Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Our Thoughts are Killing us

There's not much difference between being opinionated and being addicted to toxic beliefs and values, except our mind. Whether we like it or not, our  mind is the source of the beliefs and values we use to determine what's true, bad, sinful, good, and sacred.


Some of us go through life without ever questioning our beliefs and values, because we are too afraid. Unfortunately, most of us have been taught to believe that it's sacrilege, or something bad will happen to us if we question what we've been taught.

Our fears keep us blinded by our illusions. This is the darkness responsible for the distortions we have about the outside world.

Unfortunately, we respond to our illusions as realities or universal truths. We tend to forget that our faith in God, at least the one we have been taught by others, comes from our beliefs and values. And so does our religion; even our social and political affiliations come from others.

Most of us are defensive about our faith in God and religion. We are too afraid to even ask questions. We're afraid to examine why we became a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and so on.  And in our disquietude, we rationalize our faith -- belief in something -- as the source of our power. 

At this level of understanding, it's difficult to understand, or even accept, that faith exists only in our individual mind. And unfortunately, for many of us, sagacity died a long time ago. That's when our mind   became a cesspool of illusions.

Nonetheless, from the darkness of our mind, we seek succor in careers, education, history, religion, and other things outside of our mind. This means we are guided by our illusions in our search for clarity.

It's during our search for clarity that our illusions cause us to have a blackout,  a sort of memory loss.  We temporarily forget that our beliefs and values caused us to perceive ourselves as Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, and so on, come from our minds.

Similarly, our forgetfulness keeps us searching for answers in the illusions outside our mind. And whenever we discover what we believe is new information, we immediately manipulate it to fit comfortably with our existing beliefs and values.


When we try to manipulate new information, we become active players in the illusion game. We become so blinded by our beliefs and values that we believe sin and righteousness actually exist in time and space according to our beliefs. 

In other words, we believe things happening outside of our mind are godly (good) or sinful (bad)based entirely on our beliefs and values.This type of reasoning makes it easier for us to hate people or dislike them simply because of our beliefs and values.

As active players in the illusion game, we manipulate our beliefs to fool or deceive others. Unfortunately, when we manipulate our minds to deceive others, we only create more illusions and suffering in our own lives.

To manipulate our minds requires a lot of energy and self-deception. And after playing this game for long periods of time, our minds become feeble, powerless, and disinterested in understanding the illusions.

We must constantly practice mindfulness so that we know our minds are responsible for the thoughts killing our essence. And unless we are committed to understanding the origins of our beliefs and values, we will remain victimized by the illusions. 


Meanwhile, for those of us living outside of our minds, we believe enlightenment is another mind game. It's another form of something to give us relief from our out-of-control mind. We expect it to come from another person., one who we believe has already achieved it.


We must reach the point of clarity in our mind to know that enlightenment is arduous, time consuming, and not born of this illusory world. Enlightenment is more than a word confined to a specific language.

Enlightenment is the not-yet-discovered power in our minds. It's our inner power, our unconditioned consciousness, awaiting to be discovered by those who seek its power.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Commitment to the Powers of Our Minds

All power exists in our mind.

Our existence is confirmed by our minds. So are our goals in life. And even our religious and spiritual beliefs and values come from our minds. Everything that we are capable of doing in life come from our minds.

Some of us find it difficult to believe that everything we know about ourselves and the outside world come from our well-developed beliefs and values. And even when we get inklings or inspirations to awaken our minds, we choose to hang on to what we already know.

We even trick our minds into believing our beliefs and values come from a source of power other than society, parents, and life experiences. And we frequently forget that when we meditate or pray, we do so with beliefs and values  received from others and embodied as our own.

In other words, we seek power of clarity by using beliefs and values that distort who we are, and how we perceive life. Whenever we seek liberation or enlightenment in a power outside of our minds, we are relying on beliefs and values that are toxic and deleterious.

All power exists in our mind.

Obviously, this power doesn't exist in a toxic mind or one imprisoned with beliefs and values that distort our perception of ourselves and the outside world.

Nevertheless, in spite of our toxicity, we think and embody beliefs and values. And what we think and believe, determine who we are now, and who we can become later. Our minds determine the outcome of our lives. 

