The Entire Brain is Enlightened

There have been so many searching for so many thousands of years for enlightenment. The search goes on and on. There is nothing more unrequited than the hunger for truth when you know it is within your grasp, but you simply cannot reach out and grab it.

So what do I mean when I say the entire brain is enlightened? What I mean is that if we were aware of everything our brain is experiencing, we would instantly experience enlightenment. But we have chosen to only be aware of certain selected things about the brain’s experience of Life. To be more specific, we have become enamored with one aspect of the brain’s experience to the exclusion of all others. We are so plugged into the voice in our heads that sounds like you talking to you that we have focus on it to the exclusion of everything else in our field of awareness.

It is very much like falling in love with a beautiful woman. She is gorgeous, lovely, cute – we are smitten. We get married and spend years with her. But we really never get to know her as a person because the only thing we ever focused on was her physical qualities.

Those of us who have experienced the abiding love that deepens with the years in a relationship, know what we would be missing if we only focused on one facet of our mate.

This is what we have done with our brains. Verbal thought is the function of a couple of areas isolated in the left hemisphere of the brain. But we identify that function as “me” and as long as we do, we never really become aware of the depth of our true experience of life. If we did, we would instantly experience what the sages call enlightenment.

The entire right hemisphere and the deep structures of the brain are nonverbal. What the heck are they up to? As long as we identify heavily with verbal thought, we will never experience the depth of the nonverbal. And yet a whole new world waits.

The nonverbal invites us to look further, to experience deeper. But we have to do something for ourselves to find that new world. We have to put down the boom box with the game-show--host that is narrating our lives. Then we can stop thinking life and start living enlightenment.

Announcing the 4 Week Intensive

June 5th heralds the return of the 4 week intensive.

What is it? It is a series of 4 teleclasses where students will learn the practice of Witness Thought Transformation™ and move to an Awakened state. Along with the 4 teleclasses participants will receive a workbook, and audio workbook, daily reminders, as well as a recording of each class to listen to again and again.

Those who sign up by Saturday the 22nd will receive Extra Bonuses: A half hour one-on-one Laser Coaching Session to insure that their practice is on target, A specialized follow-up Q&A call to cement the learning and to clear up any remaining issues, and they will receive a copy of my new book, Mastering Thought.

Check out all of the details of the 4 Week Intensive at: www.masteringthought.com/masteringthought.htm

Is Awakening a Mystical Experience?

The simple answer is no. I know that comes as a great disappointment to many who are fervently pursuing mystical experience. The simple fact is that Awakening is about Awareness and there is nothing mystical about Awareness. That does not mean that the moment of Awakening might bring with it what might be called a mystical experience. It also, does not preclude one having a mystical experience and being no wiser for it.

What then is Awakening? It is breaking free from thought identification. Okay, what is thought identification? It is the mistaken belief that the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you – is you. This is a case of mistaken identity that has gone on for thousands of years. We have been held captive by this identification. It is as if a hypnotist lives in our heads that we cooperatively call “me.” This “me” identification makes it all very convenient for the voice to control us, to doom us to a life of suffering.

Awakening is the visceral ah ha that we experience when we break free of this identification with that little “me.” We then instantly realize that the world of little “me” was considerably smaller than the real world without the guidance of an internal commentator. This is so liberating that the various energies realized during this rebirth can be experienced in what only could be termed as mystical.

After this liberation from thought, life becomes supremely practical and down to earth. At this point there is no longer the question of the mystical. Now Awakening takes on a new dimension – that is that each moment presents us with a clear choice. We can either choose the drama that comes with thought identification or choose the abundance of Life itself as it presents itself through innocent perception. Now that’s living. And that’s mystical.

Survey Response #3

I my previous blog posts I have covered the first and second greatest questions that people had regarding Creating your own Reality, Affirmations, and the Law of Attraction.

Today in my final blog on the survey I want to take on the third most often heard question in the survey. The third most popular response was, “Why are certain aspects of life out of my control?” Obviously I have boiled down a number of responses to their essence. But these responders were concerned with aspects of life like health issues, characteristics we inherit in our biology, the death of a loved one, accidents and so forth.

Obviously there is a reality out there that we cannot control. Like death – there’s a reality! So we can either react to it or accept it. By studying our minds, its thought patterns, and our emotional reactions we move to a level of Mastery in our lives where it is possible to live with grace and acceptance so that we can enjoy our life and others can enjoy our life too.

If you would like to hear the rest of my answers about creating your own reality, affirmations, and the law of attraction, I will be holding a free teleclass where I will answer all the questions I can.

If you are interested go to this page to learn more and sign up: .

Survey Result - 2nd Top Question

There were so many responses to my recent survey that I wanted to address the number two question I got.

