Letter 2025 #4: How Well Do You Know Your Own Mind?
When we reflect we can see clearly; photo from Pai, Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand
Dear Friend
This week’s book extract comes from David Frawley’s brilliant book Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness.
It is just one short extract from a book of over 300 riveting pages talking about and inquiring into the mind, so our purpose in this Letter is simple and concise: to raise your awareness of this invisible entity of ours, of just four letters, yet of a size to match the whole universe; after all, we can conceive of the universe, and this conception is produced by, and held in, our mind!
Of all the books I’ve read—and since I became an adult they’ve almost all been non-fiction, of an educational nature—this book emphatically makes the top 3, and always will do. Probably #1, but definitely in the top 3.
A word on the process of learning
I don’t want to share my thoughts on the topic until you’ve done the
pre-reading task
read the text
and done the post-reading task
as I don’t wish to pre-empt the process of you raising your current awareness of the mind, and its relationship with you and the world around you. However, I will say a few words about learning.
Ultimately speaking, spiritual (and therefore harmonious) living is you taking responsibility for your own understandings and perspectives, and it’s why I use this Task-Based Learning approach in all my classroom work: to help students, through the judicious setting of tasks and questions, become skilled in raising their awareness through observation, reading, listening and reflection. It makes learning and the student the focus in education, not teaching and the teacher.
This delivers a self-empowering education and learning experience, that stands in contrast to the systematically disempowering nature of the school systems which, effectively, just offer a tell-yell-and-compel experience. Task-Based Learning puts you firmly centre stage in the context of your own life. It is a strategic, intelligent, life-affirmative learning method, if you like, to make YOU the centre of your life. Inside-out living, we could say. Start with you, improve yourself, and emanate outwards. This, of course, runs completely counter to the mainstream school education which denies us all opportunities to learn about ourselves, our mind, our body, our soul, our connections with the world.
It’s why I promote self-inquiry, because to learn about yourself you have no choice but to learn about the web of life too. Yet, in the typical school approach, we learn about the world, but nothing about ourself. We’ve got it the wrong way round. This disconnects and disempowers us. It gives us a faulty understanding of both ourselves and our world. And that means perpetual conflict and division within our own consciousness, and therefore perpetual civil war in our human world and our societies.
By consciously choosing to be a lifelong learner in your life, you are committed to your personal lifelong evolution and self-growth, not remaining stuck in the past, not regressing, not decaying. You swap stress, struggle, suffering and pain for motivation, enthusiasm, purpose and holistic wellbeing.
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Let’s get to our extract for the week. Discuss the task questions with a friend if you are doing it this way, or write down your thoughts to the task questions in your notebook. Do the pre-reading task first, then do the reading, then do the post-reading task, and then you can read my own comments at the end of it all.
Pre-Reading Task
Are you in control of your mind, or does your mind control you?
What did they teach you about the human mind during your schooling?
What is your primary relationship with our world? Which part of you is holding this relationship?
How would your life change if you learned that every single problem you encounter in life arises from the same single macro-problem?
Extract from chapter 4, ‘The Nature of the Mind’
[NB The italicised parts are my emphases.]
“Can one imagine being put into the driver’s seat of an automobile with the engine running and not knowing how to drive, not knowing how to use the breaks, the steering wheel or the clutch? Naturally we would get into an accident and, should we survive, would end up permanently afraid of driving.
We are in a not too different situation with our minds. Our awareness is placed in the mind when we are born, but we are not taught how to use the mind, its sensitivities and emotions. We are not taught the meaning of its states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. We are not shown the comparative functions of reason, feeling, will and sensory perception. We are left in the dark because our parents and society do not understand the mind and how it works. The mind is the main vehicle we use for all that we do, yet few, if any of us, know how to use and care for it properly.
We all suffer from ignorance of the nature of the mind. All problems we encounter in life are based ultimately upon not knowing the mind, and its functions. From this primary problem, various secondary problems arise—like how to fulfill our desires, or how to avoid what we fear—which, however important these may appear, are merely the natural consequence of this basic ignorance about the mind. For example, if we do not know how to drive a car properly, the issue of where to go with it is not important. However, we take these derivative problems as primary or blame others for them, turning them into social, moral or political issues, not realizing that they are just one problem - not understanding the mind. From a wrong understanding of the mind, we develop wrong ideas about the world and run into difficulty in our social interactions.
