When we access its awareness, then this greater space and ease will be concrete. Any attempt to resolve in the mind the pain you're describing is likely to just create more of the same.

Yes. Resolving in the mind � a big no-no. You�ve been keen to teach about the intelligence outside the mind (aka "body intelligence"). I don�t disagree with this notion, as New Agey as it may sound to some. I think some (like me) cling to the intellect because it�s one area we feel we have some control. Thoughts can seemingly be controlled. They can be created and manipulated at will. But at this level it�s a detached will. It�s detached from the whole mind/body conglomerate which is obviously meant to work together.

Understanding awareness is obviously a key issue, particularly understanding the difference between awareness and hypervigilance. It seems to be the nature of the mind to feel that it is "complete" in whatever state it is in�even if, say, it is totally unaware of back tension or something like that. This completeness is a convenient illusion because it makes us think we�ve got it all together. The contracted awareness, at least as I see it, seems to be acting as a filtering or protective mechanism, although I�m not so sure that some kind of complete, open and total awareness is are natural birthright, something we would naturally fall into if it wasn�t interrupted. It may be we have to fight and struggle to open that awareness up.

I was in the check-out line this morning and this nice, but frazzled, lady was ahead of me. She had to go back out to the parking lot to get her wallet that she forgot. No problem, I said. I�ll hold your place. When she came back we chatted a bit. She told me, in a joking manner, of course, how she felt like a lousy wife because she ran out of coffee in the house. She then noted how she and her husband were so different. I received enough details that I won�t repeat them here for fear of possibly betraying somebody�s privacy! You could just see the chipmunks in the squirrel cage running about inside her, attempting to stay ahead of failure and discovery that she wasn�t perfect, that she couldn�t do it all. If these two people (I presume) could sit down and expand their awareness a bit, they could dissipate a lot of that unneeded tension.

There was nothing particularly unique about this woman. This is the state of affairs that one sees more and more of. There�s a sub-human quality to this state of affairs. And no doubt when we see sub-human behavior out in the world we might guess where it comes from. It�s not primarily important, I think, to expand our awareness just in order to open up the floodgates to achievement and personal success, although there�s absolutely nothing wrong with those things. There�s something more and different that rises up out of that unconscious fog as our awareness expands. At the very least, it�s a different sort of measuring stick that emerges.

Understanding awareness is obviously a key issue, particularly understanding the difference between awareness and hypervigilance. It seems to be the nature of the mind to feel that it is "complete" in whatever state it is in�even if, say, it is totally unaware of back tension or something like that. This completeness is a convenient illusion because it makes us think we�ve got it all together. The contracted awareness, at least as I see it, seems to be acting as a filtering or protective mechanism, although I�m not so sure that some kind of complete, open and total awareness is are natural birthright, something we would naturally fall into if it wasn�t interrupted. It may be we have to fight and struggle to open that awareness up.

Very good! What you're calling hypervigilence I consider the mind's response to its own inner emotional turmoil and to potentially unsettling situations in one's life. Here the mind is gobbling up one's spiritual awareness to focus intently on a situation the mind deems threatening. The threat, of course, is dealing with one's inner emotional pain, which the mind interprets as threat, trouble, problem, etc. All those racing thoughts are naught but the mental side of the emotional pain coin. The mind wants to "solve" the problem this pain is indicating, including, here, the problem of feeling the pain, which the mind interprets to be a devastating possibility of the utmost threat to self-image. And yet that is precisely what must be done -- feel the pain . . . slowly, gently, accepting it like a wounded child, which in a way it is.

There's lots and lots of energy in those wounded emotions. Letting them come forth to tell their story or just pass on through can initially feel like disaster, or meltdown, but there is much goodness, joy and peace to follow when one does so. Then will the hypervigilance naturally give way to a more relaxed, expansive awareness.

Very good! What you're calling hypervigilence I consider the mind's response to its own inner emotional turmoil and to potentially unsettling situations in one's life. Here the mind is gobbling up one's spiritual awareness to focus intently on a situation the mind deems threatening. The threat, of course, is dealing with one's inner emotional pain, which the mind interprets as threat, trouble, problem, etc. All those racing thoughts are naught but the mental side of the emotional pain coin. The mind wants to "solve" the problem this pain is indicating, including, here, the problem of feeling the pain, which the mind interprets to be a devastating possibility of the utmost threat to self-image. And yet that is precisely what must be done -- feel the pain . . . slowly, gently, accepting it like a wounded child, which in a way it is.

Very good, yourself. In fact, I think that's extremely good, Phil. I'm not sure how much "feeling one's inner emotional pain" that I have left to do. That stuff is easily hidden, although I'm making a better effort of late at meditation (which I think goes hand in hand with self-acceptance since in meditation, almost like nowhere else, do we so intimately spend time with ourselves). I don't know why, but one of the real steps of progress I've made lately is not taking my shortcomings personally. It's reaching a sort of dispassionate "just the way it is" stature, but not in a defeatist way. Just a matter-of-fact sort of way. But in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm reaching a point where I just am becoming overloaded. I think I have so much unprocessed stuff that sometimes even the simplest of tasks become too much for me. It's like you can only put so many layers of shingles on a house before you have to tear them all off and start again.

And I really like the paradigm you stated of the mind gobbling up one's spiritual awareness. I sort of see spirituality as the equivalent of deep sleep or even REM sleep (at the very least, but certainly not limited to that). If you don't get enough of it you go bonkers. We turn into soulless automatons. Human doings. The paradigm for our whole life looks more like a cold financial spreadsheets where we run crazy trying to keep the credits ahead of the debits. We measure success in plain "what have you done for me lately" terms and there is little margin for error and little reason to forgive it.