The book How to Love the Mind and Save Our World is a guide for navigating the World of the Mind and relationships.
Dr. Scott M. Peck published a book dealing with group processes, “The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace” at a time when the Cold War was approaching the U.S. border. I am writing this foreword at a time when the war between U.S. and Russian interests has really heated up in a neighboring state, Ukraine. I wish for myself, and for all the people on this still beautiful planet, that they may be able to overcome the small notion of a foolish humanity living a story of separateness and find the strength and courage to live in a world of abundance. A world in which we don’t need guns, or an economy that is based on their production and sale and use. A world in which we care for each other and support each other in fulfilling our needs and dreams. In a world where we are homo supportive-suppotiensis not homo pretending to be rational with, for example, weapons and armaments.
I believe we can do this and use the means used to destroy ‘disobedient’ states (wars), people (prisons), animals (insecticides), plants (herbicides), fungi and moulds (fungicides), to create a whole new story of planetary coexistence and mutual support.
robo jankovich
author of Awakening of DRΛGON
The book “How to Love Your Mind and Save Your World – A Guide to Navigating the World of Mind and Relationships”, is about the group organism and its behavior, experiencing the experience of community, and discerning inner motivations. It is also about community processes and the search for alternatives to current forms of coexistence and being.
This electronic form of the book is as a GIFT for your personal use. It is not yet intended for free distribution as it has not undergone grammatical or editorial proofreading. Sharing parts of it with attribution to the author and the source is for welfare purposes is in accordance with Buen conVivir. The Book is protected by a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
robo jankovich
author
The Mind accompanies me
I’ve been living with my mind for half a century and we’ve been through it all. For a quarter of a century I have been dedicated to understanding and accepting my mind and the minds of other people “on the path,” especially people interested in circles, communities, deep listening, eco-communitar(ism), and compassionate communication. Also interested in philosophy, especially Buddhist and Taoist philosophy and living a meaningful life. Communicating and living respectfully, in reverence and supporting life.
I have been able to discover the fact that the mind to whose dominion I was subject is not my enemy. I was subject to it because I trusted it, because I identified with it. I was subject to it because I fought it and lost. But one day I understood that Mind is not my enemy. Nor is it anyone who wants to control and dominate me. It is a good instrument that serves me and does it honestly and well.
Mind is a wonderful tool for organizing. But when I use it improperly, no wonder it produces problems and misunderstandings. I have been trying to sort it out and master it, to subdue it. I’ve tried to make it do what I want it to do – enslave it.
I have subjugated, colonized, preyed upon, and abused her in every way possible, and often with absolute ruthlessness and relentlessness. I didn’t want to see slavery, colonialism, militarism and its “modern” (neo)forms in my attitudes towards the mind as well. I didn’t want to see how the planet is at an end even under my leadership (guided by mind and irreverence). The entire planet was being destroyed, damaged, and its diversity and functions were collapsing. Diversity was being lost in everything I could imagine, from butterflies to languages to cultures.
Eventually, I began to realize where this was going and the responsibility I had. I was growing in the realization that if I didn’t take a radical stand against something, we would very likely become extinct. I started working in XR (extinction rebellion). But the awareness didn’t just grow in a way of inspiring and motivating me to change. As a realist, I also see the limited possibilities for change around us, and that is both depressing and frustrating. As the awareness grew, so often did the frustration, sadness and depression. I discovered environmental grief syndrome.
I daresay, however, that this syndrome is not an isolated one, for there has also been a usually unnamed one since time immemorial – the social grief syndrome. I have experienced it for decades. It was only after half a century of physically inhabiting this planet that I understood that what I was experiencing was cultural or social grief, disillusionment and anger. I even argued that if someone convinced me that things were not going to get better, but were going to (only) get steadily worse, my staying on it, would be pointless and I would try to leave it. Like it or after the bad. Like the main character in the 1977 film “Into the Line”.
