How to Stop Pretending to Be Alive

How to Stop Pretending to Be Alive

BeiYin: “Yes, one can learn to withdraw energy from emotional reactions, but reactions are a symptom for an underlying cause. It’s more effective & creative to change the root cause. Not by manipulation. Who is reacting? Who wants to change something within oneself? Acceptance & awareness don’t need ‘tools’. “

Our ‘talking to ourselves’ symptom has the cause that we are identified with our self-reflecting mechanism in the brain. Talking to ourselves is thought energy and it is a low vibration and thus hard to detect. Through the practice of meditation we become aware of this vibration and then we can hear the story we are inventing on the inside. Thoughts carry electrical impulses through the nervous system which goes everywhere into the body. In the body there are two kinds of cells that are excitable: they can carry an electric charge. They are muscle fiber cells and neurons.

Muscles, which attach to the bones are skeletal muscles, these are known to be under voluntary control. This means we can decide how to move our body, we can will it with our thoughts. There is a structure called the neuromuscular junction, it is here where a nerve cell communicates with a muscle cell and passes the electric charge between them. This can be measured with a machine called an EMG, which measures the amount of electrical charge in a muscle. The nerve and muscle cells connect all over the place in a domino fashion or chain, in 1,000,000’s of different pathways allowing a huge variety of individual expression in the body.

Most of us are talking to ourselves all day long and this talking is building up a charge in the muscles even when we are not moving the muscles. So our idle thinking which is our assessment of situations or interpretation of energy impulses we are receiving from outside happenings is building up charges all over the body in the muscles. Muscles store energy to prepare for action if needed. The thought vibration that goes into the muscles also gives us feelings. We can feel emotions because the thought has caused vibration (excitation) in the muscle fiber cells, and we have motor sensors to detect vibration, touch, pressure, etc. Feelings are an advantage and necessary during our active day, because it is a higher vibration then it’s easier to detect, we can feel them in our body, more easily than the more subtle vibration of thoughts. Tuning into our feelings we get a short-hand take on how we perceive situations and other people, feelings show us what we are thinking. In a conversation we are not ‘hearing our thoughts’, we are otherwise engaged and it’s nearly impossible to tune into that level while we are engaged in conversation. What we can tune into more quickly is how we feel from a given conversation and/or exchange of energies. The feeling we perceive is our summation of our entire thought process, which happens very rapidly. So the reaction of feeling is more accessible and the best judge of what we think rather than trying to capture, detect or analyze individual thoughts. (In meditation one can detect thinking easier because one’s energy level is higher (one is not moving or engaged in other activities) and one’s muscles are relatively more relaxed.) In daily life, one will have more success to do one’s meditation with feelings, the meditation being the same as if one were sitting. In sitting meditation the cue is to go back to the non-thinking focal point (such as observing one’s breathing) when one realizes they’ve been thinking, in daily life meditation one goes back to the non-thinking focal point (of observing one’s breathing, but also making sure that one is belly breathing, because often in emotional stress then one’s breathing is shallow and improperly in the upper lungs. Breathing properly from the belly will relax the body as one gets more oxygen.), when one realizes that they are building strong emotions (so one knows that the thinking is repeating and the personality is energizing).

(Thoughts are triggered from received energy impulses and give us a tangible way to access the information. What we end up thinking has to do with all our past experience, and thus is very individual.)

So then one might know that stress has the cause of the thinking going on inside, and the symptom of stress is that one’s muscles are charged from all the thinking. It is stressful because there is a built up tension or charge in the muscles, but no action is taken to release it. This is normal for people to accumulate stress because they often don’t act out what they are thinking, if they did act out what they were thinking then this would release the built up accumulation of energy in the muscles. This is why exercise is so important to one’s health and to do it each day, because it releases the stress charge from the muscles in a non-harmful way. The sleep that humans need each night is also a way that the body releases some of the stress, so when one doesn’t get enough sleep or can’t sleep then stress has a tendency to accumulate. If stress builds up too much in the muscles (from uninterrupted chains of thought), then any outside event can easily trigger a strong emotional reaction from the individual. That emotional outbursts happen most often in human interactions is normal, because verbal and physical exchanges with people trigger our interpretation and our opinions of the energy coming from the other, and we then often react to the other person.

So we know that the cause of emotions is from our thinking and thinking comes from identification with one’s self-image. We believe what we think is true, we believe we are the thinker, we believe we are the one who is feeling… Everyone is familiar with the concept of acting; one can conjure up sad things willingly and make oneself cry. This is what personality is in the body of the human, the thoughts we repeat reflect in the body as emotional energy in our muscles which we can feel as vibration, then we respond in action according to the muscle charges that are built up and ready to be expressed (if we don’t then we accumulate stress). What’s important to see here is that when we identify with our self-reflection or perception, then we are being personality and we are pretending or acting and we perform this action most often when we are awake and active.

I do agree that in order to change something one has to get to the root of the matter, and modifying or eliminating a symptom will not cause a change. The root of this matter is identification with one’s reflection, in essence one’s will or awareness is being used to promote the image of personality, or of pretending. Awareness is occupied with acting.

When we are busy being ourselves in our daily lives, than the norm is that we are acting simply because we have less energy remaining to be used for self-observation which is also why it’s very difficult to tune into our more subtle levels of thought vibration. The more ‘free energy’ we have the more aware we are. But luckily we do have the capability to feel our thought energy in the body and can use the symptom of building tension as a reminder to tell us when we are pretending. Feeling ourselves building a charge and knowing what it is a symptom of, then we have the choice to withdraw energy from ‘this activity’ by doing the active daily life meditation of going back to simply observing our breathing.

When one looks at energy expenditure then one will see that thinking requires the least energy, muscles charges or building emotion takes more energy and physical action or expression takes the most energy. This follows the laws of manifestation, as subtle energy is moved through the layers from the inside to the outside, growing in vibration as it does so. When maximum vibration is reached then the seed energy impulse exists now on the outside as a physical object. Sitting and thinking needs less energy than walking and talking. When one sits and thinks there is excess energy left over which can be used for self-observation. When one walks and talks there is less energy left over to be used for self-observation. If one knows that energy is being wasted because it is accumulating in the muscles needlessly and if one doesn’t allow this to happen, then there is more energy left for self-observation while walking and talking. The way to not allow this to happen is to notice it when it happens by keeping an eye on one’s feeling feedback mechanism and then divert one’s focus back to a non-thinking focal point such as being sure one is breathing from the abdominal, the same as in sitting meditation. By doing this practice in one’s daily life one will soon notice a huge energy gain and correspondingly awareness will grow faster. Of course the hard part is that one will have to be able to go against one’s desire and urge to show oneself with all one’s colorful emotions.

The sense of this is that what one is doing is detecting when one is ‘pretending to be alive’ and to take you out of this old habit, it might be helpful to remind yourself: Drop your interpretation of xxx or of others, your viewpoint is not important, know that everything you tell yourself is a lie, it can’t be trusted. Then you might simply be content with breathing and accepting what is – without judgment — you’ve diverted energy away from the thoughts (and emotions) by going into observation mode, no longer having the great need to show yourself to others and/or get confirmation. When being the observer, your thinking relaxes its grip, your body responds, the muscles relax, the stress falls away and you become very quiet. And you keep doing this over and over and over again, always denying yourself the pleasure of being the pretender and in its place something much more real fills the void.

I hope that explains the cause and one way it can be dealt with that is not a manipulation, as it has nothing to do with the mind.

Betsy