Q: What Happens When Thoughts Are Attacking?
In daily life, I can read a poem, write one, or even play a melody. But once that moment passes, another moment arrives, filled with attacking thoughts, regrets, accusations, hostility, hatred, and rivalry. It doesn’t stop. I feel like I’m locked under this tyranny for hours, unable to find any relief or calm.
A: What you’re describing is the mechanism of the brain. As long as we remain empty, the flow of life moves through us effortlessly. But when there seems to be a pause, the brain kicks in with its own interpretation of life, broadcasting its daily news. What’s fascinating about this process is that the brain plays the same “movies” over and over again, without variation. The “you”, John or Mary, or whatever identity you hold, is always at the center of every scene, either as superior or inferior, constantly measuring how you stand against the world, as though you’re a foreign element in it.
This is a strange fire, a foreign fire that separates us from the world. The world is either against “me” or I’m against the world, and I am right while everyone else is just a puppet in my private show.
This is how the brain tricks us. Yes, there are days when the neighbors seem hostile, and it feels like everything is falling apart, but remember, it’s part of the phenomenon, and it’s not personal. There’s a beautiful verse in the Bible that describes the moment of expulsion from the garden of being: there is a sword that opposes itself. Just don’t believe it’s you. Deep inside us, beyond the mind, there is no trace of the conflicts the brain creates.
How tricky is the brain, and what illusions it pulls on us (like the ancient serpent, the “Ouroboros”). Come, see the light of realization. We can read in a flowing parable:
The essence of the will is the inclination of the soul. Therefore, its entire nature is the outward expansion of the soul. Likewise, in the revelation of the will, the presence of the soul is felt openly. And immediately, when the soul departs from that will, the will is immediately nullified. This is not the case with other forces of the soul, such as the intellect. Even after the soul departs from the intellect, what has already been understood remains. However, in the case of the will, nothing remains of it.
In this passage, we see that there are impressions that stay with the intellect even after the soul departs. This is “foreign fire”, it lures us to pay attention to it, but we can simply withdraw our attention from its show. We can also “see” that we are not consumed by the tiny, narrow chamber called the brain.
This is what verse from Psalms 111:10 “The beginning of wisdom is seeing the being”, not as it is usually translated as: “The beginning of wisdom is fearing the Lord”, as a subject-object relationship, but seeing the being that holds the whole manifestation in space and time as an ocean.
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