Mental Turmoil

What causes mental turmoil and how might I respond to it?

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

Transcript

Welcome. 

Mental turmoil at one time or another can affect a lot of people. As a race, as humanity, you tend to have active minds, quite busy minds and busy minds tend to generate more busyness. You’re not wholly separate from one another despite having distinct and separate physical bodies and both in the area of mental activity and emotional activity, there's a lot of contiguity. Your minds and your emotions are in touch with each other. It's very easy for thoughts to travel from one person to another. In addition, you live in a group of societies in which modern technology means that some mental activity at least gets very readily amplified. And so there can be a kind of background loudness of mental activity that affects everyone to some extent. The degree of effect varies enormously from individual to individual and from time to time indeed. 

1:50

So as we look at this subject, begin by understanding that if you do or have experienced mental turmoil, that however much you may be instrumental in generating that experience, it's not solely down to you. There are particular frequency patterns that are prevalent through the human mental body at this time, that are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon of being amplified. You'll have noticed how patterns of negative thought that derive from feelings of fear can spread quite easily, like wildfire sometimes. And you can witness that. You can see it in the world around you. 

02:48

And if those same fears that generated this wild fire of negative thinking are present in you, even if a little, then you're going to be to some degree susceptible to those thought patterns. There can be an idea that you are your own minds, that you are your thoughts. This is not true. It's a fallacy. There are some in the world who believe that if they could only download the content of their brains into some sort of supercomputer, they would achieve a kind of immortality. They would achieve some continuous activity, but it would not really be immortality in any meaningful sense. 

03:44

And part of the purpose in talking in this way today, choosing this subject, is to encourage you to understand that you are not your thoughts. Not because your thoughts are in some way invalid or useless, but you are so much more than your thoughts. In addition, believing that you are your thoughts generates a very fixed relationship with the activity of your mind. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, for you to stand back and become an observer of your thoughts, if you identify with them too closely. And if it is that you're finding your thoughts in turmoil (and then shortly I'll say a little bit more about what I mean by thoughts in turmoil, because there are several different meanings or aspects to it), but if you find that that applies to you, then one of the most valuable steps that you can take is a step backwards. That is to say, to stand back from your own thoughts; to become if only a little, an observer of your thoughts rather than directly and solely an experience of the thoughts. To identify with thoughts that you find unpleasant is an unpleasant experience and there is no reason why, whatever your thoughts, your own experience of them needs to be unpleasant. They can become a kind of entertainment or a wallpaper. You may not like the wallpaper. It may be an entertainment that you would rather switch off if you could. But by granting yourself permission to stand back a little, you are already changing your relationship with the thoughts you're experiencing. 

05:45

But let's say a little bit about what is meant by mental turmoil. As I said, there are several different kinds. One kind of mental turmoil is when your mind is not really able to settle for anything (or this is your experience of it), that is busy. Perhaps there's a particular problem that you're seeking to resolve. And yet each time you bring your mind to bear upon that problem, it wants to dart away and think about something else. And so there can be a tumult of mental activity without much sense, from your point of view, of progress being made. And sometimes that busyness can feel overwhelming: the noise of the crowd inside your head. There can be a similar kind of turmoil, but we might add in a slightly different effort definition here, which is when you find a lot of conflicting thoughts. So the mind may be very busy or not so busy, but what you're finding is that there are streams of thoughts that at least as far as you can tell are contradictory, that won't settle to a consensus about what the world is or what your experience is. 

07:09

There can be another kind of turmoil, which in a sense you might call a more creative turmoil, where the imagination and its function of generating ideas, scenes, pictures and so on, goes into overdrive. On some occasions and for some beings, this can indeed be a very creative process, an inspiration happening as you watch, as you experience it. The artist who creates music at speed or writes poems out of the air might be experiencing something of that kind of turmoil. And it may not be wholly pleasant for the creative person, but it can certainly be experienced as valuable. In other modes that overdrive of the imagination at work can feel like a bad trip, an overdose of drugs of some kind. And again, you can feel in a place where you're not really in any degree in charge of what's happening. But even when it's like that, even when there's a hubbub of overactivity in the imagination or in the production of thoughts, the first step, that can be so valuable even if not always easy, is to recognise that you are not those thoughts, you’re not those imaginings, that that you're able to stand back from them and observe them. 

