CHAPTER 1 I A NEW PRACTICE FOR ANEW REALITYFor example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wan-
dered off into some area that doesn't have anything to do with
what you're reading here? Probably. And most likely where your
mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation
that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear
up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally.
And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put
it in a trusted "bucket" that you know you'll review appropriately
sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the
most effective behavior: no progress was made, and
tension was increased.
The big problem is that your mind keeps
reminding you of things when you can't do anything
about them. It has no sense of past or future. That
means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need
to do something, and store it in your RAM, there's a
part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the
time. Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks
you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two
things to do stored in your RAM, you've generated personal
failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This
produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pin-
pointed.
Most people have been in some version of this mental stress
state so consistently, for so long, that they don't even know they're
in it. Like gravity, it's ever-present—so much so that those who
experience it usually aren't even aware of the pressure. The only
time most of them will realize how much tension they've been
under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.
Can you get rid of that kind of stress? You bet. The rest of
this book will explain how.
It is hard to fight
an enemy who has
outposts in your
head.
—Sally Kempton