We have been trained to focus our minds to get what we want. We have been taught that willpower defines who we become.
This is only half the story.
In order to find true self-fulfillment, we also need to let go of our carefully-laid plans and open our minds to new creative possibilities.
We can train our minds to be both focused (the go-getter mind) and relaxed (the slacker mind) at the same time. The practice of centering the mind – allowing the mind to be intensely concentrated, yet simultaneously open to discovery – grants immediate access to the same mental and spiritual synthesis that produced many of the most notable achievements of humankind – from the creativity of Michelangelo to the spiritual depth of Jesus and the Buddha.
Centering the mind, as described in this book, is an orientation towards life that is easily embraced, yet the benefits are limitless – not only the fulfillment of your creative potential, but the discovery of who you truly are.
Targeted Age Group:: 18-99
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
As a hypnotherapist, I have witnessed firsthand the numerous benefits which my clients receive when they learn how to access the deeper parts of their own minds. I wrote this book as a way to help others to expand their conscious awareness through the same technique of mental centering which has proven so effective in my practice.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
The Go-Getter symbolizes the personality of the left brain: focused and coiled for action, blocking out all aspects of the environment that do not pertain to his goal. The Slacker is the personification of the right brain: openly receptive to both his environment and to deeper aspects of his own consciousness. Both of these “characters” within our own minds are needed for creative action — the Slacker gives us access to creative possibilities, and the Go-Getter grants us the manifesting power of decisive action.
Book Sample
During your first twenty years of life, as you alternately skipped and trudged your way along the path to adulthood, you were required, like the rest of us, to learn a vast repertoire of polite and proper behavior, and you had to master a set of increasingly complex practical skills as well (how to tie your shoes, how to brush your teeth, how to hold a job, etc). If you look back at all you have learned, and compare what you know now to what you knew at the age of four, you would seem to be justified in believing that, since you can do so many more things of a practical, professional, and socially mature nature than that four-year-old child of years gone by, you are a mental giant in comparison, and are therefore – as a four-year-old child might say – “big.”
But perhaps you have left behind something essential in your quest for knowledge and mastery. Perhaps you have lost something pure and eternally rejuvenating which you used to be in touch with, and perhaps this wondrous, rejuvenating dimension of your long-gone childhood was something “bigger,” in actual reality, than your current wealth of mastered skills and knowledge.
If such is the case, then to “grow up” is actually to “cover up” – to bury the expansive simplicity of one’s true nature under a mudslide of adult preoccupations. The recovery of your true self involves clearing away the smothering impact of these adult preoccupations and allowing for the emergence of an inner mental “spaciousness” in which you can breathe freely once again. It is a recollection of what you have forgotten, yet never truly lost. It is a movement towards simplicity rather than complexity.
Modern life, we must admit, has become needlessly complex. It asks you to be complex, too – totally involved, like everyone else, in a quest to master its many rules and structures, which appear to be the only means of gaining success. But success in a complex system which disregards your true self is no success at all. Indeed, self-knowledge is the last thing asked of you by today’s society, for self-knowledge leads to personal freedom rather than compliance to the societal norm.
This is not to say that the way to freedom is to ignore all societal conventions and simply do whatever you want. Rules and structures serve a necessary function in any society, channeling human energies and coordinating them to serve constructive, communal purposes. The problem occurs when these rules and structures get in the way of the natural growth of individual human beings, because the society does not sufficiently recognize the inner lives of these human beings.
Human beings such as you, of course. Let’s examine more closely the existential dilemma which modern-day life forces upon you.
You are poised, metaphorically speaking, between a field and a forest. Family and friends and society exist in the sunny, open field to one side. This is the “public arena” of life: the realm of work and friendship, love and marriage. On the other side is the wild obscurity of the forest – the largely subconscious inner domain of emotions, impulses, and lord knows what else might be occupying the unexplored areas of your mind.
Since the public arena of life is the realm you are expected to master in order to become a respectable member of society, you have been trained since childhood to orient yourself towards it. You are taught to face the arena, and to put the forest behind your back. Once oriented properly, you begin the process of mastering the “games” of this arena. You learn how to drive a car, how to write a resume, how to say and do the things that will get people to like or respect you. As your mastery of language and machines and popular perception increases, you feel good about yourself, because you have been taught that mastery of the arena is the true measure of your self-worth.
This is not exactly true, however. Mastery of the public arena is the measure of your public self. Your inner self remains unmeasured by the public yardstick.
And what is the inner self?
Hard to say. The unpredictable impulses which arise from the forest within often seem too irrational to have any coherent unity you can label as “self.” Since your thoughts are the means by which you accept, reject, or otherwise manage these impulses, and since thoughts are also the means by which you manage your active campaigning in the public arena, the realm of thought appears to be located in the same no-man’s-land between arena and forest where you yourself reside, and the domain of thought therefore seems closest to what you often feel your “self” to be: a “someone” who consciously attempts to comprehend the external world and simultaneously manage a bewildering array of internal emotions and impulses, choosing actions as a compromise between inner desires and external reality – between what the uninhibited self wants to do, and what the situation will allow. This is, of course, very similar to the Freudian conception of the ego, which mediates between the wild id of the unconscious and the rigidly moralistic, socially-conditioned rules of the superego.
