Building a Healthy Relationship with the Mind | A Teaching from Marshall Vian Summers

And if you’re just joining us for the first time or are relatively new to the New Message, I’d like to share a little bit about Marshall. Marshall was spiritually ignited at a relatively young age and has maintained a very deep and ongoing connection with an unseen group of spiritual Teachers for over 40 years. And the result of this connection is that there are now 20 books in publication that you can hold in your hand or you can listen to and read on the New Message website. 

And all of this is to prepare humanity for the environmental, social, political and economic changes converging in the world, and for our world’s emergence and contact with a universe full of intelligent life that is vastly different from ourselves. 

These books that Marshall has received and the teachings also speak on a wide range of topics and speak on almost every aspect of life in a very deeply personal way, speaking to the challenges of living life in a modern and changing world. The teachings are applicable for life now, for looking at and perhaps resolving the past and also to discern what is needed now and into the future. 

And today we have the opportunity to hear Marshall speak on a topic important to our lives regardless of where we live, regardless of our circumstances. We can listen to this teaching, take it in and apply it in our lives. And as a student, I’ve been struck by the importance and role of the mind as a medium and as a vehicle of communication both with Knowledge, our deeper spiritual Intelligence, and with our communication in the world from one to another, and also as a means of perceiving what is happening in our lives in relation to the events that are taking place in the world and in our relationship with others. It can be an ally instead of something that we’re ruled by. 

So I look forward, really look forward to hearing what Marshall and Reed will share today about the mind and how to work with our minds. But first I’ll just do a quick overview of the format for today. First, we’ll hear from Marshall, and Reed will also contribute. Then we’ll go to the live broadcast chat on Discord and we’ll share our thoughts and experiences around two questions that will be posed; and we’ll get those later. Then we will return here to the same YouTube channel for a brief discussion by Marshall. So with that, let us now hear from Marshall, take a deep dive into this teaching on building a healthy relationship with the mind. Thank you. 

Marshall: Great. Well, we have a very important topic today. We all have a mind. And so what that mind does and whether it serves us or not is critically important to our experience of being in life and what we’re able to do here. So having a healthy relationship with your mind is pretty important. And the mind can be a hazard. It can be a torment. It can be something that holds us back or conditions us in ways we don’t want to be conditioned. But nonetheless, it serves its potential to be a great communication platform, a great service to who we really are. And we’re going to talk about who we really are today and the mind and the body in their relationship with each other. 

So to have a healthy relationship with your mind means that it has to be able to go with you through life, adapt to the changing circumstances of your life and also the change that you’re going through in life, hopefully broadening your awareness, developing your skills, getting a greater sense of yourself and why you’re in the world and how to be in the world. And so these are all thresholds of learning that we all go through, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But the mind here is a critical part of that learning process. 

In fact, the mind really has to be completely upgraded as you go through life, as you face new realities, as you go through different stages of life, as you meet new challenges in life. So working with the mind now becomes a very important thing to do. And we’re going to spend time today talking about what it means to work with your mind. 

Let us think of the mind here, optimally, as your chief organizing and communicating aspect of yourself. If you didn’t have a mind, your Spirit may be here, but you couldn’t communicate into the world. You couldn’t organize your life in the world. You might be a resident Spirit. Perhaps someone might hear you—perhaps—but you would not be able to participate directly in life. And your body would not know what to do without your mind. And so your mind here becomes the critical juncture between the Spirit and your body and the world. And whether your mind can grow and expand, entertain new ideas, release old ideas, rethink itself, have new learning is really important. Because if it doesn’t keep pace with your life, then it’s going to work against you. 

If you think for a moment that by the time you’re five years old, probably your basic attitudes and responses to your environment have already been fundamentally established. By the time you’re 15 years old, your probably outlook on life fundamentally and the way you engage with people in a healthy way or not is probably established. And so these are ages where we really don’t have much self-awareness and we’re not really involved in life fully. So we carry forth a mind that has already been set in so many ways, perhaps appropriately for its own survival and well-being, perhaps illogically, whatever the case may be. 

We’re living with a mind now that’s not keeping pace with our own growth as a human being in the world. And so our work with the mind now becomes critically important. In fact, it is, I think, one of the most important aspects of Spiritual development, no matter what your religious faith position or path might be. Because your mind becomes now either an impediment or an asset in your ability to develop Spiritual awareness and also the quality of your life and your relationships. 

So here critically, the mind cannot be a master. The mind should not be a master. It makes it a very poor master. It’s uninformed. It’s willful. It’s condemning of others. It’s easily manipulated by the world around you. It’s easily manipulated by minds that are more powerful than your mind. So without oversight and guidance of your mind, it has great hazards in being in the world––a world of increasing influence, a world of increasing difficulty and challenge. 

So this is what it means to work on yourself, basically. You can work on your body, its health, its nutrition, giving it proper sleep, nutrition, exposures in life, and that’s important. But working on your mind is the bigger aspect of working on yourself, because the mind isn’t just going along with you normally and naturally adapting to your own experiences. As I said before, the mind is very preset by the time you reach middle adolescence, for example. So it is now either working in concert with you or it is not. 

So Spiritual development has a great deal to do with working with your mind. If you’re ever to become the captain of your life, the captain of your ship, if you use that analogy, then your mind is like the crew. Your body is like the ship. A captain can’t do anything without a crew, and neither the captain or the crew can do anything without the ship. But someone has to guide the crew. And if there’s no one to guide the crew, it becomes chaotic and is prone to serious error and breakdown. 

So this idea of mind, body and Spirit, which is perhaps very familiar to many of you, has to be in the right order. As it is, and as it tends to be with most people, it’s way out of order. So we have a [slide]. So the first realization here, and this comes over time, perhaps: 

Who you are is not your mind or body. Therefore, you can establish a position centered beyond your mind to observe your mind and body.

“To observe”—this is very important, and this is a part of many spiritual practices, observing the mind without interfering with it, without trying to control it, without trying to indoctrinate it in a religious belief or philosophy, just observing the mind. And the benefit of this is you begin to realize: Well, if I can observe my mind, well, then who am I? I must not be the mind I’m observing because I can look at it objectively, and I’m thinking independently of it because I’m observing it. So this begins to create some space that you need within yourself to be able to understand your mind, to be able to direct your mind, hopefully in a very healthy way. And it allows you to become like an overseer of the mind, not a tyrant of your mind, but an overseer. 

So the incorrect alignment of mind, body and Spirit means that in this state, which is where I think we all go through this process to some degree, and some people live out this through their whole lives, is that their mind and body represents who and what they think they are. “Well, this is me. My body is me. My mind is me. What else is there?” So they think that is who they are. Here the mind serves the needs and the safety of the body primarily, overly concerned with the needs and the safety of the body, either appropriately or inappropriately. 

And so now the condition of your body begins to rule the condition of your mind, even though your mind is far more powerful than the body is. And if there is a Spirit, then the Spirit is believed to serve your mind, giving it its wants, its needs, guiding it through life. The Spirit is like a resource for the mind. It’s okay to start there, but that’s not really the relationship that’s appropriate. So this is incorrect because it greatly limits your ability to manage your mind, manage your life, and at any sense that you have a spiritual reality beyond it that is independent of it. It’s not governed by your thinking, beliefs or attitudes. 

