To Move Unshackled Into Tomorrow – Part 3

Part 2 left us with these these thoughts:

For someone with social anxiety to accept their affliction and smile at a stranger is a small victory.  To not look away when someone smiles at them is another small victory and should be embraced.  If a comparison is made in that moment to the “alphas” in society we take steps backwards. Your first beater car brought you as much joy at the time you got it as the Ferrari will in the future.  Keep this in mind.  Embrace the small moments as they occur, embrace them and don’t try to change them.  Don’t try to change yourself, you are beautiful the way you are.  At least by my definition, and hopefully now by your definition as well.

This way of thinking opens up our world, but it requires that we open up to others and most importantly to ourself.  This is more internal view  - this is really what we need to focus on because it allows to fully partake in the external world.  The external world is the internal worlds playground, not the other way around.  But alas, many excuses are created for us by the external world.  We use these excuses to prevent us from really accepting what was discussed in this article.  So the next article will look some of these excuses, break them down and see just how governments, laws, social norms, media and all sorts of other things don’t actually control us at all.

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This article is longer than the other ones were simply because it touches on many things which could be all be books on their own.  As always I bounce around a lot, yet hopefully through it all there is a weave of points which will elevate the already great person inside to the surface.

For a moment, let’s talk about assumptions.  For the most part, our lives are run on assumptions.  But do you ever stop and think why the world is the way it is?  I am not addressing the big philosophical question ” why are we here?” type question, but rather why is it that I am sitting here writing this article, while others are out fighting wars, running countries, making love, abstaining from love, promoting peace, advocating war…and each person is doing what they believe is right, or least what they think will make them feel better about the world they live in?  Some think no technology is best, others think technology doing all the work is best.  Some thing money solves problems, others think it causes more than it solves.  Why do we hold the beliefs we do?  And most importantly have we addressed this question in regards to our own beliefs.

That now that we have brought that up, let’s move on…

My ego draws a distinction between myself and the world.  It says that out there are people who do not want me to be happy, rich, fulfilled or whatever the case may be.  I may not start your own business because I am  afraid to fail or if it does not take off right away I may lose my  house.  These fears creep in, and stop us.  But why?  The first answer is the obvious one….we are afraid to lose something whether it be pride or a physical object or person.  The question we must ask beyond this is…How would I be different if one of these “bad” things occurred?

The answer is: I wouldn’t be different.  Nothing in the external worlds actually defines me, I only define myself.  Let me provide an example.  When bills start piling up and creditors start calling it is a very anxious situation for many people.  They simply cannot fathom how the problems will be solved and they start to make assumptions about what will happen to them.  They worry about social stigma, about losing possessions and about what will become of their children or significant other.  They may worry about crimanal charges, taxes or having to appear in court.  It all piles up and that anxiety becomes our identity.

Yet, anxiety is created because we are uncertain about an outcome.  We are not sure what will happen and so we worry about it.  But what if you were always knew what would happen?  Would you be anxious?  Thankfully, this process has nothing to do with telling the future, rather it is about understanding ourselves.  There are a few assumptions we have been made internally which allow for the external world to strap us down and contain us.  These shackles are not in the external world, they are within us.

The following are assumptions or mis-calibrations that we make within ourselves:

• External situations dictate who we are.  This is not true.  Think back over your life and remember times where you said to yourself “If I don’t get that my life will be great!” or “If I lose that…my life is going to horrible/bad/over!”  And yet you are still here…the same person after being through the good and bad.  You may not have even learned anything from the experience.  Likely you missed the most important and most basic lesson of all – each one of us is an observer of life.  By this I mean, the body and brain adapted to a situation. The mind tries to find a rationalization for it but really it just observes.   When we sit back and observe we become our most powerful self and can do anything.  But by realizing we are an observer of life and can still get to take part in the world, all the emotions become observations of chemical reactions going on in our body and they lose their power.  Yet, we can tap into the ones we want to experience.  Fear is the most common one we tap into; it consumes us and it becomes very very real.  By realizing that we are the same person no matter what happens, we can begin to see that all our worry is unfounded.  We are observers to our own experiences, and life is simply a package of experiences.

Most assuradbly we create our experiences, but we first create the world we experience by how we have shaped our internal beliefs.  Go to most universities and they will be able to get you to see something that is not there, or completely miss something in plain sight.  Our beliefs control our perception, and then those perceptions in turn re-enforce or change beliefs.

