Afflictions of the Mind : Part - 3 (Impulses and Desires)

The Announcement by Luis Royo

 
3. Impulses and Desires

As we have seen in the article on Intentions, there are certain activities of the Mind, certain processes that incite action. This is an extraordinary gift, to be able to act and cause a change in one’s surroundings merely via non-physical processes. Actions produce consequences and the Mind learns from them, it evolves and progresses further. As I’ve said, everything starts with an intention. It is very important that one sees how intentions arise and cause actions. This can be done by conscious observation, and the actions can be stopped in many cases by the act of choice. 

Intentions arise as Experiencing, a continuous motion in Presence, they are mostly automatic. They arise out of the vast store of impressions in the Mind [1]. In my opinion, it is not possible to consciously stop an intention from appearing, but it is possible to either ignore it or to act on it once it is already there. An untrained Mind has very little capability to see and choose whether to act or not on an intention, and it is here that these uncontrolled processes take the form of an affliction. Uncontrolled intentions take hold of the person and make him do things of which he is barely aware, causing a lot of negative consequences, suffering and pain for himself and also for others.

Afflictions of the Mind : Part -2 (The Trick of Time)

Persistence of memory - Salvador Dali

 
2. The Trick of Time

We have already seen how the Mind employs a neat trick to put all the experiences in an easily accessible sequence. It uses an axis called time and marks the events on it. Experiences happen, they don’t come with a time stamp attached to them, the Mind adds the stamp. It makes the experiences more organized and their recall (simulation via impressions) easier. Whenever there is a change, there is an experience, or we can as well define an experience as Change (which we have already done, see Experiencing). So change is more fundamental. Some changes happen at seemingly regular fashion, such as change of a day into night, orbit of the earth around the Sun and vibrations of atoms. This allows us to compare an irregular change with regular one, and we can express the irregular change in terms of regular one. Thus the Physical Time is born, which is just a regular change, it is not an entity, as it does not exists as such, its merely a concept. We use devices, clocks, to count the regular changes. Comparing an irregular experience with the counts of a clock immediately gives more information about the change, and the concepts of slow or fast are created. Now we can stamp a number on an event, making it even more structured. Physical time is derived from physical changes that happen around us, but there is another time – the Subjective Time, which is based on mental changes, and has no correspondence with physical one [3].

Afflictions of the Mind : Part-1 (Deception of the senses)

We will now begin a series of articles on afflictions of the Mind. Afflictions are undesirable side effects produced by the highly complex processes that occur in the Mind. While bearing in the mind that the afflictions are also perfect, there is nothing wrong with them and there is no natural law that compels anyone to remove them, we will still try to see what are the possible ways to see them clearly and in case of extremely dysfunctional ones, how one can eradicate them effectively. There are certain tricks that I learned from great masters, that I found work nicely in my experience, however, everyone has a unique Mind and these may or may not work for all. This is not an article on medical/psychological matters, so those who are crazy beyond repair will not find it useful. These afflictions are seen as "normal" by the human society, and are good examples of socially accepted madness. Those who are on the path, know them very well and strive to stay uninfluenced by them.

How can I know that I'm afflicted? Everyone is, don't worry. The telltale sign of afflictions is suffering and bondage. That is the main motivation behind hunting them down. It is not really important to completely cure them, in most cases, simply being aware of them is enough.