A Beautiful Day To You!
Last night I had my first eight-hour sleep since l left for England. Lovely indeed! It’s amazing how powerful a healer sleep is!and its free!
I just put the finishing touches on the plan for my new Vitality Building workshop, which will I’ll be teaching here at the Institute, Saturday, May 28.
I’ve created a special day that will emulate my normal day so I can show people how it is that I’m able to get a lot of work done and keep myself vital enough to stay in the gym, travel, and be productive in general without losing my well-being.
I will be teaching a variety of highly practical vitality building methods that are applicable to anyone, as well as being valuable methods for CHEK Practitioners of all types, exercise, and health care professionals. We will have excellent organic food available as part of our day. I will show how I connect to my biological-soul to make optimal food choices and how I give thanks to my food for nourishing me.
The Vitality Building workshop will soon be announced on the C.H.E.K Institute site in the next day or so, so keep a watch out for that one if you are ready for some simple, effective vitality building and active meditation strategies.
I am also facilitating my zen In The Garden workshop the day before on Friday, May 27, so those that want to can enjoy a double-header!
I’ve had a lot of excellent feedback on the zen in the garden workshop so I’m excited to share that experience with you again. I must limit that workshop to only 10 people because it is a very personal, intimate experience and I want to be able to dial in fully with each participant so that they gain the most from the day’s experience.
CALMING THE MIND
Calming the mind is an essential ability we all have and need if we desire to create our dreams effectively. Though most people have a very hard time calming their mind, having a calm mind is our natural state.
When humans lived in the wild, they had to hunt and gather to feed themselves, neither of which you could do in a state of monkey~mind. Most of you will have had the experience of trying to concentrate so you could finish a project of some sort while having others around you who are unsettled in their mind. It is likely that you will have come to realize that you must be away from certain people if getting a task done is the goal for the same reason most people wouldn’t sit in an active laundry room to try and meditate.
In our natural, developmental environment (Nature), if we wanted to hunt, we had to become very calm, very present. Animals are extremely sensitive to their environment, which includes exquisite sensitivity to vibration in their environment.
For example, a snake, which lives in and on the ground, is exquisitely sensitive to the vibrations created when any other animal moves across the ground just the way you would be sensitive to your bed being shaken if you were laying there in a doze and someone walked across your bed. If you want to hunt a snake then, you must not shake its bed enough to alert it that some big animal is moving its way. Surely, a snake or any other animal can sense how big you are, and smell you well before you can see it. The only way around this reality is to become both one with the animal you are hunting, and move and act within those confines, or go hungry!
Women did most of the gathering. Shaman and medicine men were also intimate with the gathering process. Eons ago our natural state was less influenced by religious inner-conflicts and the like; humans’ worshiped the plant and nature spirits. There weren’t loads of books telling people what plants were safe to eat. Humans were largely nomadic – following the animals so they could eat through the seasons. This means that they often lost contact with plants they knew were safe to eat in one territory and often were unsure what was safe to eat in new territories.
Just as the hunter must meet the snake at his own level of being, the gatherer must meet the plant spirits at their own level of being. In their natural environment, the gatherers only had to ask the plant spirits if their offerings were safe to eat. This is how foods were identified by those with calm, open minds.
There was also the smelling and tasting of small amounts of the plants and waiting to see if one got sick or died. Ironically, that’s the very method people use with pharmacological medicines today, except they don’t start small, and lots of people die from not having the ability to connect with their inner-wisdom. The key point here is that we all have the ability to calm our minds and use them effectively. Human true nature is built in with the ability to center and quiet the mind.
How The Mind Moves
In a little book titled Spiritual Science Electricity and Mikhael Faraday by Ernst Lehr, the author quotes from Rudolf Steiner’s book The Philosophy Of Freedom to explain how electrical activity, or thought action is created. Steiner is quoted:
“The strengths of electric or magnetic fields and such-like are arrived at, in the very nature of things, by no other process of knowledge than the one that occurs between percept and concept.”
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Let me explain this so you can understand how this statement is an essential aid to understanding and regaining control of your mind so you can calm it.
What Steiner is saying here is that wherever there is a gap between our “perception” of a concept and the actual reality of the concept itself, a polarity differential is created. This charge differential is the impetus for the “electricity of thought”.
For example, many people watch a video or two that I’ve produced. They often perceive that because they’ve watched a video by me that they know me (the person) by the concepts I teach. Inevitably, when they meet me or attend a live presentation, they find that Paul Chek is much different than they perceived.
They may have been watching Scientific Back Training (the concept) and show up to a lecture on holistic health where I describe the dangers of organized religion. Now, the gap between their perception of Paul and their new experience of the reality of Paul (the person) is widened.
Widening the gap is the equivalent of increasing the strength of the polarity in an electric motor, which makes it run faster.
If they were quite (authentically) knowledgeable with regards to the concepts I’d presented on the video, and then they attended that same lecture, there would be a much smaller gap between perception and concept. Therefore, there would be much less of a perception that they don’t know. The result would be more akin to a calm sense of assurance within their mind; they could essentially meditate through the lecture and in so doing, would be sensitive, like the snake, to subtle vibrations.
