The following video ‘Talking about all things Inside-Out’ is a conversation with my good friend and colleague Dr. Wayne Buckhanan from the US.
I often use the ‘Iceberg Model – Thinking in Systems’ to illustrate the Deeper Mind as another level of consciousness. The conversation came about through Wayne’s curiosity to find out more about the Deeper Mind and how the model works.
Wayne and I are both trainers in the cognitive behavioural fields of Neuro-Semantics and Neuro-Linguist Programming. Both of these fields work with the mind-body-emotion system of how we create meanings, how we embody these meanings, and then think, behave and act through these embodied meanings.
The premise working at this level is to engage with and enrich the quality, robustness and scope of perception of the meanings that we hold about our world and our circumstances. This in turn is to provider us with greater flexibility and adaptability to respond to the events in our lives. Furthermore, enhance our ability to self-lead, relate to others, lead others, solve problems, etc.
Essentially, the behaviours that we display, decisions that we make and the actions that we take are an observable expression of our internal and embodied reality. The idea here is, that by enriching our internal reality, we influence our behaviours, our decisions and our actions.
“An ego mind without knowledge of universal wisdom, can be a dangerous weapon!”
Mike Schwarzer
As I began to see our deeper nature over the last few years, I also noticed that engaging at an intellectual level was only half of the equation and that it had its limitations.
As I see it, the intellectual mind, or Little Mind, lacks an innate BS detector. A quality control system that naturally screens our thinking. Not just for its usefulness but also for its ecology in terms of how it serves the health and wellbeing of the individual, their community as well as the environment they live and work in.
It is limited as it largely relies on the quality and scope of our meaning making ability through the assumptions that we make about ourselves and the world. Without a healthy awareness that any thinking that arises from our intellect is largely made up, that means we literally create our reality, we are at risk of being stuck within the boundaries of those assumptions.
It requires skill and effort …!
Playing the game of life at this level, to operate with greater clarity and insight, requires skill and effort. The ability to step back and check in and question the quality and ecology of our thinking and that of others.
In a busy and complex world with complex problems, where intellectual thinking dominates, this is not just a big ask for many people but can also be confronting for them.
“We do what we do until something else makes sense to us!” Dicken Bettinger
However, when our thinking is informed through our Deeper or BIG Mind, it is guided by a rich, unlimited and real-time intelligence that arises from outside the boundaries of our intellectual assumptions.
An intelligence that has innate integrity and ecology. An intelligence that provides us with higher level awareness through which we see ourselves, our world and our challenges with fresh eyes.
No skill required … effortless!
Playing the game of life from this domain, requires no skill. It requires a quiet mind, absent from busy thinking. It is effortless!
Apart from illustrating the Deeper Mind through the Iceberg Model I also talk about how I first got to see the ‘Deeper Mind’ beyond a conceptual level. It was one of those ‘Aha’ moments where I didn’t listen to the words but where the words were pointing. It was also a pivotal moment for me. As I now could clearly see where I was pointing, I naturally gravitated towards exploring the world through the Deeper Mind domain in my work with clients rather than the cognitive domain.
The Deeper Mind is the source of wisdom, clarity and creativity. The intellectual is a beautiful thing, but we were never meant to live in it. The intellect is to be used as a tool to bring to live what we see through the creative energy of our deeper nature!
with love
