PSIII 18 The Immune Systems Of The Mind

18 - The Immune Systems Of The Mind

18/1 – Staying Strong Through The Challenges

In some quarters it is now held that just about any kind of physical malfunctioning, bar perhaps a broken bone, is nothing more or nothing less than a break down of the immune system.

The viruses that cause the flu, for example, are always present in the air; but we won't get a cold unless the immune system malfunctions and lets the virus get past the defensive barriers.

This can happen when the immune system is busy elsewhere - such when it is already at full stretch compensating for existing long term stress - or if it has been damaged in some way - by faulty general maintenance, unsuitable or incomplete diet, environmental toxins, to mention but a few.

There may also well be a genetic pre-disposition - please note, just a pre-disposition! - at work, all of which may have, in conjunction with the above, a bearing on how much any immune system can be reasonably expected to cope with. If it all gets too much, just a tiny little thing can come along and cause immune system failure to occur, just like the flu virus. In effect, the flu virus wasn't all by itself the reason for the flu - it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

Understanding this from old, holistic approaches to healing thus go ahead and may not even bother to treat the flu at all, but rather try and work out what other kind of straw there is, how to remove what's unnecessary, how to improve the camel's overall health and how to balance the remaining load so that the immune system can function fully once again and something like a flu virus just ceases to represent a challenge.

When dealing with mind related matters, I've found the system to be very similar.

Two people might suffer a very similar trauma or bereavement - one of them "shrugs it off" and gets on with life, for others it really turns out to be the straw that broke the camel's back, or cause the nervous breakdown, if you will.

After having given the matter some thought, I would now agree with most of the hundreds and hundreds of experienced specialists that basic self esteem is, in fact, the immune system of the human mind.

If it isn't functioning at a reasonable level, the littlest insult, injury, slight or other kind of attack will cause a breach and problems manifest; if it is functioning, on the other hand, the most terrible traumas may be endured with some form of composure and a good chance of system survival.

As with the physical immune system, it therefore makes sense to keep a watchful eye on the mental immune system, and to provide it with a general environment in which it can thrive, prosper, and fulfil it's essential tasks to the best of it's genetic pre-disposition.

When we're talking about the body, the environment required for a fully functioning auto immune systems are: water, food, shelter, absence of toxins, and the occasional bit of stress at such a level that it keeps ticking over happily but without over-exerting itself on too many occasions - the difference between keeping fit, and training for competition gymnastics, for example.

So what are the environmental requirements to keep the mind's immune systems ready and in first class condition? Here are my personal view on the subject:

18/1/1 - Peace Of Mind

Peace of mind, to me, is when you're looking around yourself, stretching, folding your hands behind your head, wriggle your toes and say, "Aaah, all's well with the world."

How often does that happen in your life? In mine, not so very often. I might think it, but then there's this part that reminds me of an unpaid bill, or something I might have forgotten to deal with, or some unfinished business or other, or even some scary event way out in the future. However, since I've had my sanctuary, it's gotten a lot better. Now here's a place where I can really relax and experience peace of mind, whenever I want, even in the coffee break when I'm taking a seminar or lecture.

It's nice to know that every time I do this, I'm giving my mental immune system a little "time out" and a little extra energy to cope with whatever might come it's way during the rest of my activities.

An important part of peace of mind is an absence of fear. Fear usually comes about when you find yourself to be powerless in a given situation, or if you simply don't know what the situation is going to be like so there's no way you can plan your response. Here, once again, basic sanctuary work comes in handy, as all kinds of fears can be addressed in many ways, and there are so many forms of help, magic and resources available to draw upon.

Although I'm not suggesting that any kind of fear can thus be resolved, it certainly helps with many of them, and every time you stop being afraid, you help your mental immune system conserve energy and function better than if you took no such action.

18/1/2 - Happiness

I really think there's not enough happiness in most people's lives. I once read a book that had you make a list of 101 things that make you happy, and then suggested you try to fit as many of them into every day as possible. I highly commend that idea; what it did for me at the time was to realise that I wasn't really doing anything at all to make myself more happy more often, rather the contrary - at that time I seemed to be dead set to make my life as hard and miserable as possible, and then bitch on about it endlessly to friends of a similar mindset.

