Metaphors for the mind

"Your mind is a fabulous instrument of communication. It can comprehend the past. It can plan for the future. Indeed, the mind is a great membrane between your worldly existence and your spiritual reality."

"Who you are is not the mind. You want to keep that window clean and clear. You want to learn to use the mind as the beautiful vehicle of communication that it really is and that it is meant to be. It is the perfect servant. It should never be the master. And it makes a very poor god."

A Tyrant

"The mind without a true ruler will try to rule itself, and it makes a very poor guide in this respect. Indeed, it becomes more of a tyrant, and it is abusive, arrogant and self-deprecating all at the same time."

A Child

"The mind exercises authority because you do not. It is not because the mind is a tyrant or a terrible thing. The mind simply provides assurance when assurance is not provided for it. It is like an orphan child who must fend for itself until it finds a safe parent or guardian."

"Deal with your mind firmly, patiently and compassionately, like a parent raising a child. "

A servant

"Your mind is your servant and potentially a servant of God under the direction of Knowledge. Honor its strengths and manage it weaknesses. Feed it well and it will be healthy."

"The mind cannot rule because it is a servant. It makes a very poor ruler. It cannot establish reality. It cannot create a stable and meaningful foundation for living in the world. It cannot establish your true identity. It cannot provide a basis for meaningful and lasting relationships. It cannot create a greater and more fulfilling purpose in life."

A House

"The mind must be free. It is as if your house were stuffed to the ceiling with all the possessions you have ever owned--everything--and you had not thrown away anything. It is all in there, things great and small, filling your every room and hallway. And you say, "Well, I want to bring new things into my house, but there is no room. I want to create a new feeling and atmosphere in my house, but there is no space for it." Everything is cluttered, and your house becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Your experience of being in it is imprisoning, and you find yourself spending all of your time maintaining all of these possessions."

"Your mind is like the house that you live in, in the world. It is filled with whatever you put there. It is the place from which you look out into the world. It is your shelter and your protection. It is the place where your spirit generally abides. However, if your house becomes too cluttered and too uncomfortable, Knowledge will not abide there. Then, you will find that you are living in a relic of your own past. You will feel like you are a museum keeper, someone who is taking care of old things."

A prison

"What keeps people from being free is not their external circumstances. It is their own mind and their own thoughts. They are prisoners to their thoughts."

"People know they are weak and fallible, but they try to reinforce their beliefs as a show of strength, a great show of strength. The firm belief, the committed believer, is like a block of concrete—unresponsive, dead, immovable, resistant, disconnected, defensive, judgmental. This is the personal mind in a state of retreat and solidification. It is a prison without walls, but so fixed that nothing can move it."

"When people are dominated by their thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, when these represent the prison bars that prevent their free access to life, they often want to do away with it all. They do not want to think of the future, and they do not want to think of the past. They say, 'Well, the past is over and the future doesn’t exist. There is only now.'"

"Without a greater authority in your life, this is what the mind will do. It will calcify and become hard and brittle. It will become impenetrable and impermeable, something that defends its point of view without any regard to reality or to changes in circumstances. This imperils you and imprisons you. This denies you and isolates you. This prevents you from having access to others and learning from them. This denies your gift and your ability to receive the gifts of others."

"Most of the miseries that confound and imprison the human mind are escaped as one advances in The Way of Knowledge, but not all suffering is escaped. Life continues to be difficult and problematic. Your body has its aches and pains. Your mind has its problems and troubling thoughts, feelings and experience, but they do not dominate your attention now, and as you advance they cannot hold you back or limit your experience."

"If you attempt to make others conform to your ideas, you will attempt to imprison them, and you will be a prisoner along with them."

"People have such strong and fixed beliefs because underneath this they are afraid and confused. The more afraid and confused, the more they attach themselves to their ideas or to their associations in life with dogged and stupid perseverance. They cannot see beyond the prison house they have created for themselves. They have locked themselves indoors. They cannot see the sunrise. They cannot see the mystery of their life."

Fresh concrete

"The thinking mind must constantly be stirred by new experience and by adaptation to new experience and new understanding in order to be vital and capable of learning. It is like stirring concrete. If you do not keep stirring it and adding water and new things to it, it hardens. And once it hardens, it can only be broken. People who are learning and living The Way of Knowledge are constantly being renewed and refreshed because they are close to life, and they are close to Knowledge. Their thoughts change, grow and evolve. Their ideas change, grow and evolve. Their conclusions change, grow and evolve. They can do this because there is something greater. There is Knowledge, the dynamic force of life within you, within the world and within the Greater Community as well. Knowledge brings you to the edge of life where you have to learn and adapt, communicate and contribute. This keeps you young, alive and close to the heart of life. Your mind, then, becomes constantly relevant to the present and is able to prepare for the future."

