monkey mind – Just the Tarot

The Five of Wands, Louise Hay, and Becoming the Grown Up Who Lives in Our Heads.

A look at childhood programming and using affirmations.

If I were to say, “Your thoughts are total bullshit,” you’d probably feel highly insulted. On the other hand, if I were to say, “My thoughts are total bullshit,” you might agree with me or you might tell me that’s not true and wonder where I got such a terrible self-image.

But if I were to say, “A lot of OUR thoughts, as human beings, are total bullshit,” that’s a more fertile ground for discussion simply because it depersonalizes it and takes us out of a fight-or-flight reaction. We don’t have to defend anything or run away from being criticized.

In, “You Can Heal Your Life,” Louise Hay made the point that, at their base, our thoughts really mean nothing at all. They’re just words that we string together and they don’t take on any meaning by themselves. We have to ASSIGN meaning to them. We have to say, “I believe these thoughts are true.”

And, oddly, our beliefs are nothing more than thoughts that we’ve repeated over and over and over until we believe that they’re true. When we take a little closer look at those thoughts we can understand exactly why so many of them really are bullshit.

First of all, a lot of our thoughts were, “installed,” in our little brains when we were far, far too young to make any rational judgements about their validity. By the time that we reach late adolescence most of us have been thoroughly programmed with unexamined thoughts that we believe to be true. The richest source of the programming is our families, of course, but we get a hefty dose of it from our teachers and peers, as well. Some of those thoughts might be things like:

I’m no good at math.

I can’t dance.

I’m a terrible athlete.

I’m not very good looking.

I’m too fat or too skinny or too tall or too short.

I don’t fit in.

Nobody likes me.

Or the thoughts might be something like:

Democrats are communists.

Republicans are fascists.

Rich people are heartless.

People who don’t practice my religion are evil.

Black people are scary or white people are arrogant honkies.

Immigrants are too lazy to work AND they’re going to steal my job.

These are all just words, strung together to make thoughts, which were repeated over and over when we were young until we came to believe that they must be true.

The truth of these beliefs were totally unexamined when we were kids because we didn’t have the mental capacity to evaluate them. If our parents or teachers told us they were true, well then – hey – they must be true because that’s what the grownups said. For the most part, though, they remain unexamined when we’re adults, which is the second reason that many or our thoughts are total bullshit.

Most of our thoughts are subliminal, which literally means, “below the light.” In this case, we mean, “below the light of consciousness.” We just think them, without even being aware of the fact that we’re thinking them. That’s the infamous, “stream of consciousness,” or, “monkey mind,” that engages about 20 seconds after we wake up in the morning. It’s just a ceaseless chatter that runs along by itself and contains – buried in its content – all of that programming that we got as kids. It sounds like this:

Gotta get the coffee going, godamn it’s cold, I wonder if I have enough gas in the car, should have balanced the checkbook but I’m no good at math, gotta get the kids up and make breakfast, can’t believe the price of eggs, it’s the rich Republicans driving the prices up, nobody cares about working people, if only I had a better job but I’m not smart enough to get a better job, where are my socks . . .”

The unexamined thoughts that were programmed into us when we were kids are running over and over again, all the time, and remain unexamined. And, yes, thoughts that are repeated over and over become beliefs and, like the people in the Five of Wands, we’ll fight to the death to defend our beliefs.

Which is the third reason that most of our thoughts are bullshit. We’re totally ego involved with them. Most of us, most of the time, completely identify with that subliminal thought stream. We experience it as, “These are MY thoughts in MY mind, therefore, they’re a part of me.” It never occurs to us that they’re not really our thoughts. They’re our parent’s thoughts and our teacher’s thoughts and maybe even the thoughts of that bully who tortured us at recess in the third grade.

Affirmations, as Louise Hay points out, are a simple way to step out of that thought stream and start changing our beliefs by changing our thoughts. Let’s face it: most of don’t have the time to just sit there all day and watch our thoughts. “Ah HA! There’s another negative thought from my childhood programming! Take THAT, negative thought!”

What we can do, though, is to become a little more conscious of our thought streams. Even when we’re working or driving to the store or taking a shower, we can watch the mind chattering away and consciously think, “Okay, that’s a pretty negative thought, And it’s probably not MY thought; it’s just something my mind was taught when I was a kid.”

When we begin to dis-identify with that constant stream of thoughts, we immediately lose the need to defend them. After all, they’re not really my thoughts, so why should I care about them? And then we can begin to replace all of that subliminal programming with programming that we consciously choose.

Just pick a positive thought – any positive thought – and repeat it 3 or 400 times a day. Does that seem like a lot? Well, how many times a day do we say something negative to ourselves with that childhood programming? Hundreds of times, right?

If that sounds like a sort of a forced, Pollyanna Positivity it’s because it is. We are quite literally pushing our thoughts in a new direction and it can feel completely unnatural to begin with. But that’s the whole point: there’s nothing, “natural,” about our unhappy beliefs, either. They were just thoughts that were repeated again and again, often by the miserably unhappy adults who raised us. That’s all that happy beliefs are, too – thoughts that are repeated again and again until they become beliefs. And we get to be the adults who are repeating them, which is pretty cool.

The Knight of Swords, Fight or Flight, and Getting Frumious Bandersnatches Out of Our Heads

Ending the endless cycle of stress.

I had a, “learning dream,” about the Knight of Swords last night and it was very interesting. Learning dreams – for me at least – are quite different from ordinary dreams. They’re dreams that answer questions that we really need solutions to, and sometimes we don’t even know it. In my world, they’re instructions from Spirit Guides and Mentors who are helping me along my path. In your world, you may see them as a sort of intuitive understanding of truths that have eluded you in waking life.