So the true alignment of the body is the body serves the mind. The body is the vehicle for the mind to participate and communicate in physical life. The mind takes care of the body but serves the Spirit. The Spirit is there to direct the mind, giving it real purpose, meaning and direction in life. This is often done discreetly. This is the process through which your higher purpose emerges and can finally be realized. It’s important to think about this for a minute. 

The body serves the mind, the mind serves the Spirit. You get the image, the Spirit is vast and limitless, or God is vast and limitless, and then the Spirit is a much bigger container and the mind is a much smaller container and the body is a much smaller container. So if you have this thing in reverse, then you’re identifying with the smallest, most limited part of yourself, which is your body. How I look, how people see me—if that’s dominating your life, then you’re identifying with the smallest part of yourself and the weakest part of yourself. Because the body without the mind is totally helpless in life and subject and vulnerable to all the hazards of being here. 

So without the Spirit, the mind attempts to set its own goals and priorities. It attempts to organize its life according to its wants, its wishes and what it may firmly believe is the truth or what it hopes to be the truth. But it can only do this with great difficulty. And whatever it establishes in life is easily undone by the uncertainties of life itself: change, the behavior of other people, the condition of the world. Right now we’re facing conditions of the world that could change the reality of almost everyone within decades, which is pretty remarkable. 

So Knowledge—we talk about Knowledge now—is the Intelligence of Spirit. Knowledge isn’t just what you think you know or what you learned in university or college or school. Knowledge is a Greater Intelligence that is your link between your mind and your Source, Spirit. I use the word Knowledge instead of Spirit because Knowledge is an act of Intelligence in our life, where Spirit can seem very ephemeral; and what is Spirit? It’s hard to identify what it is or how it’s functioning in our life. 

But the power of Knowledge is engaged with, through often our intuition, but all through other aspects of our mind and body to inform us, warn us, hold us back, move us forward, have a real impact on what we do in life which the mind cannot really understand. 

So the mind is always limited by its beliefs, particularly its firm beliefs. But Knowledge is not limited by the mind. So in a way, it is your highest source of information and guidance. And it’s God’s great gift to everyone, though most people know not of it, or maybe have never experienced it very clearly—certainly don’t understand it. For God is not managing your affairs, not managing your life. The God of the universe, a God of a billion, billion races and more in galaxies beyond this galaxy is not managing your life, but God has put a perfect guiding intelligence within you to do that when you’re ready. The key is when you’re ready—it’s very important.

So this goes way beyond intuition, even though Knowledge does work through intuition. Knowledge is actually who you are outside the world, outside of time, going with you in your ride and your journey here on Earth—working behind the scenes, unrecognized, unknown, but there to serve you and guide you when you are ready to have this happen.

So this gives us a hierarchy within ourselves. This is a quote from Steps to Knowledge Continuation Training, Step 6: My mind is here to serve Knowledge. 

The mind without a true ruler (Knowledge) will try to rule itself, and it makes a very poor guide in this respect…True harmony within yourself means that your mind is serving your Spirit and your body is serving your mind. Here the true value of the mind and the body are recognized and all self-abuse is forgotten and abusive relationships are left behind.

So this realignment of our understanding of mind, body and spirit is just very important because it gives to each aspect of ourselves its realm of responsibility and capability. I mean, without a body, your mind can’t be in the world. It can’t navigate the world. It can’t be recognized in the world. It can’t communicate in the world, except maybe through other higher channels, but how many people are aware of that? So the body has a lot of functioning capability. It needs to be trained and carefully taken care of. But your mind now has a greater set of responsibilities to govern your body, but also to receive direction from a higher source within you, which is your Knowledge, which is your connection to the Divine.

So one of the aspects of our learning here is that we’re going to have to re-examine how we got to where we are today. How did we get to where we are today? I asked that of many people and they’re not quite sure. “Well, I did this and I did that…”, but they don’t really know the journey they’ve already taken. But the journey you’ve already taken has a lot of clues to tell you about who you are and the things you’ve learned that you might have forgotten, and the reasons why you had to learn certain things to be able to develop and to become mature as a human being, and hopefully to become mature as a person who’s able to receive a higher level of consciousness within yourself.

So to know where you are you have to know where you’ve been in life, not every detail, but basically what this journey has required and the major forces and events that have shaped you. Because as we stand today, we are very much shaped by what has happened before—the primary things that have influenced us the most.

So here we have a study that’s really good to take, and it can be done over time; and it’s a pretty big study so you’re not going to do it in a day or an hour. But as you think about it, you’ll start to see the missing pieces in your past that actually hold meaning to why you think the way you do, how your mind is now programmed or set and why you are habitual in the things that you do. And being habitual is not being conscious because you just keep doing the same thing over and over again, whether it works or not, and that’s habitual.

And so you find out here…and you can plot this process over time, marking key events in your life. Well, three years old this happened. Seven years old this happened. This happened to my family or something happened to a family member; or I had an incident at school or I learned something at school. All these things that seem to have, in your memory, an impact on shaping the way you think and how you see things.

So now I’m going to give you a picture of Steps to Knowledge. This is The Book of Inner Knowing, a remarkably powerful guide to developing your connection to this power of Knowledge that is within you, which is God’s gift to you. Because if God is not going to manage your life, something has to be in you that can help you manage and direct your life.

So part of us never left our Source, and that part of us represents our Divine nature. And that’s what spirituality is—our Divine nature. But this is Divine nature with intelligence. And it’s not here to serve your every need or to guide you in all things, but to set a direction in life and attempt to keep you on course with a larger direction in life which will take you eventually to real thresholds of awareness and to greater accomplishments ahead, which you cannot see at this moment.

This is a long journey, a journey of many steps. They’re the Steps to Knowledge. And I’ve been through it many times myself. And it’s mysterious and it’s powerful because it’s a gift from beyond. I could never create something like this. So it is there for you to explore.

And part of the practice in Steps to Knowledge is stillness—stillness practice, which sounds very simple, very easy; just be still. But when you find out how your mind is out of control, you see that it’s really hard to be still. To be still for more than 10 seconds? You quiet yourself down for a very minuscule amount of time and then your mind just keeps on going. Going here, going there, thinking about the past, thinking about today, thinking about that person, thinking about that event—wherever it’s going, you don’t know where it’s going because your mind’s out of control. It’s running itself. It’s operating out of its own pathways of thought, which are well established.

So when you practice stillness, you learn now to bring yourself back to a place of quiet observation within yourself. And there are several traditions, particularly Buddhism, that really emphasize this self-awareness. Watching—not trying to change the mind, not trying to shape it, but just watching it. Because when you do that, you begin to realize, Well, who am I watching my mind? I always thought I was my mind, but here I am watching my mind. And the further you step back, the more you can see, Wow! My mind does this and does that. Why does it do that? It’s erratic. It’s not organized. It’s highly reactive to certain things and ignorant of other things. So over time, you begin to see, Wow, my mind is kind of out of control, and very influenced by certain things in the environment and not responsive to other things. So you take note of these things from observing your mind. 

The other thing that stillness does is it begins to open a deeper portal into a deeper Mind within you. It’s almost like we’re living at the surface where it’s constantly being stimulated by the world. It’s constantly reacting to the world. It’s reacting to its own thoughts and the thoughts of others and what you see. And it’s constantly stimulated by movies and television and socialization and hazards and violence and…You’re constantly up here. But what is down below you?

So stillness allows you now to gradually begin to transit the levels of the mind. And there are levels. What’s conscious is what’s on the surface, constantly stimulated by the outside. Below that are realms of memory, past experience, some of which is actually pretty important and much of which isn’t. There’s a lot of detritus and meaningful information down there. But as you transit the mind, you go into deeper and quieter states. 

And these states allow you to engage or have a pathway to the deeper Intelligence within you, which I call Knowledge, which is your Spirit. And you’re going to need this Spirit because it holds the real purpose and meaning of your life, which your intellect cannot really figure out. It can make plans. It can set goals. It can try to achieve things. But really, Knowledge within you holds for you the Greater Purpose of your being here, not just what you think will make you rich or happy, but the greater purpose of your life. That’s a big Wow.

So stillness is very important. It also enables you to really understand your thoughts, your feelings. It enables you to step back from the things that are overtaking you. It really prevents you from being overtaken by other people’s persuasions, by other forces like in the mental environment—the environment which we think, which are very powerful. It enables you to have strength and independence from the mind—functionally.

I can step out of my mind enough to be still, to listen, to be quiet; and also to observe what my mind is doing or not. So this is a tremendous path of development for people. And if you don’t do this in life, no matter how well educated, articulate, aristocratic you think you are, you’re still living at the surface; and you may be very blind to where you need to go in life and what you need to do or how to solve life’s greater problems.

So this creates an objectivity because you have a position of objectivity. Objectivity means you’re looking but not deciding. You’re not evaluating. You’re just looking. How many people do that? Objectivity. 

Or you see life as you want it to be. Or you see life as it should be. Or you see life as someone else thinks it should be that you follow or you adhere to. But you’re not seeing. Seeing is actually, Am I seeing what is actually there happening as it happens? Or is it all reflective of values and symbols that I respond to?

So it’s amazing people look but do not see; they listen but do not hear because all they hear is their own mind interpreting everything they see and hear. So all they see is themselves, basically. It’s a very critical idea to understand this.

So when you gain this objectivity because you’re developing stillness and I observation of yourself, you’ll be able to see many things that most people don’t see. Your range of vision expands hugely. You’re able to consider things that you would never think to consider which are actually operative in the world and are very important. For instance, the changing world environment, the changing environment of the world; the presence of extraterrestrial forces in the world and what they’re doing here, which is probably the largest, biggest event in human history that very few people are aware of because they’re subsumed in their personal life and their personal issues and don’t see the bigger picture that’s shaping the world around them.

So the tendency of the mind, then, is to become reactive, which means you adhere to certain things firmly and you react against other things that challenge it or they’re different. And you do this automatically without thinking. That’s why it’s called reactive mind. You’re not even being intelligent here, you’re just reacting to something. You see something you don’t like, you react. A different viewpoint, you react. Somebody who thinks differently from you, you react. Something, a problem in the world, you react. That’s not thinking. That’s not being aware. That’s not being objective. And without that, you can’t really understand what you’re looking at. And you can go through life like that, just reacting, reacting, reacting. And that’s very common. You see it everywhere.

So to get out of that reactive state and to get into an aware, objective state is really important in life. It’s spiritually important because it begins to connect you with the deeper Intelligence within you. But it’s really important in life to stop being a critical person who demeans or discredits others, who’s always at war over ideas or values or social customs, wars between countries. Your mind is always in a state of conflict and competition. There’s never an ounce of peace or well-being in any of that.

So these things are very consuming on the outside. So to be able to deal with those things, you have to create a more internal, quiet and objective state. It’s not like you don’t feel things, but your feelings don’t overtake you. Of course you feel things. It’s not like you don’t see things. Now you’re really seeing things as they really are, which you couldn’t really see before. You only see your ideas about them.

So this is a big breakthrough for anyone who takes this journey. So what this means—and if you were to find a Higher Purpose in life, which is what Knowledge holds for you, which the mind itself, your personal mind, can never really assume or gain—then it’s going to mean redirecting your mind, rebuilding your mind, reorienting your mind in present time to where you are today, not to where you were ten years ago or where you were when you were five years old, so that you should have the energy and freedom now to move with life. Whereas before, you just don’t seem to have that energy and freedom. You’d like to move in life but you just don’t have the verve to do it. Something’s holding you up. Something’s holding you back. It’s almost like your mind is stuck somewhere back there and stuck with pain, trauma, dilemmas from childhood, adolescence and so forth that haven’t been resolved.

So again, here, working with your past is the path of resolving those issues by becoming aware of them and looking at it objectively, as objectively as you can, until a point where you’re able to learn from them because that’s the value of your experience, is what you learn from it—learned in a positive sense, not just learned to never hate those kind of people or never do that again. It’s learning from your experience. Then your experience ceases to be something you want to avoid or deny, but an asset from your past. Even if it was painful, even if it was costly, it’s now an asset. This is how wisdom is developed in life.

Wisdom isn’t just having beautiful ideas or living beautiful notions of life. Wisdom is what you have learned that is beneficial, mostly from making mistakes and other people’s mistakes. So avoiding your mistakes is not the path of wisdom. Any spiritual teaching that is worth anything is always going to take you back into your past to gain that wisdom. And the wisdom is obvious. It’s not like you have to be philosophically oriented to get it. It’s just obvious what that situation taught you about life.

So unresolved problems from the past will reoccur. Things that happened before that were painful will reoccur in different ways, perhaps. And you have to be able to step back, look at them, assess them and realize, know what you’re looking at, which is possible. 

So the thing about the mind—and one more thing I want to say about the mind here—is our personal mind is very lazy. We all know that. Part of us is very lazy. We’d rather hang out, not do a lot of stuff. But the mind is lazy. Once the mind sets up its pathways of thought, it wants to just hold those pathways. It itself does not have the incentive to learn. The incentive to learn is coming from beyond the mind, into the mind. The mind may need…I need to learn something to survive. Yes, that’s the mind. But to take the mind somewhere else that it hasn’t gone before, that’s coming from a higher place within you.

So your mind is lazy. To work with it, you’re going to have to become its overseer in a beneficial and compassionate way, but a firm way; and you’re going to have to train it to do different things. That’s why we have spiritual practice to train your mind to do something you never did before; or train, even your career, your work, your life, you have to train yourself up to do certain things you never did before. So this requires a position outside the mind to see your mind clearly, and also an engagement with the deeper Intelligence within you, which is what The Way of Knowledge is about, what Steps to Knowledge is about.

So the things in your life that aren’t working, that are unhealthy, that are holding you back, these are areas that you need to work on. They’re not going to go away. There’s no magic pill that’s going to make it all dissolve. God is not going to intervene and take away your suffering, but God will give you the means of resolving your suffering, which is what we’re talking about here today. So there’s a lot of ways to do this.

Certainly to do your historical review, looking for the key elements you think have shaped your life and outlook on life and your feeling about yourself, those are very important. You can do this on your own. You can do it with a therapist, but you can do it on your own. It’s just you map it out and you look at what happened when, how you responded then, how you can look at it now, what you learned from each experience that is beneficial to you. We all have to learn what doesn’t work.

And you don’t learn that just by somebody telling you that it doesn’t work. You have to often learn it by finding out it doesn’t work. So painful experiences are very important to re-evaluate because they’re teaching you lessons about life, things to do, not to do; certain people to be with, not to be with; certain avenues not to go down; certain tendencies in your own mind not to follow. You become more objective for yourself, more discerning, more careful.

So changing the mind is a process of continual focus and reapplication. I really believe in behavioral modification myself. I’ve had to change so much in my long 40-year journey to get where I am today that it’s almost…my former life is…I can remember it, but it’s nothing like where I am today. My mind is nothing like it is today. And that’s not just because I did spiritual practice, because I actually acted upon the things I needed to do that changed my life and the kind of life I had and how I view life and myself.

To build real self-confidence comes from this, not by having new ideas but by actually doing new things and achieving them. So action is very important here. I know a lot of people love insights and love to have moments of insights, but that’s only the beginning. You have to forge a new kind of life, which means you have to forge a different kind of mind based on what you have already. It has to be rebuilt, improved, cleared out, cleansed of old hazards, old painful memories.

So one of the things you could do today in this process is to write down any unhealthy or undermining habits in your life and direction. Just write them down. You don’t have to say what you think they are, or you don’t have to evaluate them, and just write them down so you can look at them. Get them out of your mind and onto something you can look at objectively. And then for each one, write down a possible course of action—a course of action, not just idea—that could counteract and resolve that problem for you now.

You can’t just play mind games with yourself about this. Courses of action are the things that forge, have forged us in the past, can reforge us in the future, creating new pathways of learning and thinking. 

Another important practice here is always know where your mind is going. Wow, that’s a big one. Always know where your mind is going. Most people don’t have a clue where their mind is going. Maybe, ten minutes a day they know where their mind is going. It’s just going, and they’re going with it. Maybe they have to restrain it, maybe they have to not say it, or speak it, act upon it, but this is something you’re going to develop over time and it means you become self-aware in the moment.

Where’s my mind going? It’s a check-in. We have an hourly practice and Steps to Knowledge just to have yourself to kind of check in, to see where you’re at, where your mind is going. And after a while, you become to do that more spontaneously, not all the time, but more frequently, and you have a better sense of the condition of your mind and where it’s going. It’s amazing how you can go through entire days and have no moment of self-awareness. Common.

And so you wonder why people don’t do well in life, why they don’t see hazards that are arising on the horizon, why they don’t respond to problems and needs in their life. I mean, they’re just not even paying attention to what’s going on inside of them or in life. 

So here’s a quote from Relationships and Higher Purpose, which is an important book in the New Message teaching, related to Steps to Knowledge:

As your mind becomes more simple and direct, and therefore more powerful, Knowledge begins to shine through, for it is the Light you carry within you.

More simple, more direct. You’re not seeking greater complexity of the mind—even if you have, deal with very complex issues, more simplicity in how, from where you see things and how you just make your decisions. And this gives you the opportunity to experience the light of Knowledge within you, which at certain points, will show things to you or say things to you, that will be very clear and defining about what you need to do.

The other thing is knowing your basic nature. Very simply, these are just a couple of parameters; there are more than I have listed here. One is, are you more social or less social by nature? This is by your nature now. And one is certainly not better than the other. It’s just, are you more social or less social? You’ll fall somewhere on either of those. Are you independent in your thinking or more group-oriented in your thinking? You think independently, or you tend to think with others or with a group? Nothing good or bad about it, it’s just how you are. But it’s just important to know how you are. 

Are you thought-oriented, feeling-oriented or action-oriented? What’s the best way that you experience things, either through thought, through feeling or through action? Now, we all have thought, feeling and action, but one of them is probably going to be more dominant than the others. And that’s kind of, you need to know that’s how you generally like to learn or you learn the best. So it’s good to know about yourself. 

And lastly here, we’re regarding change. Do you tend to pause or do you tend to plunge? Like the swimming pool, right?—the cold water, am I going to pause, am I going to plunge? Or dipping in the ocean. It’s good to know that about yourself because if you’re hesitant, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong here, it’s just knowing your basic tendencies. Or do you tend to plunge? Well, plunging often has more hazards than pausing. Sometimes pausing has more hazards than plunging.

If your house is on fire, you don’t want to pause, right? If your car is going off the road, you don’t want to pause. So pausing has great hazards, too, as does plunging. 

So I want to say, then, regarding these practices, go deep but not too deep, because you have a lot of things you have to do. This is only…working with the mind is an important element, maybe a key element in what you need to attend to. But you also need to attend your outer life. You’re living in a changing world which could change your income, the work you do, where you can live, social problems that are going to arise around you, lots of different things.

So you have to assess your environment, like all intelligent animals in nature are constantly assessing your environment, except people. People just go ahead with their plan and their program, not assessing their environment. So they run into lots of problems they didn’t foresee. 

So this leads to a final passage I’d like to read to you. This is…I wrote this, my final note:

The world is radically changing and you were sent here to play a part that Knowledge is holding for you, waiting for you to be ready. Your task now is to become ready. But you will need great assistance both from others and from Higher levels to do this.

So to complete my part of our session this morning, I’d like to read this other quote, which I think is very beautiful. It’s from Living the Way of Knowledge, one of the books of the New Message that I have written and that is very important.

The Spirit knows. The mind thinks. And the body acts. When they are brought together, greatness begins to be revealed in the world. Your Ancient Home begins to be experienced here. A life has come alive. A mind becomes illuminated. A body is able to express and to communicate a greater and more pervasive reality. This is what you are working towards and for. And this is why your work in the world today is important.

[Living The Way of Knowledge, Chapter 5: The Pillar of Work

I’ll stop for now with that thought.

Tyyne:  Hi, everyone again. Thank you so much, Marshall, for sharing all of those deep practices. And now, we’d like to hear from Reed.

Reed: Hey, everyone. Good to be with you. Thank you, Marshall, for all of that—a lot to think about there, and I’d like to add a couple of my thoughts and insights and a little bit of my wisdom from this journey that I’ve been walking with Marshall. I want to just call out one thing Marshall said right at the end, which was: Go deep, but not too deep. And this is part of the wisdom training of being engaged in a life of purpose and calling, and not just spiritual inquiry for its own sake. This is not an adventure in consciousness. This is a journey into service in the world according to one’s nature and design, and how Knowledge is moving us to participate with others in service to our world. So we’ll talk more about that over time, but go deep, but not too deep. Don’t forget that.

Like I said, you know, all of what Marshall has presented, all of what I might share is based on, not just spirituality for its own sake, but a life engaged in calling, responding to a calling within oneself, preparing to enter into a specific purpose, with specific people, doing specific things, in service to the world, or to, I’m sorry, not just the whole world, but even just individuals in the world. And this implies direction, movement, relationship, participation, and yes, exhaustion and challenges.

And so the insights we have to offer are related to this kind of journey. Outside of that kind of journey, if it’s just you, the self, asking questions about your existence and striving internally and within your own small sphere for that purpose calling and service, it’s going to be something closer to confusion, ambivalence, stagnation, self-preoccupation—ah yes, but with self-improvement and self-discovery. And in that kind of a scenario, the wisdom we might offer is not going to make a lot of sense and actually might be somewhat counterproductive, at least what I’m going to share with you now which is actually a return to self, which is very important for those engaged in that life of purpose and calling. 

