Mind Transformation
By Raymond Phelan
A meditator for over thirty years, Raymond Phelan has undergone intensive training in spiritual philosophy and mind technology in the USA, UK, and Ireland. He trained extensively under the guidance of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, in the TM-Sidhi Programme. Living in Dublin, Raymond practices as a life coach facilitator and teaches meditation. Here is an excerpt from his new book, Transforming Your Life...
You think with the conscious mind, or intellect – the conscious mind makes decisions. The unconscious, or subjective, mind operates under law. It does not make conscious decisions but reacts to stored information. The unconscious mind does not question, reason, or evaluate. It receives instruction from the conscious mind, the deductive, rational mind, biblically referred to as "the watchman on the gate." The subjective mind responds to emotional thought flow, to repetitious feelings sent from the conscious mind. The subjective mind accepts this feeling nature of your thoughts, as a belief of what you're wanting in your life. The subjective mind is known as the willing servant at your command. When you consider the many thousands of thoughts you think with the conscious mind and their knock-on effects, surely it becomes patently obvious that you must pay attention to what you consume daily in your thought diet. You must watch diligently to see what the conscious, deductive mind is feasting on; you must watch the instructions this emotive feasting is sending to the servant, the unconscious mind, in order to serve back to you as a meal. As the saying goes, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
Continually thinking same-nature negative thoughts has a massive bearing upon your overall health, mood swings, and interpersonal and social interactive behavioural patterns. Health-wise the mind-body state is a reflection of the nature of your habitual thought stream. The body is the physical expression of your silent thinking – the sum ingredients of your mental diet. Toxic thought patterns are similar to mental fat. Thus, toxic, negative thought patterns become like meals of regurgitated lard: leftovers of unattended thought cooking, the thought sludge which you could be digesting over and over in your life. How tasty is your meal?
This process continues until you learn to become master of your thoughts. This life-affecting ignorance of programming and wrong thinking is how the infamous subconscious mind is created and maintained. The subconscious mind will continue until the grooved thought pattern is interrupted or becomes integrated into conscious awareness. Once you become aware of this, it's then your choice whether you deal with it, maybe through meditative integration, but if you ignore it, then the vicious cycle of thoughts-impression-manifestation continues, the automatic, subconscious programmed contents continue to churn out the ugly stuff.
The subconscious mind is not a separate mind but an aspect of your total mind. You create your own subconsciousness, this hell zone, through stored contradictions to your intention and your non- serving belief systems, of living a spiritual lie. Subconsciousness is past conditioning – a collection of imposed impressions or suppressed emotional untruths. It is mountains of untruth and unresolved subjective contradictions of your life journey. The subconscious needs physical and mental tension to be maintained, and dissolving this tension should be your number one priority, coupled with affirmations of intention, of spiritual truths – acknowledging the power of God within – to counter the untruths.
Thoughts originate as free-flowing from the unconscious. You can't stop this process with effort, with another thought, as that would be counterproductive, amounting to using a thought to forget a thought – one competing with the other. Free-flowing thoughts are potentially useful – they are creative tools meant for use. But trouble starts when you isolate individual thoughts and emotionalise them with that feeling down, negative energy. You start to create subconscious mental junk; you take the sunshine out of your inner and outer personal environment. What you should do instead is watch with cognitive, focused awareness as each thought enters the conscious mind – watch with a non-filtering, non-judgemental awareness; you're on guard in the conscious mind. And as each thought enters the thought chamber, you simply watch the thought without thinking or engaging it automatically, as you do in non-awareness. At that point, you can decide whether to digest the thought as food into your mental system or use it as a creative tool. With practice this is both energising and empowering, for it provides poise and tangible confidence: a real control over your automatic life like never before. Watching is the process of becoming a mind master, of deepening cognitive awareness. It's the way of becoming fully alive to the universal life-principle: of how to integrate and engage the subjective law-governed unconscious mind with the objective outer-orientated thinking conscious mind. In this way your thinking becomes more powerful, as intended in the great mind manual: the Bible.
When the subjective mind is on the receiving end of constant negativity in social situations, where high emotive energy exchanges are the norm, then these exchanges become the window through which you're seeing the world, the energy pattern that decides your actions in life generally. These energy patterns form your stable dish, your fixed thought-nature meal. Such negative emotive encounters become your future health and personal mental environment. A case of junk in, junk out – as we sow, so shall we reap. You can't expect sweet-scented roses from perennial weed seeds, so why search for health and well-being from a toxically polluted, junk-filled subjective mind?
Once you understand, in broad principles, how the mind works, the knock-on effect that wrong thinking can bring to bear on the mind-body well-being, then you should immediately start watching (the thoughts). You do this through subjective mind attention (SMA), which involves watching your passing through or transient thoughts without engaging in their nature; you become aware of your thoughts, watch, and notice how they are free flowing originally. SMA is a practice, so it needs to be cultivated through regular practice; very soon, it becomes effortless watching; it becomes a way of life, like breathing. Your mental environment is the most valuable of treasures, so it's absolutely vital that you keep this free-flowing process fully receptive and tuned to your commands. The practice pays immense dividends; it's the key to conscious mind expansion, which is the secret to a healthy, happy life. When you speak of "food for thought," be sure that your chosen food is fit for a king – your inner king – and not what you would feed to pigs. Like food, sniff before eating – watch before consuming thoughts into your life experience.
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