To use another analogy, if we do not understand how fire works, we may burn ourselves. This does not mean we are a bad person or that fire is bad, but only that we do not understand fire and its properties. The mind has its qualities and, like fire, can be used for both good and bad. It can provide great happiness or wreak tremendous havoc in the world, as history has shown again and again. All psychological problems are nothing more than a wrong use of the mind, which arises from ignorance of how the mind works. The solution to all our mental problems is to learn to use the mind properly. This is true whatever your psychological problems may be.
More important than any examination of our personal or social problems is educating ourselves about the nature of the mind. All the problems that appear so immediate and important—like whether we will be loved or if our friends and family can be happy—are not the real issue and cannot be solved directly. The real issue is how to use the most important and central instrument in our lives - the mind itself.
Learning the right use of the mind not only solves our psychological problems, but directs us to our higher potential of Self-realization. It leads to the spiritual life, which is our real occupation as conscious beings. Then we can transcend the mind—which is inherently limited—to Pure Awareness unbounded by time, space or causation. For all things in life, we must start with understanding the mind.”
~ Dr David Frawley in Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness
Post-Reading Task
Do this task before you read my own thoughts after it.
Without referring back to the text, write down one or two sentences that sum up what you have just understood from this passage. And, what is your overriding feeling from reading it?
What do you think the root cause of fear is? And greed? Loneliness? Unhappiness? Hatred? Resentment? Self-doubt? Lack of confidence?
Each human being has their own set of problems, and many of these problems are recurring problems or simply problems that never go away. We almost grow used to problems, that we can’t really solve them, and so we settle for a sub-optimal life. From what you have read in the passage, can you think of i) a reason for this inability to solve our problems; and ii) how you can bust right through this far-reaching limitation in your life?
Does this passage cause you to reevaluate the human activity of ‘blame’ - blaming others, or blaming yourself? How can engaging in blame keep us stuck in life?
Consult your mind and memory to tell you what problems or challenges you have in your life currently. Make a list in your notebook. Include all problems that you can think of, including any long-running ones that resurface from time to time.
Here are the italicised sections from the text collated in one place. I wanted to emphasise these bits as to me they are crucial to truly understand for ourselves. Reading through them, can you identify i) the macro-problem we face in life, ii) the consequences of this problem, iii) what the solution is, and iv) what benefits we will experience when we apply the solution.
>> We all suffer from ignorance of the nature of the mind. All problems we encounter in life are based ultimately upon not knowing the mind, and its functions…
>> From a wrong understanding of the mind, we develop wrong ideas about the world and run into difficulty in our social interactions…
>> All psychological problems are nothing more than a wrong use of the mind, which arises from ignorance of how the mind works. The solution to all our mental problems is to learn to use the mind properly…
>> More important than any examination of our personal or social problems is educating ourselves about the nature of the mind…
>> For all things in life, we must start with understanding the mind.Which just leaves one crucial thing: how can we best learn about our own mind?
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Discussion points
Whatever our mind is, however many of them we have, or, more likely, how many ‘compartments’ there are to our mind, the key to understanding life and to understanding your own true nature, so that you can align your life with your true nature and with the whole web of life, is to understand your mind.
Understanding is the opposite of ignorance, and if it had not been clear to some before 2020, the events of that year clearly showed all non-comatose human beings that ignorance in our time is not bliss, it can be downright dangerous to our wellbeing, and even deadly.
Dr Bruce Lipton often says ‘Knowledge is power and lack of knowledge is lack of power’. I like to add to this by saying, ‘and learning is empowering, while understanding is liberating’.
I literally view my mind as the centre of the universe. It is my mind which gives me (and chooses) my perspective of life, and my experience of life. Without my mind I am nothing. For you, your mind is the centre of the universe. The central question, therefore, is revealed in the first one in the pre-reading task.