And so my basic message that I’d like to share with you is the key important approach of: Staying in relationship with your whole self.

And here I would like to introduce a very important contradiction: Who you are is not your mind, but your mind is also who you are. Take a moment to feel that out for yourself. Who you are is not your mind, but your mind is also who you are. 

And this strikes at the vital importance of staying in touch with your whole self, as you even respond to the realities of Knowledge within, the Greater Community beyond, the needs of the world; even as you find potentially what might be your purpose and engage with it and see where it takes you. 

There is a risk, actually a very specific risk, in The Way of Knowledge, to separating internally from the personal side, which, yes, as it’s been described, is inconsistent, is childish, is fearful, right? But there is a really, really important thing here, which is to not internally separate from that self and divorce yourself from it, to silence its voice in your life and to essentially suppress or stuff down all of its communications, needs—some of which are very authentic—because that’ll all come back to bite you later on in life. 

And so I want to share that really important insight with you. And here I’d like to share a passage from the New Message: 

You see your mind and body are like the house, and Knowledge is like the garden. So you go out in the garden to grow your food and you bring it back into the house. You cannot sit in the house saying, “Where’s the food? Where’s the food?” No food arrives. So you look all over the house and you decide, “Let’s change the house.” But the garden is outside. You must bring the food in.

And here I would add, yes, and: There’s what feeds you. But then there’s where you actually live. 

And so that’s the antidote to that quote, is you can’t go live in the garden. You can’t go live in the garden of Knowledge and spiritual insight and the inspirations of higher calling and higher relationships only. You come back to yourself. 

And this is where I come back to that contradiction: Who you are is not your mind, but your mind is also who you are. 

So at a higher sense, of course, our mind is not who we are, but in a lived sense, it very much is who we are. It is who we are being. When you’re not with Knowledge, you’re living in your mind, right? 

And so let’s be honest, how often are we not with Knowledge? Probably like 99.8, maybe 9, percent of the time. So we are in our thoughts, in our mind. And so that’s the functional truth. And to stay healthy in that lived experience is really important as you go forward. 

And I think there’s an inherent risk in the New Message and in The Way of Knowledge of accidentally deprecating the mind, of de-appreciating, devaluing it as lesser, fearful, inconsistent—attributes go on, right?—and then elevating the higher Self or the higher Mind of Knowledge. 

But the truth is you’re not going to be living in that higher Self, that higher Mind very often. You’re going to be living down here. And so you need to be improving the house and serving its needs and listening to what it’s telling you even as you might strive for something higher. 

And so neglect the mind at your own peril. Listen to it. Meet its needs. And maintain it well. This is advice I would give. And don’t internally separate for the sake of spirituality. Don’t abandon yourself for spiritual ends. Really important. 

So with that, I’d like to offer some kind of insights that stem from this. In my experience, it’s been very important to actively listen to my experience for signs of what is really happening within me, to not silence that internal voice or divorce myself from it. And so as you listen to yourself, you’re going to be hearing and feeling a lot of different things. And some of that is difficult. It’s not all the good stuff. But it’s really important to continue to listen to that because that difficult stuff has information, vital signs as to the true state of your mental and physical well-being, and the relationship between your mind and body into the environment of others, of the world, of possessions, of other things. 

And so a lot of what establishes, I believe, a healthy mind is managing the relationships the mind has out beyond itself, those energetic dynamics that pull energy from the mind or provide energy to the mind; and so the mind can get into very unhealthy dynamics. 

And so often you’ll hear the mind express communications of depression or anxiety or frustration or exhaustion. Super important to listen to that. That’s information. That’s vital, those are vital signs as to the true state of your being as a human, as a lived human in this world. So very important to live—I’m sorry—to listen to that.

And with that, I’d like to offer this kind of maxim you might consider: Instead of fighting it out with yourself, go find out with yourself. Find out instead of fight it out. Instead of grappling with the mind and its negative thinking and its tendencies—and again, deprecating that, reaching for Knowledge—go face that. Go turn to face yourself and listen and see what the mind is telling you. 

Also important there, though, is that often what it appears to be is not what it really is. It is usually about something else. You are rarely upset for the reasons that you think. And this is why, again, [it] starts with listening to oneself. But it also leans on this key attribute of studenthood in the Way of Knowledge, which is observation, establishing a point in your experience from which you can observe the mind. 

And I’ll be just totally honest. This has been absolutely vital for me to stay in the saddle and not be thrown off that saddle with great injury. And so I do take time to map out my mind, to see what’s really going on inside of it. I take those personal retreats—I spend those evenings and afternoons and I encourage you to do so as well—and what this has given me, which I would invite you to consider if you need as well, are the abilities to listen to myself while I am speaking to someone else. 

So I can literally watch my words as they go out of my mouth. And I can think about them, even as I’m saying them. And this is really important. Best is if you can think about them before you even utter them and potentially adjust them before they leave your mouth. That’s level two. That’s also good. 

But even if you’re communicating and expressing yourself, can you watch that flow of communication? Can you consider: What is it that I’m really trying to express here? Where am I coming from in saying all of this? 

This is the result of establishing a point from which you can observe the mind instead of just be the mind, be enveloped by it. Can you watch your emotional reactions as they are literally taking place? Can you analyze them afterwards, not critically, but with curiosity to understand what was really going on with me in that moment?

And then, can you take the time, are you willing to take the time, to sit down and write those things down, transferring them from the more reactive part of the brain to the more executive part of the brain? 

[A] really important activity is to actually write out felt experiences, to take them out of that vague emotional reactive space and put them into the cognitive space, the space that has concepts and deliberate action associated with it. So this is another thing I wanted to contribute to you, is the importance of becoming the observer in your experience. 

Another thing, also important, is finding ways of constructively expressing what is actually in your experience. Self-expression, I believe, is vital for a healthy mind. Even if it’s a difficult thing, even if it seems small and petty, there’s something behind it that’s motivating your mind to want that, to think that, to pursue that. So listen, which requires some observation. 

Second, look for the evidence in that communication, what’s really happening beneath the surface. It’s often not what it appears to be. And then third, is there a constructive way of expressing that? 

Because the mind has to be decompressed, especially if you live that purpose-calling-service life with all of that participation, relationship, exhaustion, challenges. The mind is going to be accruing a lot of detritus from that activity in the world. It’s not an easy thing to be living as a person of that, of those attributes in a world like we have today. 

And so the mind is going to be generating some of that detritus. You have to be purging that detritus. You have to be finding out what it is. Some of it’s very important. “There’s gems in the rough,” as the saying goes. And so you have to go into that graveyard and find those precious items that are still buried, that are actually a part of what you need to bring out to the forefront of your life and they’re back there in those difficult experiences. And so there is this work. 

To me, this is a big piece of the inner work. But it’s not inner work, again, that kind of treats the mind like a problem child, like something to be managed only. I think there is some management. But again, I would counsel you—this is the antidote—to avoiding that dynamic of, you know, manager/subordinate, master/slave. 

This is a marriage of minds, as Marshall said. And so how do you have a healthy marriage? Well, one mind really can’t be the dominant, the dominating presence over the other. There is a service dynamic. You know, the mind is meant to serve; personal mind, the knowing Mind; that’s true. 

