As a very mind oriented person, I sought psychology as the antidote to the trappings of my own mind. I knew that the way I saw things, the beliefs I had, needed some sort of adjustment.
I didn’t need to know about how the brain works as an electro-chemical machine, although such things can be fascinating. I wanted to know what makes people tick. What motivates them? What makes them act the way they do? It seems like we’re all born innocent, and then things happen to us through the course of our lives that make us act “evil” or good. What happens there to cause this? Even my own confusion and conflict, and my own mistakes, must be the result of the things that have happened to me.
I found at some point that the term “conditioning” or more specific “psychological conditioning” is the label for these events. The things that make an impression on us in a way that alter our behavior is conditioning. Of course things happen to us all the time to condition us, but in this sense I’m referring to the types of conditioning that cause issues, cause conflicts, cause a lack of peace.
I am so thankful that truthfully, the heart (unintended pun now intended) of the matter is addressed by the psychological theory of ego development, of the concepts of the superego. I only found this by the guidance of the Ridhwan Foundation and their Diamond Heart program. The conditioning that forms as beliefs that make up the superego, specifically the [conscience](http://en wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience), is the thing that I sought to see clearly, to understand, so that I could begin to correct it and adjust it.
But why is this? In my mind it was to find peace, relief, and then be free for what’s next in my struggles and exploration as a human being. Something I’m realizing, this morning, however is that even though it was my mind… it was my heart that was driving this process. The mind has so many rules and worries, and it has so many conclusions about what the truth is, but the interesting thing is that as you dig deeper into your own inner content, and your heart is allowed to open up, to speak, you find that your mind has been a block to your heart.
The hearts desires have been blocked, stopped, dismissed. The movement of the heart, the voice of it, has been silenced for a very long time in me, and surely others in some way. In my own exploration this weekend, one of the things that was told to me by a trusted friend was revealed to be a major blocker to my heart. That thing was itself a form of conditioning, something converted into a mental thought, with it’s own force and energy, and I saw that it was yet another thing blocking me from an aspect of my deepest yearning.
Through any depth work, in a meditative or trance-like state, where the content of my body and mind are given a chance to speak in balance, I’ve seen that certain things said to me have triggered sensations throughout my body. These sensations, in response to the things said, do not match the content of my mind. For someone to speak to something within me, and for it to contradict my mind, made me uneasy, and yet I’ve remained somewhat open to it. For me to inquire into the desires of my heart, and to see the amount of energy it takes to pierce through the fears of my mind, the sense of desperation and shame for being a being that craves things like sex, love, and the deep union that my soul suspects, and that the depictions of romance in our culture, only to see that the pure truth in my heart of that, and how this truly is me…truly what I want, and shouldn’t be shrouded by this thick layer of fear and bullshit, because that’s what I really want… that’s where I’m at… and that the bullshit is the layer that is keeping me from moving forward, from being liberated from this state of fear and loathing…for me to see how my heart runs counter to my mind…
It shows that all along, I was really trying to undo my mind, and undo the barriers to my heart. In a sense, the way the ancient Egyptians thought that the heart was the seat of the mind, and not the brain, seems to point to how much more they might have valued the heart. Still my mind is saying “You can’t trust the heart completely, the mind is still a useful tool”. This may be true, but at least for some period of time, the heart is going to get a microphone and a loudspeaker.
The search for psychology was really just my hearts curiosity and desire driving my mind to undo itself. I had rightfully grown wary of religion because of Southern Baptist Christianity had let me far far astray, and deserved no further attention. This was my only scientific, mainstream way of finding this.