I am still writing a reply to that nameless teenage boy who, in a moment of giddy emotion, said something stupid to a girl on a dance date, which made her push him and walk away. It was a crazy moment of infatuation, a moment where a creative pause would have been really useful. Finding the creative pause — that’s the point. How on earth can you gain control of a moment of insanity, where everything and everyone is going crazy?

If you have ever lost your temper, you would know that the progression towards the explosion is a hop skip and jump into madness. The first hop is arousal, where you begin to respond to the situation and the people. The second skip is engagement where you actively participate in an argument that increasingly gets out of hand, and the third jump is the flare up, which is like a dam bursting open, an uncontrolled unleashing of energy hell bent on destruction.
Your sense of control, if any, is only in the hop and skip. By the time you hit stage three, you have lost it completely, and cannot hold on or reverse the mood until you have exhausted yourself.
The same thing happens in sex, infatuation, jealousy and a dozen other things. You always move in a spiral, faster and faster like a moth into a flame, until you get intoxicated, helpless, and beyond control.
So they say that mental control comes to you only after you grow a bit older, when the hot flush of hormones have ebbed a bit.
Not true. Mind control doesn’t come in old age, or you wouldn’t have so many ranting parents lose their cool so often. It has nothing to do with hormones either — the body logic never changes — it gets worse as you grow older, so an angry father is much more difficult to handle than an angry school kid.
Imagine this — when everything around you is going crazy, you silently gather yourself, take a deep breath — and in a flash, quickly download vital knowledge about yourself, the other person and the situation at hand without losing the energy of the moment. Knowledge will prevent your jump into doom like the moth into fire. That’s what awareness can do for you.
What’s awareness? It starts with a distancing yourself from yourself. A technique that gets better with practice, where you watch yourself like an observer, reporting stuff back to yourself. So it’s a report like — Sheila felt jealous, Sheila went crazy, Sheila said some stupid things. You are Sheila, of course, but you refer yourself in third person because the one who watches isn’t the everyday you. It’s someone who wasn’t named as a child, someone who never grew old, someone unaffected by pain or pleasure.
Make no mistake — the same mind that makes you go crazy also watches everything, knows everything. Even when you are going mad, some part of you is watching the rest of you go mad. Some part of you is ice cool and serene. Some part of you is totally beyond all that is happening. It’s just that you can’t access that part of you yet. Awareness makes you access it. That’s all.
I am done, guys. If you want more stuff on this, you’ll have to write back in sufficient numbers or I won’t think you are really interested, because this is a bit deep. Have a great weekend.