I present or see myself is that our thoughts are just thoughts and there's no way to control them and they come up without warning.

And the best thing that we can do is separate ourselves from those thoughts and look through a lens of our internal being in identifying what they are and taking the time to sit there with that thought and be like, that is not me, that is not who I am.

That is just a thought.

That is just a concept.

That is probably not my end.

It was probably delivered to me or given to me in some way.

But in essence, 90% of the thoughts that we come up with are not our own.

Yes, I love your space.

Thank you so much for everything that you guys provide and I'll be back.

I appreciate you.

Thank you for speaking.

We really appreciate it.

And I love what you said.

I loved that you found what we were speaking about without exploring the three principles.

And that's because we're already it.

Some people just stumble across this seeing through their own thinking.

And what you saw didn't come from thought.

It's from a deeper space.

It's not even in the analysis of thought.

You had an insight and something from within came through.

Something deeper than thought came through.

You saw that you weren't your thinking and that's it.

That's the key to everything.

It's seeing that you're not your own thinking, that you're not this thought that comes and goes.

That's just a transient, temporary experience and there's so much to see and that so much of life can change.

When we observe that there's so much that isn't true.

You said 90% isn't true.

I'd say it's probably higher.

Most of our thoughts are actual nonsense.

They just create our experience and it's fun.

We have this temporary human experience that we're here to play in and not take as seriously as we probably have been.

And thought creates that.

So it's just beginning to access this witness of thought in the principles, that's consciousness.

That's our awareness of our thinking.

That's being able to see thought, because it's not in stopping thought.

It's as I said, it's in seeing thought.

And that's available to every one of us.

It's not the people that see it as special or they've done something special or they've got an ability that somebody else hasn't.

We all have this within us to be able to see through our own thinking.

So it's just I want you all to be really aware of that.

This isn't not on the table for you.

It has to be on the table for you.

It has to be available.

When you see it, when you get it, when you have the insight, who knows?

But it will happen at some point and when it does, it will lead to a freedom of mind, which will lead to a much freer life without anything in your life actually changing.

And that's really important.

Life is going to look how you look at life.

Yeah, it's always us.

It's the lens that we have.

And so these principles, they come and they clean the lens and that's really, really important.

It's beginning to see that there's nothing for us, there's nothing for this energy before us and there's nothing that isn't us.

It's one thing.

We are one.

We're all made of the same thing.

It's truly wonderful to be able to share this, to explore this, to see it for yourself.

And what have you got to lose?

I always say, what have you got to lose by going on this exploration?

You're always going to find something within you that is more than you thought you were.

You're going to get the opportunity to see through your insecurities.

Insecurity is thought bad.

Feeling is so intrusive.

Thinking is still anger is still behaviour is so it's all one thing.

Yeah.

Thank you for coming up and sharing that queue.

And a couple of things you both said has given me a question, so I'm going to ask that.

But obviously everyone has different experiences, everyone has different thoughts.

Everyone's experience is going to be completely different.

Now, do you think that some people are born and have such a lovely, wonderful, just like a model life that they know straight away that when they have a negative thought or something that is not true about them, they know that that's bullshit.

Do you think that there are some people that just see this without this?

Basically, yeah, definitely there are some people that see it without this.

I think there's always levels of conditioning and the character and there's this part that we play.

I don't see that anybody is going to really not have levels of that.

To have this society conditions as our family, our friends, our schooling, it all comes in and it's like, what do we take on board?

What do we create ourselves from that?

Do we create ourselves out of all this thinking of this world that we live in?

So for someone not to have it, I'm not sure because I've still got a load of conditioning and a load of thinking.

I just get to see thought more often than I used to.

So it's really beginning to see that it's available to everybody.

But definitely some people will see it without understanding the principles, because it's insight, it's available to everyone.

Now, the principle is kind of primus for it, but the fact we are it before thought means that it's definitely available.

So it's that availability that I want everyone to be aware of that even if you haven't seen it yet or you've just got it conceptually for now, at some point, if you stay in the conversation, you'll see it more deeply.

And when you see it more deeply, you'll have a different experience of life.

Yeah, it is really mind-blowing.

Just give me an idea, actually, something that we might be able to do with unwinding.

So that's exciting.

We did have a couple of questions that have come in from Twitter, so I just want to run through them as well.

The first one is from Quinn.

He said, we all love a bit of instant gratification.

Do you have any tips for changing unhealthy head spaces?

When it's hard to get out of a slump, any practical reminders or any steps to take?

It goes back to really what we've been talking about, which is, this isn't a doing, this is a being.

It's seeing thought, it's understanding what thoughts doing.

The more that you understand thought, the more that you see thought, the easier it is to deal with those slumps, those times that we're going through, the unhelpful thinking.

So listen to a podcast, listen to our minding, listen to Sid Banks.

