Practice 11 · Investigating the Mind

Settle yourself. Find a position you can hold without trying. Gently close your eyes.

Before we commence, tell your mind: I have come to observe you, to observe how you work, how the thoughts are formed, how the feelings are produced, how you react.

Herein lies the irony: we are applying the mind to the mind, a tool studying itself, a means of studying its own structure.

Phase 1: Manual vs. Automatic

Pay attention to your breathing. Experience the air in your nose, the lifting of your chest, the gradual descent when you breathe out. That little trouble to retain it here? That's manual control.

Then observe the natural course of things: suddenly you lose concentration, to some noise somewhere away, a tickle on your arm, a recollection, a list of things to do. Did you select that?

Whenever you feel the drift, just go back to the breath. No judgment, no struggle, but turn back.

Here you are observing the two modes of operation of the mind in action:

• Automatic: attention is transferred by itself.
• Manual: you turn it willfully.

Wait a moment, breathing, and observing the alternation of the two.

Phase 2: The Pull of Good

Keeping the breath in the background, think of something you hold dear: a warm embrace of a partner, economic stability, a place you feel totally secure. See it clearly.

Now experience the expansion in your system:

• Muscles loosen.
• The breath opens and deepens.
• The mind is light, spacious, at ease.

This expansion was not your choice; it came the moment your mind recognized this as “good” in your stored knowledge.

And take heed: you want more. You would like to remain here. No one would take a pill to stop feeling this way.

Phase 3: Changing the Label

Now, change the story about the picture, not the picture. Visualize betrayal, loss or abrupt removal. Watch what happens:

• Shoulders tense.
• Breath shortens.
• The mind recoils.

Same image, different label, and the reaction reverses to contraction. Here is the mechanism of the mind: it responds not to reality, but to the category into which your knowledge has put it.

Phase 4: Meeting the “Bad”

Now consider something that you strongly classify as bad: sickness, loss of a loved one, personal failure. Notice the contraction:

• Body tightens.
• Breath shortens.
• Mind attempts to draw away.

This was not your decision. It is the system running its program.

Experiment: say that this contracted state is good. Feel how your system resists. That is how deep the stored categorization goes.

No one experiences something branded bad and remains expanded. Nobody prefers to have pain when there is space to grow.

Phase 5: The Core Insight

You've just seen the universal mind in action:

• It stretches out to what is labeled good.
• It contracts from what's labeled bad.

It is automatic, in everyone, in all places. And the label belongs not to the thing, but to the knowledge stored.

The same event can be perceived differently by two individuals simply because it is given a different meaning by their knowledge. Example: pain. For most, it's contraction. For others, in the BDSM world, it is expansion. The feeling is the same; only the label is changed.

Why This Matters

These expansions and contractions cannot be prevented. They are built into the system. But we have a choice of what comes next.

It is not the reaction we can control, but our action in response to it that is our real leverage. And that decision alters everything.