This is a big concept to understand about fighting the subconscious. We must practice Death in Motion, “dying” from instant to instant. When we’ve fully comprehended an aspect of our psyche or completely mastered it so it loses all control over us, it’s basically “dead”. The concept of “Death in Motion” refers to working on changing our psychology continuously from instant-to-instant, moment-to-moment all throughout our daily lives.
Emotions like Anger and Lust and Fear and Pride and Addiction and Greed can’t be met head on. Remember that those are the main categories that make up the subconscious mind. Each of those is like the captain or the general of a giant army. What’s the problem with that? You got to get through like millions of soldiers to even have a chance to be close to that guy. You got to go through all the smaller ones first. That’s what death in motion is all about.
What is dying from instant to instant, from moment to moment? It is referring to those small, minute manifestations of our subconscious that we do not pay attention to. Those are like the “food” that are feeding the subconscious. We are feeding it through all those minute manifestations. Then if we start to take them away, the subconscious “dies”. It starts to decay once and for all, because it sustains itself from all these. Therefore, the minute manifestations are the life of the subconscious. If we start to take them away, the subconscious essentially “dies”.
Think of the subconscious as a tree with several roots. The main ones that hold the tree in the ground and give it a solid foundation represent the main aspects of the subconscious. These big roots don’t actually gather any water or nutrients. We know from the structure of a tree, off of these roots are other big roots. Off of these roots are smaller roots. Off of these roots are even smaller roots. It’s these really tiny root-hairs that actually gather the nutrients and water from the soil. Those little tiny root hairs represent the minute details.
Let’s say you have a problem with anger. There’s no point in waiting until you really lose your temper to try to deal with your anger. Once you’ve lost your temper it’s too late. It’s too powerful and you probably can’t control that. Maybe you only lose your temper once every couple months. But in your day to day activities there are all these tiny manifestations of anger. You might have impatience at a store lineup, or frustration on the road, or technical difficulties at work. Ironically that’s what “feeds” the anger, which later leads to an outburst with your partner or lashing out at a co-worker or friend.
It’s the same thing with lust. You can’t go after lust head to head, but you can go after all those tiny manifestations. Things like seeing an attractive person on the street and letting them catch your eye or standing in line at a grocery store with all those magazines on the side of you. These are little manifestations of lust that you can choose not to react to.
Those represent the tiny roots and they’re the ones that we deal with. You can’t go after the General of the Army. You got to sneak around like a sniper and get all those soldiers one at a time. If you run head first into an army of 10000 people, you don’t have a chance whatsoever. But if you can crawl around in the dark and fight one-on-one, you’re going to be stronger than all the individual soldiers.
Death in Motion is all about using Self-Observation to catch the tiny manifestations of the subconscious in our daily life. Remember when we work with self-observation there’s always a fork in the road, where we can go either the conscious way or the subconscious way. By choosing the conscious way we’re stopping the subconscious from manifesting itself and preventing it from sustaining itself. We’re therefore basically “starving” the subconscious and weakening it.
The danger that exists in working on our psychology is to miss this whole concept of dying in motion. It’s a big mistake to look at the subconscious and try to meet the larger things head-on and think “It’s too hard. I can’t control my fear. I can’t control my anger. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. I’m not strong enough.” You’re never going to be able to stop a large outburst of anger, but if you look at it the other way, find all the simple things. There are tons of little things that we do throughout the day that are manifestations of much larger things. Those are the ones that you start with.
If you have a fear of public speaking just because you understand the concept of the subconscious doesn’t mean you can walk into a concert hall tomorrow and give a speech to a thousand people. You can say “It’s just an aspect of my subconscious.” You can try to self-observe all you want. You’re still going to be afraid. But if you can catch all the minor manifestations of fear in your life and you learn to control those, eventually you reach a point where you can master the bigger ones.
If you know anyone who’s ever had a problem with alcohol one of the things they do is take it one day at a time. You got to start small. You can’t just cut it off, but you start small, catching those small details on a day to day basis and as time goes on you become stronger and stronger. That’s the key to death in motion.
Working on our psychology isn’t something we have to save for some point down the road. We can start right now with all the day to day activities that we do. If we’re paying attention and self-observing, we can find all kinds of tiny manifestations that are really easy to deal with and control. It’s not hard to avoid losing your temper if someone cuts you off driving. Your reaction is to get angry, but you can say “Hey, nothing happened. I didn’t get in an accident. There’s probably something going on in their life. I probably cut somebody off and didn’t notice either. No big deal. On with my day.” It’s really easy to do that. And that’s where we have to start.
It should be easy to feel that reaction and say “I’m not bothered by that. I don’t need to react to that.” If you encounter somebody that turns against a red light, remember that maybe they just found out that their wife is giving birth and they’re rushing to the hospital. Maybe they just found out that their child has been injured and they’re rushing home from work. “That’s fine. I’m not going to react to that.” Every time you catch something little, you slowly start to take the tiny roots away, which subsequently wipes out the larger roots further up.
Those are what you have to look for, the tiny examples in day to day life. Not the big ones, you’ll never take these on. They’re too big, too strong and better than our psychology. They’re too powerful. You instead go for day to day manifestations. Make the tree die from the bottom up. When you start to take away the food, the larger roots get weaker and weaker until eventually the whole tree topples.
We must be alert like a sentry at a time of war.
Samael Aun Weor
We’ve got to be “En guard” catching all these little things, all these small day to day activities. Because the irony is those small things we don’t even think twice about ironically feed the larger things. We start by eliminating the smaller things, and then we change the larger things.
You want to sneak around in the dark like a sniper taking out one after the other. Not making a presence going after the general. You just get rushed and you go nowhere. But you can fight all those small one-on-one battles day-to-day. Do it one day at a time and eventually over time you see huge changes.
The whole key to Death in Motion is that recognizing the daily minute manifestations and learning to eliminate those. Almost inconsequential, it seems, meaningless things are the ones that sustain the entire tree. So you want to go after the little soldiers that are really easy to get rid of and eventually one day we find ourselves facing the general of the army, but all his reinforcements are gone. And at that point we’re both equally matched and we have the strength to eliminate it entirely. Make it a permanent change in our psychology, but you can’t get that permanent change while you’re allowing all those daily manifestations to appear.