Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Understanding the Powers of Mind

Most of us never fully understand the power of our minds. And we believe it's too painful to examine this power,  because of the fears we have about disrupting our current lives. After all, our beliefs and values are all that we have in this world.

For those of us who want to know about the untapped powers in our minds, the starting point is the recognition that we were born into a world already created by others' beliefs and values.

And whether we had consciousness at birth or not, we became dependent on others to teach us their beliefs and values. This is the process we began in the development of our minds; the sense of being aware of others existing outside of our minds.

Even though we became aware of others, and dependent on them for our beliefs and values, we were unaware that our minds were being conditioned to accept their toxic teachings as our reality. In other words, during the development process, we didn't have the awareness to distinct between reality and illusion.

Similarly, the illusions became the bases for our beliefs and values, which distorted our perspective of ourselves and the world. This limited our abilities to expand our consciousness to discern that everything we had been taught had come from someones mind who was deceived by their own beliefs and values. 

Somewhere in our minds, a place beyond the power of our illusions, is the clarity for us to understand that everything we believe  came from the human mind. And this prototypical human mind is always searching for answers to questions about the minds' relationship with the world.

We should remind ourselves from time to time that human minds wrote the great books of the world that we cherish today. Even the great philosophers, who impressed us with their brilliance, used their minds to write and communicate plausible arguments on life, purpose, and creation.

Unfortunately, their brilliance only confirmed our lack of understanding about our own brilliance. We began to accept their ideas on government, human values, religion, God, language, education, marriage, gender, race, class, and so forth as the bases for living our lives.

In other words, we built our societies on their philosophical teachings. And after thousands of years, we no longer question the validity of their ideas. We accept them as sacrosanct.

Many of us rationalize our dependency on others' beliefs and values by comparing them to other beliefs and values. We argue for their acceptance because they seem to be better than anything else in the world.

We even rationalize our own understanding of the fallible, toxic human mind by endowing it with divine inspiration or guidance. In other words, we believe some human minds, thousands of years ago, were more enlightened than our minds are today.

Most people today would consider it ludicrous to emulate societies from thousands of years ago. Their language, culture,and  lack of the technological knowledge we cherish today, would place them in almost a prehistoric epochal evolution.

Similarly, this also applies to our religious and spiritual beliefs. Our religious and spiritual beliefs were created by others, in most cases, thousands of years before the creation of our society. We first became aware of their existence from others -- society, parents, and life experiences -- and claimed them for ourselves.

Our minds were conditioned to believe that what we were being taught was exactly the way in happened in space and time, even though none of the people who taught us was present when it happened. Yet, our minds accepted the beliefs and values and began to perceive itself existing with the world according to these teachings.

Meanwhile, the existence of God and the universe had been discussed by philosophers thousands of years before we were born. They postulated arguments for and against their existence. And when some of their arguments became firm beliefs in the world, they became anthropomorphic realities to guide our behavior.

Somewhere lost in all of this heuristic fervor is that it was human minds struggling to make sense of the phenomenon perceived outside of their minds. The mind was unable to clear itself enough to see the world as it is rather than the phenomenon.

Unfortunately, many of us are unaware that our relationship with the Creator and universe exists only in our minds. And depending on what we have been taught by others to believe, will determine how we play the mind games of interpreting certain thoughts in our minds as coming from the Creator.

Some of us claim to hear all sorts of things in our minds that we believe are coming directly from the Creator. And some of us go so far as to claim these thoughts come from our personal relationship with the Creator.

We tend to forget how easy it is to forget that these beliefs were already in the world before we were born. And for the most part, the world has accepted them as part of the existing beliefs and values.

Nevertheless, if we dig deeper into our knowledge and experience with the Creator, then we will undoubtedly discover that this relationship exists only in our minds. In other words, since we have been taught very little about our own personal minds -- not the psychological studies we read about others' minds -- it's easy for us to accept others' definitions of the world and our relationship with it.

Some of us want to solve our problems so badly that we find it difficult to do the work to understand the mind that created them. It's difficult to accept that our minds were developed from toxic beliefs and values already present in the world.

Nevertheless, the enlightening of the mind process begins first with the awareness that our minds dictate how we perceive ourselves and others. This newborn consciousness exists without others telling us how it should express itself.

To become reborn occurs within the mind and means we have overcome what others have taught us about ourselves and the world. In other words, we are in the world, but we're not born of the world.

Meanwhile, enlightenment is consciousness without the toxic distortions that we have been taught by others. And our search for enlightened consciousness occurs in our minds. As our minds gain clarity, we lose our dependency on others for our enlightenment.

Monday, February 13, 2012

"The Pain of Denial"

At what moment in our lives do we actually know that we don't really know what we're doing. Is it when we reach the low points in our lives? Or is it when we have achieved our goals?

It's rather easy to listen when we become victimized by unpleasant situations. When we reach our low points  -- those points of the pain and suffering we feel in sorrow, debts, unemployment, foreclosures, prison, illness, and so forth -- most of us are ready to listen to anyone with a solution to our situation.

We work to accomplish things in our lives because many of us don't know what else to do. We cannot bring ourselves to accept that we don't know exactly what we want or why we spend our lives doing things that cause us to deny our own existence.