What I will say is that unless you’ve done the requisite ‘inner work’ on yourself (your own spiritual revolution), your mind will control you, or rather, your mindset and its contents will control you. But, through inner work, we change this relationship, and after practice for the most part we will now be in control of our mind. I also think of it like this: from emotional enslavement to external triggers to spiritual liberation with inner peace.
It is essential for our wellbeing, and the healing of our troubled human world, that we know how to find inner peace, and that means we need to learn how to get it, and that means learning about our mind which blocks or enables it.
Your first education, as a kid during your 12 years of schooling, did almost everything in its power to disconnect, disempower and dehumanise you… which may even be unintentional.
(Whether this woeful and harmful schooling is deliberate, as many say, or unintentional, as I suspect, is immaterial to our search for solutions, and can only be conjecture. We get the solution to any problem by seeking out its root cause. This is our focus, not whether the egg or the chicken came first: both are there and both belong together!)
Instead of training us to use our mind in an intelligent and harmonious manner, our woeful school systems block us from even learning about our mind, never mind how to use it properly. We were made completely ignorant of the most important entity in our life, and this is a serious handicap! But as Frawley says, we are ‘left in the dark because our parents and society do not understand the mind and how it works’.
What’s happened is that humankind has got itself stuck in what I call a vicious intergenerational cycle of anti-education. If we don’t learn about and understanding something, then when we become parents we are hardly able to help our children learn and understand it either. Leaders, too, are unable to lead and inspire, instead they just try and force things through, same in most teaching. And this is the vicious cycle that continues to block humanity’s ability to live in peace and harmony, keeping us stuck in conflict and stress.
Humanity has, somewhere along the line, perverted its own intelligence. We are destroying ourselves with this perversion. It’s why our world is so conflicted and why we have perpetual civil war (human killing human), and why we ourselves are almost perpetually stressed, because individual human beings everywhere are conflicted within, because we have little idea of the very entity that gives us our life. We don’t really know who we are, and we don’t really understand how the whole interconnected web of life works.
Society is not out there, it’s a virus programmed into your mind! The relationship we hold with the world is flawed, based on misunderstanding.
A Spiritual Revolution is my pathway to removing this handicap, deprogramming your mind, shedding light into the dark, and taking charge and ownership of your own mind. This is the beautiful news, that we can take our own proactive steps to recover everything that has been denied us (for it is still within us, just that it’s been hidden all this time). And so let me reshape Q1 from the Pre-Reading task (Are you in control of your mind, or does your mind control you?) into, Would you like to be in control of your own mind?
It’s abundantly clear… since we were denied an understanding of our true nature, and now that you are aware of this, you have a binary choice: remain in your conditioned, disconnected, disempowered state and carry on with your life as normal, or learn about your mind to empower yourself and carve out a life that suits you, your own unique talents and traits, your dreams and desires. And, best of all, contribute to the healing of humankind and to the greater good of our whole beautiful Mother Earth!
It’s really not difficult to empower ourselves, and transform our lives. It took me quite a while, because there was nobody to guide me or train me back in the 90s when I did my main work. My whole venture, these Letters, my book, the Academy I’ve built, and more, represent an ecosystem I’m building for adults to get a second education. You can read stuff, and you can learn live with me in my online or in-person courses and workshops. I’m just fitting the last bits into the ecosystem, and once they are in place, I’m ready!
Back to your mind. It is a receptor, a processor, a storage centre, a creator and producer.
You can think of the world in physical terms, or in terms of energy flow. With our minds, the energy flow is information. We receive informational input from the world around us, our mind then processes and interprets this input for meaning, you may store some or all of it in your memory bank, and you will react to, or act upon, the informational input by creating, producing, speaking… that is, informational output. You ‘consume’, you ‘digest’, you ‘produce energy’ and you ‘excrete’ waste. This two-way energy flow is the cycle of life in every sphere.
I would say the key thing is the processor. On what basis does the processor in your mind interpret and discern information coming to you from media, government, books, the internet, other people, your own experiences? We are getting to things like mindset, perspective, perception, viewpoint, beliefs, ideology and so on.
A major part of learning about our mind and how to use it properly, is learning how we can consciously reset our mindset. Your mindset gives you your orientation in life, and filters incoming information accordingly.