But the truth is, we are the personal mind. And you will be that tomorrow and the day after. And that is a vital partnership with the knowing Mind. And that is also, even the more you may become like Knowledge, the more you unite with Knowledge—if that ever happens as your studenthood deepens, which may or may not happen—even then, it becomes all the more important. 

The mind is an even more vital partner. Its capability to sabotage the whole process is even greater. And, you know, there’s an adage that the personal mind bats last, in the baseball analogy, right? So like, who’s up in the batting rotation? Well, the personal mind bats last. So don’t undermine the personal mind. Otherwise, it will have its way with the game. And this is wisdom I’ve gained from my own personal experience and in relationship with others. So I think that’s really important. 

And then last, before I end—you’ve heard me say it many times, you’ve heard Marshall say it today, but I think it’s absolutely vital—you have to get your life moving. If your life is stagnant, all of this wisdom, all of these insights will not find healthy application that really makes a difference for you. So purpose and calling and service means that you’re now moving in concert with other forces in the world. It is a Greater Coordination. It’s not just you, yourself, your spiritual awakening. 

And so if you’re not moving in concert with life itself and those elements of life you’re intrinsically connected to, you’re going to start to feel really messed up. You’re not going to feel good. And your mind is going to be barking at you and your spiritual side is going to be doing the same in its own way. And it’s going to cause upset and turmoil. 

And in some ways, getting moving is the key. They say in physical exercise, movement is magic for the body. The body, its tissues, its muscles, its joints: they need to move. They’re made to move. 

Well, the same, I would say, is also true for the mind. The mind needs movement. It needs to see evidence of itself, the mental, personal self, moving in concert with life.

Because then it will sense that it can take its place in service to that greater movement instead of having to claim that movement, generate it from scratch, and really kind of take control of the process—which that’s a whole other conversation, what that’s like. So movement is magic for the mind. 

So I wanted to contribute these insights to you that stem from living a life of internal calling, purpose in the world, service with others. I’m hardly a master of any. I’m simply a participant in that whole. And so this is some of the wisdom I’d like to offer on the relationship that you can have with your mind in a healthy way. So thank you. Good to be with you all this morning.

Tyyne: Wow, thank you so much, both to Marshall and to Reed, given all that you’ve shared for us to be with regarding our minds. So important to be with ourselves, to be an observer of ourselves and to take note of what we might be experiencing and doing the work to manage our minds while being willing to see ourselves clearly, but with compassion as well. I loved hearing you say, “Get your life moving.” 

We’re now going to transition to the live broadcast chat, which is linked in the description below, or if you have it already saved somehow. So it’s in the description below in the YouTube broadcast. And we’ll be considering two questions. And those questions are:

What do you feel is the greatest area of need in working with your mind? 

And the second question is: 

Do you currently maintain any mind management practices? If so, what are these? What effect or benefit for you have these practices had?

So I am going to pop over to the live broadcast chat, and I will see you all there.

Tyyne: Hi. Hi, everybody. Thank you for participating in the chat today and we are now back in the YouTube channel and we’re going to have some time with Marshall as we kind of look at what all of you have shared in the chat today. 

So this first comment is from alenjoshy and he’s talking about practices: “Knowing where the mind is going, which means to be present. Only contemplate things, issues, self-doubt later. Second, being in the Watchtower in several situations. Third, attempting to use the wisdom from past experiences, no guarantees, and fourth, being objective about people and situations, listing fears and preferences.” 

And that’s in response to the first question that was…What do you feel is the greatest area of need in working with your mind? And that was from alenjoshy. 

Marshall: Good question. Well it depends on your needs at the moment. I mean, your mind is in life, in action, with people, with circumstances. So these practices that you mentioned are valuable if you know how to use them and when to use them. You can’t practice them all the time. But if you can call them up in the moment, if you can think of them or remember them, then they could be useful in the moment. 

I mean you’re using the mind here as a window. And so it’s very valuable to do that. And the more you do that, the more you can click into a present state of mind in a situation and not be self-preoccupied. So these practices are meant to be particularly used in need, but you could practice all the time just clicking in and out of these different states. I find this very important when to stop myself and really pay attention to someone or something is going on in my midst, and try to just really see what I’m seeing. 

And there are situations that are very important to do that, certainly. So these practices come into use when you need them, but you can also practice them freely, just so you have the ability to call them forth and you know how to use them in the moment. So there’s what you practice on your own, there’s what you use out in life. And these are all, many of them are very valuable to use out in life. 

Tyyne: Okay. This next is from Marc. And he’s responding to the first question as well, which is: What do you feel is the greatest area of need in working with your mind? And Marc says, “An area I still need to work on is being able to listen. This aspect has been my greatest revelation when discovering the New Message and has always been a challenge. Being able to still the mind while moving and listening. I think I’m better at the reflective part, but I really feel that being able to listen as I speak, as I move, is an area I would benefit the most from.”

Marshall: Well, Marc, that’s really good. I think to be able to listen, you have to be able to pay attention. So paying attention is probably the first step. And then listening is the second step. I mean, if you’re not listening then, or you’re not aware in the moment, then it’s really hard to do these things. So I think listening to yourself talking to people is really valuable because you have a little truth meter within yourself. 

Am I staying on purpose here? Am I saying what I need to say? Do I know what I’m saying? Or am I just talking? Do I need to pause and think about something before I say something? You can always say in conversation, let me think about that. Or I’m not sure. Or I don’t have anything to say about that right now. So you don’t always have to have an answer if somebody asks you a question. Or sometimes it’s not a good question or it’s a loaded question or it’s a deceitful question. 

So I think it’s always good if you’re in conversation with someone or being interviewed that you want to really consider the question in front of you as to how you’re going to approach it. But being present is the most important thing. Then you can decide whether you’re going to listen or not listen, whether you’re going to apply some kind of practice or just be present to the situation. And some situations are hazardous. So you have to be ready to act regarding them. 

So I’ve calculated I’ve been in 35 countries. So I’ve been in these countries. We often go to places that are backstreets and simple life and some of them may be hazardous. Here we’re standing out as Westerners with myself and my family in the backstreets of a foreign city, foreign third world city. So you have to really be aware of what’s around you and know when not to go down that certain street. Can I go down the street? Yes or no. Should I go down the street? Yes or no. So you’re really paying attention. You’re navigating now. You’re not thinking about things. You’re not making decisions except navigation. So it depends on where you’re at and what you’re dealing with. That you can call forth these various practices to support you. 

Tyyne: Thank you. This is from Mellany and she says, “Maintaining focus on what really matters. Being aware and careful, regarding what information and potential influences that I expose my mind to, and recognizing its need for rest and to take time to integrate any significant learning and experiences.” 

Marshall: Well, that’s a whole host of things. There are different components to that. That’s maybe fine when you’re alone and you want to enter a certain state of self-awareness or you want to consider a thought or a problem. When you’re out in the world that’s very distracting. So when I’m out in the world I’m paying attention to the world, and particularly in certain situations. 

So I think being more present to the environment, and secondarily to yourself…but it’s a balance. And when I’m really looking at something, I’m not paying attention to myself. I’m just looking and listening. I need to know what’s happening around me. I want to witness something. So that’s looking without thinking. Sometimes you have to look and then you have to think, “Well, what is going on here or should I respond to this?” So that’s looking and thinking. 

