Monday, January 30, 2012

Enlightened Minds

We are the products of our own minds.

Everything that we have been taught came from the human mind. We can argue about where the inspiration came from, but we cannot argue with the fact that all of our beliefs and values have come from the human mind.

Even the myths we create to help us try and understand our purpose, our actions and our destiny come from the human mind. In other words, our beliefs and values are products of some human mind. So, even when we believe we're erudite, we are imprisoned by the limitations of someone's mind.

If the mind, including our own minds, is responsible for everything in the world, then it means we are also responsible for maintaining and enriching our minds.

We can elect to perpetuate the beliefs and values given to us by society, parents, and from our own living experiences, or we can choose to cleanse the mind of the toxic beliefs and begin the process to create another perspective that defines us with power.

As we know, our minds are full of fanciful things. We imagine all sorts of things and then give them life. We give life to Santa Claus, flying reindeer, little green men from Mars, the Devil, the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and so on.

Some of us tend to forget that we were born into a world filled with ideas, beliefs, and values time-tested for thousands of years, Some people describe our births as being born into a world of sin, suffering, struggle, and so forth.

Nevertheless, we treat these beliefs and values as sacrosanct. We embody them as reality and begin to see ourselves and the world from the perspective of what we have been taught by others. And in doing this to ourselves, we mitigate the power of our minds to conform with the limitations imposed on us by others.

Many of us never go beyond what others have taught us. We're unable to create another perspective of ourselves with power; a power that comes from within our own unconditioned minds.

This power exists in all human minds. It  is there for our use to overcome the myths about ourselves and others.

For us to go beyond the beliefs and values given to us at birth and nurtured throughout our lives, we must be willing to first understand and accept personal responsibility for embodying our own beliefs and values.

Yes, someone taught us these beliefs and values. And yes, because we accepted them and shaped them into our own reality, we are not bound by them.

We must remain mindful of the awareness that the mind can create all types of images of things not yet seen by others. It's the source of airplanes, missiles, hospitals, churches, prisons, slavery, oppression, racism, wars, and so forth.

Unfortunately, the mind loses much of its imagination and creativity when we hold on to the beliefs and values that we use to define ourselves and the world we live in. When we become too dependent upon others, we diminish our own power.

We begin to believe we are less than others, and that we must do whatever we can to become like the ones we give power to. This is the process of victimization or powerlessness. In other words, we victimize our minds by empowering others with greater power than we give ourselves.

The enlightenment movement today is not about change, but about enlightenment itself. The desires for change, or for something not yet achieved, come from our toxic human minds. They come from the beliefs and values given to us by others.

Similarly, it's the toxicity in our minds that distorts our perception of clarity to see ourselves and the world as we really are. When we remove some of the toxic beliefs, we clearly know that there's nothing to change in the world itself. Everything is exactly the way our minds have created it.

Meanwhile, when we do the work to cleanse our minds of the toxicity distorting who we are, we will be able to create an enlightened  perspective of ourselves and the world.  And then the world will look exactly as our minds have created it.

We are clearly more powerful than what we have been taught by others.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

We Don't Have to Struggle, if we Don't Want to

Many people believe we have to struggle to get what we want it life. In fact, some of them consider it a badge of honor or respect to identify with "The Struggle."

Fortunately, today, with the presence of enlightenment shining brightly in the world, we don't have to struggle, if we don't want to.

Whenever we struggle, we are fighting for something outside of ourselves. We want something -- freedom, money, acceptance, education, and so on -- to make us feel more complete.

And by struggling for it, we believe it represents hard work or some other antiquated folklore about how to achieve success.

We are born complete and perfect in every way. Our imperfections come from our beliefs about how we look, how much money we have, where we live, where we attended school, and what the world thinks about us.  All of this and much more is what causes us to believe in struggle.

The mind-games we play with ourselves about who we are, and the things we want in life inextricably tie us to illusory beliefs about our incompleteness and what we need to do to make ourselves better or more complete.

In other words, we begin searching for something we already have, but we cannot recognize it within ourselves because of the beliefs and values that we're using to define ourselves.

For us to stop struggling, we first must understand how we are living, and how we formed the beliefs that we use to interpret our actions and our relationship with the world. 

This awareness is usually sufficient enough for us to become cognizant that we are always acting according to our beliefs and values.

Similarly, as advocates of our own struggling, we perceive the world from the prism of incompleteness. This belief of incompleteness is what overwhelms us with doubts and cause us to feel small,  insignificant, and incomplete in a world we have created with our beliefs and values.

Unfortunately, this world that we've created is nothing more than an illusion that we claim as our reality.

To begin perceiving the world with different beliefs and values will mitigate our struggling. This new perception of ourselves and the world will create the clarity for us to begin perceiving our lives with less struggle.

And most importantly, we will understand that struggling is a societal concept of make believe; a fairy tale.

When we work to achieve our goals, we are being creative. There's a major distinction between struggle and creativity.

One important distinction between struggle and creativity is that creativity is the foundation of our consciousness of clear awareness. In other words, it's our awareness to know that our minds are the source of both our struggles and freedom. 

This freedom of mind begins with our awareness of its existence. Each of us must take the time to discover it within our own minds. And while it takes some work and time to discover the power we already have within us, the rewards are significant.

And when we discover this great power within our minds, we free ourselves from the beliefs and values that cause us to believe we are incomplete.

Some of us call this new found freedom or clarity -- enlightenment. And there's no doubt about it whatsoever that there's no struggle in an enlightened mind.