Whatever we cherish or desire in our lives come from our minds. Our education comes from the information we are taught by others. So does religion, and to a larger extent spirituality. We know about the existence of things because of our beliefs and values, which existed in the world before we were born.

Although many of us crave knowledge and, in some cases, knowledge of the self, we search for the self with the beliefs and values responsible for distorting the self.  Unfortunately, this is a fruitless search. All that we can find in our search is what we already know, or more aptly, what is already known by the collective world consciousness.

This means we search for ourselves handicapped by our illusions of language, religion, moral and spiritual principles, and our incessant need to fit in with others by denying who we are.

Nevertheless, our search for the self is a necessary one, if we desire to enlighten our minds.  It's during our search when we become aware that all we know about ourselves is nothing at all. And unfortunately, there's no one in the world, other than us, who can ever define who we are.


Many of us are taught to worship other people, places, and things. And after awhile, we begin to think so little of ourselves that we believe nearly everyone is more powerful than we can ever become. These beliefs confirm we are lost in the search for the self, and that we have forgotten our search is inside, not outside of the mind.

Whenever we forget that all power is in our minds, we fall deeper into the abyss of human victimization and powerlessness. It's important for us to remain mindful of our power at all times. Mindfulness is a form of clarity necessary for the inward journey.

Even in those moments of intense desires for something outside of us, we must remember most of our desires come from toxic beliefs and values. And the things we desire are fulfilled by the powers of our minds.

In other words, we can conceive specific desires and use our mind powers to express the desires into the visible world. This mind power becomes limitless when we remove the veil of distortions preventing us from having a clear and clean mind.


Similarly, we must remain steadfast in our commitment to remove the toxic beliefs and values distorting our vision of ourselves and the outside world. There can be on letup on our work. We must to committed to working everyday on understanding the development of our beliefs and values.

In other words, we must have a strong, unshakable commitment to working on our minds. And if our commitment is easily shaken by others, then it's not a real commitment. Our commitment to enlighten our minds must be strong enough to ignore what we hear and see from others.


For us to think less of ourselves, other than what we were created to be, mean we don't truly understand the limitless power in our minds. We must believe and know we are greater than our present beliefs and values. However, to accept this awareness of power we must be willing to go deeper into our minds, beyond judgments of right and wrong, and discover who we really are without our current beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, even at the level of intense suffering, some of us know  we are more than what we have been taught. Something in our mind reminds us of the existence this yet-to-be discovered power. This undiscovered power is our unconditioned consciousness or our inner power. It's all the power we need to express who we are on this journey.

All power exists in our mind.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Immersed in a World of our own Creation

Sometimes it's difficult to know that we don't know. Many of us believe and trust what we have been taught to the point that we perceive the world from the prism of our beliefs and values.

As the late spiritual mystic, Dr. Howard Thurman said, "I forgot how easy it is to forget." His words are reminders for us to remember how easy it is for us to forget that our beliefs and values came from the collective illusions disguising themselves as the truth.

Our beliefs and values  create various characters for us to play during different epochs. Some of the characters we play possess the things we most desire in ourselves, while many others display traits we believe are undesirable. And some of us are better or more proficient actors than others.

Some of us get to live our lives on a national or even international scale; however, most of us live our lives in basic anonymity. We're so anonymous that our neighbors don't know we exist.

Unfortunately, we do most of our acting in front of  ten to fifteen people that we call friends, some family members, and whenever we expand ourselves in special events: parties, weddings, funerals, and so on.

If we were Hollywood actors, we would starve to death, because only  minuscule numbers of people were really interested in how we're living our lives. In other words, only a few people ever see us act.

Most of our acting occurs in our minds. We immerse ourselves in a world of our own creation  We created this world from our beliefs and values and our characters act according to them.

The high walls we have erected around our minds protect us from outsiders. This allows us to imagine all types of things existing outside of our minds. It also allows us to create characters that express this imagination.

Sometimes we create horror movies by doing things to create unpleasant situations. While at other times we create love or romantic characters, which result in happy or unhappy endings.

We are usually overwhelmed by fear, worry, lack, limitation, and doubt, which keeps us in a perpetual state of suffering. We fear what will happen to us when we go outside of our minds. We worry about what people are thinking about us.