Freud’s schematic of the human mind is a useful map of the modern Western mindset, but it’s merely one of the latest in a long line of instructional teachings regarding the human psyche. As the mythologist Joseph Campbell has pointed out, schematics of the human mind and its potential development have been presented to us for thousands of years, hidden in the form of stories and legends.
The main difference between mythic wisdom and modern psychological theory is that the aim of the mythic hero’s quest is much grander in scope than that of the modern patient suffering from psychological distress. The patient merely wants to raise himself from distress to normality. The hero, on the other hand, wants something more than what everyone else seems to be settling for, and he is willing to turn away from the arena of normal life and enter the inner forest of the unknown to get it. For the hero, this unexplored realm which quietly lies below his own conscious awareness contains all the violent impulses, sexual urges, and irrational fears Freud could ever hope for, but it also holds, beyond all that, a priceless treasure – something worth risking his “respectable” life of normality for.
For you, the person living in the modern world, the risk of not undertaking your own hero’s journey is worse than the risk of death – it’s the risk of never bothering to discover the ultimate fulfillment of your own life, the risk of never bothering to seek what your heart really yearn for, but grasping instead at money or prestige or some other consolation prize in the public arena as if it were the Holy Grail.
It’s time for us to abandon the old conception of the hero as someone other than ourselves, someone to lead us collectively out of our apathy and into a societal revolution. How soon we forget that “revolution” also has another meaning: a spinning of the wheel full circle, with no real progress made.
Evolution of the self is the grass-roots growth process of the present age. It may be slower than revolution, but it leads to changes that are stable, durable, and open-ended, for it calls on each of us to grow from our own individual level of development, and it does not discard the past.
Even though we are living in a largely unconscious age dominated by misguided willpower, we know better than to throw away the will in an effort to be more conscious. We will need willpower to manifest the creative visions of growth which our expanding consciousness brings to light. There will be no hero to ride to our collective rescue. We, ourselves, must lend our fellow heroes a helping hand as we grow together.
And we will need each other’s help, for the modern age is a crucible of isolation and uncertainty for a large proportion of those who live in it. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as isolation and uncertainty are the traditional, defining elements of the ancient rite of the vision quest, where the young person seeking initiation into a new realm of spiritual maturity is sent off by himself to find himself. This isolated quest for the self is what many of us, living as best we can in the impersonal immensity of urban modernity, are called upon to undertake today. Unfortunately, the demands and the distractions of modern life drown out the inner voice that calls us to this adventure, and so we fail to even try to discover our deepest selves, settling instead for some other, officially sanctioned quest – a search for money or social status or one of the other benchmarks of success in our culture.
Spiritual immaturity is the norm for adults in the modern age. Our parents, in asking us to focus our attention on preparing for a job that will bring us material security and social respectability, have failed to nurture our innate appreciation of the deeper dimensions of life, both personal and universal. As the sense of the sacred is lost, our traditional social structures and values lose the authentic grounding on which their integrity depends, and our basic energies are scattered by the almost unlimited variety of diversions at our disposal rather than channeled into a higher purpose we can believe in. The beasts from the inner forest – our accumulation of unexpressed fears and desires – emerge into the public arena unchecked, contributing to a variety of social ills.
Yet, even though the growing irrelevance of traditional social structures and beliefs has allowed displays of hyper-stylized violence, sexual imagery, and crass consumerism to saturate our awareness through movies, magazines, and other media, it has also provided an opening for something grander to emerge into the public arena: a growing consciousness of social, environmental and spiritual realities unvarnished by dogmatic belief systems. Like a river of clear, unpolluted water which has burst the weakened dams of moral and religious conformity, this growing consciousness is flowing into the public arena from the deepest regions of the inner forest, providing refreshment to all who welcome its purity. Yes, there are those who choose the “high” ground, afraid of the flood and clinging to outdated social conventions. But many of us welcome the waters, and we seek to channel it into new social structures that have the potential to irrigate the arena of life and make it bloom like never before, for the public arena has always been a field of the Earth itself, underneath all the pretentious games we play on it. Still others of us, amazed at the rejuvenating quality of this new consciousness slowly spreading across the social and moral landscape, seek to discover the source from which these waters spring, and so we turn our center of attention towards our own psyches, seeking the inner fountainhead of this new wisdom, something available to anyone who cares to look, yet unknown and unappreciated by those who refuse to explore the reality within – and ultimately beyond – their own minds.
The choice for you is a simple one: remain focused on the public arena, as you’ve been taught to do, or open your conscious mind to an expansive inner reality that has, until now, remained largely unconscious.
About the Author:
Andor Czigeledi is a clinical hypnotherapist who specializes in facilitating the expansion of his clients’ conscious awareness at an emotional and spiritual level by balancing the activities of their right and left brains. To this end, he teaches the practice of mental centering as an easily adopted and highly effective means of boosting creativity and spiritual insight. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Book Sample:
