Episode 078 - A Case of Mistaken Identity

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

In the last episode, I offered a brief introduction to The Higher Mind Training, which is the next project that will be released by the Better Angels Publishing Company.

I mentioned the remarkable fact that modern neuroscience is in the process of verifying the basis of the higher understandings that have been expressed by Ancient Wisdom for tens of thousands of years. Now, we don’t have the time to go into the specific scientific details of what happens to our brain and nervous system when our inner awareness evolves into its higher levels. Just suffice it so say that the physiological proof of its positive effects on us is irrefutable.

I also presented the work of Dr. George Land and the study he produced for NASA that indicated that an astounding 98% of us were born geniuses and remained that way through the age of five. And by the time we reach adulthood, only about 2% of us are still in that genius category. But amazingly, that level of intelligence hasn’t left our consciousness. It’s still there and we can definitely reconnect with it.

And finally, I began the episode with the statement that the Higher Mind Training presents the average, everyday person with practical understandings and techniques they can use to expand their awareness and take them into our larger sphere of human intelligence. It is specifically designed to be simple to understand and easy to put into practice.

So, with this in mind, let me give you a brief update about some powerful events that have taken place with the Higher Mind Training during this past spring and summer.

About six months ago, I was invited to teach some of its basic principles to the counselors who serve in a half-way house in Wilkes-Barre, PA as well as the residents who live there. The results of this initial phase of implementation have been truly encouraging.

The name of the establishment is the James A. Casey House and it has been in operation for over twenty years. Its population is about fifty men, all of whom are recovering alcoholics and/or drug addicts. And these guys are all veterans of some truly hard times. Many have just been released from incarceration, several have recently been subject to severe overdoses, and many were homeless before the Casey House took them in.

You could say that a lot of them are living on the very bottom rung of society’s ladder, with very little education and even less wherewithal to survive the school of hard knocks that they find themselves involuntarily enrolled in. For me, although I have been speaking about and teaching the ideas and methods involved with the Higher Mind Training for many years, I had never tried to apply it to a population of this kind and had no idea what to expect.

As I began to train the counselors, I also held six training sessions directly with the residents so I could gain first-hand knowledge of their reactions. It was far more powerful than I had anticipated. Not only did they understand the material, but many had uplifting, liberating experiences practicing it. The results with the counselors, who continue to learn about the training and practice it have been equally impressive as well. And even though we are still in the early stages of implementation at the Casey House, the results have been truly encouraging.

One of the key fundamentals of the training is that most of us live in a state of Self-Sabotage and this is clearly at the root of most of the problems of the residents of the Casey House.

The basic description of the state of Self-Sabotage is quite simple. We keep getting in our own way of making progress in our lives. If it becomes bad enough, we become our own worst enemy. To one degree or another, this happens to almost all of us. No matter who we are or what we may have accomplished in life, we all have certain dissatisfactions that we are trying to transcend, higher goals of some form that we would like to achieve. And we each have only one truly powerful enemy who is fighting us every step of the way. And that is – our own self!

And the reason for this is also quite simple. Basically, we are at war with ourselves. In his introduction to the NASA study, as Dr. Land put it, our neurons are constantly fighting with each other. And again, this goes on with most of us, no matter who we are, how successful we may be, how much money we have, etc., etc.

So where does this constant inner battle come from and how can we resolve it? Believe it or not, it all comes down to a case of mistaken identity. Let’s use the lens of the Higher Mind Training to take a quick look at it.

To get started, let’s go back to the very beginning, which for us means, let’s go back about 300,000 years ago to when our species first began to appear on earth. In that regard, there are a couple of things to consider. First, since the beginning of life on planet earth, an estimated five to fifty billion species have evolved here. And incredibly, approximately 99 percent of them have become extinct. They came, stayed a while, and then for one reason or another, they vanished. Gone for good.

So, the obvious question then comes up – how did we survive? Why haven’t we become extinct?

The fact that we didn’t defies all logic. Given our relatively puny bodies with our lowly position on the food chain, natural selection should have wiped us out thousands of years ago. After all, we’re not the biggest. We’re not the strongest. We’re far from the fastest. Compared to sea creatures, we’re pathetic swimmers and we can’t fly at all. And when it comes to reproduction, our babies are born helpless, it takes them years to get to where they can survive on their own and compared to most other species, our overall offspring statistics are terribly weak.

So, under the laws of survival of the fittest, we should have been long gone by now. And indeed, we would have been just another unknown creature that came and went, except for this one small feature that was bestowed upon us by nature. We were born with this incredibly powerful brain. And although we’re clearly outmatched on every other level, this one small organ, with its endless creativity, has given us an overwhelming advantage against the competition.

At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be much. About the size of an average cantaloupe, it’s less than 100 cubic inches and weighs only about three pounds. And yet, of all the biological evolutions that have manifested on earth since the appearance of the microbe, with its 100 billion neurons seamlessly wired for endless creativity, it’s in a class all by itself. Indeed, the human brain is the single greatest masterpiece ever created by nature. And we each have one of our own.

With just its ability to invent tools, starting with primitive flint rock knives, it altered the survival equation, and soon we were at the very top of the food chain. And it did much more than that. With its boundless innovation, we didn’t just survive, we became the dominant creature on earth, radically transforming the entire planet.

And it truly is a most extraordinary tool. It is estimated that it would take the most advanced computer in the world about 45 hours to do what your brain does in just one second. So, your mind is absolutely incredible, and you could never grasp how much intelligence you have within you at this very moment.

So given all of this, where does this horribly destructive state of Self-Sabotage come from? Well, the truth is, it’s not all that hard to understand. The first concept to grasp is that we all have something in our intelligence which the Higher Mind Training calls our “Neural Template.”

Our brain has about 86 billion neurons that fire together constantly, and as the saying goes, neurons that fire together, wire together. They create about a hundred trillion neural pathways, which form a neural grid. This vast neural grid is called our neural template.

It is an incredibly complex device and it’s filled with everything that makes us who we are in the world, all of our concepts, emotions, thoughts and feelings, likes and dislikes, hope and memories, and on and on. We end up filtering everything that happens to us through this vast neural network, and that filtering shapes our entire life experience. We’ve each been basically living our lives through this neural filter since age five.

Now it’s important to remember that according to Dr. Land’s study for NASA, 98% of us were born geniuses and remained in that category through the age of five, which is when our creative intelligence began a significant and steady decline. So, what happened?

For most of us, we become more and more over-identified with our neural template, which is also called our ordinary mind. Due to an almost unending barrage of external stimuli, we lose the understanding that this grid that we have created is just a tool that we use to navigate our way through life, and we start believing that this neural template, this ordinary mind that can be overwhelmingly filled with negativity - this is actually who we are. And this extreme over-identification with this very small part of our overall intelligence becomes this case of mistaken identity. And this mistaken identity is the root cause of most of our mental and psychological pain.

Now, we don’t have this over-identification with anything else that we own. I don’t care how much you might love your car or your cell phone. You never get confused into thinking that they’re actually a part of you. But by mid-childhood, we’ve become so bonded to this neural template we’ve created, that we’ve lost touch with our actual identity and we no longer know who we really are. And the inner civil war, the war between the states of consciousness rages on.

So, as I mentioned in the last episode, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s also a great place to bring this episode to an end. There’s a lot more coming, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and let’s get together in the next one.