Some of us live for our families. We strive for harmony and happiness, and when we get it, we know we can only keep it for a short period of time. In other words, we cannot control the uncontrollable: The vagaries of human behavior.

Some of us proudly proclaim that we're happy with our lives, and readily trick ourselves into believing we have no regrets. We chalk up our pain and suffering as being part of the reason we believe we're happy. 

Some of us even go so far as to keep secrets from ourselves. And in doing so, we strive to achieve societal defined goals at the expense of ourselves.

In other words, we lose ourselves in the society of pain and suffering by trying to use it to rationalize our lives. This action inextricably tie us to our desires to achieve something to make us feel that our lives are meaningful.

Nevertheless, by denying ourselves the limitless power in our minds, we become lost in the vast ocean of collective pain and suffering. Unfortunately, as we drown in the deepening swallow of acceptability, we continue to swim aimless in a never ending ocean of denial about what we are doing to ourselves.

Similarly, many of us actually believe our lives have meaning, even though we aren't doing anything close to expressing who we really are.

So, in our quest to deny the limitless power we have in our minds, we work tirelessly on jobs that require us to harm ourselves and others.

We deny our participation in selling pharmaceutical drugs, fraudulent loans, alcohol, and all types of products and services that cause the destruction of others. And even as we participate in our own psychological and physical destruction, we fail to recognize that it's suffering we're creating, not happiness.

Some of us remain psychologically depraved because we're unwilling to unleash the great power in our minds. We accept mediocrity, because it gives our lives some meaning.

There has to be some meaning for us as a receptionist, mail room clerk, truck driver, retail salesperson, local politician, school teacher, union worker, computer programmer, telemarketer, investment banker, religious leader, writer, dentist, doctor, and so on. 

Meanwhile, it's very difficult to find someone who has unleashed their full potentiality, the limitless power of the mind, in their work. We seem unable to get to that point of greatness or powerful. It's always something causing us to come up short in expressing our limitless power.

Most of us work because we have to. We search for professions that we believe will give meaning to our lives.

And because we're the ones who decided these professions would give meaning to our lives, we find it difficult to accept another perspective.

Whenever we deny our potentiality, the limitless power in our minds, we deny who we really are.

Friday, February 3, 2012

"High on Symbolism"

All that we currently know and believe exist in our minds. We are the ones responsible for our own realities.

There are some things that make us feel good about ourselves. Some of us particularly like holidays, birthdays, historical accomplishments, and so on. We seem to find some magical psychological solace in them.

Many of us don't realize that in these types of situations our minds are playing tricks on us. We are so heavily invested in the mind games of symbolism that it's difficult to discern the realities we are creating and giving life to.

Unfortunately, we're only juggling existing beliefs and values in our minds and giving life and importance to them. In other words, we're giving more form and power to our realities than actually exist.

Sometimes we even believe the events, particularly if we believe they make us feel happy, are greater than what's present in the event itself. It's similar to believing we are powerless and then giving great powers to others that they don't actually possess.

In this case, we are empowering our minds to distort our perceptions of what's actually happening in the world as well as our lives. Whenever we give power to something -- holidays, birthdays, historical accomplishments, and so forth--, we make them important to us. And, at a certain level of awareness, we begin to worship them as things existing outside of us in time and space.

Similarly, whenever we devalue our own power, we create an awareness of ourselves that is different from what actually exists in us.

In other words, we use our minds to create realities of pain, suffering, oppression, poverty, wealth, and so on, which exists only in our minds. And it's our awareness of ourselves and the world that's interpreting  what we see and feel.

Some of us prioritize holidays, birthdays, and historical accomplishments according to their importance to us. They mean a lot to us. We want others to know this and respect that this particular holiday is important to us.

Unfortunately, depending on our beliefs and values, particularly as they relate to how we define ourselves, some of us don't give the same importance to the events as others do who believe in them.

Some examples of symbolism are Christmas and Black History Month. Those who celebrate Christmas believe it's a very important event. They spend considerable energies on preparing for it. It is a time for them to come together as a family and feel good about themselves.

Now, there are others who don't believe Christmas is important. They either ignore it or create an alternative to it such as, Kwanzaa or something else.

By de-prioritizing Christmas, they have done nothing to demean or devalue it. They have merely expressed their beliefs and values on the importance, or lack thereof, of a particular holiday.

Meanwhile, in the case of Black History Month, those who celebrate it believe it's an important event. And many of the celebrants expect others to respect it as such. Unfortunately, much like Christmas, others might not feel the same way about it. And like Christmas, by them not supporting it, doesn't devalue or demean the beliefs and values of those who support it.

When we engage in symbolism, it causes us to believe something is greater than it really is. We give power and importance to things based on our beliefs and values. And in nearly all instances, these beliefs and values were in the world before we were born. We forget they are merely beliefs and values that we were taught by others to believe in, and perpetuate as our own creations.

Nevertheless, whether we are aware of it or not, we are greater than the holidays, birthdays, historical accomplishments, and so forth that were created from the human mind. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget that the human mind creates all types of fanciful things to entertain itself and others.