You Can Walk Out of Any Mood
You are not angry; your awareness has walked into an area of the mind called anger, and the same way you walked in you can turn around, walk out and go somewhere else.
Dandapani lays out the model his guru taught him: the mind is a vast space with many areas, and awareness is a ball of light that travels through it and lights up wherever it goes. He shows how a mansion of a thousand rooms makes moods a matter of location rather than identity, and connects the same skill to adaptability.
What this talk covers
- There are two things, the mind and awareness: the mind is a vast space with many areas, and awareness is a glowing ball of light that travels within it.
- Wherever the ball of light goes it lights up that area and you become conscious of it, so being angry means your awareness is in an area of the mind called anger.
- If the mind is a mansion with a thousand rooms, you walked into the room of anger and closed the door, and you can open it, walk out and enter the room of love.
- Each day you either move your awareness yourself or let the people and things around you dictate where it goes; an insult can take you to anger or you can answer that it is a great opportunity to go shopping.
- The goal is not to control the mind but to control where awareness goes, because where awareness goes energy flows, and energy waters the weeds and the flowers alike.
Are you angry? No, you're in an area of the mind called anger.Dandapani
Questions
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Treat it as a room you walked into rather than something you are. You entered it, so you can turn around, open the door, walk down the hallway and go into a different room.
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The goal is not controlling the mind, it is controlling where your awareness goes within the mind. When you can do that, you decide which areas get lit up and strengthened.
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It is a phrase his guru coined in the 1940s. Whatever your awareness rests on receives your energy and starts to grow, and energy cannot tell what is good for you, the way water grows both weeds and flowers.
Transcript
915 words · 4:12
In understanding the mind, the way my Guru taught me is there's two things. There's the mind and there's awareness. You have pure awareness and a simple visualization that gives people this. 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 angrier of the mind, it lights up the angrier 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 mind as a mansion with a thousand rooms,
every room represented a different area of the mind. 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 awareness goes. So, you know, Eric, if you looked at me and said, don't a punny, your shawl looks like an ugly kitchen rag. And I can allow you to take my awareness
to an angry area of the mine, and I can get upset with you, or I can move my awareness to a different area of the mine 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 mine.
The goal ultimately is to control where awareness goes within the mine. And when you can do that, where your awareness goes, my guru always says is where energy flows.
So he 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's 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. I mean, I see two things happening. One is that you have the stimulus and you have to choose where awareness goes. So like, you know, you get told something and in that moment you have to choose.
I think that in my life at least, I think that's the easier one. I think the much harder one is once I've entered a room is to get out of that room. And my wife and I, like we get along very well. Like we barely ever have any disagreements.
But when we do, she's able to go into the door of like being a bit frustrated and irritated with me and come out of it pretty quickly. And I'll sit in that room and she'll be like talking to me. I'm like, how are you talking to me?
Like nothing just happened. I'm so, I'm not there yet. Like, how do you move in and out of this room so quickly? Yeah.
Eric, can I just bring up this one point? I want to tie it to something, you know, I've really, I heard when John spoke in Vegas that I feel is so important and something I'm really keeping in the forefront of my mind.
the control awareness and move awareness out of the room for me is the critical skill that everyone needs to learn. And John, you talk about the future surviving the future is adaptability, right? If you cannot adopt, yeah, you will
die, you will perish. So not being able to adapt is not being able to walk out of the room. Yeah, is going into a room and saying, you know what, I'm going to keep doing things this way, because this is how it's always been done. And that's
how it's always going to be. The ability to adapt is to realize this room no longer works. I need to move out of this room and move to another room and do things completely differently in this world of AI and everything. And if I don't have that ability to do that, I will perish.