In my previous blog post, I talked about the number one question. The number two question was, “why do I still have bad thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” Of course I am distilling down a number of responses to their essence. The questions sounded a lot like when Paul said, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

My answer might surprise you. We are being hijacked! Human nature is a mechanism, and we can learn how that mechanism works. Once the hijacking has taken place, it’s too late to do much about it. So we need powerful tools of insight and understanding to battle this hijacking. The best tool we can have is Awareness.

Awareness trumps thought, feelings and behavior. So rather than battle the hijacking, we need to lay in wait for the hijacker. And, yes, there is an easy way to dramatically increase your awareness and move toward Mastery in your life.

If you would like to hear the rest of my answers about creating your own reality, affirmations, and the law of attraction, I will be holding a free teleclass where I will answer all the questions I can.

If you are interested go to this page to learn more and sign up.

Survey Result - Top Question

WOW you blew me away! Over the last week or so I have been conducting a survey. The question I asked was, “what is your greatest question about creating your own reality, affirmations and the law of attraction.” The number of responses I got was well above what even I had hoped for. This tells me that a lot of you are interested in this topic.

So what was the number one question? Many people articulated it in many different ways, but it all boiled do to one question; “why don’t they work?” or rather “what does it take to make them work?”

Here is my radical and controversial answer. They do work! They are working now. We just don’t like how they are working! When people discovered that the Buddha said, “With your thoughts you create your world,” everyone ran off and started to try to create the life they wanted. People totally forgot what he said next which was that we need to purify our minds.

So we need a way to very clearly see what our thoughts already are. That’s both the problem and the missing key. The issue is not creating new thoughts; the problem is to discover the thoughts that are already there that are manifesting our reality.

If you would like to hear the rest of my answers about creating your own reality, affirmations, and the law of attraction, I will be holding a free teleclass where I will answer all the questions I can.

If you are interested go to this page to learn more and sign up

Survey - I need your help

I need your help. I'm planning a teleclass on Personal Growth and Self Development and I need to know your biggest question about it.

If you could take 2 minutes and click on this link Survey and answer my question, "What is your biggest question about Creating your own Reality, Affirmations, and the Law of Attraction?" I would really appreciate it.

In a few weeks I will be hosting a free teleclass where I'll be answering as many questions as I can.

Here is the link again: Take Survey

By the way, I will be revealing the results of the survey in my newsletter. If you would like to sign up for it, here is the link:

sign me up

Life with Howard Cosell

Many of you reading this may be too young to remember an American icon of sports casting named Howard Cosell. "I'm telling it like it is," he would say about his style. I remember Howard Cosell as an irritating, grating, and raspy reminder of what one’s ego mind might sound like who would drone on and one in a nasally tone that made you want to turn down the TV. My apology to Howard Cosell fans the world over.

My point about Cosell is that whenever the man opened his mouth you knew it was Howard Cosell. There was no way to deny the tone, timbre, and quality of his voice. At sporting event after event, his unmistakable voice could be heard and heard and heard.

Now, for those of you that can remember Howard, imagine the following scenario. You and I have gone together to a football game. You are completely taken by the smell of the fall air, the pageantry of the crowd, the play on the field. You are taking it all in.

On the other hand, I am sitting next to you listening to the broadcast of the game through a set of earphones. And after every play, Howard Cosell is telling me what just happened, how it happened, and more importantly what it all means. In other words, I am listening to the commentary about the game.

So ask yourself this question, “Who is experiencing the game you or me?”
The answer is simple; you are. I am experiencing the commentary about the game. I am listening to Howard Cosell interpret the play by play is his pompous self important tone. Everything about the game that I am seeing is being distorted through the lens of the commentator coming through the ear pieces.

This is a metaphor for how we live life. We are so enamored with the internal commentator, so inured that we are thinking life instead of actually living it. Our experience of life, and therefore of one another, is filtered through the commentary. We talk to ourselves and then we talk some more. Then we have an internal dialog about self-talk!

Are you tired of having the irksome commentator dictate your experience? Join me and so many others in breaking free from the internal commentator. Life without Howard Cosell is a new life and then the real adventure begins.

The Monkey Brain Strikes Again

My upcoming book, Mastering Thought, has a subtitle, Loquacious Simianus. Many of us know what loquacious means. It means talkative. But Simianus may be a bit of a mystery. It is a Latin word that means monkey. This is what I call the Limbic System. It is the part of the brain that we share with other mammals like dogs and cats and primates. Since it is all about fight or flight, anger/fear, and survival, and since it is in charge of all emotions in the brain, I call it the monkey.

Now the missing piece that ties together the monkey and “talkative” is that the Limbic System is the driver of the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. Therefore we all have a loquacious simianus in our heads! Yuk!

