You Were Never Taught This

When I went to the monastery and my guru asked me, do you know how the mine works? And my answer was, I have absolutely no idea. I did just graduate a few weeks ago

with a degree in electrical engineering, but I still have no idea how this tool works. And at that point when he asked me that question, I realized, this is so true.

And I like to use the analogy of Photoshop, and I think I use it in the book. One of my close friends is a Photoshop certified expert, and he can do anything with Photoshop.

And because he understands Photoshop so well, he can do all kinds of things with Photoshop. The mind's no different, right? The more you understand the mind,

the more you can do with it. The less you understand the mind, the less you can do with it. And so in order to create the lives we want,

we need to know what the tool we're working with, which is our mind. Because everything in our life is created with our mind, not even externally, but internally,

not only professionally, but also personally. Our relationships with our family, with our friends, with our relatives, you know, our business,

everything is done with the mind. Yet there's no training, there's no understanding, there's no time spent. In giving people the just the fundamental understanding,

you don't need to understand it like a neuroscientist might be able to understand the mind, but just the basics mechanics of how does it work. And once you know the mechanics of how it works,

then you can harness the mind or control the mind and start to steer it in the direction you want it to go in. You know, people aren't taught accounting, basic skills on how to manage their money.

You know, no one gets taught that. Everybody has to deal with money, whether you're a chaperone, you have money. No one teaches you how to manage that.

no one teaches you about your body. Everybody has a body. How to eat well, how to exercise. Look, I don't need to be competing in the Olympics,

but if I knew some basics on how to look after my physical body, that would help. Right eating, we all have to eat. We all drink, you know?

There's no training in so many fundamental things in life, and we'll just pop out on this planet, out of the womb, and get slapped in the ass and say, good luck, you know? Hope you make it at the end without being broken.

Yeah. Understanding the mind, we don't need a complex understanding of it. And the analogy I always use is think of a stick shift car. What do you need to know how to drive one?

You've got your gears, you've got your clutch, your brake, your accelerator, steering wheel, left, right, all this straight, go forward. If I know how to operate the clutch and when to change my gears, I can move forward without stalling the car and I can drive the car.

I don't need to know how the fuel injection works, the carburetor works, the brake fluid works, none of that stuff. fundamental basic understanding of those things allows me to drive a stick shift car. In understanding the mind, understanding that we're not the mind, rather we're pure awareness moving within the mind

is literally all you need to know about the mind in order to begin the process of driving awareness or steering the mind in the direction you want to like the car. And the simple understanding is is that the mind has many different areas. Awareness, you can look at it as a glowing ball of light,

which is you, and you move within the mind. And wherever in the mind you go to, that is what you experience. So at any given point in time,

either I am moving my awareness to a particular layer of the mind, or I'm allowing my environment, and I define environment as the people and things around me to dictate where my awareness goes.

So Scott, if you say to me, hey, down upon your shoulder looks ugly, I can go like, oh, what a jerk. Now my awareness has gone to like the upset area of the mind.

But if I had enough control over my awareness, I can prevent it from going there and I can move it to a different area of the mind that it needs to go to.

So even with my daughter, I asked myself when my daughter was born, if there was one thing I could teach her, what would it be? And for me, it was awareness in the mind.

And there was one gift I could give her because as soon as she understood the mechanics of awareness in the mind and she could control awareness,

she could always choose then how she acted in life and reacted to life's experiences. And what a gift that would be. And we don't need to dive into the prefrontal cortex and the serotonin and the dopamine and all that kind of stuff.

You can if you want to, but it's not needed.