The Knight of Swords shows a Knight in full armor, sword extended, in a balls out gallop. It’s a totally concentrated, furious charge toward whatever he or she means to conquer. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the eyes of the horse are rolled backward, as if to say, “Okay, you’ve got the spurs, you’re in charge, but WHAT IN THE FUCK are you doing?”

Now, aggression is a perfectly normal part of human life, so much so that the Tarots suit of swords can be seen as representing a variety of aggressive ego states. Aggression is, after all, one half of the famous Fight or Flight reaction. There are times when it seems that we have no choice but to fight to defend ourselves or to stand up for what we consider to be right.

But what happens when we get, “stuck,” in that reaction? What happens when we live in a state of Fight or Flight?

Well, we start to break down and fall apart. Our bodies are constantly flooded with stress hormones and we develop high blood pressure, heart problems, and sleep deficits. Our minds become paranoid, habitually anxious, and we start to feel increasingly isolated and alone. It’s not pretty.

The revelation that came to me in my dreams last night is that there are really two elements operating in concert when we get stuck in Fight or Flight. The first is the internal dialogue. Buddhists refer to that as, “monkey mind,” the constant, chattering thoughts that will really mess up your meditation sessions. Eckhart Tolle discusses it quite a bit in terms of, “ego,” which he views as a sort of an artificial construct of the mind that was a result of a wrong turn in our evolution.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s there: an endless stream of thoughts that tend to operate just below the level of our conscious control. And we really can’t do much about that. As Emily Fletcher says in Stress Less, Accomplish More: The 15-Minute Meditation Programme for Extraordinary Performance the mind thinks involuntarily in the same way that the heart beats involuntarily. Thoughts are a natural by-product of the mind, in the same way that waves are a natural by-product of the ocean.

The second element in a stuck Fight or Flight reaction is the body, that wonderful amalgam of proteins and hormones and electrons that’s constantly whizzing around creating and recreating our physical selves. More specifically, we’re talking about that part of the body that’s intimately connected with Fight or Flight, the amygdala in the brain and the stress hormones.

When we’re confronted with something that the brain interprets as being dangerous, the amygdala jumps up and screams, “Holy Shit! Watch out! It’s a Frumious Bandersnatch!” And then our brain dumps about 80 million gallons of adrenaline and cortisol into our systems, our blood pressure shoots up, we become hyper-focussed and we’re ready, by god, to fight!

All of that’s good when we’re confronting Bandersnatches and Jabberwocks and we need to stay alive. But we were never meant to live in Fight or Flight for extended periods of time. We were meant to engage in intense physical activity – fighting or running – that burns up the adrenaline and the cortisol rapidly and allows us to return to a normal state of consciousness.

When we live through an extended period of stress – military combat or a marriage from hell or taking care of a loved one who is dying by inches for years – then the Fight or Flight reaction becomes habitual. It becomes our normal way of behaving and of perceiving the world.

It becomes a self-feeding cycle that operates independently of what’s really going on in our world.

The first thing that happens is that the quality of our internal dialogues change. We begin to see the world, “through a glass darkly,” and it shows up in the quiet chatter at the backs of our minds.

My life is so fucked up.

I can’t get a break.

I’m such a loser.

Why does this shit keep happening to me?

The kicker is that the Fight or Flight system in our brains is so ancient that it’s literally pre-verbal. It evolved long, long before we developed speech or nuances in thought. So it’s not hearing, “the world was a dangerous place,” or, “I’m having obsessive thoughts about something that’s over.” All it’s hearing is, “There is danger,” and it’s continually dumping more and more stress hormones into our bodies so that we can respond to the danger.

And there’s a feed-back loop that starts up. Our bodies are incredibly stressed from the hormones and our brains pick up that stress and interpret it as, “Something’s wrong. Something’s dangerous.” Which in turn makes the amygdala jump up and scream, “Holy Shit! It must be another Frumious Bandersnatch! Dump some more stress hormones!”

At a certain point it really does become almost like an independent, autonomous personality that we can’t control any longer. Our circumstances may change completely. We may be OUT of combat, we may have divorced the horrible, abusive spouse, we may have gone through the death of a partner and emerged on the other side of the grief. But that Fight or Flight personality just keeps on trucking.

The problem is two pronged – the inner dialogue and the body – and so the solution needs to be two pronged. First of all, we need to be very, very conscious of our inner dialogue and start transforming it. It’s like a radio operating at a very low volume that we only half hear. TURN IT UP. Listen to it. Start flipping every negative thought into a positive affirmation. When we can turn that constant stream of negatives into a constant stream of positives, it interrupts the self-feeding cycle and starts to shut down the stress reaction.

Second, soothe the hell out of our bodies. I mean that literally. If we’ve lived through years of stress, our bodies are pretty tortured by it. Take the time for hot baths, listen to quiet, peaceful music, take naps, lie in the grass, visualize beautiful scenes, masturbate or make love, BE GENTLE. The more we soothe our bodies, the fewer stress hormones we’ll have. The fewer stress hormones we have, the more our inner dialogues will change to healthy, grateful thoughts.

Like any big change in behavior, it can feel very complicated at first, but it’s not. It’s really just a matter of transforming ourselves into the kinds of people that we’d LOVE to live with. Because . . . you know . . . we are the people we live with, and who wants to live with a depressed roommate?