Monday, April 30, 2012

Conquering the World of Illusions

Today, while we're living in the midst of changing circumstances, the greatest accomplishment we can make in our lives is to conquer our illusions. Whether we realize it or not, our illusions are responsible for our angst.

Many of us believe whatever we've been taught by others. And we take this information and begin creating illusions masquerading as realities to help us navigate through the pain and suffering. Unbeknown to us, our illusions are nothing more than preconditioned beliefs and values.

These beliefs and values cause us to impose our will on how we interpret outside events. We give wars, unemployment, burgeoning debts, alcohol and drug addictions, religious and spiritual dogma and so forth, power that doesn't exist in them.

In other words, we trick ourselves into believing that everything we hear, read or experience in our personal lives exists as we believe it does. And based on our beliefs and values, we create and immerse ourselves in a world of our own creation.

This is the mindset we steadfastly defend as we perceive life, with all of our judgments and opinions, to be exactly as we perceive it. It's this toxic distortion of the world that diminishes our capacity to see the world as it really is.

Regardless of our backgrounds, the struggles we face in our lives are in direct proportion to the illusions we have created and accepted as reality. Our realities, the things we believe to exist according to our interpretations of them, are nothing more than flickering illusions.

In other words, toxic realities are our beliefs and values shaping what we see and hear. And within them are also our desires for even more illusions. We desire more illusions to help shape our existence, which make them appear real to us and exist outside of our minds.

 For us to conquer our illusions, we first must acknowledge their existence. Many of us believe our beliefs and values are sacrosanct. We are ready at a moment's notice to defend and attack those who question our reasons for acting according to our beliefs.

After we reach the point of acknowledgment, we are now ready to understand who created all the illusions in the first place. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to understand that we are their creators.

Even though they seem to exist outside of us and without our control, nonetheless, we created all the illusions in our lives with our minds.

A good illustration of the illusions we fear is found in unemployment. Many of us fear unemployment because our mind (beliefs and values) believe we will starve or become homeless if we lose our jobs.

And because of all the information bombarding our minds with spiraling unemployment, mass layoffs, and a dismal economic outlook, we believe that this is a true expression of what's really happening in the world.

Similarly, within the context of the  fears produced by our illusions, are our desires for security or permanence. We want to live without unpleasant interruptions. This makes unemployment an unpleasant interruption: one we're unsure of our power to overcome.

Some of become so afraid of losing our jobs that we're willing to relinquish some of our beliefs and values and submit ourselves to accepting behavior from others in the form of humiliation. We begin  to believe we are powerless without our jobs. And we do all of this, because of our unawareness that this is a mind game created by our own minds. 

Meanwhile, for us to go beyond our fears of unemployment and other similar illusions, we must accept that all power comes from our minds. There's nothing that ever happens in our lives where our minds are not present.

This is the recognition that it's the power from our minds interpreting the perceptions from the outside world. And because our beliefs and values came from others, we are always caught in a web of distortions causing us not to perceive the world as it really is.

Nevertheless, try as you will, we cannot escape the truth that our beliefs came from others. And we, along with our teachers, are collectively living our lives in this web of toxic distortions expressing themselves as illusions. And it's from this toxic prism that we devalue our minds and succumb to the illusions. 

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, this is the price for admission into this world. However, if we desire to see a new movie of ourselves existing without our toxic distortions, there's also a price for this experience. Fortunately, the price for admission to enlightened awareness is something we all have, namely, our minds.

Enlightened minds come from toxic minds that are seeking to understand the power responsible for creating the illusions. And the ability to express enlightenment is not given to a few people, nor is it reserved exclusively for the so-called special people; it's available to all of us. 





Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Going Beyond Judgments About Right and Wrong

For many of us, it's difficult to let go of what we have been taught. We use our beliefs and values to defend ourselves whenever we are challenged by others. This is when we cling to them as if they are sacrosanct.

This habit of clinging or defending what we have been taught continues to mitigate our own power. It's easy for us to forget how easy it is to forget where they came from: People with toxic distortions preventing them from seeing the world clearly.

Some of us have reached the point where we find it to be exhilarating to cling to toxic information without realizing it's toxic. Even today, when many of us facing the disquietude of unemployment, imminent home foreclosure and bankruptcy, we seek refugee in our beliefs and values.

We've imprisoned our minds in a web of mindful distortions that cause us to believe that  some of our beliefs and values are good, while others are judged to be bad. We have forgotten that the mind making the judgments about good and bad is one consumed by toxic distortions. 

Many of us like to believe that we don't know why we're in this world. We attribute our existence to all types of beliefs that we learned from others.

