“Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity.” ~ Thomas J. Watson; American businessman, pioneer in the development of accounting and computer equipment used today.
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation.
Have these in mind– How do most people come to know what they know? Through other people, thoughts, ideas, self-deceits of their own minds, and books, right…?? And, more precisely, how are these same thoughts arising and how are they written…?? By human beings with an ego and a goal to reach, after thinking the thoughts in their mind.
Let us switch now–
Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of what is happening or what you are experiencing in the present moment or situation. It is being COMPLETELY here and now without judgment, chastising or blaming, without comparison and without any kind of conflict in your mind. This is a capacity that all human beings possess. Whenever you bring awareness into what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. The physiological reason is that breaths, by paying full attention to your breath, taken mindfully tend to be slow and deep, which stimulates the vagus nerve, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It lowers stress, reduces heart rate and blood pressure, and calms you down. The psychological reason is that when you put your attention intensely on the breath, you are fully in the present for the duration of the breath. To feel regretful, you need to be in the past; to worry, you need to be in the future.
We all enter this world pure, fearless, without doubt and struggle, untainted by duality and delusions of the flesh, full of love and wisdom; imagine a new-born baby and you’ll understand perfectly. The whole problem of suffering and delusion starts when the baby comes out of the mother and learns to make use of the physical senses, and, on top of that, the adults around him teach him wrong, teach him about insecurity, fear, difference in people and nature, about how limited their own intelligence is and how to conform to one mindset about a specific religion, about patriotism, about monetary values, about how to think and the importance of an ideal or a person up on a pedestal–fanaticism about a preferred sport’s team, a movie star, a prophet or philosopher, any rigid mindset that creates an unbending mind.
But a mind should flow like a river, mold into the formless and shapeless essence of truth, love, and ABSOLUTE AGILITY of strength (not be lazy or rigid, but able to move quickly and easily, a weightless and stress-free mind). Early infancy is when the brain absorbs all the information the physical senses feed, just like a sponge; from then on, the mind is being poisoned and troubled, and the wisdom and fearlessness, love and positive thinking remains under chains by the conditioning and all the garbage fed to it by parents, religious practices, patriotism, government, and so on and so forth. These muddy layers of haughty and erroneous beliefs which oppress the soul or the mind of the growing individual turn into stone and shape the personality into the mundane and short-sighted, it robs the potential for greatness in the human being; therefore, we should all get rid of all this baggage that only creates stress and a weighty mind with fear and doubt and pride, lack of wisdom, mental and physical illness, and crooked perceptions of everything we experience.
Absolutely no being is born into this world with evil or with hatred towards anything, because the pure heart does not produce evil, the pure, untainted heart only produces the natural condition, love, peace and bliss, which are one unity, one condition of wholeness, the one existent and irrevocable truth, one universal consciousness, ONENESS, complete harmony and perfection; but, however, evil and erroneous belief is created by thought, by human conditioning, by weakness of our own choosing when we attach to a rigid mindset, when we follow other weak and poisoned minds. Because we have all forgotten our natural state or condition of love and unity, and thus felt fear, doubt, without purpose, being led by our mundane and egotistical physical senses, which run amok untamed and unguarded, our perception of reality becomes narrow and confused and we start thinking darkly and empty; as in we need something, we are not whole, we need security, we need love to be whole again, we need a leader to straighten our path and guide us because we feel too weak and ordinary, maybe even broken by our past or by our vices, to find it alone.
All delusions of the human mind, obviously; a sure way to feed the ego and create a false belief, for a false belief offers so-called “security” to the ego and the means to feed that delusion, it all creates pleasure to the physical senses. And in following our self-pity, by whining mentally–“I can’t do this and won’t even try,” “What’s the point…??,” “I do not have an education so I can’t start a business,” “I have been smoking for too long to change now,” “I need someone to bless me for I am a sinner and I need to go to church to wash my sins away”–our minds become weak and victims of the ego and its designed fears.
One sure way to stop this vicious cycle of fear and self-pity is to become aware of our present, live that present and be the best we can be in that same present, not wait to give our best in the following hours or tomorrow or the next day, but give our full attention to the moment, seize the moment and find pure happiness there no matter what the situation is or where you are. If you fall in the trap of following others or expecting others to raise you up, then you will live your life in parts, not as a whole, and you will encounter moments of fear, doubt, and misery.
I know this from experience, because when I used to follow a leader in church, or become engaged by the nonsense in the news, or follow the illogical beliefs of the egos of others, or compared the success of another with my own success, or try to always please others, I would quite often become mentally depressed and hateful. And that is no way to live a full and rich life; it steals the motivation and beauty of life in you.
We must be vigilant in this and remain always aware of our thoughts and the reactions we have. We must stop following the news and others telling us what the reality of life and of God itself really is, for our unique perceptions in meditation or mindfulness of the present is the only one we should trust and rely upon.
- Asa Rodriguez - 