Why can’t we free our minds?
The idea shouldn't be complicated, to be truthful. Every child understands this. The child doesn't need to know what something is called or how it works to use it, play with it, or enjoy it. A child doesn't care about money, status, looks, names, origin, etc. Children are simple, and we all were when we were kids. The only thing child wants is a sense of pleasantness, in other words: love. Everything in the world of little humans is focused on coming back to the feeling of love. Every expression of negativity such as anger and sadness is expressed for one reason, to come back to joy and happiness. We are not familiar with fear when we are kids. Fear is a phantom produced by the adult mind. We learn fear. The more we know fear, the more we unlearn love. The more we unlearn love, the more unpleasant we feel inside. The more unpleasant we feel inside, the more detached we become from our inner world and attached to the outer world. Since none of us wants to experience unpleasantness, we have inside we focus on finding a solution in the outside world and come back to the sense of joy and happiness inside.
We think as adults we are more mature, experienced, more thoughtful, more substantial, but we are complicated. The problem is that we grow only in terms of our body and mind, but our spirit stays the same. In other words, none of us grew up. We are not adults; we are complicated kids. We still want to be playful, be silly, be curious about everything, be happy, and most of all, feel love. But we can’t because we never learned it. What we learned is to be like others. Others were as complicated, hurt, and confused as we are now and looking for the solution in the external world through thinking.
Our thinking mind exists for us to survive and communicate with the world; therefore, the focus of our thinking mind points to the outside. It gathers data from external sources and uses that data to create a defense mechanism that is useable in that situation to protect our physical and energy body—something like a computer assistant program that is responsible for the balanced existence of our inner self. The primary purpose of that computer is to bring us back to the sense of pleasantness. What happens with the computer if it's not guided by anything? It goes to autopilot and operates based on the data gathered from an external source. We call that data experience. The problem is that data is limited and may not be relevant if the situation has changed. Still, since it's not controlled and operates on autopilot before it gathers another information, it will respond the way it used to.
The response may not apply to the current setup, which will create a distinctive atmosphere. We call that atmosphere unpleasantness or stress. If the vehicle keeps the same curse and stays in unpleasantness or pressure for a certain amount of time, it will create turbulence. We call that turbulence anxiety. When the amount of turbulence is critical and affects the physical parts of our vehicle, the computer puts the vehicle in the rest mode. It keeps on only functions essential for keeping the vehicle ongoing. We call that depression. Intuitive we all understand what our computer, our mind needs to be guided to function naturally and adequately we seek that guidance, the paradox is what since we were taught what our mind our computer or our EGO is the primary operating system, we look for that guidance everywhere, but not in our inner self. We gather data through our thinking mind, it doesn't matter how spiritual that data is, and we point it to external, as an outcome. Instead of freeing ourselves, we repeat the loops of usual responses.
The basic idea of all religions and teachings is the same, liberation from a complicated mind and back to our natural senses. For children, this is a simple concept because their focus is turned inside. Everything they learn they learn through senses, feelings, and intuition- "What I feel." For the adult mind, these ideas are complicated because we know through our thinking mind; conscious analysis; "What I think I feel." Children are intuitive, and their operating system is based on feeling: higher self, soul, inner self, unconscious, light side, divine, etc.; every teaching has a different name, but the idea is the same. Adults are logical, and our operating system is based on our thinking mind, EGO. The problem is not in the existence of our thinking mind but the misplaced control wheel.
Generation to generation, we repeat the same loop. With each subsequent generation, we sink deeper into symptoms and come up with new, more extravagant ways of fighting that symptom. Each generation has the central theme of the "path" and groups of people following and showing "the way." We are the most confused ones because we are born in times of open knowledge. All the "paths" and people who show "the way" are mixed. In our lifetime, we have not only one loop but many loops. None of them are right or wrong, but since we look around instead of looking within, instead of finding what aligns with us, we get stuck in one of the loops and consider that the right way, but deep inside it still hurts, deep inside we don't feel the essence of love, we feel fear. Each time we go back to our room, we don't want to spend much time there because it is not designed the way we want. Therefore, we look for liberation in other people, drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and generation to generation. We develop more and more ways of distraction just because we don't want to be alone in our room.
We are in pain not because the outside world or other people don't happen the way we want them to happen, but because we don't happen the way we want. We can't control our temper, our emotions, our expressions, or our choices.
Since we learn through our thinking mind and the focus of our thinking mind is from outside to inside, whatever we remember is not used to explore our inner world. Our focus is pointed to the outer world. Therefore we think about what outside world affects our inner world. Still, since we all live in our head, our private room, whatever we experience, we experience it through the window of our room, but we are still in the room. In other words, our inner feeling determines our perception of outside life. This is the touchstone we all got wrong. We are competent, in fact, designed the way to choose what we want our room to look like, but we can't because we don't know we can. The surface world in which we are all born and die doesn't teach us to choose. It teaches us to obey.
One of the essential basics of freedom of mind is the ability to tune inward and follow the guidance of our inner self rather than the given agenda of the external world.