Meanwhile, those coming to the lecture for the first time, particularly those that esteemed themselves as “experts” may find that my presentation obliterates their prior concepts of how the spine works, which could only result if their perception experiences a gap between their knowledge or belief and my knowledge and conceptual offering.
Their minds (unlike the person without the percept~concept gap), would be wildly alive, possibly very uneasy or nervous! There would be a tremendous amount of “self-reflection” and inner dialogue. They would be shaking the bed, which I, as the teacher, can easily feel.
To make this even easier to understand, let’s say you were sitting in front of me in a lecture presentation and I had you hooked to an electroencephalograph, which measures electrical activity in your brain. I might begin by saying, “Today, I’d like to talk about shoes” and I put a shoe box on the table in front of me. Since most people have an intimate knowledge of, and lots of experience using shoes, there isn’t likely to be much of a gap between their perception of shoes and the concept “shoes”.
Therefore, even though they didn’t know what kind of shoes were in the box, there wouldn’t likely be much electrical activity in their brain at all until I made a statement about shoes that challenged their perceptual – concept relationship.
For example, If I stated, “sexual intimacy is enhanced if you wear your shoes to bed and in this box I’ve got a pair of shoes designed to enhance sexual arousal,” THEN THERE WOULD BE A HUGE SURGE OF ELECTRICAL (MENTAL) ACTIVITY!
Ways To Calm The Mind
I give seven methods of calming the mind designed to help people with busy minds in my Dr. Quiet audio recording for those of you that would like to try some effective, easy to use methods.
Returning to what we’ve been discussing so far, one can use these following tips by understanding to calm our minds in the following ways:
1. Follow your thoughts and rectify the charge: If you mind isn’t relaxing when relaxing your mind is your intention, then become aware as to the nature and content of your thoughts at that time.
You may find, for example, that your rent is due next week and that at the moment, you fall short of having the cash to pay the rent. Your “concept” of “rent” is that it is absolutely essential to pay your rent on the day it is due. Your perception is that you may not be able to do that. There exists the charge that drives the thinking process.
Now, simply review all the times in your life that you’ve had a week left to make rent and you did. Most of you will find that you have made your rent payment far more often than you haven’t. With that assurance in your own abilities, you can simply relax and save the unnecessary mental-emotional expense of worry and trust in the process. By doing this, your perception of your ability to pay the rent comes closer to the conceptual meaning and reality of “rent”. Therefore, by relaxing into your experience, which is real, you can choose to relax.
2. Explore the concept: If your mind keeps bringing up thoughts regarding your fear of this or fear of that, this implies a significant percept-concept gap, or charge potential.
For example, if your doctor or therapist were to tell you that you can actually lower your cholesterol by eating organic butter, bacon and cooking with coconut oil, and that goes against everything you learned in your university nutrition course, the perception – concept gap will be significant.
Most people will run around with a racing mind, becoming anxious, nervous or even distraught that such advice was given by people that should know better.
If you choose to look into the resources the doctor or therapist gave you or do some research on holistic web sites, you are very likely to find quality education resources suggesting that indeed, their advice is based on sound logic and even science. By enhancing and clarifying your concept of fats and cholesterol, they become more and more like the concept of a shoe instead of sex shoes. This induces relaxation by narrowing the perceptual-concept gap.
3. Let it go entirely!: Most of what runs through people’s heads all day long is useless anecdotes picked up from popular media streams and frivolous interactions with others.
A technique I frequently use is to simply ask myself, “Is this thought adding value to my life?” If the answer is “No,” then I choose to let it go.
If the answer is “Yes,” then I make the choice as to whether or not it is more essential to the next 20 minute of my life than giving my mind permission to rest. If the answer is “Yes, it is more important than resting my mind,” I allow that thought or concept to become the focus of my meditation.
By allowing your mind to connect to just one concept, which you’ve now deemed to be “important”, you can gain a level of perceptual clarity that is far greater than jumping from story to story or concept to concept.
This is one way I get a lot of work done inside myself while flying on airplanes or traveling in cars and the like.
My drawing above is of my Anima, the feminine aspect of my soul. Since I’m quite fire-like by nature (masculine), she represents my water-nature or my potential to manage fire. The flame in her forehead represents Spirit, the power to transform. The fire on the right ear ring represents the concept of the child or wholeness – seeing things in their natural state of integration with the whole. The fire on the left ear ring represents logic – being able to apply any concept specifically to get a logical outcome.
My beautiful Anima shows me that by balancing these fires, there is an equilibrium of energy between warming my water and using the steam to move me in the direction I need to go in order to effectively create my dreams.
I hope this little explanation of how the mind produces activity will help give you to understand how you can close the gap between perception and concept. Understanding the distinction between these will allow and support you to choose to relax because you know how to close the gap, or eliminate the need for the gap all together.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
