Development of a Toxic Mind

One day, and usually without any warning, we realize our minds are overwhelmed by toxic beliefs. They're there, creating all kinds of havoc in our lives, but we don't know exactly where they come from.  All we really know is there's something unknown within our minds that's responsible for the suffering in our lives. 

The first place some of us look for answers is outside of our minds. We do so because it's difficult for us to believe our suffering comes from inside of us.  So we search for answers outside of ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for us to believe that most of our toxic beliefs came from outside of us.  Since we're born into a highly toxic world, and since our beliefs came from this world, we believe the world is responsible for our suffering.

And for most of us, this is valid. While it is valid, it is not the complete reason for our toxic minds. We also participated willingly, in the sense that we were unaware of any alternatives, in our own development of toxic minds. 

Unfortunately, even our absence of alternatives don't clearly reveal to us exactly how and why we were taught these beliefs. We didn't see any warning signs that what we were being taught could be harmful to us later on in life. Everything in our development seemed like an innocuous learning process.

Our learning process to become human is entrusted to society, parents, and our own life experiences. So there's little reason for us to believe or fear language and history, spiritual and cultural values, racial and class distinctions as being harmful to us. We just continue to accept all this information into our fertile, nontoxic minds.

At some point in our development, we begin to perceive ourselves as individuals with certain physical and psychological attributes that separate us from others. We begin to believe we are unique.

And within our uniqueness we believe we have free will, special God-given talents, and a purpose in life that others don't necessarily possess. We translate our uniqueness into individualism, which allows us to believe we are somehow different from others.

Meanwhile, we begin to observe that others have this uniqueness, too. Some of them have different language and history backgrounds, different spiritual and cultural values, and they belong to different racial and class groups.

After awhile, we begin to accept the toxic beliefs as part of our uniqueness. They make us different from others, even though others have toxic beliefs, too.
Similarly, from our life experiences, we also accept that there are few, if any, alternatives to the beliefs and values we use to confirm our uniqueness. So, even after we have the power to teach ourselves new beliefs and values, we continue to hold on to the toxic ones. 

For some of us to go beyond our uniqueness, we must be willing to explore alternative knowledge to create a new awareness of ourselves that's void of ego-driven uniqueness. In other words, we have to create a new person; a sort of psychologically rebirth of our minds.

To go beyond the illusory uniqueness that's caused by our toxic beliefs, we must believe and search  within our minds for the unconditioned awareness that remains unaffected by toxic beliefs.

This inner power or unconditioned consciousness is there for us to use to teach ourselves limitless beliefs and values to liberate our minds of toxic beliefs. The price for this awareness is the willingness to search for the inner power or unconditioned consciousness within our minds.