B. Alan Wallace 'Cultivating mental and emotional balance ' at Mind & Its Potential 2012

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I've been asked to speak about the cultivation
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of mental and emotional balance.
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Which I imagine many of us
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perhaps all of us here are interested in already
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But I'm quite sure everyone is interested in
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having a clear mind, having mental well being
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emotional well being, a sense of health.
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And the implication in the title here is that balance
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is a key to both mental and emotional balance
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so how do we go about cultivating that?
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I would suggest the key is attention.
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I think we all know from our own experience
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that our own minds
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can be our worst enemies
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they can drive us mad
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while sitting quietly in a room with no stimuli from
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the environment at all, we can be abjectly miserable
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just by the rumination, the thoughts going through our minds
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getting caught up, snared, in the grip of
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which i call rumination.
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In other words we know we can
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miserable all by ourselves with no help from outside
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it's an inside job
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and many, but perhaps not all, people know
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that it's also possible
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to be sitting quietly in your chambers
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quietly in a cave, quietly in a serene place in nature
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and with little or no stimulation from the environment
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to have a sense of being truely well, happy
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and you look around, and think, what's making me happy
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and you can't find anything outside
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that sense of well being is coming from
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inside
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so we should be sherlock holmes
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here
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tracing this to the source. now in this marvelous
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presentation I have the luck of being to listen to off stage
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causation the agent was uniformly attributed to the brain
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and there's no question the brain is implicated
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in all of our subjective experiences
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but the notion the only true explanation is a neurological one
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and i never heard the speaker say that
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i think, is limited.
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Sometimes i think we have a brighter light shed
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on what's going on in subjective experience
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by looking into subjective experience itself.
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looking for a psychological explanation
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so i suggested that attention is the key
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a person who can control his attention
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his or her attention
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can control the type of reality that person has a sense of
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experiencing and living. for after all,
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as William James, the great pioneer of modern psychology stated
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for the moment what we attend to is reality
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we take seriously, we count as real, only that which we attend to.
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so when our minds are caught up
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in attention hyper activity, whether or not it's clinical
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diagnosed, i think we all know what it's like,
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when the mind is like a runaway train
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like a elephant in rut
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to use on of the great indian
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classic metaphores
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it can give us
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an enormous amount of grieve, especially
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when this rumination
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this obsessive compulsive flow of thinking
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is negative.
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dwelling on passed misfortunes, the misbehaviour of other people
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negativeness of once or another and they
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catch us in their claws
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we really become victims of our own minds.
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so negative rumination. If we're looking for
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mental balance, emotional balance, in so far
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that our minds are still prone to do
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such negative rumination, such attention hyper activity
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where the mind really is out of control
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and we're kinda just being dragged along in its wake
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then, as long as we are prone to that,
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or to the extend that we are prone to that,
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mental and emotional balance will be an unreachable ideal.
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I call this OCDD
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this tendency.
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Not to be confused with the OCD obsessive compulsive disorder which is clinically diagnosed,
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the OCDD will not show up in the current version, the 5th version of
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the encyclopedia of mental diseases.
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Probably because all of the editors of DSM have it,
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as do most of us, if not all of us here in the audience
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i call it obsessive compulsive delussional disorder
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but see how familiar it sounds.
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obsessive and in the sense that you would like to be just quiet
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nothing to think about, nothing you need to think about
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you'd like to be quietly present
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simply attending to... your body, your mind another person
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you can't because the mind is like a chatterbox
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it always has something to say
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obsessively thoughts are flowing out, one after another
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and as much you would love to turn it off,
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at least have a respite once in a while
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a bit of quiet in the chamber of your mind
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it does not give you that option
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it always has an answer
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you want to be quiet. Good let's talk about it.
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It's obsessive.
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If you think you have control
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try to not think for one minute while your still awake
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and that's obsessive.
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well and if that's not enough
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it's also compulsive, that is the thoughts arise
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but don't just simply arise
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like images on a television screen
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they arise and we generally are compulsively drawn into them
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it's a syphon, as if it sucks our attention in
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and our focus is on the reference of the thought
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we are there and then thinking about this and that
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there was a really awfull image in that movie "little miss sunshine"
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remember where they tied the dog to the back of the station wagon
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and then forgot?
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yeah, it was a comedy so no animals were harmed in that sequence
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but nevertheless, we're the dog
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and the rumination is the stationwagon
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it draws us in, it drags us along.
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does that resonate with your experience?
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but it's worse than that.
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obsessive would be bad enough.
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compulsive is even worse
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but it gets worse
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it's delusional
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and that is when we get caught in the vortex of this kind of flow
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of rumination
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the general tendency
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and see for yourself, i'm not trying to tell you what your experience is like,
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i'm making a generalisation
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see whether the shoe fits.
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we tend to take seriously whatever we're thinking
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eventhough we're not thinking it
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it is thinking us
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the dog is not driving the car.
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but is it not true that when we're thinking about something
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fixating, ruminating, obsessing
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about something
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that there's a general tendency to think
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i think therefor it's true
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psychologist call that refractory period.
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where the mind gets caught in the grip of an emotion
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a memory, a desire, and we can't see outside of that filter system
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if i'm ruminating negatively about some person
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resentment is arising, maybe contempt or disgust is arising
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towards that person
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in so far as i am in the flow of that rumination
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that obsessive compulsive delusional disorder
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i cannot imagine that person has any good qualities
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or even any neutral qualities

Title:: B. Alan Wallace 'Cultivating mental and emotional balance ' at Mind & Its Potential 2012
Description:: How do our desires and impulses affect our mental wellbeing?
How does inattention affect our minds?
What impact do negative thoughts have?
How can we remedy emotional imbalances?
How can we cultivate mental and emotional balance in our lives?

B. Alan Wallace, leading scholar, author and meditation teacher, Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, USA

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Video Language:: English
Duration:: 30:34

Martine Theeuwen added a translation

English subtitles

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Martine Theeuwen

B. Alan Wallace 'Cultivating mental and emotional balance ' at Mind & Its Potential 2012

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