The mind is a brilliant asset. It’s best at running our lives in almost a task oriented fashion. Get up, make coffee, kiss partner or not. This is a pretty rote example, but you get the idea. And the mind can think great thoughts, if only it could get out of its own way. The Buddhists call it “monkey mind,” chattering away in its endless cycle of an RSS feed (or tapes, if you’re old school), and streaming our emotions along with it. We catch ourselves “on automatic” and yet somehow, making a new groove in the way we respond to life seems paradoxically gargantuan and illusive. The good news is, the mind is interrupted by awareness.

In my last blog, I discussed the “law of three,” how it is embedded in all religious and spiritual traditions, and in many different ways in the Enneagram. In order to “interrupt automatic,” we have something again to learn from the law of three.

1.) The mind is part and parcel of the personality.

2.) The soul/life force is one with Essence or the Greater Life Force.

3.) The Observer, or our Awareness, is a third and neutral point from which we see, as though standing on a hilltop, not only the vast land but the eternal sky.

From this vantage point, we can differentiate the topography of our personality as separate from Eternity and simultaneously experience that Observer within us. (To be sure, though, every plane, land, sky and vantage point, is ultimately, a part of Unity.)

This is an analogy of point of view. We have the ability, if we choose to develop it, to tell the difference from the land of our unique minds and emotional habits from the freedom of the sky.