A tree

"You see, your personal mind—as opposed to Knowledge, or your spiritual Mind—is like a great tree that is growing. It is built upon the past. Like a great tree, the new leaves are budding towards the top, particularly if you are growing in a great forest. The part of the tree that most people see is not the part that is growing now. They must go all the way to the very top to find the freshest young shoots that are growing.

This is like the personal mind. It is built upon the great structure of the past, which makes up the personal mind, and towards the very top it is developing new things and creating new experiences, ideas and so forth. But the great mass of it is grounded in the past."

A window or a wall

"Here you begin to realize increasingly that who you are is not your mind, and that your mind is either a window or a wall. Either it enables you to look onto the world, or it prevents you from seeing altogether. And you want to keep this window clean and clear. You do not want it to become clouded and dirty because you want to use it to look out into the world."

"The teaching in Listening for Knowledge emphasizes creating space in your thinking and awareness so that stillness and seeing can be developed and experienced. I often think that the mind, instead of becoming a solid block of belief, needs to have windows and doorways so that both Knowledge and new experiences can arise. Creating a growing number of these little openings each day has enabled me to 'reset to stillness' more spontaneously with less difficulty. Stop, look and listen."

A command center

"It is your little command center for being in the world."

The crew on a voyage

"Your body is the physical vessel, adapted to its environment, a marvelous instrument if it is guided properly. It can sail the whole world if it has a wise captain and an able crew."

"Your crew are your thoughts and emotions, what the mind produces to direct the body. Here you have a functional crew or a dysfunctional crew, a faithful crew or an unfaithful crew, a competent crew or an incompetent crew. And their competence or incompetence will determine how far this vessel can go, what it can withstand in the winds and waves of the world and how well it can adapt to the presence of other ships and the hazards therein. Then there is the captain. The captain is you. It is even greater than your mind, for you are greater than your mind, for the mind is the crew. You are the captain."

A plane

"Having a mind is like flying a plane. The plane is always going off course. You have to keep it directed where you want it to go."

A stream

“Learning how to clear the mind and to quiet the mind can sometimes seem to be a great effort because the captivation has already occurred. Somehow you got swept downstream, and now you have to go downstream and find yourself and pull yourself out of the water because you got washed away! And though the current may be strong, you must pull yourself ashore.”

Television

“When you begin to listen inside of yourself, you hear the chaos of your own thinking and begin to feel your discomfort. If you are patient and observe these things without running from them, you will pass through them because they cannot keep you from what lies beyond. What keeps people from being free is not their external circumstances. It is their own mind and their own thoughts. They are prisoners to their thoughts. They cannot stop watching their thoughts. It is as if you were watching a movie on a screen and you could never tear yourself away. The screen then becomes ever more real to you, for you have no contrast. You have no experience to remind you that it is just a movie you are watching. As a result, it has greater and greater impact upon you, and you become a more captive audience with every moment.”

"When you are learning the way of stillness, which produces an environment in which Knowledge can emerge within you, you realize that the mind is constantly thinking, constantly moving, distracting you, taking you away, and so forth. You find here that as it is doing this, you are actually within your mind, for your reference point is still in your mind, and so wherever it goes, you go. In practice, you are trying to bring yourself back to a position of objectivity and observation, but the mind takes off, and it takes you with it. It goes here, there and everywhere. It thinks about things that are grand, and it thinks about things that are ridiculous, and it imagines all kinds of scenarios—little dramas in which you then find yourself. It is like a television that is running all the time. So, in spiritual practice, how do you deal with the television running all the time? Here you set a certain focal point for yourself. It is like tuning the television into one kind of frequency or channel. You have to learn to do this, and only practice will enable you to do it. You have to have a focal point, and your mind has to have a focal point as well. In the Steps to Knowledge program, there are many different focal points that are introduced."

"People are so frightened and so driven and so compulsive, they cannot be still for five seconds. They close their eyes to begin meditation, and their mind is like a wild animal—going everywhere, like all the channels of your television running at once, going from here and there and everywhere."

"Knowledge will guide you, simplify your life, give you the freedom to be quiet and give you escape from your personal mind. Who wants to be with a chatterbox all the time? Who wants to be governed by little thoughts all the time? My goodness! That is like being stuck watching reruns on television twenty-four hours a day!"

Like little mice

"Look at people around you. See how unable they are to be with anything. They are constantly stimulated, constantly reading, constantly watching images on the screen, constantly talking, constantly agitated, constantly dealing with information, constantly running around—busy, busy, like little mice. They cannot stop and be with themselves. They cannot stop and be with anyone."

A slum or a factory

"It is like your mind is a slum, living in a part of a greater city, far away from what is beautiful and elegant. Perhaps your life is like a factory, where people are oppressed to work too much. These are merely examples of different states of mind."

See also

Prison Quotes‎

Quotes About the Mind