All My/Our Pain and Suffering

Chapter 13 Everything Is in the Mind Nothing Is New under the Sun We stated before that there is nothing new under the sun, and we related that fact to the saying “Everything is already here.” However, as we scan the environment around us with our senses and then filter that data through our subconscious minds, we aren’t experiencing all that “everything” consciously. We also said, “Everything is energy,” and we can’t experience that either. So, where is all this “everything stuff”? It is unmanifested. It is here but isn’t expressed in a form we can capture and experience, and that makes it difficult for us to approach the unmanifested everything directly. Manifest and unmanifested are terms used in the shipping industry. The manifest is a detailed list of what is there on the shipping pallet. It is a symbolic list of what is here now. Unmanifested is something hidden and not available to see; it cannot be counted or weighed. There is no list to refer to and nothing to hold in your hand. In the way it is being used here, the unmanifested is the ground from which the manifested comes forth. The unmanifested everything is complete in itself and is infinite. Being complete and infinite, it is therefore eternal. Since in the eternal there is no time, there is no rush to manifest anything. It doesn’t change because it is already everything. It is the infinite at rest, quiet and still; it is inactive and motionless, waiting for something to move. And like the whole concept of the infinite everything, it isn’t explainable or comprehensible to those residing in the manifested finite realm in most cases. The unmanifested is an energy state beyond our current awareness. It waits for the right filtering system to bring it into a manifested state in someone’s mind and then in the world. Everything is created twice; we said this before. The first is created in the mind and then in the physical world. We might think metaphorically here; imagine a piece of the unmanifested energy as a marble block, which a sculptor might select to carve a statue. The block has the possibility of everything being inside it. What is inside that block of possibilities is restricted only by the artist’s imagination and artistic abilities that are also in his or her mind. The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has. —Michelangelo The interface between the outside energy system of the unmanifested everything and the body is the mind. The body doesn’t directly experience the world outside; all the body knows and is aware of is the mind’s interpretation of the incoming filtered information. To appreciate this statement, we may need to look again at our touchy-feely sense of touch, which was grossly outlined in Chapter 3. When anything touches the body, that pressure is picked up first by the nervous system inside, not by the body. Those nerves that were touched are coded into electromagnetic signals and sent to the subconscious mind’s filtering system; then they are screened for matches and sent on to the active mind. Whatever gets through that filtering process goes to the active mind, and a perception is created. It is at the point of perception that signals are created and sent to the mind/body; and the body, which is always monitoring the interpreted universe of the active mind, is now aware that something has touched it through nonverbal signaling sent to it. Then it knows how to respond to what’s happening, not because of what is happening outside but because of what is happening inside the mind. We need to restate, “Everything happening in the black box of the subconscious mind, active mind, and body is at billions of bits of data per second,” because to the conscious mind, it looks like the body is responding to the outside pressure, but it’s not. (You can see by this model that everything you think you are experiencing in the outside energy system is actually coming from your created interpretations, can’t you?) All our sensory inputs go straight to the subconscious mind’s filtering system. The body isn’t involved at all with the passing of the information, except to provide a space to hold the sense organs. What gets through the filter process system goes directly to the active mind; and like magic, we have an internal universe created. It is this internal universe the body and conscious mind are responding to. It is also the internal universe we live in consciously. What we believe is outside us in the energy system is a reflection of our mind’s perception, and then our conscious mind projects the inside into the outside. This gave rise to the saying “Perception is reality”; but as we know now, perception is nothing like reality. Everything we know is in our minds first. If it’s not in our minds, it is meaningless to us because we have no reference to the information. Inside us is the manifested world we live in. What is outside us in the energy system is the unmanifested everything. If we want to manifest a different internal universe for us to live in, we need to change the data the active mind uses to create the universe we now have, which is to say we must change our filtering system. And again, to change the filtering system, we must heal our past by forgiving ourselves for past errors and letting go of the negative memories from the past that still haunt us on a subconscious level and sometimes consciously. We have millions and maybe trillions of memories in our subconscious mind, depending on how old we are and how much we have experienced, and only a few of these memories will cause us any problems. Almost all our memories are neutral and have no emotional attachment, and they won’t cause us any problems; and for the most part, we get through life just fine. However, when one of those negative memories we buried in permanent memory with negative emotional energy still attached gets awakened, the mind and therefore the body will have problems. The following diagram depicts two individuals experiencing the same input data and information; from the same source of information, two different interpreted universes will develop. The bodies don’t experience the outside directly because they respond only to their individual interpreted universes created in the active mind. The conscious minds of the individuals aren’t aware of anything until there is a perception in their active minds, which is to say the creation inside the two interpreted universes. The two individual conscious minds analyze their individual interpreted universes, and their bodies response to the interpreted universes; and then the conscious mind reports to us in words so we know what has happened inside, even though we believe it’s happening outside. Look closely and notice that by the time we get the report from the conscious mind, another interpreted universe has already been created, and the body has responded to it. Again, we see the conscious mind is the least informed and the last to know, but don’t we believe it knows all?