Say you’re walking alone at night and it’s dark and you see a man coming from the other direction. Maybe you get scared and turn around and head the other way, right? It might seem like the smart thing to do. 

At the time, you clearly see the man walking in your direction and it seems like you’re turning around in order to avoid this particular person. Simultaneously, there are unseen images of the past cycling through the subconscious mind. 

While I’m looking down the street and seeing the man in real time, my subconscious mind might be seeing a traumatic past event I survived. Perhaps my subconscious mind is seeing images from the local news about someone being raped and killed. Maybe my subconscious mind is remembering a time a parent or teacher told me to run away from strangers. Maybe my subconscious mind is remembering an old newspaper article about a strange man in the area. All of this could be going on in the darkness of my mind and I’m not conscious to it!

So I turn away from the man and walk in the other direction. It seems to me that I’ve reacted to the man before me. It is truer that I’ve reacted to the images of the past that are passing through me subconsciously. 

Though it is quite possible the man walking down the street is harmless, the man in my mind is definitely not harmless. The images in my imagination are what’s responsible for the change in my behavior.

With meditation, one can become more in touch with the images that pass through our minds; the images that guide our behavior. When the eyes are open, the images we see are so loud that our subconscious images are overlooked. With eyes closed and in stillness, we can become more aware of the fainter images passing through our minds. In time, the capacity to see these images grows stronger. 

Back in March, I was working on my fears around “middle America.” One question I really love to use while meditating is, “when you think the thought [I’m afraid of middle America], what images do you see of the past or future?” 

Immediately I saw images of Matthew Shepard in my mind and I began crying. There he was, tied up to the fence, in the cold, and dying alone. The image in my mind was so vivid it’s as if I saw it in person. That image lives in me and I overlay that on top of “middle America.”

And when I think about “middle America,” and “red states” and “Republicans,” I’m not even aware that this scary image is informing my behavior. With this sort of violence frozen in my subconscious mind, what Republican can stand a chance with me? I put this on all of them. 

Another example: Since I was very young I’ve bitten my nails. I’ve tried to quit for almost 20 years. Often times I’ll have success for weeks at a time and then I’ll relapse. I’ve noticed for years that I often relapse on busses, on flights, and while driving. Just today I realized why! 

When I was in elementary school, a previous classmate of mine died in a car crash. It was in the wintertime, and her family’s car went off the road and into a river where she drowned. Today I realized that I had an image of her dying in the car in my mind, and that this image runs in the background whenever I’m traveling in a vehicle. That image is frightening–and I’d be crazy not to bite my nails when that’s what’s running in my subconscious mind. 

For now, I’ve moved one more thing from the “darkness” of my mind “into the light.” 

How many thousands are there left in the dark? 

What ghosts guide my hand?