Return to Abby Eagle's Blog Menu

Coming to a point of understanding (14/12/2004)

After witnessing a series of memories, while engaged in the drop through meditation technique, I came to an actual point of understanding, at which time the emotion associated with the gestalt of memories disappeared. From the perspective of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) this is quite profound. The challenge of course, is to try and model this experience so that the technique can be taught to others.

Discovering the 'I'. (22/12/2004)

I was sitting in meditation last night and reflecting on how consciousness and content equals the mind. Of how consciousness with no content (no thoughts) equals meditation. And of how after a period of time with no content, the consciousness, which habitually requires some object to focus on, will turn on itself. Whenever there was a period of no thought I tried to find a way for the consciousness to be aware of itself.

It was then that I discovered that there is a tiny bit of the mind which likes to be present during meditation. I experience it as a soft coaching voice which reappears after about five seconds of silence, and wants to assist with the meditation. For me this is a good representation of the 'I', and when it realised that it too had to disappear it felt upset, as if it should be excluded from the annihilation of the mind, and be there to watch the process. It was as if this part of the mind, the 'I', had not realised all of these years what meditation was really about, until now.

(By analogy it was like the Windows software animated help icon. Even after you click on it to disappear it still comes back a few times. And when you give it the final click to disappear it looks upset, before riding away.)

Using awareness to silence the internal dialogue (26/12/2004)

If you watch the internal dialogue very closely during meditation it will often disappear, but in an everyday situation it is a little more challenging to quieten it. NLP has a set of tools to shift the submodalities but it takes a bit of work to bring about the change, especially if you want to make the change by yourself without the aid of NLP Practitioner. Awareness, however is something that can be practised constantly, 24 hours a day if you wish, just as long as you bring some energy to it.

I should also mention here, that I have been wondering for sometime about the mechanisms that actually generate specific types of thoughts and feelings. For example, what is the mechanism that generates fear based thoughts and behaviour? NLP has tools that help us to elicit the strategies that generate an emotion; and techniques to let go of a negative emotion; and other techniques to lessen the emotion or direct the unconscious mind to create a different type of emotion, but NLP still has no way to stop the mind/body organism from actually generating fear or any other emotion for that matter. I don't dispute that feeling and expressing emotions are an integral part of being human but no matter how much NLP'ers like to think that they are working at meta levels, they are still working with and within the confines of the mind.

Meditation, on the other hand provides a way to go beyond the mind and gain an understanding of the mechanisms of the mind at its most fundamental level. (I should mention here that meditators see the mind as being a manifestation of the first five subtle bodies interacting with each other, in the same way that the 'tick' of a clock is generated by the all the components of the clock.)

Meditation, as taught by Osho, uses awareness to 'see through' the mind. One does not have to analyse the mind or make changes to the mind, just the simple act of seeing what is there is enough. (One can look at a tree using the mind as a filter, which has all your accumulated knowledge about trees, or one can just see the tree as it is here and now.)

Anyway the point of this diary entry is that for ages I have suffered with an internal voice that would rave on in my head at any opportunity, on a particular aspect of my business. When I reflected on this it seemed that there was always a good reason why the thoughts should be there. Recently I started questioning the reason for the thoughts of work, especially in view of the fact that I was on a Christmas break. (What was the mechanism that created this internal dialogue and its content?) So over a period of weeks I brought as much awareness to this internal dialogue as I could muster. At first I caught the internal dialogue after I had been listening to it for 20 minutes, then after 10 minutes, then 5 minutes, then 2 minutes. Eventually I caught the internal dialogue just as it was starting. Then I felt as if I had just woken up, or come out of a dream. I started yawning and stretching my arms and legs. I became aware of tension in my shoulders, neck and head. I felt energised and motivated to have some fun.

Return to Blog Menu