It's not in the doing, it's definitely in just being present in the moment and being responsive.

We talked about that earlier.

We talked about don't try and put it on the world to make you better be responsive to what's within you.

And so if you can let go of all that unhelpful thinking about needing to do something to feel better.

Actually, what tends to come through is thought.

That will be helpful, so it might be go for a walk or go for a swim more, put a movie on or eat some ice cream and we'll see that more clearly and we'll be accepting of that rather than in this fight against our own being, against our own thinking.

Now, fighting thought is incredibly unhelpful.

You're using thought to fight thought, which is where the problem was in the first place.

So we have to step before thought, we have to see thought.

That principle of consciousness, that principle of observation of who we are, is what changes the experience.

Asking if there's something you can do is going in the wrong direction.

Seeing the truth of who you are exploring within is going in the right direction.

Yeah.

And actually being able to observe that you are in a well, inverted commerce, unhealthy headspace.

You're probably not going to want to make any life changing decisions at the moment and sort of just accepting it and knowing that it's not going to last forever.

It allows you to be a lot more fluid with life, doesn't it?

Yeah.

It's a temporary experience, as we always say, every week, nothing's permanent.

Thought comes, thought goes, experience comes, experience goes, feeling comes, feeling goes.

It's all coming from one place, which is us.

Yeah.

And the final question, unless anyone else has anything else or any more questions, is why am I always surrounded by people but feel lonely all the time?

Yeah, that's a lovely question and I'm sorry that you feel like that, but I think it's expecting other people to make us feel not lonely.

That's the problem.

We have to come away from that expectation of the outside world to make us feel a certain way.

So you can be in a room full of people and feel lonely if you haven't explored your inner world, if you don't see that you're connected to all things at all times, if you're looking for those people to feel something up within you that they can never feel.

And you can be alone in the room and feel completely connected to all things and not lonely in any single way.

So it's really dependent on you.

It's nothing to do with the people.

It’s beginning to explore who you are, begin to see that you are all things, begin to see that you have everything you need within you and then you'll have a very, very different experience of being in that room full of people.

So back to who we are.

Nothing is going to change on the outside until we change on the inside.

So when we talk about finding light in dark times, the light is going to come from you and the dark time is almost going to be the creator of that light, the creator of that change.

And as we change within, the reflection on the outside world, I know.

I've seen it in me.

I've seen it in my clients and the people around me and the people I love.

That when they go within, when something changes, when old beliefs fall away, when life looks different, then life becomes different.

The only way out is in.

But people are constantly outsourcing their well-being.

They're looking at the room full of people to make them not feel lonely.

This is never going to work because a room full of people cannot contain your well being.

They cannot contain your happiness.

So explore this.

Explore the three principles.

Check out the unwinding podcast.

Find someone like me to talk to.

It's a wonderful exploration.

People go and spend money thinking they're going to feel better.

They might get a temporary fix.

But to go and find someone to speak to about this, to have a guide in your exploration of who you are, that's going to be with you forever, that's going to change how you see the world, that's going to change what you think you need and want from the world.

You're going to become a different person.

Gangaji has a book and it's called the diamond in your pocket.

And we search the world for the diamond.

We don't realize it's already in our pocket.

That's the light.

There's nothing to find.

It's not a light to find, it's the light to uncover.

It's the light that you already are.

And it's just been covered with these cloths of salt.

These valves of salt have covered up that light until you can't see it.

And the principles slowly take away the veils, the beliefs, the thoughts, the opinions, they begin to fall away and the light begins to be seen more clearly.

No, that's so beautiful.

I've noticed it.

You have to let go of the person that you thought you were.

Many of the beliefs that I had were not true and I've noticed it recently with friendship groups, been sat in conversations and thinking, I don't really want to be here or not really enjoying this as I used to.

It's me that's changing and there's nothing wrong with that.

But whether it's outgrowing people or sometimes you just don't connect to people like you used to.

Yeah.

When you find out more who you are and love yourself, you never can really feel lonely because you know that you're whole and you're connected to everybody else.

That was a beautiful question and a very lovely explanation.

So thank you and I think that's probably going to be it for tonight.

Thank you all for joining us.

Been a really wonderful episode.

I want to say thanks to Joe Blazer, and Amarin for the messages on the website. https://www.theunmindingproject.com

Thank you to the V-empire who are our sponsor.

You can check them out at V-empire.io https://www.vemp.xyz/

Thank you very much to them.

As always, DMs are open during the week and looking forward to seeing you all next week for Thanksgiving.

Yeah, thank you, everybody.

And I'm going to leave you with a lovely Robert Adams quote.

And it's go deep within yourself, deeper than you've ever gone before, where the thoughts stop, where you've touched the substratum of all existence, when you become the ocean of bliss which is within you, the centre of you, is the ocean of bliss.

You are that.

Thank you.