“I just want some ice on my wrist so I look better when I dance

Have you lookin’ at it, put you in a trance

I just want a Rollie Rollie Rollie…’

We seem to be listening to this song a lot, Finn and I, in the car on the way to school. (For those of you who, like me, didn’t know… ‘ice’, the urban dictionary says, ‘is flashy jewellery often containing many diamonds’).

‘Have you lookin’ at it, put you in a trance..’. Ayo and Teo know that the ‘you’ in the song will be hypnotised by the jewels, made half conscious by the story the mind instantly creates. The more blinding the bling, the greater the glaze.

And maybe it is not ice that does it for us. But there will be other things… so many things…. that have the same effect of taking the mind out of reality and into an unaware, not fully conscious or present state.

The mind lives in a world of words and objects.  Over the years of the mind’s development these words and objects take on meanings that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with what has been learned.

And it could be considered that this is the basis for all attraction, all preferences. All the symbols and stimuli that stimulate that idea of reward in some way are contained here.

And, in the other direction, it is the basis for all resistance. All the perceptions and triggers that cause withdrawal, defensiveness are there because they were learned.

Life can be lived entirely from this stimulation of movement towards and away from. But it is an unaware existence. The mind is held captive in its unconscious desires and fears. And our experience is taken on the ups and downs of the roller coaster or flicked from side to side of the  pin ball machine.

So how do we exit the trance? How does the mind become fully conscious?

That has to be through noticing.

In noticing all reactions of the body, words said, actions taken, the mind settles into reality. It leaves its conditioned highly identified, personalised state and instead watches that state, that movement, that conversation in action.