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.