The mind-screen (do we have a mind?)

Look at the drawing.

A head, looking up. A blank board tipped over the skull. A brain at each corner, feeding the board. That is the picture I use for what is going on inside you when anxiety or OCD has the volume up.

I call it the mind-screen. Chalkboard. Whiteboard. Old computer monitor. Same job.

Thoughts do not live in the middle of your chest as “you”. They get projected onto that board. Then the body looks at the board and treats the picture as news.

That is why a thought can make your hands sweat when nothing in the room has changed. The horse does not know the difference between a film and a fire.

We blame the mind

Most people walk in and say, “My mind won’t shut up. My mind is against me. My mind is broken.”

Have a look at that.

There is no single villain called the mind. There are aspects of you that are not lined up.

One part throws a picture on the board.
One part writes a story on top of it.
One part, the frightened child, treats the story as a warning.
The body believes the warning and moves chemistry.
The Observer could watch all of that. Often it does not, because attention is glued to the board.

When those aspects are in alignment, the board stays usable. A thought appears. It is seen. It passes. The body stays roughly where it was.

When they are not, you get the feeling of being at war with “your mind”. You are not at war with one thing. You are several systems talking over each other, and you have given the loudest one the job of being you.

That is not proof you are defective. It is proof the parts were trained at different times, for different jobs, and nobody taught them to work as a team.

Two feeds, not one voice

In the simplest version of this, the screen has two inputs.

One: the unconscious chucks something up. A noise downstairs. A face. A what-if. It just appears. You did not order it.

Two: the conscious mind grabs a marker and starts writing. Analysing. Checking. Building a story on top of the first picture.

The body likes a clear board. Empty-ish. That is its preferred state. A busy board is treated as an emergency. So the more you write, the more the chemistry moves, the more the unconscious throws up the next frame, and the board fills.

People with anxiety, and especially OCD, get addicted to the screen. They think they have to watch every frame or they will miss the one that matters. They think thinking is the same as functioning. They think every thought needs an answer.

That is the trap. We only have a screen. We then blame “the mind” for the mess on it, instead of noticing which part is writing, which part is staring, and which part could look somewhere else.

Who is watching the board

More than one part of you is in the audience.

The conscious mind looks down and tries to manage the show.
The unconscious glances up at its own output and reacts to it as if it came from outside.
The ego, the protective little eight-year-old, grabs a pen and turns every picture into a threat or a verdict.
The Observer can see the board without having to sit in the front row.

You do not have to look at the mind-screen.

Read that again. That is the whole skill.

Attention is a torch. Put it on the ache, the doubt, the contamination picture, and that frame gets brighter. Put it on the cloud, the kettle, the next action toward the life you want, and the old frame fades because it is not being fed.

The horse will protest. The horse thinks the film is the paddock. The rider can know it is a film.

Dreaming a new dream

We all dream a dream of life. Same outer street. Different inner film.

Your inner film is made of conditioning, chemistry, values, what you do, and what you refuse to do. If the film is fear, doubt and “what if I look silly”, the body will live that film. If you want a different life, you do not wait for the unconscious to kindly project a nicer movie. You become the person who stops starring in the old one.

That will feel like biological discomfort. Call it that. Not a prophecy. You are doing new things. The old programme will put its favourite scenes back on the board and ask you to sign them. You can decline.

The mind can be calm even if the body is not. That is rider work. You learn it by exposing yourself, again and again, to the obstacles that sit between you and the life you actually want. Clear the board. Walk. The next picture will come. Clear it again.

A table, if you need a tool

When the board is a mess, I sometimes picture a big table on it. Every loud part of me gets a chair. Judge. Victim. Pleaser. Engineer. Frightened child. They can talk. I do not have to become any one of them. I am the one who can see the table.

That is not a séance. It is a way of stopping a single voice from filling the whole screen.

Paranoia, in this picture, is what happens when the board is treated as a window onto other people’s minds. The unconscious offers a guess. The ego writes a novel. You stare until the guess feels like evidence. It is still a picture on a board.

What to do with this

Do not argue with the frame. That writes more.
Do not hunt a blank mind as a personality. That is another obsession.
Notice: there is a picture.
Notice: I am looking at it.
Move the torch.
Take the action the old film was designed to stop.

Knowing this in a chair is knowledge. Walking while the board is noisy is wisdom.

This is Video 35 in The Chronicles of Common Sense. The drawing is the map. The work is what you do with your eyes.

Access this video and over 60 others for $15 a month, along with guided meditations and practical workbooks. These are The Chronicles of Common Sense, forged from facing life directly and learning through real-world experience. They guided me out of anxiety, OCD, bipolar depression and crippling self-consciousness, and helped me become more trusting, energetic, optimistic, self-loving and courageous.

This work reaches the mind, body and soul. The next action is yours. Take it.