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.
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