Powers of mind mean we exist because our minds tell us so. Everything we do, every choice we make, come from a repository of beliefs and values we use to interpret the world and ourselves.

And depending on the type of beliefs and values we use to guide us in this world, we judge things to be good or bad without realizing it's our beliefs and values making the judgments.

Somewhere in our minds is the source of clarity about who we are, and our purpose for being in this world. It's truly our sacred inheritance to this world. It's the part of the mind that escapes all the probing from outside sources such as psychologists, psychiatrists, gurus, and so on.

When we go deeper, beyond the judgments of right and wrong or good and bad, we discover that we have far more power than what we have been taught by others.

At the point of clarity, we know that all our efforts to succeed in this world are fruitless unless we discover how to perceive ourselves without toxic distortions.

Nevertheless, many of us believe we have found the answers to our limitless power because of our education, career, wealth, status, and so forth. And it's from this prism that we perceive ourselves and the world. This is the power we're using to discover the clarity in our minds to see the world clearly.


This distorted perspective of ourselves and the world empowers our  minds to play tricks on us so that we  believe we have actually done something meaningful with our lives.

And even when we attempt to rationalize our lives to ourselves, we imagine flowery images in our obituaries extolling the virtues of our education, wealth, the status we held in our community, and the good we believe we provided to others. We do so, without having achieved the clarity to see ourselves and others without toxic distortions.


Nevertheless, at the end of the day, most of us leave this world with our original beliefs and values intact. The same beliefs and values taught us as children remained with us for our entire lives. Unfortunately, we forgot they were taught to us by our parents, our society, and from our life experiences.

All power exists in our minds.

And everything outside of our minds must be interpreted by our minds.
When our minds become clean, we're able to see the world as it is without the toxic distortions causing to judge events as good or bad or right and wrong.

All power exists in our minds.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Creating our own Path

It's difficult just to be ourselves.

Most of us are easily distracted by the shenanigans of others on the crowded road of life. We are constantly searching hither and yonder for the next fad or gimmick to magically solve our problems.

And since nearly everyone we know is caught up in this illusory behavior that's responsible for  human suffering, we find it too difficult to resist what they're doing. So we go along with the crowd.

As we create more illusions in our lives, we forget that we picked them up from the troubled lives  of those guiding us on our journey. We don't recognize the sickness within the illusions, because sickness is all around us. Everyone on the crowded room is sick in one way or the other.

Sickness of the mind is deadly, even if we can't see its pernicious effects in our dysfunctional beliefs and values. It's there, dragging us blindly through life; killing us slowly with each step we take.

Nevertheless like all sickness, silent or not, at some point we begin to feel its presence in our illness.  And we usually feel this illness more intensely when we become  discouraged with ourselves and begin questioning the wisdom of those guiding us on the crowded road.

This means we have reached one of the many forks on the crowded road providing us with the opportunity to change our paths.Whenever we reach the point in our lives that we're willing to listen, to trust, and believe in the powers in our mind, we realize it's time for us to travel on a different path.

And to travel on another path, we can't use the toxic illusions to guide us to it. This new path must be one that's free of illusory beliefs and values. It's a path without signs, maps, or the ideas of others to guide us. It's one where we must create our own signs, maps, and trust in ourselves.

For most, if not all, of our lives, we have followed the signs, maps, and ideas of others. We seldom questioned their maps or even if we were traveling on the path we desired to be on. We just followed the crowd.

Surely, we thought, they know where they're going. If not, we thought someone would raise questions about the direction we are traveling in life.

So we packed our bags with college degrees, life experiences, ambitions, and desires searching for worthiness in the life choices provided for us on the crowed road,

After stumbling and falling beneath the surface of the prodding footsteps of our guides, we can no longer sustain ourselves in the darkness engulfing our path. We find it too painful to walk through life by holding on to someone in front of us.

At the point of psychological, emotional and physical exhaustion, we are ready to let go, even if only for a little while. Our blindness has been removed from the veil of powerlessness and we can see what's on our path.

Unfortunately, what we see is very disturbing and daunting. We can see that people on the crowded room have no idea about where their path is leading them.

Yet even with this information, most of us are too afraid to change our paths. We are too lazy or too afraid of the work we must do to create our own paths. And we continue to doubt if we have enough sense to know what's best for us.

When the pedal of our minds meets the road (beliefs and values) and we're faced with either remaining where we are, or creating a new road to travel on, we know it's time to do something.

Now that we can see the garbage -- all the beliefs and values we have acquired in our lives --  on our path, we can no longer tolerate the smelly and harmful toxins emanating from them and causing us to become psychologically ill.

