Oakville Zen Meditation
Self-induced Virtual Reality (VR)
If you are looking to buy a VR headset for yourself or as a gift think twice.
They are expensive and limited to video games.
You don’t have to go on line or at the shop to find a fantastic VR set. Just learn to pay attention, to observe, to be aware of what your mind is currently doing and you are submerged in your self-induced dream world.
Main functions of our mind:
After more than 3.4 billions years of life evolution, the human brain/mind and its 100 billions neurons is probably one of the most fascinating and complex instruments ever created.
One can divide our mind activities into to main two categories.
Physical/ Material:
Control and function of our 40 trillions cells of our body.
Mental:
Intellectual: analytic logical thinking, concept, opinion, judgment, deduction, synthesis, decision
and memories (short & long term)
Emotional: positive and negative feelings.
Several factors control our mind:
Genetic, age /aging, alimentation, physical activity, health status, education, experience, potential treatments.
As far its emotional activities, our ego (“I”) is the #1 factor.
It is important to realize that:
Thoughts and feelings do exist but are not real. There are illusions and you should not trust all of them.
Thoughts and feelings are almost always ego-driven unless rational, cognitive and decisional thinking is
require such as writing a report, checking your bank account, planning, etc..
Apart few actual analytic thinking, our mind is a fantastic VR machine putting us all day long in a total virtual ego-driven world.
Out of our 75,000 virtual thoughts or so during 24h, how many are useful, practical and decisional?
Our mind, called monkey mind in Zen literature, is our inner theater open 24/7 . It is full of audiovisual stuff far more sophisticated than any audiovisual gimmicks.
We are not watching our mind stuff like we are watching a computer, VR set or theater screen since we are totally immersed in our inner virtual world as main character with great script and wonderful special effects.
The human mind is the only one among all living beings spending more time in the past and future than in the present moment. He does that as his main strategy to control us.
Here is a little very useful exercise that you can do several times during the day:
Ask to your mind the following 5 questions:
My dear mind:
1)“In which time-space are you right now and what am I doing there”? 2)“What are you thinking about,“?
3) “How do you feel”? 4) “Is your current activity useful to me”? 5)” Should I trust you?”
You will realize then that our ego-driven mind is trapping us in its virtual world in order to control us.
The problem is that we believe that this mind-created VR world is real and, inside this world we do exist.
When our mind is trapping us in the past- usually using good or bad memories- we believe that we are there.
But, this “past you” is pure illusion since you cannot exist at the same time in the past and the current present moment. This “past-you” is just an avatar, a false you but you do believe it is you.
On the opposite side, when our mind is trapping us in the future, which is most of the time, we also believe that we are there. As for the “past-you”, this “future-you” is pure illusion since you exist only in the present moment and cannot exist in two different space-time.
It is important also to ask your mind about his current thoughts and feelings especially regarding people.
Thoughts, opinions, concepts and judgments are just virtual outputs of our thinking machine. They exist but are not real. The fact that you produce them does not mean that they are true and right.
Being aware of what our monkey mind is doing is the only way to control his activities.
By doing so, our main source of suffering that is our ego can be managed to achieve and enhance inner serenity.
