The Primitive Brain Keeps The Mind Busy-Busy
Following on from yesterday’s post, because I’m a dude of my word, what was standing in my way? Well, I didn’t have what I call ‘the foundations of a quiet mind’.
The foundations include the brain knowing what reality is, why a quiet mind is all you need, having the brain’s operation flowing through the wisdom, positivity, confidence and solution-focused nature of the vast intellectual main cortex of the brain, and the calm and control from which we can abide in the present and repeat again and again in order to get really good at this simple new skill, and maybe merge in and as what is, as we are.
There are two parts of the brain: the vast intellectual main cortex and the primitive emotional mind. When our stress is down low, we operate from the main cortex, calm and in control, coming up with answers based on a proper assessment of our situations and tending to get things right in life – the foundations from which we can seriously abide in being and repeat. But when stress goes up, we can find ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree, falling to the primitive mind – the brain’s limbic system, home to the flight, fight and depression response.
If we come across a tiger, our stress goes through the roof and our operation falls from the intellectual mind to the primitive. We’d feel sweaty, heart pounding, stomach churning, and be off like a shot. In a life-threatening crisis or emergency, the primitive mind steps in to help and only operates from the primitive parameters of anxiety to get us panicking and running as hard as we can, anger to fight off the threat or depression so we can pull the rug over our heads until the situation has changed. It’s a negative, obsessional and vigilant mind. It goes on and on and on. It’s about survival – it doesn’t want you to be anything other than the body-mind, because that’s what needs to survive. It’s about identity, constant inner negative noise, and it’s not an intellect, so it repeats old and often negative patterns of behaviour.
Imagine you’ve been chased by a tiger and you’re now hiding behind a big rock. The mind will go on and on and on about the threat to the body-mind. It won’t want you to relax and abide in being. It won’t want you to ponder the Ultimate Reality. It won’t want you to be anything other than a separate and finite thing in big trouble. You’ll be well and truly lost in a busy-busy mind.
If we want to abide in and as a quiet mind, we’ll need to grow the foundations and keep the stress down in our lives. But hey, life is stressful – yes it is – but it’s not the events of our lives that cause the stress, it’s the thought patterns we have around them.
We have a stress bucket lodged inside our heads, you see, and every negative thought we entertain is converted into anxiety and drops into the bucket. The bucket’s level of stress can positively or negatively affect our lives tremendously, and so it’s vital for us to protect it from filling up by all means necessary – which, hey, we’ll explore in the next post…