I was angry at my parents, principals, government officials, bishops, presidents, and all the powerful for doing nothing about it and letting relationships and the world deteriorate, even though I didn’t know about the environmental side of it at the time. In my previous book, “Awakening the DRAGON”, I published a speech by Severn Suzuka, a 13 year old girl who spoke at the UNGA about her fear that her children might not be able to see live butterflies in nature and her interest in doing something to prevent this from happening. It will soon be 50 years since her speech and children no longer have to worry about that. The warming is already being felt and the concern is no longer just about butterflies, but about entire ecosystems, such as ocean ecosystems, and all life – the entire biosphere. Today I have come to understand:
if we fail to deal with social grief, we will never do enough !!!
to treat the planet better.
But why does the mind control and direct me?
It does it for me, and it doesn’t think badly. It does it “for my good” like a critical parent. My mind controls me, not I control it. I could hate it, or hate myself. I do believe, however, that the mind doesn’t mean it badly! The problem is that I can’t separate myself from it – stop identifying with it – identifying with it, or even taking it for what it is and understanding it.
I have come to understand that her purpose is not to think.
I have come to understand that I don’t understand her, and no one has taught me to really understand her. 🙁
The mind’s intent and probably purpose is not to “think” but to organize and sort – to catalog. What is Think? Think? To think? To think – to think through in one’s head, to invent – to invent is to actually think, creatively, appealingly, imaginatively, playfully, easily, entertainingly? But cataloguing can also be routine, autopilot, mechanical, mindless, uninteresting, bureaucratic – is it (still) thinking? So the mind was meant to evaluate (compatibility) to guard, align, sort, classify and maintain (consistency) content – content structures?
Is the waking mind consciousness? Is a good attitude “toward self” properly called self-consciousness?
When the mind figures everything out is in order
When things are “in order” then it is completely at rest. This applies to material things as well as to non-material things – relational, natural and social!
How does the mind arrange things? It figures them out! That is, it figures them out in detail and stores the map. When it has it, it is no longer worried and is calm. How did I come to this? Well, I was sitting. On my arse. 🙂 I was sitting in a monastery of the Terravada tradition of the old teachers and I was watching her.
No matter how much I prevented her from doing what she needed to do, she never stopped and always eventually shrugged off the moment of inattention – of inattention – and kept going.
She continued to do her “job.” And she did it as always, respectfully and well. The only problem was that in doing so, I always lost my patience (called consciousness) – awareness. And so I gave up (with her) after a few days of sitting trying and in pain in an “unnaturally” prone body, I gave up. I left her and sat. Sat and tried to watch her. Watch what she was doing and sit quietly. And she did, she labored, she worked, she processed, she sorted and stored.
When it was all done, all thought out, suddenly she was quiet. Tired, soothed, content, had she fallen asleep? Was she quiet? Forever? Forever it wasn’t. She found other objects that needed to be “dealt with.” An aching body, a gasping air, a full or empty stomach, but mostly it wasn’t so disconnected from the present moment, nor was it so insistent. There was usually no returning to the “made up” things that were #ordered anymore. It was a big shift, it changed a big part of her world view, and it wasn’t easy to maintain, especially after returning to the “dusty world”. After a couple of weeks, I retired for a few days in a cave under a swimming castle. The fasting body again managed to calm the troubled mind, allowing it to gradually work its way through the laundry to more economical trajectories that took into account both old and new needs and perspectives.
Mindtracks are the lanes, the pathways my mind moves through. I think my mind-archivist-librarian-needs to call attention to unfinished, unorganized, unfinished things. If I don’t attend to them, it does so more often and more piercingly until they are attended to and procured.
My mind-trains are renewed after relaxing the mind by not thinking and resting, by sleeping. One way of resting is meditation or contemplation, or losing the mind completely in an interesting activity (or its culmination) or story. Even after meditation, my mind returns to its usual, established paths, and it can look like this:
“…the void is amazing, and in time a bright presence, a light, a radiant light of presence, of the present moment, begins to emerge from it. A presence in which it is as if “I am not alone”, as if someone is present, maybe everyone” 😉
I noticed how gradually my mind began to put in ideas about that silence, about that presence. It began to judge them, to evaluate them, to cling to them, to want them, to desire to keep the present, or at least to preserve it, to memorize it, to explore it.
