You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

56 / You Are Not
off, have it as energy, then take the label off of
energy, and dive into the NOTHINGNESS.
I can stay in the land of psychological abstractions
or the spiritual story and game, but then
I am stuck in abstractions.
Question: It seems that when “you” hit sensations, then
people systematically go into stories and that’s
where the resistance hits?
Wolinsky: That’s because it’s hard-wired into the nervous
system, fight-flight-freeze. To organize chaos,
the nervous system automatically shifts sensations
to thoughts, etc. For its survival, in other
words, the chaos must come up with a reason,
a story, a false cause. To organize, the nervous
system goes cortical. When it goes cortical, the
nervous system gets into the cause-effect.
The nervous system has a searching-seeking
mechanism, which, for survival, keeps it going,
and it will get into anything to avoid the chaos
of not knowing
Question: “You” said in Volume III of The Way of the Human
that thoughts come out of the personal
level.
Wolinsky: Let’s not jump levels. There is no personal
thought. The illusion is that if a thought goes
by, such as “I love myself” or “I hate myself,” the
“I” Stephen is having that thought.
At a physiological level, my nervous system is
producing this thought, this representation of
the idea of Stephen and “I.” But, ultimately, that
is not occurring. Ultimately, “I’s” are coming and
going all the time. They are not personal to a