Your mind is the key to everything. Your physical and mental activity is ruled by your mind. Your mind is not a stable mechanism, it leads you all over, while at the same time you can exercise various degrees of control – if you put your mind to it. You can choose to use your mind as a tool to create a good life for yourself, or you can just let everything be taken care of for you – be in an automatic mode and just let yourself be dragged along, almost imperceptibly.
The way to achieve control of your own mind is to eliminate all external influences completely, and at the same time work on understanding yourself, what you do, how you react, what you identify with. This is not easily done, and you must work hard to get close to a situation where you can say you are in control. You must change your life in thoroughgoing ways. You must shed all and don a new mental state where consciousness is king.
When all external influences are controlled you are in a position to wholly decide what to think and do. This also has to do with timing, place, importance. Then nobody can tell you a thing, you are all on your own, you are beginning to see the rudiments of freedom.
We all live under the influence of tremendous forces. The external forces are societal in the form of peer pressure, authority messages, media influences, seasonal variations. Internally your own morals and ethics play a part, your reasoning or logic based on your knowledge and what you think is right. The sum of these forces have a huge impact on you, they make you what you are.
The information explosion is part of this picture as there is a constant stream of messages aimed at you, wanting to influence you – companies, government agencies, politicians, media all want you to perform in certain ways. In the old days much of this was called propaganda, now it is part of the ongoing process of crystallizing public opinion, making you behave in certain predetermined ways.
Reading and reacting to advertizing is one bit, incessant negative news is another. Participation in arrangements, activities of many kinds are time thiefs of great importance.
The biggest influence on you is without doubt your work that occupies you maybe 10 hours or more every day all of your life, and fills your head with huge preoccupations, influencing your life immensely, often tying your mind into a knot.
Your family takes a major part of what time you have, severely limiting the time you have available to choose independendently.
The things you own are there too. All your belongings – dwellings, cars, boats, bicycles, clothes, books, tools, …. - the list is endless – steal your time in all manners you can think of.
And sure – we must not forget entertainment in many forms – time flies. And drugs and alcohol drowsing you into near unconsciousness.
So all is set up for you and your life flies away, into empty space. It is certainly OK in many ways, but your mind is turned off when you live like this.
Awareness of what you do is clearly lacking, and the result is a stupendous lack of time that you can call your own and none of what you do is chosen by you, you just react to influences all the time. Everything on the agenda is controlled by others and is aided and abetted by your own confusion, your sleeping mind.
Surely the aim must be to have a life of your own, to be able to do what you yourself want to do. This life can be a full life, creative, spiritual, engaged, attentive, included in the big system that the world is, engaged with likeminded people.
The choice is yours: engage your mind, wake up, decide things, do things.
Go be like that – fix your own mind and your life will follow suit. Surely you want that?