Sanctuary work is about happiness in every shape, form or appearance. There shouldn't be anything at all within your sanctuary that isn't supportive to that end; if there is, it's high time to address basic issues such as whether you actually believe you deserve to be happy - or, in parts terms, whether your internal committee has voted on the matter and whether or not they've come out in your favour.

If you are amongst the not so uncommon percentage of people who really can't say anymore what would make them happy, please re-visit memories to that end, find out what exactly it was that made them classed in your mind and body as "happy", and then go ahead and create more of it, whatever it was. If you cannot do so in real life, then simply go ahead and do it in your sanctuary instead.

Your body cannot distinguish between a very vivid internal mental experience and an external physical one; this is why people under hypnosis can manifest blisters from imaginary fires, or start to shiver uncontrollably if you tell them they're stuck in a snowstorm.

Being happy in your sanctuary, therefore, is a good interim substitute for being happy in a practical setting; every time you can experience pleasure and happiness, your mental immune system will be strengthened and rejuvenated.

Once you've mastered how to give yourself basic happiness, you might like to go on to take the next lessons, in the more advanced subjects such as joy, bliss, and ecstasy ...

18/1/3 - Love

All forms and kinds of love are real energy boosting states (if you think you're loving someone and you end up a nervous wreck, I'd perhaps re-define whatever is going on and give it another name, 'cause it cannot be love by definition), and as such really valuable in boosting the mental immune system.

No matter how much unconditional love already flows from you to others in your real world activities, it is strengthened and supported by sending loving energy through your sanctuary relationships - and if you remember that section, you need not restrict yourself to loving people; loving relationships with God, minerals, pets, beautiful sculptures and sunsets all count as well. Further, very many of the sanctuary activities such as making peace with other selves, dead relatives or past lives, contain a core aspect of learning to love and appreciate the good in many previously unrecognised people and situations, thus increasing the amount of loving that's going on inside of you every time you do such a thing.

18/1/4 - Purpose, Contribution & Direction

One of the key reasons why people in old folk's homes fade away is that they feel useless and no longer needed - a thought which gravely affects the full functioning of the mental immune system.

Sanctuary work can certainly help with that issue. Whether it's in the form of questing for a life's purpose; by resolving conflicts with other people, thus setting them free from their obligations at least as far as you are concerned; by being more positive and thereby doing your bit to counteract the general negativity in this world; by encouraging and discovering talents by which you might serve others better; or in the end, simply by being able to more fully recognise that you are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, and that you have a right to be here, if you have your sanctuary, then you'll never need feel useless again.

18/1/5 - Mental Stimulation

There's reams of scientific evidence by now that in the absence of mental stimulation, all kinds of problems from low self esteem, via a lowering of general intelligence, to all kinds of psychic malfunctions and behaviour disorders tend to develop (and this is aside from numerous physical symptoms as well).

Now I do sincerely hope that I don't have to go on at this late point in this book as to how mentally stimulating sanctuary building and exploration is by definition.

Suffice to say that every single person who has ever started it has experienced a tremendous increase in new ideas, new thoughts, new insights and new ways of perceiving old situations. I haven't tested them, but I'm willing to bet the better part of my salary that they would have scored significant higher on a basic intelligence test after they've had their sanctuaries up and running as compared to beforehand.

If it does just one single thing, stimulating the mind is the forte of sanctuary exploration - and thus a tremendous resource to boost depleted auto immune systems of the mind.

18/1/6 - Increasing Your Intelligence

Contrary to what many people have been told at school, intelligence isn’t parroting mountains of facts but to be able to make connections between them, develop a sense of perspective and to be able to organise information into useful forms.

At the beginning of this book I’ve repeated the old myth that we only use 5% of our brains. It is probably a lot less than that in my opinion; in the last section we spoke about intelligence increase when Project Sanctuary and related activities are undertaken.

