Day 52
4 It is in the sorting out and categorizing activities of the mind that errors in perception enter. And it is here correction must be made. The mind classifies what the body’s eyes bring to it according to its preconceived values, judging where each sense datum fits best. What basis could be faultier than this? Unrecognized by itself, it has itself asked to be given what will fit into these categories. And having done so, it concludes that the categories must be true. On this the judgment of all differences rests, because it is on this that judgments of the world depend. Can this confused and senseless “reasoning” be depended on for anything?
A customer calls me with a problem. Even as he begins to speak, my mind has already begun the process of sorting and categorizing. At incredible speed I have put him in his place in my mind, who I think he is, what I think about his personality and how that will affect the tone of my reply to him, how smart I think he is, and how that will affect the words I use to answer him.
I judge according to how often he calls, and whether he is actually going to follow my advice. I calculate how important he is to me as a customer, how much time I can afford to give him. I judge his words to me according to their impact on my life. Does he sound mad and will this affect my bottom line? Perhaps I will see his request as a good opportunity to make myself more important to him. Perhaps I will see it as an intrusion.
And each of these thoughts branch off into more thoughts. It is all based on the past and on my thoughts about the past. No one is allowed to simply be. No one is allowed to free himself from the little prisons I build for him. He is, in my mind, the person I created. His actions and words seem to prove this to me over and over, and I mindlessly accept the judgments as if they were given to me, written in stone. “Ah hah, I knew he would do this or say that. I must be an astute judge of character.” And all along I am the maker of his character, pretending to discover it.
My day is thrown askew because circumstances change. I quickly, faster than the speed of light, I decide what it means and how it feels, and thus make a response. I pretend that none of this happened in my mind. I pretend that I am an innocent victim of circumstances beyond my control, and my feelings seem to confirm this assessment, confirm and prove it. All the time I am creating the categories that each judgment falls in and thus creating my reaction, which I then pretend is out of my control. What a dizzying process of self-delusion, and yet it is what I do all day long, every day.
The only exceptions are when I am, for brief periods of time, in my right mind. In that sublime state, love overflows into everything, and when the customer calls I only want to know how I can help this precious child of God, and I don’t ask my ego mind because I am in the other part of my mind. From this part of my mind, I don’t have any desire to categorize or judge. I don’t figure anything out. I bypass the thinking mind, and simply ask, and the answer is given.
Its so simple and so perfect, it seems I would always want to be only there. It seems a mystery to me that I so quickly revert to the ego- thinking mind. This morning I was reading a note I had made for myself. It came from Regina and she was talking about devotion to silence.
She said that the thoughts would start again and your attention would drift to them. Then she said that we can again make the decision to return to the heart. And she said, “In this decision thoughts are not fed. That which is not fed must eventually die.” How encouraging that feels to me!
This crazy self-deluding process of asking to be given what fits into my categories as proof that my categories are true is very deeply rooted in my consciousness, but I trust it can be undone. I give my desire and my willingness today to starve the ego-thinking mind through frequently turning my attention away from it.
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