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.