But this particular monkey has some specialties; namely rationalization, regurgitation, and recapitulation. Rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a behavior that was originally arrived at through a different emotional process. In other words, it is a story we tell ourselves to make us feel okay about something we did that we probably shouldn’t have.

Regurgitation is the rehashing of something said or done that we simply cannot digest in its original form usually because to digest it in that form would make us sick!

Recapitulation is a brief summary of what we did. The beauty of recapitulation is that is allows us to leave out key facts from our summary thus making us look better.

You notice that the three “R”s of the monkey are about the past.

There is another specialty the monkey has about the future; anticipation. Anticipation is the building of a scenario of what will happen in the future. Anticipation is almost totally useless since the future can never be predicted, but it gives the monkey a sense of control over what we cannot control!

As long as we believe we are the voice in our heads, the monkey has its way with us, and we have lost our way. This is where Witness Thought Transformation™ comes in. It frees us from the monkey. To be sure, the primitive primate doesn’t necessarily die, it just becomes irrelevant and we go free of its influence. Oh loquacious simianus – take a hike!

Tiger Woods - Sex or The Finger

I have been wanting to weigh in on this Tiger Woods thing ever since we all read that he was being treated for sex addition. My experience as a therapist give me a very different view on this. I look at it through the lens of my theory on relationships - the Dance of the Lion and the Unicorn.

Infidelity is more often an act of anger than about sex. Tiger Woods is a Unicorn. As such, his sexual acting out has more to do with his viewpoint that he is being pressured and dominated and that someone is "telling him what to do." This is always about a parental relationship that has left an imprint of rage on the young child.

"You can't tell me what to do." What better way to act out than to violate the trust in a relationship. Oh, you asking what has this to do with his wife. Nothing, to the Limbic System, a very primitive emotional part of the brain, the wife is a surrogate for the parent that was demanding and dominating.

So infidelity more often is a way of giving life the finger - over and over again. Without this insight, I am not hopeful that a sexual 12 step program will cure this kind of passive aggressive behavior.

Julie & Julia

Just wanted to pass on what a delightful experience Sheila and I had watching this movie. What a wonderful 2 hours and what a nice evening. I would encourage anyone to go. Just a whole lot of fun.

And if you don't believe that Meryl Streep is Julia Childs, get your eyesight and hearing checked immediately.

letting go (of the non-Self)

Why watch thoughts? Because when we do something wonderful emerges to take its place. I ran across a quote from David Hawkins that says this better than anything I have ever heard. He says, “It is not necessary to know about the Self but simply to become it by letting go of the non-Self.”

When we practice Witness Thought Transformation we literally watch the non-Self melt away. We are not thought – we are the Self that remains when thought dissolves into awareness.

My Arguement with J. Krishnamurti

Oh my gosh, what am I thinking? Arguing with J. Krishnamurti?

Here is my beef with the old sage. Actually it is a point of contention I have with most of eastern, new age, new thought – er thinking. Here is what Krishnamurti says:

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Okay, so what is the problem with what he is saying? First off let me state categorically that I agree with everything that he says. It is the absolute truth. So where’s the issue? My issue comes in the first sentence: “When a man becomes aware of the movement of his thoughts.” This sort of statement has been made in various forms for thousands of years. So what’s the issue?

The issue is so obvious that we never question it. What exactly is the movement of thought? More precisely; what is thought itself? This is never explained. In fact, it is left to the ego-mind of the reader to fill in the blank. This turns out to be a very dangerous thing. The role of the ego is to trick us into thinking we “get it” when we don’t really get it. In the process, the ego becomes spiritualized and then we are pretty much lost forever.

The key to understanding thousands of years of eastern thought and spiritual teaching is to confront the question what is thought? And, in Krishnamurti’s case, how do we become aware of its movement? For without this little gem of truth, the rest of what he is saying is not only irrelevant to our growth but dangerous fodder for the ego-mind.

This is where my work comes in. A number of years ago I made a startling discovery that produced and almost immediate awakening in my clients visiting me in my therapy office. Today I call that teaching Witness Thought Transformation™ and it is an amazingly simple practice that makes the movement of thought and the mind obvious. And I don’t just mean in the setting of meditation or some spiritual practice. I mean walking around in everyday life.

Our new age culture is full of people who think they understand what Krishnamurti is saying. This is intellectual understanding. But the fruit of actualizing this revelation comes in the form of better relationships, experiencing joy even when there are problems, and a personal quality of life that others enjoy about us. If we are instead still in the drama and the struggle then clearly there is no awareness of the movement of thought.

Conference Call

Saturday's Conference Call set a record for us. Not only did we have a lively group on the call, but we had an overwhelming number of people who asked for the download. So here is a link to download the call!

