In this blog, I’m trying something different, don’t worry it will only be a one-time occurrence. While I normally deep-dive into web technology-related topics, this time, I went down the rabbit hole of studying the human mind.
The reason why I wanted to explore and learn more about the human mind is because I’ve had an increasing feeling of anxiety building up over the last few years. Mental issues and feelings are difficult to open up and talk about, so it took me a lot of courage to write and share this article.
My feelings of anxiety went to a stage where I never really knew how my mind and body would react to different situations or when I would get a wave of anxiety overwhelming me. Thankfully, I’m in a much better place today and I’ve now found a way to cope with these feelings.
I’m sharing some highlights from discoveries, heavily inspired by Zen Buddhism, that have opened up my mind and made me much more confident to deal with whatever thought or feeling that arises in my mind.
Original Nature
Imagine a space that’s infinite in all dimensions and filled to every last millimeter with energy. This energy is the foundation of everything we know and do not know. The energy in this space is completely fluent and dynamic without any boundaries. Now, our human minds are limited and aren’t good at imagining infinite and intangible things. So, you can simply think of this like a universe.
In this space, time is beginningless and endless and flows much faster than we can imagine with our minds, like the millennium falcon switching on hyperdrive and swooshing through space. While this interdependent and interconnected energy moves at superspeed to create new formations, it creates flashes. Like lightning during a thunderstorm or a strobe light at a 90s disco, this space creates 6,400,099,980 flashes in a day.
Each of these flashes is called a moment. In each moment, our human world including us, our minds, trees, stones, water, animals and everything we know is created. Every moment starts with the construction of our human world and ends with destroying it. A moment ends in an instant, faster than we can perceive with our minds, and there are more than 6 billion of these moments every day.
There is nothing before and there is nothing after a moment, the only thing that exists is the current moment, the current formation of energy in the universe. Each moment is unique and once it ends, it will never exist again - it’s gone forever. Thus, there is no concept of birth and death as the start and end of a human life, we don’t appear or disappear, we’re always present as particles of energy in the endless universe.
Moments and Conditions
We must start every moment by accepting the lives and conditions given to us. No moment is the same, even if you feel like you’ve done or experienced the same thing before, you’re not looking close enough. If you suffer from chronic pain and feel like every day is the same with pain in the same body part, then you’re not looking at the pain with sufficient granularity and resolution. The fact is that everything in the human world is impermanent and constantly moving and transforming. If you pay enough attention, you’ll see that even pain is moving and changing its form and characteristics.
The conditions given to us in each moment are beyond what we can understand with our senses. They are related to your karma and while you can influence the conditions, they’re still beyond your control. You could be in the best baseball team, having the most skilled coach and team members, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll always win the game. We have to remember that every moment is unique and so are the conditions that come with it.
The only thing that exists is this exact moment, we have to stay focused and present in the current moment and wholeheartedly commit to it. The past is already gone and the future is yet to exist and you can’t control it, so there’s no point in worrying or putting your ideas or expectations into the future.
Don’t fill your head with thoughts that will distract your focus on this moment, since you’ll letting the current moment and thus your life, slip away while you’re lost in thought. Simply stay focused in the current moment, burn your life energy and radiate positive energy, this will be beneficial not only for ourselves but also for everyone around us.
Human Mind
While we all originate from the same infinite space of energy in every moment, our human mind is what makes us believe that we’re different and separate from for example a stone or a carrot. The mind is what creates a dualism, I am I and you are you. The human mind wants to reinforce its existence but the truth is that it’s constantly being cut off by the universe at the end of every moment when the strobe light turns off. There’s friction between our mind and original nature, that’s why there’s an innate unsatisfactoriness in the human mind that can’t be taken away.
Like a little puppy, the mind changes from moment to moment, continuously looking for something new to explore or chase after. Constantly seeking distractions and temporary pleasures to forget about its impermanence. Always busy comparing, judging, competing and grasping after new things. How many times have you been saving up for something, that last thing that is going to change your life? However, once you buy it you’ll get temporary satisfaction but a year later, that thing is tucked away in the storage room collecting dust, or even worse, at the landfill.
We have to accept and realize that our minds are very unstable and unpredictable, often overcomplicating things by adding layers of thought and emotions covering and hiding our original nature. A lion would very naturally take down a zebra to sustain its existence. While we as humans with our human mind would probably overthink the situation; is it ok to put an end to this animal? Is it ok to eat meat? How would we go ahead doing it? What would its family think about us terminating the life of this zebra?
Thoughts and Emotions
If we get caught up in and chase after every thought that emerges in our head, we fill up our heads with thought and the mind will constantly be spinning, reflecting on something. This creates a situation where there’s no flow in the head of thoughts entering and exiting the mind. When our minds are constantly full of thoughts, we’re at overcapacity and will easily get overwhelmed by every new thought that appears.
It’s like waves on the ocean, if you imagine the mind being the ocean and the thoughts being waves, it’s very hard to navigate if you sail through turbulent waters. We must therefore learn how to let go of thoughts to maintain a calm, restful mind. I believe that for many of us, we know how to take a nap and rest our bodies but we do not know how to rest our minds, often having a spinning mind even when sleeping only to wake up more tired than before we went to sleep.