This is primarily because right from the start, working in the Sanctuary realms entails multi-dimensional thinking and problem solving in context of a complex, unique ecology with innumerable unpredictable factors – when you’re doing Project Sanctuary work, you are thinking on your feet the entire time, learning at a rate that is much faster than linear spoken or received information all the while you are doing it, and expanding your understanding of something way, way beyond just knowing a few facts here and there.

When you switch from fact based, linear thought and speech into the multi-dimensional, time-inclusive, limitless potential movies and developments of the Project Sanctuary realms with their flowing manifestations that are always changing, always developing and always responding to input from your many strata of environments, what happens is that we are dealing with an exponential increase in data and information that needs to be processed.

The beautiful discovery is that this isn’t something you have to study to do or be a genius to be able to handle; with wonder we begin to understand that we all already have the structures in our minds to be able to not just handle this extraordinary flood of information, but to process this information intelligently and to do something with it afterwards.

Einstein rode on a beam of light and what he learned there got translated down into the much simpler modality of the symbols the physicists and mathematicians use to be able to consciously handle the true complexity of nature.

Einstein knew how to use these symbols to express his experiences from the Sanctuary realms; I know how to use linear words, and sometimes music and also paint on canvass to facilitate this translation process.

The true language of metaphor as we are learning here with the processes I have described and which feel so simple and so natural even to a very small child or an adult who can’t even read and write is the most complex, the most beautiful and probably the most information dense system of learning which exists for humans at this time.

Compared to what goes on when you plant a single little seed in a dusty plain and call upon an underground well to begin the process of making this land come to life again, the most complicated mathematical formula you could begin to imagine is nothing but a child’s plaything – simple, brightly coloured and stackable.

Organic metaphors simply are the most information rich messaging device we have to both learn about the universe as well as tell others about it.

It is little wonder that the highest traditions of learning were made of story, legend, myth and metaphor and that changing a single deep metaphor can by itself re-shape an entire civilisation over a period of millennia.

If you are seriously interested in developing your human potential and your true human intelligence, working with this realm and its conventions is the most extraordinary gift you can ever give yourself, make no mistake about it.

You might not even notice how much easier and clearer your thinking becomes, how much more you understand (and not just with your head!) and how much more you can relate to all manner of things which seemed always so complicated and incomprehensible.

I, for one, didn’t notice this at all. I love Project Sanctuary and have always loved the explorations, quests, surprises and experiences it provided to me, but the truth is that I really didn’t appreciate what it had done for my creativity over the past 6 years until I came to write this revision of the material. I didn’t appreciate how the lessons from Project Sanctuary had opened my eyes to interactions in the real world, and how this opening up preceded all my other work from that point forward.

Many approaches claim to “improve your intelligence”. I put forth the proposition that Project Sanctuary teaches what intelligence actually is and what it can do for you – and the true wonder is that it’s natural, it’s right, and it is absolutely what we were always designed to be doing in the first place.

18/1/6 – The Power Of Wisdom

Alright. So what, exactly, is “wisdom”? I’m not going to trouble either of us with a dictionary definition of this term but in general, it’s held to have something to do with a state beyond raw learning, where knowledge and experience have come together and created a deep understanding of something in a person; when this happens, they are said to be “wise”.

The very powerful “wisdom of the hindsight”, often repeated, creates wisdom.

And herein lies one of the least commonly understood and incredible resources of the Sanctuary realms.

In the Hard, we can have so many experiences a day and what we can get up to in the knowledge and learning department is strictly limited by physical time but often also all kinds of other circumstances, including personal set ups, how much money you have or what limiting relationships you’re in or what limiting beliefs you are holding at any point.

In Sanctuary, there are no such limitations.

I wouldn’t know about the dolphins, but chances are we are the only creatures on this planet who can play out a multitude of possible scenarios in our minds to test the outcomes before they have ever happened.

People use this incredible ability which is actually way more wonderful than just being able to predict a single simple future (as you are dealing with many, if not entirely unlimited! futures) in general to drive themselves crazy as they lie in bed at night and think of all the things which could possibly go wrong in their near or distant futures.

