One extremely vital and also immensely practical message central to the ancient myths is the teaching that our mind is not at all the entirety of who we are.
Our conscious mind, our egoic mind, is described in the Katha Upanishad (one of the ancient Sanskrit texts of India) as "the reins" by which the horses of the senses and emotions which pull the chariot of the body may be controlled -- or may be allowed to run away with us, depending upon the charioteer:
Obviously, if we find an ancient text telling us that the mind is like the reins in the above metaphor, then the question naturally arises "who or what is behind the mind, holding the reins, so to speak?"
In the above illustration, taken from the famous scene in the Mahabharata prior to the start of the cataclysmic battle of Kurukshetra, the answer to that question is the Lord Krishna himself, to whom the hero Arjuna is bowing with hands in the anjali mudra (a recognition and acknowledgement of divinity).
In the Katha Upanishad, the one holding the reins is the Atman, a term which refers to the aspect of each and every man or woman which can be broadly understood as related to the higher self, the divine self, the authentic and essential self, but also to the embodiment of the undifferentiated spirit of the entire creation, the Brahman, with which we are all connected and in fact more than connected but actually a part of.
However, our egoic mind -- which psychologists such as Dr. Peter Levine and healing teachers such as Dr. Gabor Mate tell us develops as a coping mechanism to insulate us from the trauma of this world -- tends to try to take over, and to suppress the essential self, causing us to believe that this conscious mind we have created is the totality of who we are.
See for example the quotation cited in this previous post, which contains a link to an entire talk by Dr. Mate well worth listening to, in which Dr. Mate states:
The other problem [. . .] is that your mind, your egoic mind, always wants to invalidate your essence. Because the egoic mind develops as a replacement for the essence. When essence shows up, the mind is threatened -- the ego is threatened. So it wants to fight back. When the psychedelic substance really reveals the mind -- what's underneath the mind -- and puts the ego onto the sidelines: as soon as the effect is gone, the mind wants to come in and reclaim its territory. And it does that by making nonsense of the experience you just had.
We can get glimpses of the truth that the conscious, egoic mind is not the totality of who we are, such as when we get an intuition which later reveals to have had more knowledge or truth than our conscious mind perceived at the time, or when we receive a message from a dream, or wake up in the morning after our conscious mind was asleep and not in control with an answer to a knotty problem that our conscious mind was trying to solve (without success) the night before.
And we sometimes get glimpses of someone who is connected to a deeper and more complete totality of who they really are when we see an athlete (for example) playing their sport in a state of such complete awareness and mastery that we say that he or she is "unconscious" or "beyond themself." We may even have experienced such a state in our own lives in one area or another.
I have embedded the video above, in which professional pianist, author and teacher Arthur Migliazza (excellent website here, with piano instruction!) is explaining to us how to go from "zero to independent" when playing (in this case, while playing a left-hand bass pattern) because it shows very clearly that the conscious mind is not at all the sum total of who we are. In the video, Mr. Migliazza takes a left-hand bass pattern which he does not already know beforehand, and demonstrates the process of getting to the point where his hand can play that pattern without his conscious mind's direction -- to the point that the hand becomes, as he says, "independent."
If you go through this process for yourself, for example with a boogie-woogie bass pattern for the left hand, you will experience at first the doubts in your conscious mind that the left hand will ever get the pattern that you are trying to make happen (particularly if it is a challenging left-hand pattern). Then, after some period of time and practice -- just as is shown in this video by the talented Mr. Migliazza -- you will experience something quite extraordinary: the hand will start to be able to do the pattern by itself, as if with a "mind of its own."
Indeed, you will find after some time that the hand will do the playing much better and more accurately (without mistakes) without the conscious guidance of the thinking mind, and that if you start thinking about what it is doing, your hand will make mistakes that it does not make when allowed to play on its own.
This example may seem simple, and labeled as "simply" muscle memory, but it illustrates that there is more going on in our total being than is under control of the conscious, egoic mind -- despite the protestations of the conscious, egoic mind, which wants us to think that it is the one driving the chariot and in charge of everything. The mind wants us to think that it is the totality of who we are, and that is simply not the case at all.
In fact, in order to achieve the highest potential of who we are, we have to transcend the egoic, conscious mind, which holds us back in many ways (particularly by denying and suppressing our essential self, as explained in the quotation from Dr. Mate cited above).
Note that in the video above, Mr. Migliazza also makes a very interesting observation that when he actually sleeps in between practicing a new bass pattern, his progress is much faster than if he simply tries to practice straight through. Note that this observation is coming from a professional pianist and master musician, one who has played at a very high level for three decades, and who has obviously had a tremendous amount of experience learning and practicing new songs and skills -- far beyond what most of us have experienced.
I would suggest that practices such as playing music in this way, as well as ancient disciplines such as meditation, martial arts, Yoga, and others, and also playing sports, and many other areas of human endeavor, can all be pathways towards relaxing the iron grip of the egoic mind which wants us to think that it is the sum totality of who we are -- and can be a pathway towards reconnecting with the higher self, the essential self, which is very often buried and suppressed by the mind and by the exigencies of this world.
And that is a path towards putting the "reins of the chariot" back in the hands of our essential and authentic self -- which is who we actually want to be steering our life, if we think about it!
If you go through this process for yourself, for example with a boogie-woogie bass pattern for the left hand, you will experience at first the doubts in your conscious mind that the left hand will ever get the pattern that you are trying to make happen (particularly if it is a challenging left-hand pattern). Then, after some period of time and practice -- just as is shown in this video by the talented Mr. Migliazza -- you will experience something quite extraordinary: the hand will start to be able to do the pattern by itself, as if with a "mind of its own."
Indeed, you will find after some time that the hand will do the playing much better and more accurately (without mistakes) without the conscious guidance of the thinking mind, and that if you start thinking about what it is doing, your hand will make mistakes that it does not make when allowed to play on its own.
This example may seem simple, and labeled as "simply" muscle memory, but it illustrates that there is more going on in our total being than is under control of the conscious, egoic mind -- despite the protestations of the conscious, egoic mind, which wants us to think that it is the one driving the chariot and in charge of everything. The mind wants us to think that it is the totality of who we are, and that is simply not the case at all.
In fact, in order to achieve the highest potential of who we are, we have to transcend the egoic, conscious mind, which holds us back in many ways (particularly by denying and suppressing our essential self, as explained in the quotation from Dr. Mate cited above).
Note that in the video above, Mr. Migliazza also makes a very interesting observation that when he actually sleeps in between practicing a new bass pattern, his progress is much faster than if he simply tries to practice straight through. Note that this observation is coming from a professional pianist and master musician, one who has played at a very high level for three decades, and who has obviously had a tremendous amount of experience learning and practicing new songs and skills -- far beyond what most of us have experienced.
I would suggest that practices such as playing music in this way, as well as ancient disciplines such as meditation, martial arts, Yoga, and others, and also playing sports, and many other areas of human endeavor, can all be pathways towards relaxing the iron grip of the egoic mind which wants us to think that it is the sum totality of who we are -- and can be a pathway towards reconnecting with the higher self, the essential self, which is very often buried and suppressed by the mind and by the exigencies of this world.
And that is a path towards putting the "reins of the chariot" back in the hands of our essential and authentic self -- which is who we actually want to be steering our life, if we think about it!