In our minds we often identify strongly with our emotions, creating storylines. For example, I am a happy person, I am a sad person, I am an anxious person. Many times we also enforce this storyline by convincing ourselves that no one could possibly feel the same sadness or agony that I’m currently experiencing. Since we’re all humans with similar minds, this is not the case and it’s important to realize that we’re not our thoughts and we’re not our emotions.
To create a mind that has more space and flow, we must let go of our thoughts and emotions and not let them stay in the mind for too long. It’s important to never try to reject, resist or avoid any of your thoughts or feelings that arise, even if they’re bad, because that creates friction in the mind. Instead, don’t give them too much attention and don’t identify yourself with them too strongly, take a step back, accept and acknowledge them, and then let them go.
It’s possible to create a calm mind by letting go of thoughts and feelings in this way, but you can’t prevent them from ever appearing again. It’s impossible to say that you won’t have any anxiety ever again because the thoughts and feelings in your mind are created in every new moment by conditions that are beyond your control. The only thing you can do is to train your mind to learn how to let go of these thoughts, making them less amplified and hopefully less frequent in the mind.
Negative Loop
The way the mind and the body are connected is quite fascinating. If you have a very strong thought about something, that thought can get reflected in the body. When the thought is reflected in the body, the body senses it. This makes the mind react to this sensation, intensifying the initial thought. The thought is then amplified through continuous iterations between the mind and body, creating a negative loop. A scenario is created where the thoughts fuel the emotions and the emotions fuel the thoughts.
At times when my anxiety was the most intense, a thought appeared in my mind that I was having trouble breathing and that I was going to faint. My mind was so convinced of this thought that it became strong enough to create a reflection in my body. I was now starting to get chest pains. The chest pains verified that my thoughts in my mind were correct and created an even stronger thought in my mind that I was indeed having an attack of some sort. This created a negative loop that quickly intensified, creating a huge wave of anxiety crashing down on me.
These thoughts that arise in the mind and start a negative loop could be anything, cravings, hatred, lust or whatever. Once they get strong enough they create a reflection in the body generating an emotion that is strong enough that you can’t help yourself but take action. Like that tragic incident here in Japan where a man hit his neighbor with a hammer in the head due to him being too loud. The man who hit his neighbor with a hammer must have had a strong thought dwelling in his mind for a longer period creating a negative loop that got stronger and stronger until he couldn’t help himself but take action.
It’s important to identify when you’re about to enter one of these negative loops and break the chain as soon as you can to let go.
Meditation
Meditation is all about getting to know and training your mind. If you learn more about how your mind works, you can identify negative loops early on, making it easier to break out of them before something bad happens. Meditation is also a great tool for training the mind to let go of thoughts to create an open mind with more space and flow.
In Zen, meditation is practiced to calm your mind to the extent that you peel off all the layers that your mind has put upon your original nature. This enables you to connect with your essence which is the energy in the universe. The reason why you need to shut off your consciousness is because the mind is dualistic by nature and can’t understand the oneness of the universe.
I’ve done a deep dive into meditation and I’ve meditated between 30 to 60 minutes a day every single day since the beginning of the year. After only 3 months or so of practicing, I can’t neglect or underemphasize the huge impact it has had on me and my mind. Even though I’ve been on a trip somewhere knowing that I’m having the time of my life, the feeling I’ve felt after some meditation sessions has topped that by a hundred. I’ve never felt so content and fulfilled in my life before, often finding myself smiling like a fool.
I think that meditation is often misunderstood and considered complicated, but once you get the basic technique down, it’s not something difficult. My first experience with meditation was at a Zen temple here in Japan, the only thing I experienced was extreme numbness in my legs and I didn’t get the point of meditation at all. I’d recommend taking some courses to get the basics down so that you’ll get a better first-time experience than mine.
Final words
We live in a very turbulent world with many things happening and changing daily, it’s easy to at times feel lost or insecure. As humans we often reflect on previous experiences, comparing them with the present moment and feel disappointed that things are not moving as we’d expect or anticipated.
It’s important to remember that the human world is constantly changing and taking new forms when it’s created in every single moment. To live happily in this world we have to try to not control our lives too much, but rather sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the view of our life unfolding. Accepting our lives and the conditions that were created for us, keeping a kind of playfulness and not taking life too seriously. Also remember to enjoy all aspects of life, even the bad and painful ones, as life moves from moment to moment.
This doesn’t mean that you should give up on your life. What this means is that you should focus on the only thing that’s real, this current moment. Engage with it wholeheartedly, giving it your full attention and focus. Instead of letting your mind overcomplicate things or distract your focus in this moment, clear your mind and become one with whatever activity you are engaged in: working, cooking food, sitting, resting, exercising or whatever.
Realize the endless combinations of formations of the energy in the universe, still here we are in this fleeting moment, together with all the other beautiful things in the human world. Keep an open mind with enough space and flow so that you can be kind and compassionate not only to yourself and your mind, but also to others around you.