What is in fact a safety device and the possibility to create unlimited futures and test them out before embarking on any of them turns into a mechanism for insanity with three simple omissions:

1. the sequence of events is directed to show only negative possible outcomes rather than a balanced selection from all possible outcomes. Someone who might be afraid of getting onto a plane the next day might thereby be only thinking of ways in which it can all go wrong, from endless waiting for flights that never arrive to various forms of plunging into the sea, the wings of the plane falling off, the pilots dying of fish poisoning and so forth but NOT the possibility of a comfortable flight where they step out into the exciting new location.
2. the events don’t get played out right to the end but stop at some evil disaster point. For example, someone might just see the plane explode and that’s it. Move it on a bit and you could get to ascension from there and sleep most beautifully or even learn something about what happens after death in the process! (See also “Grovian Metaphor Work” in the Addendum).
3. they leave the events as a remembered “hard” event, rather than to test them out deliberately in a sanctuary setting where resources exist that can’t be had in the Hard, such as time rewind, replay, stop, make changes, test the changes, check for long term repercussions and ecology effects and of course, magical interventions and possibilities that can’t occur when strictly hard thinking is applied to any situation or problem (See also “How To Make Tesla Machines” in the addendum.

Setting up scenes and events with people and circumstances, with machinery if necessary and letting them run under various test conditions in fast forward time to be able to “gain the wisdom of hindsight” is a mindbogglingly useful ability – and what it means is that you can achieve wisdom long before you are white haired and doddering.

You can practise all manner of things and learn from them if you want to do that; you can live entire lifetimes as one person, or another, in one setting, or another and gain incredible understanding about so many things, about so many facets of life in general and your own personality and preferences in particular in the process, the uses of this one Sanctuary technique are absolutely limitless.

All I can say is, try it for yourself. Take any area of your life in which you think you lack “experience and practise* and set up the scenarios, let them run and find out for yourself just how much you can learn in this protected space and without ever taking the risk of even stepping outside your own front door.

To conclude this section, I’d like to look back for a moment at what we have discussed here. Love. Happiness. Wisdom. Intelligence. All of this just from a simple little mind game where you make imaginary events happen in this strange space I refer to as “Project Sanctuary”?

Isn’t that a bit over-optimistic, to put it mildly?

Well, here’s a story. Somewhere in Africa, there is a lake and in the lake, there lives a species of crab. It’s common enough and well documented. One time, some experimenter guy in his lab put the wrong water in the tank where these crab things were kept from the African lake and something very, very strange happened.

The crab things started to evolve into a whole new form of being. It seems that there was a stage in their development to become an adult that no-one had ever observed because the lake was very acidic, had become more and more so over the last few thousand years, and these crabs needed less acidic water to develop into their adult stages. They could mate in their adolescent form and in the environment they were in, not a single one of them had ever grown up fully to be an adult for at least 10,000 years – and that’s why no-one even suspected there could be a third developmental stage for these beings nor what it might have looked like.

After 6 years of Project Sanctuary, I believe that is also true for human beings.

I believe that we have actually no idea at all what a real adult human being could be like, what they would think or what they might be able to do.

I further believe that Project Sanctuary is my idea of a special playground for human children who mate just like those African crabs do before they have reached maturity and thus hold the illusion that what they are is all they could be, to help them develop towards an actual adulthood in safety.

A playground where they can learn things about the true fabric of time and space in a sheltered, supportive environment and where we can’t hurt ourselves whilst we are learning.

A place where we can play out our challenges of self and others, hone and fine tune our understanding of ourselves and how we work, a place where we can get ready for the transition to true adulthood.

Let’s face it.

You gave any human alive today, and I don’t care if they are held to be the most “enlightened” being on this planet with millions of followers, the power to take the stars from the sky, to truly twitch and ripple the fabric of reality with a single thought, and what would happen?

It is actually a scary thought.

There may very well be good reason that magic is so difficult and illusive – who would give a small child a nuclear bomb to play with? It simply isn’t safe for the child, nor for the Universe at large.

If you are willing to entertain the notion, no matter how experienced and wise you hold yourself to be already, that you might actually be nothing than a small child, beginning to take their first unsteady and tottering steps out into the vastness of the Universe, then Project Sanctuary can actually become your training ground towards something that we can’t conceive of as yet.