Confabulation of Life
Tuesday 20 Dec 2016
Living life as a practicing hypnotherapist allows a unique view into the human condition. The world of the subconscious and conditioning becomes very visible and the way that it impacts our lives as human beings is very compelling.
Over the past few years I have developed (or confabulated) a new modality that I call “Stillness Healing”. It is a practice that allows me to inculcate into the consciousness of my clients a deep understanding of stillness. My intention is for them to eventually see how it works and how it can be of benefit to them. When stillness of mind is known and its quality becomes something you can both know intellectually and feel emotionally, it becomes a real resource to someone! It can be used to enhance and build our creative life or conversely it can be used to penetrate deep into our being and allow us to let go!
Still consciousness is the foundation of everything that exists. It is, what makes every condition we can know, whether it is mental or physical. (As an aside the Buddha taught that Mind or mental conditions come before the physical.) To have this knowledge in mind, beyond any doubt, takes determined practice and reflection. It develops insight and wisdom in order to understand what the stillness itself means. When a being has this knowledge to a level where it can be used as a datum or first filter in one’s life, one starts to see the world, as the Buddha taught, “With the Right View”! The stillness literally surrounds every condition that is apparent and at the same time it shows the way to its transcendence. Every condition in life comes out of and paradoxically finishes in stillness.
It follows that when stillness is present with the conditions of life, it will offer a very pure and truthful reflection. This is so because any reflection rooted in stillness is coming from the present moment and therefore is very close to truth. Stillness is there all the time! Normally our view is seen from the conditions of our mind. Generally we are lost in what we are associating with, whether it is in the physical world or in our mental world. Further, our understanding of all this and the way that it affects us, is driven from the way that we grasp onto our past and what our expectations of the future may be. This conditional reflection forms our stream of consciousness from past to future, and will always be blurred over the moment. The movement makes it fuzzy and unresolved with the result that stillness is lost. The present moment is never clear and sharp with just this mind stream working to control our beliefs and opinions, and the reality and truth of things gets hidden. However with practice the mind stream can be seen coming out of the stillness. Stillness becomes the datum for us to filter truth, which will allow reality to be seen.
When we start to see the conditions of our life from the stillness, then we have the right perspective to start and see the confabulation process that happens inside our minds. We start to see how we create the ideas and belief structures of who we are. We also start to see how we, together the world and the people in it along with all the phenomena that forms, is present to work and reflect a vision of who we condition ourselves to be. This confabulation process can never be underestimated. We make our own stories and create the world and our lives inside our confabulated framework. It is a process that has been feeding back into the present moment since the beginning of time. These feedback loops are written into the conscious field of the Universe, coming and going, always present. They are apparent and real in the moment, but at the same time transcendent and ethereal, because the present moment that collects the feedback is all that there is. It is the beginning and end of time and space. The conditions feedback into the moment incessantly until the blur we experience becomes real for us.
I have experienced this confabulation process in others when, in the course of my work, I plant a suggestion into the subconscious mind of one of my clients. Then when I see them to get feedback on the session, they will very happily and truthfully explain how they came across that idea. There explanation does not usually realise that I planted the idea in their mind. They will tell their story about it in their own confabulated way that has nothing to do with me. 
The view or opinion or belief has gone in seamlessly. This experience has allowed me to be more aware of the way I confabulate my own life and how I receive all my views and opinions from the information and feedback I receive from the world and people around me. Especially from those that are influential. This is the way we are conditioned and it is ubiquitous. No one misses out. This is the way we are made. It all comes from what is written into the space of the universal background. It is present and it is always changing. When this becomes clear for us to see, the Buddha’s path becomes easier to see.
The Buddha explained how the enlightenment he realised goes beyond and transcends the “Mundane” mind stream. It goes beyond even the pure stillness that easily penetrates the mind stream. Then as the still consciousness itself settles further he explained how it finishes in what he called Cessation. He called this knowledge Supra Mundane. A practitioner will need to know what stillness is beyond any doubt to fully appreciate the experience of Cessation. This experience literally ends any mental or physical feedback into the world because the Universe has collapsed totally into the mind of that practitioner. The world continues but the practitioner will know that when their body dies, in its due course, there will be no more rebirths, no more confabulations. They will experience what the Buddha called Extinguishment! This is the pure peace of enlightenment.
