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Are you wanting to make a difference with your life?
If you are, your mind is unlikely to support you unless you specifically task it.
Your mind's operating system is your survival
For it is pre-tasked with the survival of your body so will pull you in any direction other than making a difference with your life. It will look to achieve your body’s fearful survival needs, which, in this era of relatively plentiful housing and food supply, will be more about meeting psychological ‘needs’ such as being seen to be successful, comparing favourably, and achieving good social standing, than about making a difference in the world.
Your unmanaged mind will shape your life to the extent that you could get to the end of your very successful career, and ask, “Was that what it was all about?” and know at a deeper level, that it wasn’t. Success in the eyes of the world achieves satisfaction but generally in the form of fun, excitement, or happiness which tend to be temporary.
Survival doesn't bring joy, it brings survival
When your life and actions are about you and your achievements, you forgo the longer term rewards of joy, fulfilment, and inner peace that seem to come when you strive to make a difference by serving the greater good. To do that, you must consciously use your mind to support you.
How do you do that day to day?
Know who you are and give your mind a task
Be aware of who you really are and operate from that place in your daily actions. That is, centre yourself regularly and frequently. Your mind will respond with creativity and innovation.
Who you really are
Who are you? That becomes more apparent when you rule out who or what you are not. You are not your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and moods. These are products of your mind and come and go. You are not your personality - your habitual reaction to perception - which your mind made up and which changes over time. You are not your mind or body, both of which change over time and also come and go!
Who you are, then, is the awareness of all this; the witnessing presence; the experiencer which never changes, whatever the state of the body, mind, or personality.
As the unchanging witnessing presence, you are eternal and do not need to survive or demonstrate personal success. Devoting your life to such survival needs is a complete irrelevance and is inauthentic for who you really are.
Centre yourself in who you really are
You will be pulled in these directions, however, unless you regularly centre yourself. There are a number of tools that can help you to do this.
First, choose your life’s purpose, vision, mission, and principles. These are your life’s compass, or your North Star, and knowing and being guided by them will guide you through your most adverse situations.
Second, have regular, annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, review meetings with yourself to represence and trim your purpose and course, so that you are going where you want to go.
Third, each day, preferably in the morning before you begin to work, and before bed, give yourself some uninterrupted alonetime to represence your purpose and what you are here to do.
Use your transitions and situations
I have found, however, that it’s not enough at the beginning of the week or even the day to declare your intent to yourself - and others. Even with your purpose, vision, and daily contemplation of these in place, distraction and dissipation during the day are likely.
So here is a technique I came upon years ago which, when habitual, is excellent for keeping you on purpose: become aware of and use your transitions and situations.
In the moment of now, you experience your life as a sequence of situations. You are also aware that you have other situations in which you are not present just now so that your life is like a matrix of situations but that you actually experience them as a sequence.
Transitions are the moments between situations and represent a perfect space for you to decide who and how you are going to be in an impending situation. Use the transition to get present to who you really are - the witnessing presence; awareness, or the experiencer, and to what your operating system is - fear the mind’s default self-serving posture or, if you choose it, love, or service to the greater good, and to get present to any purpose and vision that you have in place.
For example, the phone rings (transition, taking you from one situation into another). As you go to pick it up, centre yourself. If you were coming from who you really are (love) rather than your ego (fear) during your conversation (situation), how would you be with the caller? Your answer will determine how your call goes and your experience of it and of yourself.
When unconscious (not centred), you will be in situations like the phone call but not present and so far more likely to react rather than respond, getting drawn to a low level of consciousness at which your life resumes its raison d'etre - your survival.
But by using transitions in this way you centre yourself before you enter any situation. You can be present and can actually be in the situation and use it for what you really want for yourself and the greater good.
Christopher Jones-Warner