Creating New Situations Using Mind

  During the second day of the Living Chan Workshop, we had explored the different ways of responding to situations, without falling into the usual mistakes of dualistic thinking (such as creating a self and an other, confusing the image with the true person, and so on). I started to realize afterward how difficult it is for me to stop myself from falling into the various traps that arise in the mind when we take the image to be something that has awareness. For instance, I was thinking: whenever I have some conflict with someone else, how much of that conflict really happens in face to face situations, and how much through the arising of an image in mind?
     One thing I really got from this workshop was to contemplate that all images are creations of mind. Just as an image has no awareness of its own, so it would not make much sense for me to treat these images as capable of harming me, unless my awareness allows them to do so. The problem is that I hardly ever stay with the awareness of images as images: instead, I have the tendency to embellish those very same images to the point where they seem to be an actual person. How often do you find yourself having an imaginary conversation with someone, only to realize that this same conversation is just an amalgamation of memories from the past?
    I think that it's quite valuable to see how the mind is set free once I begin to realize that my memories are not bound to specific encounters with people. I can play with the phenomena, to the point where they are storied anew. An example would be reframing an encounter with a difficult relationship as a student-teacher one. Could it be that those who create challenges for us are also in a strange way  our own teachers, here to help us to overcome certain habits? Much of this reminds me of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) which operates from the same principle of being able to flexibly vary one's thoughts to fit situations or reframe perceptions of things. There are simply an infinite variety of ways of interpreting one's experiences and encounters, simply because what we experience are not discrete, fixed beings which are forcing us to think in fixed ways. In this way, memories become the medium through which experiences can be created and recreated in accordance with new attitudes and ways of seeing.