"Taking Care of our Minds"

For many of us, at some point in our lives, we became aware of being something, and found ourselves here in this world. We don't have a clue why we're here or what's really happening in our relationship with ourselves and the outside world.

And since we don't pay particular attention to the development of our minds, there's no need for us to spend time wondering about why we're spending our life hours doing the things we do.

Some of us are alive, but we're not living. We take our minds for granted. We treat our minds similar to our waking up in the morning. We woke up. That's all there is to it. There's no need to spend time wondering why it happened.

We find it socially acceptable to express platitudes for being "blessed" to wake-up. Yet, for many of us, being alive is synonymous with complacency. We are alive, but we haven't discovered the passion for living. We're just going through the motions. Playing a character someone created for us.

For us to become truly alive, with our minds aroused enough to create nontoxic space, we must be willing to challenge the toxic beliefs distorting our perception of ourselves and the outside world. This is the path to an enlightened mind.

Our path to an enlightened mind requires us to embark on a lonely, inner-mind journey filled with beliefs and values that make us who we are now. It's a difficult path: an arduous endeavor to strip our minds of the things that define us.

Nevertheless, to discover what's beneath the toxicity in our minds, our minds must become naked, vulnerable for all to see. It's the freedom of knowing that we are already adequate and complete. So the work we're doing is removing the beliefs and values concealing our essence.

When we begin the inward journey, we frequently become bogged down in philosophical gymnastics by discussing the opinions of others who claim to have found the answers to how our minds relate to the outside world. This exercise becomes our excuse for not doing the work to understand our own minds. 

As we cultivate our confidence in ourselves, we can readily perceive our beliefs and values are the real culprits responsible for the toxic distortions expressing themselves as illusions. While unknown to us, the beliefs and values that we were taught by others have now become our illusions. And it's from these illusions that we have created in our minds the world we live in.

Similarly, when we do delve deeper into self-discover, we fight to rationalize what happened to us as children by blaming others or praising them for filling our minds with their toxic teachings. And the further we go into the mind discovery process, the more difficult it becomes for us to maintain our lifelong beliefs and values.

As we work to extricate ourselves from our toxic teachings, we experience a little clarity in our minds. Unfortunately, the clarity allows the illusions to reassert their power in our lives. We allow this to happen because our illusions receive their powers from our minds.

Moreover, until we have embodied the clarity as our new perspective of relating to the outside, we continue to empower our illusions with greater power. And the more power we give to the illusions, the greater our dependency on them. However, the more we depend on them, the greater their deception become on our ability to see the world as it really is.

After awhile, we are fighting with the illusions as if they exist outside of our minds. We can't remember having created them with the beliefs and values taught to us by others.

The illusions that frighten us come from our minds. In other words, we're afraid of ourselves. And the more illusions we create, the more frightened we become of engaging in self-discovery. As we struggle to make sense out of the outside world, the illusions trick us into believing they actually exit separate of our minds in time and space.

Most of our time is spent searching for answers within the illusions, who cloaked themselves in our beliefs and values and express themselves as images that are acceptable to us. Most of the time, they express themselves as  gurus with special powers. These gurus or self-proclaimed liberators purport to us that they have been endowed with special powers to help us manage the illusions.

When our pain becomes unbearable, and the illusions become all-powerful, we seek solace in the promises of others to guide us beyond the suffering we have created in our minds. And regardless of the number of times we try to find ourselves in the murky, yet clever eloquence, of these self-appointed gurus promising us peace and prosperity, we find, after awhile, that it's just another false promise.

Fortunately, regardless of our fruitless searches outside of ourselves, we always return to our minds, which are the source of all of our suffering. And when we realize that it's our minds, or the toxic beliefs and values in our minds, causing us to deceive ourselves into believing we are less than who we really are, we will have opened the mind to enlightenment.

The desire to know the development of our ego (self) becomes overpowering when our minds are stimulated with inquisitiveness. Our desires to know more than what we have been taught by others is all the power we need to create enough space in our minds to discover the origins of our toxic beliefs. And when we know how they were created, we no longer have to depend on them to express our existence.

Meanwhile, the journey of self-discovery is a daunting one. Whenever we clear some space in our minds to clearly see our beliefs and values, we become overwhelmed with the work required for us to overcome our toxic beliefs, And even those of us who feel really committed to doing the necessary work, find the working to be daunting.

During our foray into our minds, we become high on egoism and psychological pot, and forget that we are using toxic lens to guide us in our search. This enables us to hold on to certain toxic beliefs by judging them to be good or bad, based on what we have been taught by others about good and bad.

In moments of great stress, we cling to our definite opinions (beliefs and values)  about the way things are or should be in the world. We believe we have acquired the clarity of mind to judge things in the world, and to decide what's good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and so on.

Our beliefs and values, the source of our illusions, are what we use to guide us on our unknown journeys to our unknown destinations. We believe we're headed somewhere in life. Even those of us mired deeply in dead-end jobs, hobbled by educational deficiencies, victimized by layoffs, poor health, and overcome with deep anger about how we're living, we still believe that we're somehow making meaningful contributions to our society.

When we reach the point in our lives where we recognize our confused illusory minds as being  products of toxic beliefs, we will have arrived at the point of self-discovery: the point where we begin taking care of our minds.

This is the point where we are willing to listen and do the work of enlightening our minds.
Unfortunately, most of us never reach this point of self-discovery, because we believe our minds are already healthy. We believe our minds are healthy because we believe the information we received from our guides made them so. 

Nevertheless, the source of our confusion in believing in illusions comes from the various college degrees and prestigious positions that are coveted by our society. Even though we desire to know ourselves, we do so by holding on to the beliefs responsible for our illusions.

Some of us, even after working to enlighten our minds, continue to play the deleterious mind-games of illusions and realities. We convince ourselves that it's not our responsibility to take care of our minds.

In other words, we continue waiting, hoping that  someone will tell us how to free our minds of the toxic beliefs and values causing us to believe we're powerless to go beyond our teachings.

Yet, the search for enlightenment is in our own individual minds. And it doesn't matter how confused or dysfunctional we believe our minds are, we can begin our journeys from where we are now.