With so many people each experiencing the world in a different way it is no wonder the world is the way it is.  It is simply everyone trying to achieve their dreams, in the only way they can at this time while everyone else’s dreams seems to conflict with theirs.  Taxes conflict with being rich.  So governments are viewed as an adversary.  But this is just another group of people working on individual dreams…and it may not even involve their current job…just as your job may have nothing to do with the ideal life you are striving for.  It is just where you are right now.  You are an observer, an experiencer.  Embrace that idea and it will not matter where you go, what you do, where you end up.  Everything is fascinating, because there is always something new to experience and it is never the same thing twice (unless you tell yourself that something is boring).

Let me briefly digress and address the dream idea.  Most people do not even know what their own personal dream is.  They are operating on assumptions and beliefs within the brain.  The body then operates according to the “algorithm” the brain is running  and the “mind” just goes along for the ride thinking it is exerting control when it is not.  Unless our beliefs are analyzed and we ask why we are doing what we are doing…we are on autopilot and nothing will change until we break the cycle by physically doing something different.  For instance, someone may have a dream for world peace, but they are in the military.  Someone may want to eliminate poverty yet shops at places that use child or slave type labor.  What the belief is does not matter, that is for you personally to judge for your own life.  But question your beliefs so that you can align them with your actions.  In this way it will not seem like you are a mouse on a wheel…a prisoner to your own brain.

But for now, back to the “boring life” I started talking about before that last paragraph….Some may say life is often mundane.  It is true we may not appreciate one thing as much as the next, but when life is overall mundane, it is because there is a direct relationship between how we have contained our own life and how boring it is.  If life is boring it is probably because at some point fear or a belief shut down certain avenues of life to us.  Those fears and beliefs were reinforced by the ego which said “right now, this is who you are.”  And we listened.  But if we realize that no matter what we do we are the same person, the world opens up.  All excuses dissipate because we can do wherever we want to do, and we will still be the same person.   For some, they may view this idea as a problem…

• The Person I am right now, is not the person I want to be.  If I accept who I am, in an instant I will gain the enlightenment of ten thousands experiences.  The problems lies in that if I believe I am one thing, but can be another, these are both aspects of myself.  There is no difference.  It is all “I”.  In society we generally add to something to try to make things better, but when we do this internally we just become cluttered.  Stripping away all the crap that has filtered in is how we find clarity, not by adding more theories to cloud our vision.  Accepting this moment –  verbally and simply (and physically) smiling in each moment will strip a little bit of the internal assumptions away.  We will learn to simply observe and enjoy.  And the person you are right now has that capacity, and always will have that capacity.  You don’t need to try to be something else in order to enjoy life….because as the point above indicated – I will always be me and accepting that is to find immediate pleasure where as to fight it is to never find what I thought I was looking for.

What we “want” to be clouds what we are right now.  And certainly who we are now is the exact person we want to be, we don’t realize because we are so cluttered up with thoughts of something else.  I said in another article, “the feeling you had when you got your first crappy car will be the same feeling you have when you get another shiny new one.”  The point being that happiness has nothing to do with external things.  In that moment you are the exact person we want to be, simply because are enjoying the moment.  What we find joy in is up to us.  What we build up in our mind becomes important and a belief is formed.  Nothing changes in the days or months that follow the “car”, when the novelty wears off and and all of sudden we feel damaged by life again.  It is just we get bogged down and start searching for the next “high.”  There is nothing wrong with that, but life should be about experiencing plane and simple.  Working and pawing away to have an experience that only briefly gives us a high is to miss the entire point.  The whole process, each moment, should be given our focus and amazement.  In this way life never should seem fleeting.  It simply is, and I am experiencing it by how I perceive it and then acting based on those perceptions.

• I don’t want to be “good” by accident/without any work. This is something which continually bogs us down and it is the work of a complexity in our brains which can create a vicious cycle.  In my opinion this is very large part of what the Law of Attraction is.  Not some pie in the sky idea which seduces people out of their money to attend conferences, but rather simple trick of the ego.  Take a sport like golf, or any sport.  Some days I play very well, normally when I am not thinking about anything at all.  But then all of sudden I realize I am playing well and I start asking myself “how am I doing this?”  And of course as soon as I start to analyze it the game falls apart.  When we are cruising through life and everything seems great it is because we are not thinking about bad thing, we are just experiencing life.  But when we start to question why our life is going smoothly, we lose it.  This ties in with the other points.  When we focus on all experiences without labeling or analysis… everything flows.  But when we start to try to control an outcome or analyze ourselves we cloud the very thing which was providing us with our flow….a clarity, a non-judging, simply experiencing mind.  Don’t fight to control, or we lose.  To hold your breath, is to lose it.

