The Empire Strikes Back
We get glimpses of the possibility of living our lives from a place of increased awareness. Yet this very awareness can initially make things seem more intense and uncomfortable.
The mind, with all of its thinking and planning and remembering and projecting, believes that it can protect the human organism that we are (and occasionally, it is even true – there is a place for the thinking mind). But we are starting to realize that there is another way of living that is not so mind-centred, anxious and defensive.
As we start to go down a path of increased awareness, the mind sometimes feels this as a threat to the whole organism, and often fights back desperately and skillfully: “This is uncomfortable. I don’t like what I’m seeing when I’m aware. I feel like a bad person. I’ll be at a disadvantage if I’m not focused on protecting myself. I won’t be able to get what I need if I keep going on this path. I’m not good at this so I might as well forget it. I’ll never get the hang of it. This stuff is crazy.” -- and most powerfully – “I won’t be ‘me’ if I keep going in this direction.”
What is underneath is something we can’t usually see: that there are wounds, feelings, fears that we have managed to keep out of our awareness. The mind senses that this ‘awareness path’ is going to bring those things up into the light – and it fears that we won’t be able to handle them. Its tricks and habits of disguising pain with stories and patterns are being exposed – and it feels unfamiliar and threatening.
The analytical mind has a specific job, shaped through tens of thousands of years of evolution – to protect the physical organism. Through time the simple survival aims of getting food and shelter morphed into complex goals like gaining and maintaining status and avoiding any threats to our sense of self – even if they come from our own awareness. Through its conditioning over the millenia, the mind can still react to these emotional goals as if they are life-or-death, physical survival issues – so it may do its best to convince us to turn away from developing increased awareness.
"Internal work is hand-to-hand combat without hands. As attention grows, we become more and more aware of the habituated patterns that run our lives. One student said to me, “I was aware of all these issues before I started practicing meditation, but now I’m intolerably aware of them.
Attention and pattern are in direct conflict with each other. Patterns function for one purpose and one purpose only: to decay attention so that the emotional core of the pattern is never sensed, felt or known experientially.
To be present in life, we must engage these patterns in combat. To avoid this conflict is to give our lives to the patterns…
The only weapon against the operation of patterns, the only weapon that makes victory possible, is active attention." Ken McLeod, Wake Up to Your Life