This allows us to imprison our minds with thoughts of lack, limitation, and doubts about our power to function in the outside world. So whenever we get the chance, we load our minds with as many toxic beliefs as we can, and trick ourselves into believing we are actually living in the outside world.

Meanwhile, we have forgotten we're still living with the beliefs and values that we acquired from society, parents, and life experiences. The illusions of money, fame, political, and social power seem so real. It's as if this is all our lives can ever become.

Nevertheless, the illusions continue changing within our minds. They keep providing us with characters to express ourselves within our own minds. And just like the movies, we find it difficult to believe what's happening is only an illusion.

To free ourselves from our characters, we must understand how we created them. This means we must clearly accept our beliefs and values as illusions. When we can do this, we are able to know that the outside world reflects what's in the inside world (mind).

For us to change the outside world, we must first remove the toxic distortions preventing us from seeing ourselves and the world without the illusions. We are always living according to our beliefs and values, even when we forget they're there.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Standing Still with our Pain

When we are down and out, feeling lowly and unworthy, it's time to get busy working on unleashing our mind power.

Great opportunities are always present when we find ourselves in unpleasant situations. We have to trust ourselves enough not to run away from what's happening in our lives.

Many of us have been taught to run away from what's happening to us. Yet, if we really think about it, sometimes it's not good for us to move forward too quickly.

Although many people subscribe to "let's move on" and not dwell on what's happening in our lives, some of us subscribe to different ways of going beyond our problems.

In this age of enlightened minds, some of us sit still (reflective meditation) with our problems. We sit and feel all the pain, the sharp points piercing our minds with doubts and fears.

Then we suck up the pain with our thoughts until we gain the clarity to understand that our problems are nothing more than the illusions we have created from our own beliefs and values about ourselves and the outside world.

Whenever we feel the pain, really feel the pain, and not run away from it, we begin to trust our minds to guide us. And with this newfound trust comes the awareness that it's our mind filled with beliefs and values distorting how we perceive ourselves and the outside world.

This awareness of being is our epiphany, our freedom.


Similarly, when we reach the point of clarity where we clearly see and understand we are responsible for creating the illusions, we also know that we are doing this with our own beliefs and values.

These are the beliefs and values embodied and embedded in our minds as the truth about ourselves and the outside world. And without hestitation, we will defend them fearlessly and dare anyone to question them.

Meanwhile, as we continue to live our lives in the cesspool of tainted visions, we tend to forget that we're caught up in the mind games of being what others want us to be. Somehow our lives and dreams merged with the world's dreams, and we lost the power to find ourselves.

Everytime something happens in our lives and we don't know what to do, we take our beliefs and values and run as fast as we can to the comforts of world opinion. And as we speed forward, we leave behind  the footprints of failed dreams, which become our regrets. 

Unfortunately, each time we have the opportunity to understand our problems, to learn something from our unpleasant experiences, we turn away from the source of our power and seek succor from the toxic beliefs and values. 

It's important for us to be mindful that whenever we move too quickly from our pain, we will regret our decisions and begin wishing we had acted thus and so. That's when our regrets inextricably bind us to our habitual behavior of running away from our problems. This darkness tricks our minds into believing our habits are responsible for our beliefs and values.

So whenever we do things that we later regret, we try to change our habits, not the beliefs and values responsible for them. It seems easier to work on anger, addiction, greed, envy, jealousy, and so on, rather than understand how we developed our minds from beliefs and values taught us by society, parents, and life experiences. 

Nevertheless, we continue to use the same beliefs and values to enlighten our minds. In other words, whenever we encounter great problems in our lives, we turn to what we have been taught by others for our solutions. Many of us are too afraid to turn to ourselves for the answers, because we doubt our powers to know something the world hasn't taught us.

Meanwhile, the recognition by us that all power comes from our minds is the starting point for understanding what's in our minds and how it got there. In other words, what are our beliefs and values? Where did they come from?

These are the questions that move us slowly, but clearly, to the deeper parts of our minds where we discover our inner power or unconditioned consciousness -- the part of our minds that remains free of toxicity.

This is the perspicuity we need to understand our regrets and why we're so anxious to move on before taking the time to understand what's there in our lives.