Mastering Thought

The Buddah said, “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world.”

Too many in our day have totally misunderstood what the Buddah is saying. What he is pointing to are the thoughts that are already there. But the ego mind wants to take this principle and rather than do the work of cleaning up the mind, it wants a new Cadillac or relationship, or more money so we need to learn the “Secret.”

This is not the truth at all. The Buddah says, “If a man's mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.” “We are what we think. A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering. We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” So the emphasis is to purify the mind, not layer goals onto an already polluted mind.

A Stroke of Insight

Every now and then something really important appears on the internet. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find it. But when I do, I want to share it. You must watch this video and then think how it applies to Witness Thought Transformation. Click the title and have your life changed!

All my best,

Mark

Buddhists Blunder

There is a wide spread belief that Buddhists can do no wrong. This latest bunch of violence aimed at Tibetan liberation is wrong headed and potentially exposes Lama Buddhism as a fraud. But not so fast! The Dalai Lama has stepped up to the plate and shown wisdom in denouncing any form of violence. In fact he has threatened to resign if the nonsense doesn’t stop.

So what is going on here? Should we all want social justice? Don’t we have the right to fight for world peace? If you want to live from your ego, of course you have all kinds of rights. This reminds me of that well worn phrase; “Be the Change.”

Being the change means changing from the inside out. It does not mean rushing to the Chinese border and having a bloody confrontation with their army.

Shame on those Buddhists. They should know better!

The Super Bowl of Life: Go Deep, Go Long

Yes, this is inspired by the Giant’s Super Bowl win. They started the season with losses and came into the playoffs as tremendous underdogs. But they won. We think of going deep and going long as tactics used to win football games. Having a running game is important, but these days it usually serves to set up the passing game. So every team must be able to go deep and go long to be a serious threat.

Life is very much like that. In order to win, we must go deep and stay at a depth for a long time. Today, many of us are confusing money, success, and achievement with depth. When I tell people that they need to go deep and go long, I am often told that the message is “off-putting.” Few want to answer the call to depth. Many of us have confused depth with being very serious about our superficiality.

So I wanted to put this going deep into perspective. Perhaps some sobering facts might serve to motivate.

Every year over two thousand children, most under the age of five, die as a result of child abuse. 18% of us are alcoholics or alcohol abusers while 8% are drug users. 816,000 of us attempt suicide every year and about 33,000 of us succeed. If ever there was a case for going deep, those statistics tell it all. But I could go on. I could go on to the divorce rate, teen pregnancy, and a depressing number of other topics.

The bottom line is that the world we live in is not in good shape. It is not in good shape because people are acting out their pain. We lie, murder, we are greedy, judgmental, intolerant, materialistic. By the way, the murder rate is about 5.7 for every 100,000 people.

Now you are saying to yourself, that’s not me. I’m not a murderer. I don’t hit my kids. It is what happens inside of us that makes all the difference. The world on the outside will only change if we each individually take responsibility for what is on the inside. But we don’t want to look inside. Why? Because there is pain in there! Inside of many seemingly very nice people are thoughts of violence, hostility, anger, rage, hatred, and enormous judgment, not to mention fear and an overwhelming sense of rejection.

Witness Thought Transformation™ frees us from the tyranny of thought and releases us into the flow of life. From this vantage point we can witness the pain instead of becoming overwhelmed by it. Witnessing our thoughts takes us deep and long in a way that is not burdensome, but is uplifting and fulfilling.

I want to tell you the benefit of going deep and going long. It is a life of peace, free of struggle, without the need to become something or achieve something to feel like a complete being. Mastering Thought releases us from drama, ego patterns, and the need to prove something. With clean motivation, we can now step into the world and make a real difference.
I am a therapist. I know your pain. I have seen every kind of misery. I know the only way out is going deep and going long.

Do you find this message “off-putting?” Good! The more uncomfortable the better. No one in the history of human kind has ever gone deep and gone long until they were very uncomfortable with going nowhere.

The Witness Consciousness Two-Step

I am finding that Witness Consciousness has two distinct steps to it. The first of course is the initial thought watching. This leads to a huge breakthrough in awareness and a “knowing” that is easy to experience. But then I have observed that without practice people go back into their ego and the drama of the world. The knowing that comes with the initial breakthrough never leaves however.

This requires step number two. In a way, this is more work than the first step. Practice! Yes, we need to keep watching our thoughts in order to stop the slide back into the ego mind and the patters of unconsciousness that we all have. This requires a sustained effort at “watching” over a period of a year or two until it becomes second nature. That’s why building a community of watchers is so important in order to support the practice.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this two-step process?

Video Book Review

Here is my video book review of "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle.

Click here to play video...