So there’s different kinds of ways you could do this depending on what you’re doing. I think the outer practices are really important because we have so many opportunities to use them to be still and listen to others, to be still and observe others, and save your inner exploratory work for when you’re home alone or you have time and space to do that. But out in the world you should be all ears—all looking. And you’ll see things that you wouldn’t see otherwise and you’ll see things that most people don’t see. And you’ll tune yourself to dealing in a world that’s becoming ever more frantic, ever more tense, ever more problematic. 

I notice in driving and traffic people don’t drive the way they used to. They’re much more aggressive, much more rude and much more self preoccupied. Of course it depends where you’re living. And assessing your environment is really important. So sometimes when I’m out, I’m more assessing my environment than I am dealing with any internal state.

Tyyne: Okay. Thank you. Yeah. This is from Tariq. And he says, “The greatest need, the greatest area of need in working with my mind is discerning my thoughts and emotions from the movement of Knowledge.”

Marshall: Well, I will say that most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, you don’t know the movement of Knowledge. You’re not aware of Knowledge all the time. But you bring forth from what you have learned from Knowledge or from your own wisdom and others’ wisdom how to deal with things in the moment. So Knowledge is in the background. And to be open to it, speaking to you is important. But Knowledge is too big for you to be aware of. 

So we’re aware of the impact of Knowledge or the voice of Knowledge or the message of…What Knowledge is, it’s beyond your awareness. So to be aware of what may be your deeper experience, that is important. But we don’t really know how much is your experience, or what Knowledge is giving you. There’s a zone where you can’t really be sure of what you’re looking at. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re being present to it. 

We like to make levels of the mind and have these distinctions. But I think functionally that’s not so important. You have your surface mind, your surface mental activities and you have your deeper senses. Some of them are very deep and some of them are not very deep. But how deep are they? Who knows? Just what are they and what do they account for? 

I’ve gone long periods without experiencing what was clearly Knowledge. But it doesn’t mean I was not being fed insight or certain things discreetly from Knowledge. So you’re not going to be aware of the deeper realms of your mind at all times. Certainly. If you’re out in the world, you need to be at the surface. If you’re not, you’ll drive off the road. You never get a handle on Knowledge. But that you’re available to it and can receive it whether you experience the Presence or not, that’s important. 

So our Knowledge represents your eternal nature, which is beyond the thresholds of physical life. It’s within physical life to a certain extent, but beyond the threshold of physical life. So treat it as being more mysterious than concrete. 

Tyyne: Okay. So the students on the chat were talking about responding to the question about what types of practices. Do you currently maintain any mind management practices? And there were a few comments about engaging in the hourlies, deep breathing, meditation. Is there anything you could expand on regarding that, Marshall? 

Marshall: Well, with hourlies, sometimes I go still and sometimes I’m inner listening and sometimes I’m contemplating something. I’m taking the opportunity to do a number of different things, depending on what I need in the moment. But often just being still, being silent, and letting everything quiet down: that’s usually the need, but sometimes I use those practices for other purposes. So practices become, as you become more ingrained, as they become more ingrained in you, you tend to call upon them more spontaneously in the moment, as well as having a formal practice time. Like listening to the mind. I pay attention to my mind. I can never say always, but quite a bit. 

Tyyne: Thank you. 

Marshall: And as I listen to it, I sometimes let it be what it is, and sometimes I’ll reconnect it if it’s going where I don’t want it to go. I’ll give it something more important to think about. 

Tyyne: Okay. Another student, Nasim, mentions the practice of spiritual retreat that Reed said is also a very effective mind managing practice. “Taking care of not letting all Pillars go to hell,” as he said. “I like to work on being able to be more present to the condition of my Pillars of my life.” 

Marshall: Well, I think being more present to the condition of your Pillars is kind of a daily thing. Go on a retreat, I would think to get deeper, either deeper in meditation or to walk around a certain need or problem in your life, or more than one perhaps. It’s more of going, often doing special work with yourself, or going to take an opportunity to deepen the well that you go into in your practice. So sometimes spiritual retreat is for practical needs, and sometimes it is for deeper quiet, deeper stillness, things like this. 

Whenever you’re facing something really difficult and you’re not doing very well with it, well, that might take a day of retreat or longer to spend all your focus on that. Is there anything you need to know about this situation? How should I perceive this situation? How is it affecting me? Is it my problem or someone else’s problem? These are very good questions to ask and things of that nature. 

I think when you’re in the world, it’s time to be with the world. When you’re not in the world, it’s time to be with…it can be time to deal with your own four Pillars or with aspects of your inner life. They are all practice; they’re all good practice that’s useful in different arenas at different times. So it’s good to have a palette of practices that are called upon appropriately in certain situations. 

Tyyne: Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to say or respond to more, Marshall? 

Marshall: Well, I’ve said what I can say on those topics. I think in terms of what I presented this morning, it presents certain challenges. How to do some of these exercises, which I didn’t go into in great detail, but we have a lot to attend to. We have to attend to our own nature, our own mind management, the Pillars of our life, our relationships, our work, our health, and our spiritual development, like the four legs of a table. You can’t abandon all of them for one for very long, and you should always be maintaining them as best you can, given your circumstances, so that they could uphold your life.

Because what’s going to make you crash and burn is the Pillar you haven’t been working on for a long time. That can be a real sudden problem when you fall out of the sky one day. So there’s a lot to pay attention to that is more practical in nature than it is esoteric or deep and spiritual. I think the quietness and the stillness are so important to attuning your mind to be able to receive inner guidance when you need it, which may not be when you’re asking for it.

In fact, I would have to say from my experience that asking for guidance is more like putting in a request with the understanding that it will be responded to when I need the response and I’m ready to hear it. So a lot of what I may request, I don’t get a response to, but I understand why that’s the case. Because they may be asking for more than I’m ready to deal with, or I may not be asking with enough incentive for the truth to really ask for it honestly. It’s like I’m testing the waters, or I just like to hear what Knowledge has to say. 

So we don’t in the moment know exactly how authentic and genuine our requests are, so I always make a note that this may not be responded to for some time…even years. I don’t need to tell Knowledge what I need, but it is good that I express what I need to Knowledge. Knowledge is waiting for me to hit a juncture or turning point where something can be given to me that will alter or change the course of my life, or bring a greater resolution to the thing that I’m dealing with, which I may not fully understand. But it’s good for me to ask the question because I know I’m asking the question, which is me expressing a need or desire. I’m trying to initiate contact, but it may not happen when I want it to. 

There’s an old gospel song, it’s titled, God may not come when you want Him, but He’s right on time. So I thought it was interesting about that. We don’t even carry out the things we know to do, so to ask to know more may be fruitless and inappropriate. Are we really carrying out what we know to do that we already know to do? Do we keep a record of what we think we know to do or felt we know to do? And are we working on those things, or we just want to know more? Or go somewhere else, deal with something else in life, which isn’t really the thing in front of us to deal with?

So I think you become more mature as a questioner over time, where you realize that am I really dealing with a question I need to deal with, and how ready am I to deal with it? And I’ll put forth a request, but with the understanding that I may not know enough or be ready enough to address it. Like asking for your higher purpose in life, which may not be revealed to you for years, and only if you were to make major progress, which you can’t even see, you don’t even know what that progress is. So I don’t ask those kind of questions. 

