The Mansion of the Mind

You shared an incredible example, which I have spoken about and thought about many times about the mansion. Yes. And could you take our listeners through it? And also, Eric, I don't know if you've heard it, but I loved it.

I've heard you speak twice about it in both times, so enthralling and such a beautiful example to think about. So please, please take us through it. Yeah, in understanding the mind, the way my Guru taught me is there's two things. There's the mind and there's awareness.

You are pure awareness and a simple visualization to give people is look at awareness as a glowing ball of light. And the mind is a vast space with many different areas. So one area of the mind is technology, fear, anger, joy, happiness, sex, food, photography.

And your ball of light, your awareness can travel within the mind. And wherever this ball of light goes within the mind, it lights up that area and you become conscious

of that area of the mind. So if awareness goes to the angry area of the mind, it lights up the angry of the mind. You become conscious of being angry.

Are you angry? No, you're in an area of the mind called anger. Just as easily as you went there, you could move out of there and go to a happy area or a sad area.

So the simple analogy I gave that you were talking about is that if you look at the mine as a mansion with a thousand rooms, every room represented a different area of the mine. You walking in the mansion can choose which room you go into.

So if you walk up the stairs and go down the hallway, enter the room of anger, close the door behind you, you will be engulfed with anger because that's where you are. But you walked in there, so you could turn around, open the door, go out,

close the door behind you, walk down the hallway, open another room, go into the room of love, and just experience love. So every day we have a choice where in the mind our awareness is. And we can choose to move our awareness, or we can allow our environment, which is the

people and things around us, to dictate where our awareness goes. So Eric, if you looked at me and said, Dona Pani, your shawl looks like an ugly kitchen rag. And I can allow you to take my awareness to an angrier of the mind, and I can get

upset with you. All I can move my awareness to a different area of the mind and respond with oh, what a great opportunity to go shopping Thank you for letting me know that so, you know find another shawl But the goal is not to control the mind the goal ultimately is to control where awareness

Goes within the mind and when you can do that where your awareness goes my guru always says is where energy flows Right. So he had coined this phrase in the 40s where awareness goes energy flows So if my awareness goes to a happy area energy flows then it strengthens that area of the mind and energy cannot discriminate between what's good

for you and what's not good for you. It's like water, right? If I water the garden bed, the weeds grow and the flowers grow. Water can't tell the difference. Energy is no different as well. Whatever we put energy into will start to manifest in our life. And the way to do that is to focus awareness on what matters. And that's where energy flows and that thing gets measured

and starts to grow. Such a great analogy. That's so good.