09:00

And then another crucial step is the recognition that you do not need to react to those thoughts. That is to say you do not need to move into an automatic response to the thoughts you're experiencing, but that you can respond with choice. Part of your choice, of course, might be that you would really like your thoughts to quieten and it can seem that they are not willing to oblige or indeed, however you choose to respond to your thoughts, there may be a continuing experience that, as far as you can tell,d how you are responding is not changing the thoughts themselves. Nevertheless, you are opening a door to freedom for yourself. 

09:47

Another form of turmoil that can occur is the sense, now not quite so much that there are too many thoughts happening, but actually in a sense that there are not enough thoughts happening. That's to say you find yourself in a situation where it feels to you as if there is no choice or there is only one choice and that choice is not palatable to you, and therefore you find all of the thoughts in a sense continuing to be very busy, but repetitive: focusing upon this one perceived choice.  Here too, take the first step. Stand back. Recognise that however much your mind may insist that there is no choice or only one choice, and however unpalatable that choice may be, that the mind is not telling you the truth. There is always choice. Choices may be difficult, they may be what you would like to choose, they may not be what you'd like to choose, but they're there. 

11:05

There’s a more general point to make here, and that is this. It's a simple point, but it can be easy to overlook. Your mind does not necessarily tell you the truth. It has its own capacity for generating thought. It likes to generate thought, or most minds you will find do, at least for a while. And so part of the value of standing back from your thoughts is that recognition that you are watching a show. You are watching wallpaper. You are watching something other than or outside or beyond you. And part of the freedom of response is that you are free to disbelieve your own thoughts, however convincing they might seem. Part of your mind, you are likely to find, is devoted to generating thoughts without really much interest in whether they are actually true. It's generating thoughts to meet a perceived need, but its perception of the need may be quite inaccurate. You may be seeking the answer to a particular situation in your life. Your mind wants to help. It sees that as its job and it may come up with a plethora of suggestions, some of which may be of use to you. Others may be entirely fanciful and really nothing to do with what you're looking at at all. It's not that they've come out of nothing, but when you find your mind in turmoil, you will find that almost invariably, and we might even stretch that and say actually invariably, the thoughts that are being generated are not really about what is happening now. Something, if your mind is over-busy in the present, has stimulated your mind. And that stimulation may be in the present, but it's touched, it’s triggered a whole lot of associations that belong in the past. 

13:21

So you can find that a considerable proportion of the overactivity, the turmoil that you can experience in your mind, is really nothing to do with the present at all. Indeed, really none of it may be: that it's all a kind of attempt to arrive at a solution to something that happened long ago and was never wholly resolved. And that at some level you've generated the current situation, at least in part, to give you that new opportunity. But you can find the idea that all that you are thinking is about the present situation, because that's how the mind tends to perceive things. It sees itself as being here now in the present. From its point of view all of your past, that from your point of view is not wholly resolved - and now we can bring in the future and say all of those issues that generate a degree of fear or uncertainty or a feeling of a need to reach out into the future in order to resolve something - all of those, from your mind's point of view are present. but they are not actually present.

14:39

Here and now you can find a silence, a quietness of the mind. So another approach, which is not other than what I've already suggested, but is really complimentary to it, is to, if you are experiencing a mind in turmoil, is to come quite strictly into the present moment. What I mean ‘by quite strictly’ is not just coming into today but into this moment, this actual moment of time, which in terms of the clock may be a fraction of a second, but experientially can be very expansive, very large. It's not the easiest thing to do to be fully here and now, but it is utterly worth the endeavour because that liberates you from the drudgery of reliving past experiences in an attempt to find some kind of redress or balance or harmony or resolution or reeling from fears about what the future might hold, gather yourself into the present. And these are not present. The past is past. The future's the future. They're not present. 

16:08

It can also be valuable (two things here): First of all, not to take the activity of our mind unduly seriously, to treat it with a pinch of salt or a sense of humour. The mind, even when it's doing its darndest to create images of terror can indeed be quite impressive. But you can treat it as you would treat an impressive performance, in a play say or in a film. You can admire the skill of the actor and you can allow yourself, if you wish to be temporarily frightened by the expert villainy that the actor demonstrates. But you have the liberty in that situation of enjoying a frisson of fear without needing to truly believe it. Something has been acted out for you. And so you can treat the activity of the mind in that way, as I've already suggested. And you can treat it with a kind of levity, an appreciation of that skill, but using humour that for all the awfulness the mind can generate (and what it generates may not originate with you at all, but be you tuning into other minds, sometimes humour can be a valuable way of freeing up the tension, the burden of it all.

17:45

But then also allow that the mind (I already suggested) is not you. It is activity of an aspect of your energy field that is very valuable, the mental body. Part of the way it is active for you, as shall we say, a modern human (if we go back to those of your ancestors who are categorised as Neanderthals, for instance, you'd find their minds working very differently, very beautifully, but very differently. The mental activity was not the same. They were not generating verbal thoughts in the way that you do so naturally); so generating the kind of thoughts that most people do on Earth now is not the only way of using the mind at all. And another way of stepping back from it is to step back from the content of the thoughts altogether and regard it simply as a particular kind of movement of energy, patterns of energy, frequencies of energy, some of which may be attractive to you, some of which may not be attractive to you at all, that you're recoil from, that you find burdensome or distressing. 

19:11

But when you stand back and begin to observe the thoughts, now not as the content, not that kind of standing back being the observer of the play or the wallpaper, but rather looking at the sound waves that the actor is producing or the pigments that went into creating the pattern of the wallpaper, going back another stage closer to the source of what's going on. And one of the things to be aware of is that even though, as I've said, thoughts may not originate with you, you're just tuning into them, nevertheless you are the creator of the thoughts you experience. That is to say you may be choosing to replicate the thoughts of others, but you are choosing to do it at some level and you can choose not to. It may take practice, it may take a level of skill to choose not to replicate the negative thoughts of others, for example. But you can learn to do it. And one of the ways is to observe all of that as energy, movements of energy. That then gives you a fresh way of addressing what's happening. You can work with that energy as an energy being yourself, specifically as a being of light and love. You can allow yourself to love the energies that are creating that mental turmoil. You don't have to love the content, in the sense of adhering to it, wanting to identify with it, but you can love your ability to generate thoughts, to have that degree of activity as part of your experience of being human. You can love that movement of energy. You can admire it, you can appreciate that it happens. And then you can add. You can add love, you can add light to what you're experiencing. 

21:16

Consider a repetitive thought that you find deeply repulsive to yourself. And it may be one of the reasons that it is repetitive, because you do find it repulsive and something within you says, ‘this needs to be resolved. I need to find peace with this.’ So the thought comes back and back. But you're not stuck with it. You can learn to love whatever the source of that thought was. Somewhere, someone in pain generated that thought first off, you picked it up and so on. You can send love to wherever it came from. You can bring light around that pattern of energy. Imagine it as unpleasant thoughts or a dark disruptive pattern of energy. Imagine it something like that. You can add light. You can bring light round it. That light is not fundamentally in the first instance about making the thought change. Rather it's you illuminating the energy so that you can see it a little bit more, so you can sense it a bit more. And then being in that relationship, a collaborative relationship, a cooperative relationship, a harmonious relationship, you're saying to that energy, ‘I allow you to be, I'm witnessing you, I'm understanding you. I'm exploring what you are, getting a feel of what your origin might be. I'm in a place of compassion. I'm offering light to you this thought or the originator of this thought or the place from which the thought is derived or whatever’. And so you're opening up a space of interaction. You've left behind a place of ‘I can't do anything about this. It keeps coming back. It's driving me mad’ to a sense of, ‘this is interesting. This is part of my experience of being human. I can relate to it. I do not need to reject it. I'm recognised that however good a person I wish to be, I am capable of containing within my energy field, my presence, these rather terrible thoughts that are distressing to me, that I don't want to think, but I can. I'm able to.’

23:38

What is the benefit of this? It brings you to a place where you can recognise that others who are suffering around the world at this time or at other times and whose suffering may lead them to act in ways that you find are appalling or reprehensible or disgusting, that actually they are not other than you ultimately. That these are just other manifestations of the Source of All. And that your willingness not to condone the thought, to condone the action, but understand, to in a sense say, Here, but for the grace of God, go I,’ to use that kind of idea. Even if you don't choose those kind of words, what are you then doing? You're then moving into a global arena, we might say. You've moved from the painful privacy of your own mental turmoil to understand that you are part of something much larger. You're part of an evolving human consciousness. You are part of minds evolving all around the Earth. Coming generations will do even more. But you do this now every time you allow a thought that has appeared in your mind to exist without flinching, without fearing it, to witness it, to stand back so that you can see it better to bring love to wherever it came from, to be in that place of accepting all it is, to be compassionate, to bring love so that you can see, to bring light so that you can see better, bringing them together around the thought, around the energy. 

25:28

Then you are bringing healing not only to your own mental body, but you're offering that healing to all in the world. Now you're living in a time in which the changing energies of the world around you and energies that are coming into the world from beyond are stirring things up a great deal. And one of the primary areas of this energetic stirring of the pot is the human mental body. It has become overstimulated, as a generalisation - there are many, many distinctions, many differences around the world, many different groups, many different ways of operating the mental body. But as a generalisation, some ways in which the mental body works have become much overstimulated and other ways not sufficiently active. 

26:21

And so in the whole area of what we might call ratiocination of the use of the mind as, and I put this word now in quotes, ‘rational’ actions, which often of course turn out not to be very rational at all, but that way of using the mind computationally to create structures that define the world: this has led to a lot of problems for humanity, a lot of rigidity, a lot of difficulty in relating to one another and choosing instead to hide behind competing ideas that prevent you seeing each other properly. All of this is getting stirred up a lot at the moment, stirred up because it's time for it to change. And you can be part of that change. In all probability, if you're listening to these words, you already are very much part of this change. And so if you experience, from time to time, mental turmoil yourself, recognise that a very considerable part of what may be going on, and again this is a generalisation, but what may very well be going on is that you are open to these changes and that to some level you've chosen to participate in these changes, and that therefore you are allowing yourself to feel the mental turbulence that is there for much of humanity, that you're allowing yourself to be in a space of responding rather than ignoring that movement of energy, of recognising that you have a capacity innate within you and honed and developed through your life experiences to bring healing to the mental body of humanity. 

28:11

Because whilst, of course, you have your own personal mental body, as I said at the beginning it's not really that separate from the mental body of others, and collectively we can see a human mental body, which is in the process of fairly rapid evolution at this time. It'll take in all probability, several generations for this, at least two more generations beyond your own for there to be a marked shift. But you're approaching a time when more and more, especially those who are coming into the world, look at the consequences of the kind of turbulence of mental activity that there has been over the last century and more. Really much more, but let's stay within the compass of a century or so. Look at that as they come in and say, no, this is not the way to move forward. And so you can find within a comparatively short space of time in terms of human evolution, no more shall we say than several hundred years. 

29:18

But let me add a caveat. The future is yours. So this is just looking at it as it is now. That timescale can change very dramatically. It's up to what you all choose to do. But as things stand, it looks as though the process I'm talking about might be several hundred years. But it is a real change. And so if you encounter mental turbulence, if sometimes that has brought suffering to you, if you're feeling mental turbulence at the moment, again, stand back, not just to look at that mental turbulence, to recognise that personally you have freedom to respond, to witness, to observe with compassion, to recognise that you are not your thoughts. But in addition, that in standing back, you're also giving yourself permission to have this wider picture of human evolution, evolution of human consciousness, in a certain kind of way the softening of the mental structures. Softening in the sense of becoming more open, more flowing, more responsive, so that you are able to see one another more truly, letting go of the notion of the enemy that must be kept at bay. Because in a sense, when mental turmoil is painful to you, that's what's going on. You're seeing that mental activity as the enemy that must somehow be beaten, beaten back, or conquered in some way, demolished. No, your mind becomes quiet, becomes peaceful, not when you fight your thoughts, but when you love them, and allow them to fade out into peacefulness, oneness, a state of bliss. 

Thank you for listening. Go well.