We’re still trying to heal the mind. We’re still trying to work out, regain the lost energy from our past, which is one of the things I talked about today. I mean, so much energy got held up from our past events that we didn’t even have our full…we can’t even fill our fuel tank with energy. So going back through the past is really important for insight, wisdom and to free up energy. Otherwise, we’re trying to forge ahead, dragging behind us a lot of unfulfilled, unresolved issues. It’s like pulling a sack of weights behind you as you’re trying to move forward in life. So there’s a lot of inner work to do, and there’s a lot of outer work to do. And you do the best you can to try to work in both of those arenas as you go through your daily requirements. 

My job…I can’t compare my life to yours because my task is really enormous, and I had to move in leaps and bounds—not all at once, but episodically. So I had to do major stuff, which you may not have to do. So I can’t say, well, my journey is your journey. But nonetheless, the dynamics of that journey still hold, probably hold the same in terms of how this whole thing works. 

So, so much we have to take care of today. There’s so much we have to resolve today. And then you can put out requests to get help with bigger things. That’s my long answer to that. 

Tyyne: Thank you. Yeah.

Marshall: I think working with your mind is an ongoing thing. Listening to your mind, being aware of where your mind is going—it’s an ongoing thing. But when you’re driving a car in traffic, you may not want to focus on that practice. And so that’s a time for when you have the time and space to engage with that, just when you’re when you’re working at home, preparing a meal, listening to your experience. So many opportunities to practice that when you’re not out in traffic. So, yeah. I think it’s a great practice myself. 

So many times I’ve found, wow, I just spent five hours today I had no idea where I was at any moment in that time. Damn, now that’s a problem. You have no idea where you were. And you’re out there driving cars, interacting with people, doing things, being impacted and you had no idea where you were? It’s like, that’s scary. I mean, it’s a wonder we just haven’t gotten wiped out already. 

So this is a kind of practice that you really need to employ. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. It doesn’t take special circumstances, necessarily. Just don’t do it while you’re driving your car in traffic. You need to pay attention. 

So these practices work their way in your life. You just have to remember to do them. So you can put five different practices I want to practice as I go forward, put it on your refrigerator in big letters, and just keep reminding yourself to practice them. You need a lot of reinforcement. You’ll forget. Wow, a week went by and you didn’t do any of them. Where was I? Knowledge is with me; where am I? I didn’t even know where I was. 

So choose a set of practices you want to instill and make it very visible to you—you’re seeing it every day as a reminder—and just see how much you can engage with them appropriately in whatever situation you’re in. That would be a good recommendation. 

Tyyne: Okay. 

Marshall: I’d be very challenged in my life right now by bigger things I won’t even talk about. So if I’m not developing my acuity, I have to develop my acuity. I mean, so, and the other thing to do, I want to say this. It’s really important to rest the mind that you have an activity that engages the mind, but in a way that’s unrelated to anything else, like working in your garden or doing a simple thing you enjoy to do that’s good for you. It’s mindful. It’s really helpful because the mind may be active, but it’s resting. It’s not problem solving a plethora of things. It’s just working on one thing. Very good to have some kind of hobby or thing that is unrelated to anything else you do that you do because it gives you simple pleasure to do it. I play music. It’s simple pleasure for me. It’s work the way I play. I play difficult things, but boy, I’m not thinking about anything else. So that’s restful to the mind. 

Gazing is beautiful for the mind, gazing out the window, no thoughts, gazing. Very healthy for the mind. Resting your body is healthy for the mind. If you’re moving all the time, that’s not healthy for your body. You’re not thinking all the time. That’s not healthy for your mind. 

So these are kind of health practices that you begin to weave into your experience. You need a lot of reminders to do it because no one in your environment is probably reminding you to do it. So you have to remind yourself to do these things. And as you do that, they begin to become more habit forming. And you want good habits, and you replace old habits with good habits. That’s the best thing that I’ve seen to work in replacing old habits. I don’t live at all the way I used to live. So that’s lots of change of habits. And lots of requirements in life have changed me too. 

So you can only do so much for yourself. You need pressures from the outside to do greater things. I’d never be in my position on my own. So welcome those challenges when they come. They will help you grow and develop beyond what you can do for yourself. 

Tyyne: Oh, beautiful, Marshall. Yeah. Yes, managing our mind. And one thing that has come to my mind while you were talking is practice makes permanent. And you’ve spoken about that before. There’s so many ways we can practice either consciously or unconsciously throughout our day. Yeah. 

So wonderful that all of you could be here for this, for Marshall and Reed and for the chat, and then this lovely end piece where Marshall speaks more deeply on some of your comments. So we’re going to wrap up today. But I want to let you know that if you’re new or would like to explore the teachings further, we invite you to create an account on the Worldwide Community site. And that’s at community.newmessage.org. 

And there are some upcoming events we’d like to invite you to. And we’ve got a…We’ve got a, oh, yes, the resources for further study. Working with the Mind from Wisdom from the Greater Community, Volume six; Harmful Influences, Building the Foundation for a New Life, Volume two; Interdependence from Love and Relationship, Volume two; The Ship, Building the Foundation for a New Life, from that same text, Volume two and The Still Mind, Deepening your Spiritual Practice [Volume 3]. They are all really wonderful, deep teachings to be with that will help support building a healthy relationship with the mind. 

And then upcoming events. I think we have a slide for that. Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, in the next week to coming months, the Tuesday World Meditation will happen this Tuesday, June 18th at 7 p.m. It’s a place to come and share in stillness practice with others from around the world. It’s a lovely time to practice stillness. 

And then the Studenthood Chat will take place—the next one—June 22nd at 9 a.m. And this is part of a two-month educational series, educational sessions, basically, with chats, teachings, on learning and living the New Message in our lives. 

And then a New Message teaching will be released live on July 6th. That’s coming up. And these are releasings of teachings from the New Message that have never been released before. They are going into the public for the very first time. And it’s live on the New Message YouTube channel the first Saturday of the month. 

And then the next live stream from Marshall will be in August, August 17th. And like today, we’ll hear from Marshall, and he will speak on another important topic and we’ll have the opportunity to discuss this together as well. 

So, I want to thank you all. Also, I want to thank you all who are financially supporting the New Message. And for those not financially supporting The Society at this time, please do consider giving at a level that’s appropriate for you, given your own Pillar of providership and work. This is a real significant way for you to help The Society, Marshall, Patricia and Reed meet the world’s needs for all that the New Message and the Allies bring to the world and to each of us individually to financially support The Society in that endeavor. 

It’s a critical time. It’s a lot of work. I see how much time, energy and consideration go into this by Marshall, Patricia and Reed. So, please do consider supporting the New Message and The Society. This is our opportunity to put resources, our resources behind and under this new phase of the work. So, please go to NewMessage.org/donate to contribute your financial support to this critical mission. 

And if you have any questions, please just email us at society@NewMessage.org. And I’m glad to answer any questions you might have about donating. 

So thank you again to Marshall for your in-depth teaching today, and Reed for sharing all that you did as well, and for each of you for participating in this great time of livestream from Marshall. So, thank you all and I look forward to seeing you at the events to come. Take care.