In trying to find out more about the nature of the mind and of reality, you very often find yourself like a man on a boat reading about the sea. Though learning about the discoveries and interpretations of others, often better equipped technologically, is very important, you shouldn't stick your nose too close to the book as to miss out on the chance to see the ocean with your own eyes.
It is one thing to hear someone say that the truth is a just sense of comfort and it is an entirely different one to experience that for yourself. In our own search, quiet observation of the motion of our minds has allowed us to witness the cogs of our thinking process and recognize crucial emotions which are involved in many other mental phenomena. "Love doesn't have to make sense to make sense." (quoted from How I met your mother by C.B.S.). The feel of making sense is something more universal than what pure logics considers sensible. If you take a careful look at the phenomenological interplay within your mind you might too come to realize the algorithmic diversity of the many logics at our disposal of which the one described in mathematical books is only one of them.
The internal world is an odd and complex universe whose exploration will definitely amaze you. It can't do any less than enrich your understanding of existence. We would like to present here a mental technique which developed as we explored our new views of reality. It revealed and still reveals a lot to us about our own perception but, above all, it is a lot of fun. We picture it as a sport with great side-effects. We call it - for lack of a worse name - the Way of the Intercepting Mind.
There's another reason why this technique was so important to us. In coming to realize the absolute relativity of things, even of granted absolutes such as truth or the notion of self, we experienced, to say the least, a strong mix of dismay and excitement. Of course, we could just be bananas, but the loss of any stable frame of reference sounds like an acceptable excuse to feel lost. We were suddenly confronted with a very different world where we didn't really know how to behave. The Way of the Intercepting Mind has helped us cope with it. Imagine yourself living in your own little village in northern Norway and you read about the outrageous incomprehensible habits of the inhabitants of Canton. You feel lost, maybe even angry. They do things you thought you couldn't do. They eat things you thought nobody would eat. Worst even if you're transported there and you suddenly realize that you don't know how to behave properly anymore. All the references that you built throughout your long learning experience growing up to your age are useless. You don't know how to hold a pair of chopsticks, you can't talk, you don't even know how to read body language. That is how we felt.
The Way of the Intercepting Mind is basically an immersion program to familiarize yourself with this exotic reality. It's the sane, let's say compassionate, approach to dealing with this new world. Instead of cursing these strange people and running back to your homeland and closing the drapes to the outside world, it's a choice to befriend what you can't wish away. It's a way of learning how to live in a universe that makes sense in a very different way from what makes sense. It's kind of like a wise insanity.
The technique is very simple. To start, just sit, relax, and look at what's happening in your mind. It's not as easy as it looks. We know from the study of dynamical equations that a system coupled to itself often exhibits runaway or oscillatory solutions. Your mind might quiet down or release full blown chaos on you. It might start to chase after it's own tail. You are likely to feel a strong feeling of utter boredom. Your legs will start to twitch and you will feel this thing, this strong emotion, trying to pull you away from that situation. It will tell you that this is stupid, that this is useless, that you're doing it wrong, that you're wasting your time, that if you keep doing it, it could lead to the very breakdown of your self. The way of the intercepting mind gives you a chance to witness first hand how powerful this force is, how it fuels your thoughts and even moves your body. How little in control you are.
Your goal is to surf this force.
The name The Way of the Intercepting Mind comes from the idea of not running away from these forces but facing them, not in a confrontational way but in an embracing way. You don't want to be rolled by the wave nor to stand your ground against the wave (because you're likely to lose). You want to surf it. As you start to observe the mind you will start to recognize different drives, different forces, how they interact and how they drive you. They make you walk, talk and think the way they want you to think, talk and walk. You will become aware of how much more is going on in the backstage. How thoughts are like steam floating on a boiling pot. You may blow the steam away and quiet you thoughts, but soon more steam comes out of it. That's why when people tell you not to think about something you can do it for a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes but not more. That's also why ideas are so difficult to convey: in this text we are giving you the print of that steam and we are asking you to reproduce the boiling pot.
The familiarization with these forces is the main objective of the technique. It doesn't take very long to catch one; after all, they make up your whole experience. Once you succeed in riding one you'll realize that the way of the intercepting mind can safely take you much further along this emotion than being simply rolled by it. You can experience profound sadness or excruciating pain without jumping off a balcony. Like any other sport, it just takes practice.
Becoming proficient in this art you could develop a feeling of pride because you're invincible. You can ride any emotion you want. Though if you're actually really good at it you will eventually catch a glimpse of the force that compels you to ride other forces. There's always one behind your back, making you do whatever you do.
Of course, by then you realize that there is no one taking control of anything. What you thought was you surfing an emotion is just another imperative pushing you towards surfing that emotion. You can now surf that imperative but bit by bit you lose the perspective that there is anyone choosing to do anything. The Way of the Intercepting Mind is just the natural phenomenon of all these different forces harmonizing.
Just like surfing a wave, surfing these forces requires letting go. If you try to control the wave you fall. The only way to stand on the wave is to acquire the motion of the wave. It's to become unjudgingly the wave. In that way, the way of the intercepting mind requires you to unjudgingly become you.
And unlike the earlier feeling of pride, a successful letting go actually brings with it a sense of deep compassion. It's probably a side-effect of your constant training towards accepting whatever comes, even things which your mind might initially pass a negative judgement on. Our personal findings appear to agree with the descriptions present in traditional meditative practices such as hinduism, buddhism and taoism. A lot of experimental effort in the field of neurology is going today into understanding better how compassion arises in the practice of meditation (check this out).
Anyway. Go stand on your mind, see if you can.
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