It is almost as if the mind just can’t have something come to easy.  I have tried to break this down in my own mind, sacrificing my sanity in the process of course,  and here is what I often find.  Let me use the golf analogy.  There is a part of me that says I want to be phenomenal at golf.  But since by saying that I obviously am not seeing myself as a phenomenal golfer currently, my ego says “you will continue to suck at golf, because you want to be a phenomenal golfer”…now I don’t think this outright, but it is the subtext of a thought that says I want to be something different than what I am right now…so I get exactly what I “want” which is be an average golfer who wants to be phenomenal.  There are not two people inside, there is only one.  Often it is separated into two people – what we want and what we see ourselves as currently.  I am simply saying that since these “people” are just one –  we will always end up being what we see ourselves as currently and if we want to be something else we simply reinforce the opposite of that.

If I just go out and play and don’t worry about anything, I do play phenomenal.  But if I “try” I don’t play as well.  The reason also seems to be that mind needs time to adapt to a new level of play, income or any other aspect of life.  Switching examples…if I view myself as average but then all of a sudden fall into a windfall of money, it is likely not going to last unless my mindframe switches to “rich” mode.  Why? Because the ego views itself as average and if all of sudden you are rich the ego feels that who you are will be lost.  The “average guy” who always wanted to rich will be lost and will be replaced by a guy who is rich and no longer needs to dream about being rich.

These points all start to come together.  There is also the logic that if someone always wanted to be rich, and all of sudden we have it, something is lost.  If “wanting” has always been a big part of a us, what happens when we get what we want?  The ego tricks us into thinking we can’t handle it or that we will lose it, or that we will change (think back to the first bullet point) and not appreciate what we now have.  Of course this is the lie of the ego, but it is normally enough to make us sabotage ourselves.  (But we know that accumulating thing won’t bring happiness anyway)

The way I see it there are two ways to make life interesting: constant pursuit or observation.  Constant pursuit is what most of the western world operates on – get more, more, more but always feel something missing, or have continual highs and lows (just like the stock market which is an indicator of mass psychology).   Observers (and I am not talking about “fence sitters” who never take part in life) embrace each experience for what it is.  It is a simply tweet in psychology, an awareness, to move from viewing something as negative to simply seeing it as an experience which we are all here for.  I use the word simple because in this state we have no internal clutter…it is the simplest state to be.  But the word “easy” was not used.  It is anything but easy because we already carry so much clutter which is quite obviously the exact opposite of clarity or simplicity.

I said I would talk about governments, laws, taxes, etc in the last article, and how they don’t need to control us.  I will keep this brief.  All laws, regulations, taxes etc are only for those that wish to follow them.  Now most will say “Oh sure, but if I don’t obey I go to jail.”  This is also an assumption based on the prevailing understanding of courts.  Don’t challenge the crime, challenge the authority of the court to impose a sentence on a free man/woman.  Challenging assumptions means digging deep into multiple levels.  If a snap judgement is made about a belief or assumption, there is likely much more there to be discovered.

And let me digress here for a moment…have you ever not thought it weird that you are born into a country (not by choice) and are then subject to laws (not by choice) which if you disobey someone else can take away your freedom?  Most people just accept this and never question the process. To me it is completely bizarre and apparently to many others as well because pockets have formed within all countries who operate outside the social construct most of us are familiar with.  These people simply don’t accept the assumption that governments can control what an individual does.  Anyone can leave modern society behind and “move off the grid”.

You can leave society and will not be subject to the laws of that society, but you also give up all the privileges of that society.  So these should never be excuses for not doing what someone feels compelled to do inside or outside society.  People generally only point out the negative and forget the positive aspects of a society.  We don’t need to follow the law, but we better not care then when someone else doesn’t either and it hurts us.  Also, there are of course loopholes in all laws, but we must ask ourselves what battles do we want to fight in life?  Is fighting against someone else’s dream worth it?  If it is our own dream, then we should do it.  But if not then we must choose our battles wisely because we don’t want to waste time on things what don’t matter to us.  That said….no matter what it is all just an experience.

~Cory Mitchell

P.S.  Shortly I will be releasing a eBook of Meditations and practices for visualization, anxiety reduction, creating peace as well as many others topics.  It will be filled with guidance an exercises to actually change how the brain operates.  As this article discussed often the brain runs on auto-pilot based on beliefs we never think twice about.  While this is happening, our mind, the part we call “me” feels lost and out of control.  These exercises will create an alignment between body, mind and soul to end this vicious cycle.

I have decided to release it as an eBook so that costs can be kept extremely low.  In this way the information is accessible to the widest range of people and if they wish to have it printed they can.  I will update the site as the release date approaches.

Thank you for reading.

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