MIND NOISE; the Importance of Awareness of your Reactions

It may seem strange at first to think that in your mind there is constant noise, it arrives through the senses and delivers, when necessary, a reaction. But before that arrival of sensory input, we can have thoughts rolling around in our head that we are just not aware of. Self depreciating, self criticising, self harming thoughts. Those thoughts become our default and can, from time to time, act in the opposite direction to the ambitions we have for the future. Lets explore…

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 G’day and Chris Walker here. And today we’re talking about mind noise. Once again, we are continuing the series for February, and today I would love to share with you a little bit of information about reaction. 00:13 Now we’ve gone through uncertainty, confusion, doubt, anger, emotion, worry, anxiety, regret, frustration, and overwhelm as being really important. And primary sources of mind noise. 00:26 And mind noise is when we have our, our rattling around in our brain, that doesn’t necessarily add up to anything. 00:35 It does it, it’s an indirect thought. In other words, it’s churn. It’s spin in our heads. So it can be going spinning around like this. 00:43 We’re going, do I or don’t I? Will I or won’t I? Can I or can’t I? And these things can actually become habitual. 00:51 And the thing about mind noise is you don’t know you’ve got it because it’s like an ambience. You don’t know you’ve got it until you go somewhere like the Himalayas of Nepal, and you go up to four and a half thousand meters, and you sit on a rock and you look at Mount Everest and you listen. 01:09 And on a winless night, you hear absolutely the sound of nothing. And the sound of nothing is the most perfect, perfect music you could ever imagine. 01:22 It is an emptiness to behold. Now, I’ve been up in the Himalayas quite a few times in the journey of my life. 01:30 And one of the magic moments that I’ve experienced is listening to the massive big Buddhist trumpets being played. I don’t know what they’re called, a huge horn. 01:41 And they can be, I don’t know, three or four, five meters long, these horns. And they play that music on a full moon from a monastery. 01:51 And if you are 10 kilometers away down the valley or up the valley or up another valley, you’ll hear this sound in the background, like, Oh, It’s exactly the same sound as listening to monk’s chant in the monastery itself. 02:24 There are different notes. I spent time and there’s a video on my YouTube that I took with nuns at a nary. 02:32 Of course, monasteries and nunneries are kept separate, but the nuns chant and their noise is, they’ve got an overtone. It’s a lighter, more joyous sound. 02:55 The monks, the nuns, but it’s an octa apart. And you can hear these sounds so perfectly in the stillness of the mountains. 03:07 Occasionally you might hear the sounds of kids playing. Occasionally you might hear the footsteps, but the silence is astonishing, and it makes you realize how much noise we call ambience right now. 03:20 There’s a fan blowing air into my balcony to try and dry it out from the storm we had yesterday because the rain came in all the way in from horizontal rain with massive wind. 03:33 I can hear that hum. But after about five minutes of sitting here, I have no idea that there’s a hum taking place in the background. 03:41 I have no idea at night when I’m lying in bed that there is a party going on next door. I, what I do is I lie still and I try to include the party in the ambience. 03:53 What does wake me up is when someone screams they’re on ice or they’re having a fight, or they, they’re having a, a fun time and they scream at the top of their lungs. 04:03 And that breaking of the silence, the breaking of the ambience becomes, it penetrates. And I think with mind noise, we, we gradually develop a massive volume of adaptations. 04:16 And it’s only when a noise comes in and bangs us on the head, do we realize that something’s that our, that our that we’re outta kilter and we address the, the sound that bangs the scream or the shout or the sound of the car or the dog barking. 04:33 We address that. But what we, and what it does, it brings us to the awareness that we have noise in our mind. 04:39 It’s been triggered by something, but it quite often leaves us immune or or absorbing the, the generic noise that’s been going on long before the mind noise started. 04:52 Let me give you some examples here. I meet in my daily life as a Bondi resident. I meet a lot of angry people who smile and who are cheery and friendly and warm, and go to yoga and meditate on the beach and go for swims. 05:10 Have brown skin wear bikinis or tos sluggos. And they, they’re, they’re hat they’re, they’re living the life, but they’re angry. 05:20 But if you said to that person, you look angry, they would be very upset. And so an ambiance has taken over that person at that ambiance of anger. 05:31 I also meet a lot of people especially as we have a yoga school beneath us now, or one of one of the people in the building has created a yoga school out of the bottom apartment underneath us. 05:43 So we are blessed to have people practicing yoga in a in the building in a yoga school now. And I’m, I see a lot of people coming and going, and I see disappointment on their face, but it, the disappointment is ambience. 05:59 And we have to be really careful that we don’t adapt to an ambiance in our mind, the mind noise, and start to think that that is what life is about. 06:09 And that’s why I think it’s very important to make mind noise a very important focus of your day. You don’t eliminate necessarily all mind noise. 06:20 What we do is we create a vacuum of mind noise that we can fill with the noise that will cause us to go where we’d love to go. 06:28 So what we are trying to do is clear the fog, strip away unnecessary turbulence, bring it all down to silence like the Himalayas, and then we reinject new noise that is healthy and productive for us. 06:43 Now, we, it’s all very well to say, I’m gonna do affirmations and self-talk, and I’m going to hold my vision and do all these things. 06:53 But if that is on top of an ambiance that we are unaware of, in other words there’s anger or disappointment or frustration or sadness, then we get left in a very difficult place because it’s almost like mixing old eggs with new eggs, stirring it up and making an omelet and wondering why it doesn’t taste very good. 07:17 The new eggs are perfect, the old eggs, we didn’t realize were as old as they were. And so we can end up with a poison chalice, if you want to call it that. 07:29 And today we are talking about reaction. And reaction is how you know whether there is ambience in your mind and whether that ambiance is healthy or unhealthy. 07:43 Every single reaction you have to anything that transpires in your life is a sign of ambient mind noise. And ambient mind noise is contradicting arguing with fighting against where you wanna be. 08:00 So that ambience is ambience because you’ve adapted to it. That ambience is there because, and and below the surface, because you are now become, let’s say adapted to it. 08:12 But what it does that ambiance, it triggers reactivity. So if you react to a barking dog, what it so says is there is already ambiance going on in your head, and the barking dog took you over the limit. 08:29 If you react to another person in any way, shape, or form, that’s revealing that there’s a massive ambiance in your mind, and that person has just tipped you over the curve. 08:43 So I think we need to cherish reaction, reaction if there is a sign from the heavens reaction, if there is a sign from the nature, if there is a si sign from the universe that you are ready to rejig the ambient mind noise that is inside your brain, every reaction you have is evidence of it. 09:06 What you react to is also a source of inspiration, because what you react to is telling you about the ambience that’s going on in your mind. 09:17 If you have criticism of yourself, then your reaction will be to criticize somebody. If you have doubt about yourself, and that’s become an ambience in your mind, you will have doubt about others. 09:32 If you think that other people are not being loyal or faithful to you, then you ha have a lack of loyalty and faith to yourself. 09:42 Something inside you feels rotten. So I’d like to suggest that you put reaction up there on the altar next to the picture of Jesus or Buddha or Krishna as I’ve got over there on my little altar. 09:59 Put tho that word in an icon up there on the altar reaction. Is the universe telling you that you have an ambient mind noise that is fighting against your choices to achieve and look forward to in the future? 10:17 Let’s be really clear. All human eyes are turned to the future. If you want to know the health of a person’s mind state, just say, what do you look? 10:28 Just ask, what are you looking forward to? If they say a quality to do with lifestyle, you know that person has lost their path. 10:37 This is Chris. You have a beautiful day. Bye for now.