The road to enlightenment is not crowded. It is spacious. It's a path where we can see clearly where we are going. It's one where we don't have to hold on to others to guide us.

And it's one we must create for ourselves, because our own individual path is the only one that will guide us to the enlightenment in our minds.

All power is in our minds.



Monday, April 2, 2012

Beyond our Toxic Distortions

Today, we continue to pray or meditate for the clarity we need to overcome the problems of unemployment, bankruptcy, home foreclosures, evaporated savings or retirement accounts, and so on,

Some of us are so desperate for solutions that we're willing to try anything. We feel badly for having placed ourselves in such a terrible position. And regardless of how many times we are told that our problems are only illusions, we find it too difficult to believe that they are not really real.

We know, at least intellectually, that our minds are responsible for the decisions causing us to suffer from our own creations.

In other words, we know we're responsible for the decisions we made to place ourselves in positions to produce these unpleasant results. Nevertheless, it's still difficult for us not to blame our employer, bank or interest rates for what's responsible for the nightmare we have created in our lives.

Fortunately, we have reached the point in our lives where we have the opportunity to go inward and discover the limitless powers of our minds. It is in our minds where we will find the clarity to perceive the world the way it really is by understanding the toxic distortions causing us not to see the world clearly.

Many spiritual enlightened and social philosophers believe our beliefs -- the ones we were taught by society and our parents -- are what prevent us from seeing the world clearly. So they offer us many different books, techniques, and sagacious insights to assist us with our toxic distortions.

Some of us find it difficult to believe that we'll ever see the world clearly, or the way it is without our beliefs and values. Nor are we able to accept the enlightened ones' ideas that our difficulties are rooted in the beliefs and values themselves. Moreover, it's our beliefs that are responsible for our limited imagination about the existence of things not yet expressed in the visible world.

Nevertheless, this clarity seeking journey has been wrought with pain and suffering for billions of people. Most of us have become caught up in the centuries old philosophical and spiritual discussions on being and existence. We want to know why we're here and nothing can deter us from finding this out.

While we search for clarity, blinded by our toxic beliefs, we seem never to achieve it. In fact, nearly all of us alive today have never met anyone with this clarity. However, it's true that we have read about a very few people, less than five, who have achieved the clarity we seek.

So, if we begin at this level of awareness, then we must conclude that our odds for achieving clarity are even greater than those from the recent mega lottery jackpot. Yet, much like the lottery players, we also spend feverishly with our toxic actions by trying to beat the odds of achieving full enlightenment during our lifetimes.

Whenever we get a moment of clarity to see the illusions as our own creations, existing in our minds as things outside of us, then we're able to search on our own. Now we want clarity, because we experienced brief flashes of it.

As enlightenment seekers, some of us believe it's not the perfect or fully awakened clarity that we are seeking, but the clarity to understand how humans have constructed this world. We want to know how language was arbitrarily developed by a few people for our use in interpreting our feelings, emotions, desires, pains, happiness, sadness, anger,  and so on.

And from what we know now, there was nothing divine or spiritually holy about this creation. It was done primarily for us to communicate with each other by accepting a standardized language that we all agreed with.

And like most of the beliefs taught us by our parents and society, we didn't believe language was a toxic distortion preventing us from perceiving ourselves and the world clearly.  We just accepted it by relishing our accomplishment of having learned our ABC's.

Nevertheless, is it reasonable to assume that those of us who have accumulated thousands of words in our minds are unwilling to let them go. It would be like letting go of all that we have, and then falling into an alien existence without anything (our beliefs) to guide us in the world. Yet, this is what we must do; become alone with nothing but our clear minds to reconstruct our lives.

To be alone with our unconditioned consciousness is all the clarity we need. When we are alone with ourselves, free of our toxic beliefs, we are free to exist in a state of complete being without being anything,  except colorless, faceless, and formless.

In this state of consciousness, we have the clarity to understand the limitless possibilities we have to create new ways  of communicating, other than our existing languages.

Meanwhile, as clarity-seekers, we seek something (enlightenment) by handicapping our minds with unknown toxic distortions. We even rationalize our psychological disability by arguing that everyone else is disabled, too.

And, furthermore, there's nothing we can do about it. However, as we go deeper into our minds, we discover there is something we can do about it.

Whenever we achieve a tiny speck of enlightenment, we know that which we seek is our unconditioned consciousness. This is the consciousness that remains free of toxic distortions. This is the clarity we seek.

However, to get to this clarity, we must revalue our minds to accept this rebirth as enlightenment. If not, our search will only result in us becoming like  the billions of others who have been on this journey. We will, like them, rationalize the results of our efforts as being part of our human destinies.