(This is Part 1 of a series.)
My first experience of dis-identifying from my own mind was in 1977. I was 33 (I've always been a late bloomer). I've told this story elsewhere, but I'll retell it briefly here since an example is often helpful:
I had just finished taking a weekend seminar. As the seminar concluded I walked up to an attractive woman I had talked with at the seminar and asked her if she would go out with me. She said no.
Undaunted—sort of—I walked up to a second attractive woman that I had talked with at the seminar and asked her if she would go out with me. And she too said no.
On the drive home I was sunk in depression and suicidal thoughts. The thoughts went something like this: "I will never make it in this life. Everything I do fails. I'm ugly and unattractive. Nothing works. I don't belong here. My life is shit." Like that.
Accompanying these thoughts were overpowering feelings of hopelessness, depression, isolation, suicidal sadness and so on. The thoughts were feeling the emotions and the emotions were feeding the thoughts, in a self-reinforcing cycle that was spiraling downwards.
And then something happened. I had read about "jumping out of one's own mind", so to speak, in the books of some spiritual teachers, but had never been able to do it. Now, for the first time, I remembered what they had said while I was still in the middle of my drama (instead of later), and suddenly, right then and there, it happened.
Nothing changed, that was the interesting thing. A storm of mental and emotional drama was still going on in my mind but my consciousness wasn't involved anymore. The awareness had shifted from identifying with the thoughts and feelings to just observing them, watching them just as we might watch birds fly across a sky.
I wasn't rejecting the thoughts and feelings in any way, I wasn't minimizing them or denying them; I was perffectly there with them. It's just that my relationship with them had shifted. I realised that my thoughts and feelings were taking place within a spacious awareness that was vast and empty and pregnant—all at the same time—and that those thoughts and feelings were not me, not my identity. They were ongoing productions of the mind, that's all.
Further, I realised that that is what my mind did—it was an organism for producing an ongoing thought-stream. And, it didn't even need my participation; it just went on doing the whole thing by itself.
(This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, 12.27.05
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