Your mindset and orientation might typically be self-entitled, envious, greedy, fearful, unmotivated, or grateful, contented, accepting, enthusiastic, wholehearted, loving. Your mindset exerts a tremendous influence over how you process information from the world around you (media and your own world), and therefore how you feel, act, think and speak.
The fourth question, ‘How would your life change if you learned that every single problem you encounter in life arises from the same single macro-problem?’ is important too. What do you think after reading the extract? My answer is that pretty much every single problem that arises in our life does so from an ignorance of our mind, and from not being in charge of it.
This is Frawley’s message in his book. It’s the message of many who have spent much time looking into the matters of the human mind. I spent thousands of hours on my hammock in the 1990s in quiet tropical islands in Thailand, before mass tourism changed it. I had so much peace and quiet, and time and space to myself to do all the mental exploring, contemplating and reflecting.
Therefore, learn about your mind to take charge of it, and now most problems will not even arise any more, and those that do are always solvable. I might add that sometimes we know the solution, but actually making it happen can be quite a bit harder! This is precisely because we’ve been using our mind in a wrong way for our entire life, and as we all know, habits can be hard to break. We just need to have faith in our ability, practise and practise until we become skilled. You did not learn to walk in a day!
My life has transformed itself in multiple and beneficial ways from my spiritual explorations and self-inquiry, and this is the direct result of learning about my own mind and how it works. It means I know how your mind works… haha! But I’m not about indoctrinating you; I’m wanting you to discover whatever the extent of your own programming is, and releasing yourself from it. If we know how it works, we develop immunity to it.
Question 2 from the post-reading task:
What do you think the root cause of fear is? And greed? Loneliness? Unhappiness? Hatred? Resentment? Self-doubt? Lack of confidence?
The root cause is not knowing your own mind and therefore not knowing the true nature of yourself and therefore not having a right relationship with the world. It’s not quite that simple, there are nuances and exceptions to everything, but this is an excellent understanding to start with.
Question 3:
Each human being has their own set of problems, and many of these problems are recurring problems or simply problems that never go away. We almost grow used to problems, that we can’t really solve them, and so we settle for a sub-optimal life. From what you have read in the passage, can you think of i) a reason for this inability to solve our problems; and ii) how you can bust right through this far-reaching limitation in your life?
i) We don’t know how to use our mind properly.
ii) Learn how to use your mind properly!
Question 4 was about blame. When we blame others or ourselves for something that has happened, we will be focused on the pain of the problem and will be ignoring the root causes of the problem, and therefore solutions are unavailable. The problem will cause suffering today, and it can come back again any time the same conditions happen. We are the architect of our own problems, by reacting to triggers in negative ways, so by blaming others we cannot see the real situation.
Question 7:
Which just leaves one crucial thing: how can we best learn about our own mind?
What did you think? This is what meditation is all about, not to stop the mind, not to stop thinking, but to observe the mind, observe its thinking, be aware of its nature as a thought-producing factory, just watch, notice, see, listen without judgement, and even if you find you are judging things, other people, yourself, then you notice that too, and move on from it. No blame, no shame, no guilt, just watching, observing. Then one can reflect and make sense of what we observed after the ‘meditation’.
I so strongly recommend you create a regular slot of time and space to spend alone, in a distraction-free environment, and just reflect upon life. Observe >> become aware >> reflect >> learn and understand. Reflect >> become aware >> observe >> learn and reflect more. And just keep practising this, become skilled in it.
Or, save a heap of time and sign up for my workshop and foundation course when I bring you news of it. Coming soon! I am putting myself out into the world as a navigator and catalyst.
Okay, that’s it for this week, and while I didn’t get the Letter sent before lunch my time in Thailand, it IS Saturday as I send it, so a big improvement on last week! I hope to get settled and routinised now, so that you can always have the whole weekend to read and do the tasks.
I realise I have left the important question #6 unaddressed, but will return to that next week. But in light of everything you’ve just read, did you do the task I set at the end of the last Letter? If so, apply what you’ve just read to what you experienced when doing the task. You’ve still got a week to do this task, and I will talk about it in our next Letter too.
All the best
Philip