She was losing the pure gratitude and surprise of the intoxication of presence. Returning to the world of intention and purpose was not easy. Jack Kornfield’s book, “After the Ecstasy Laundry,” was a great help. I sought solitude and silence to return to. Even so, it was getting further and further away. It did me good to talk about it and share it. I learned from Nicolas that the experience was gradually fading and fading away. Today it is only a haze, but I still have its legacy and cultivate it in the concept of a supportive culture that I explain and facilitate its understanding.
I started facilitating 20 years ago when I was looking for a way to understand and support group processes in Zaježová community (Slovakia, Central Europe), where I lived. Learning to create – building community and supportive communication is a way to deepen my awareness and ability to understand. To understand myself, those close to me, the happenings in the group-groups in which I live, but also society and the global changes we are witnessing and (unfortunately) driving.
I believe we can do this, and use the means used to destroy “disobedient” states (wars), people (prisons), animals (insecticides), plants (herbicides), fungi and molds (fungicides), to create a whole new story of planet-wide coexistence and mutual support.
The book begins with wisdom
Shared misfortune is half the battle,
but shared joy is double!
The mind accompanies us all our lives
It can make life easier or harder for us, depending on the relationship we form with it. We can enjoy it and help it, or we can curse it and destroy it and be angry with it. In many teachings, the focus is on “showing up” and controlling the mind, but in this book we will see how to work with it. And maybe not just cooperate with it, but even like and love it. It’s an unusual perspective, so it won’t often stand on the usual assumptions, but I can assure you it will be an adventure. It will not infrequently take us to new, unexplored corners of the inner world that are often well outside our comfort zone. So I invite you to take an untrodden “journey – a path – not a path” of learning about ourselves and our minds that will take us past our worldviews, past opinions, thoughts, soulfulness, awareness, perhaps even to another holy – sacred perception of mindfulness and consciousness.
One of the very very essential – fundamental activities, will be dealing with what we believe. We believe what we choose to believe, but also what we take for granted, or at least natural – the “natural order of things”. We take for natural and self-evident things that we haven’t given much thought to and have accepted without consciously deciding whether we believe them. Without deciding whether or not we believe them to be right or wrong. (Sometimes we “sucked them in with our mother’s milk”, other times we adopted them in early childhood, based on the answers (or non-answers) to our call, triggered by our needs.
Why do we believe what we believe?
When we have made choices unconsciously, this opens up the question Why do we believe what we believe? Why don’t we believe something that other people believe? As I mentioned earlier, we have made a conscious choice to believe part of what we believe. But another part we have not chosen to believe, we have merely “believed” in this or that, having observed and taken over from the world around us. A world that we still considered magical, sacred – that is, holy. We have observed and taken on insight or “belief” mainly from persons we considered important and trustworthy. Over time, though, we discovered that many of these persons were not so credulous, but we could no longer accommodate all of our assumptions. We didn’t adapt them and stop believing the facts we had come to believe based on observations and lessons from now untrustworthy people!
Whether we want to or not, part of our world view is created without our “knowledge” and consent, even often against it. However, if we would like to expose it, we have much to look forward to! There is a lot of work ahead of us – mental work, of wondering, “Why is my view such-and-such, and not that?” We will become (somewhat) incredulous “religionists” who will be most interested in the answer, “because that’s just the way it is,” “because that’s the way it’s always been,” “because it’s natural,” “it’s a given,” “it’s customary,” “it’s the way it used to be,” and so on. In these answers we encounter the unrecognized and unconscious contents of our minds and perhaps even our souls that have arisen without our adult consciousness (self) and conscious decision. In my opinion, it is very important to recognize these =contents and consciously re-decide or reject them. You may not agree with me yet, but I think that (also) the fate of the whole beautiful planet Earth depends on your decision.
Thank you for your concern and support of me people and loved ones in your neighborhood and all people suffering from direct or economic war, thirst, hunger, or lack of medicine, love and support!
Thanks to DeepL translator and its creators for the free translation!
Free support is the way to Abundance and Peace!