All the hate and horrors of the world always start with a microscopic single millisecond of appearing dislike for something.

Deep profound meditators such as experienced Buddhists eventually see the coming and going of thoughts and the whole spectrum of the apparatus at work deep in their mind. This is part of the observation of deep meditative practice. Each day the mind expands and opens and we start to see what’s really going on between the subconscious and the conscious. Before we dislike something, a microscopic millisecond of energy or dislike appears such as when we glance at a television screen or walk past a stranger on the street or even meet a new person in our life. Our minds make an instantaneous and unconscious evaluation and it’s done in a millisecond.

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In psychology this specific mechanism is called automatic effective response triggered by transference.

When your mind instantly rejects a face based on a visual feature like a nose shape, face expression or jawline. What it is doing is executing a survival shortcut and maps out the visual layout of a stranger onto a deeply hidden and buried or subconsciously buried emotional blueprint of someone in your past, such as a school teacher or school bully. The average person is oblivious to these millisecond flashes of appearing dislike because the untrained inexperienced average person’s mind lacks the metacognitive awareness that naturally opens and develops in deep daily regular meditative practice.

The average person lives in the subconscious mind and is subjected to the appearing thought effects constantly from the external world and from within the subconscious. The average person only notices the resulting cognitive rationalisation which is the minutes or hours spent building a story about why they think a person is an irritation, a jerk or worse. The millisecond is an evolutionary signal and all of the world’s behaviour in every human being starts in that millisecond. I would suggest that is something for you to take away with you to reflect upon.

All the wars of the world, all the defensive weaponry, including nuclear arms. All of the world’s rage and disgust all start with a millisecond signal from the subconscious prompting you to act and in that moment the mind is flooded with attachments for something to come into being such as anger, judgment, criticism, insults, ridicule, threat and so on. The good old evolutionary fight and flight signal flags up, a person’s swagger, tone of voice or their energy and body language as a threat to ego or a social threat and it releases a tiny spike of cortisol, an electrical charge and adrenaline which is the mild electricity you feel when it starts to rise inside you seconds before you react.

The average person cannot see any of this taking place.

Meditation slows the mind down and it opens the awareness and it expand so that deep-down meditative practitioners see a lot more than they can say. When you’re watching the television and your most unfavourite person comes on the screen even though they cannot hurt you through the glass, your subconscious mind feels free to experiment with this micro of dislike and vigilance almost like practice in the playground for the real scenarios.

And sometimes when we meet someone, before we even register their name we might experience an instantaneous sudden flash of irritation, judgment or just pure aversion towards their visual appearance and then we build a story about them and then live by that story.

Most people are totally blind to this millisecond spark which serves as the exact solid foundational root where all human conflicts, prejudices, and negativity in malice arise. Everywhere around the world throughout the human race this is the pin prick rising moment where it all begins. We only catch ourselves noticing the minutes or the negative stories and insults or criticisms about someone else but we don’t see beneath the surface.

This called the arising point of thought!

As we meditate and deepen, we start to enter depths that other people aren’t aware of and this very natural process, providing it is left to develop without interference. You will then develop an advanced metacognitive awareness where we start to get glimpses of this genesis deep in the mind. You are slave to this and you don’t know it. Meditators free themselves from this lower mind activity often called the survival or ego mind.

At a subconscious level our minds are running a psychological process called transference where we are constantly running background scans and comparing facial architecture and micro expressions, body language and physical features of new people against an internal database of relationships both good and bad from our past to determine our safety and security as we move forward in the relationship or the social scenario with this new person.

If a stranger happens to possess a certain trait or tone of voice or facial appearance we start to like and dislike them instantly. This structural mirroring means that your current, intense dislike is not an accurate assessment of this person in front of you. Instead, it is an unhealed unresolved subconscious memory which is leaking into your present moment and is transforming an innocent stranger into a modern stand in for your ancient enemy or past hurt, dished out by someone else long gone.

The rubber band effect

There is a term in psychology called the rubber band effect and it traps you in a chronic cycle of negativity and judgment and criticism of others also called the threat inspection loop and many people are trapped in this daily. Breaking this loop requires a daily level of psychological discipline and mindfulness. Practicing deep meditation expands your internal space between your attention and the emerging thought allowing you to observe the millisecond flash without being swept away by it to then grow into other things.

When you can observe the tiny spark of dislike appear in your mind as a biological echo of the past, you remove its power to turn into a storm of rage, judgment, or resentment by just noticing till it passes and this is the training.

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