Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We’ve been talking about the fact that where we put our awareness, or our dot, defines who we are. We are where our awareness is. We can view many different things on the screen of our awareness. I’d like to share a mashal (parable). Imagine someone watching a movie for two hours. During that time, he’s so engrossed that he becomes detached from reality. There are no thoughts running around in his mind. His brain is sort of off. He’s totally involved in the movie. The movie, so to say, is projecting onto his inner screen, and he gets so involved in what’s happening that you sometimes get jolted. You get scared. You jump back as the car stops on the screen.
When you’re watching the movie, you’re hearing and seeing it using two of your senses. That’s what gets you more engrossed and connected. If, for some reason, the audio isn’t in sync with the video, you can’t really get as engrossed. Sometimes, in even more advanced movie theaters, there’ll be smoke that comes out. You could smell what’s happening. Sometimes the chair starts shaking, so you start feeling the touch of what’s going on. But you still have your mind. Imagine if the movie screen were so advanced that when the character was scared, you also got scared. It’s actually in your brain. That would be very scary.
But in truth, that’s really what’s going on in life. We get drawn into the outside movie. Life is really a video. Everything that’s happening is happening because we get involved in it. We can choose to get involved or choose not to get involved. We can choose to be in the situation or not. There are stories of great rabbis who, while the world was collapsing, were totally engrossed in their learning or what they were doing. What was going on outside wasn’t what they were focusing on.
It’s similar, in a way, just for a moment, when people use breathing techniques while trying to avoid pain. What’s happening is that they’re not focusing on the pain. With Lamaze methods in childbirth, they’re not focusing on the pain. So, really, we decide where we’re going to be. That’s why people like to learn meditation techniques, because all you really are is your conscious awareness. But there are multiple levels of how we can identify ourselves with things that are not really us, and we’ll explain.
Rav Wolbe tells a story. There was a time in Israeli politics when the government wanted to somehow incentivize the ultra-Orthodox to join the army or punish them for not joining the army. And there are such things in play currently. You can’t get a job, whatever it may be; there are certain rights that you can’t have unless you go serve in the army. At one time, the idea was that you couldn’t get a driver’s license unless you were in the army. There was a tremendous uproar in the yeshiva world. The yeshiva boys wanted licenses, and eventually the idea was dropped. Rav Wolbe was thinking, as great thinkers do: What was the big uproar? What was the great need for licenses? These boys did not need a license. They could take a car or take a bus or take a bicycle. What was the need for a car?
He said that when a person drives a car, he’s able to identify with his car. His self becomes larger. When you sit in the car seat in a small sports car and suddenly go from zero to 60 in a few seconds, that surge of energy somehow identifies with you. It’s a fascinating concept when you think about it. And it’s so almost false when you people go to on vacations and they rent luxury cars. Somehow, you’re sitting behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley, and suddenly you feel more important. You’re identifying yourself with that car. We can identify ourselves with money things, but as we said, our job is not to identify with the false identities inside of us. Just as we can get engrossed in that movie, we can get engrossed in the movie of life and not really peel away the layers of the onion, so to say, and get to who we really are. And that’s our goal, not to be lose our identity with the false identities that are out there.