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Are We Prisoners of Our Mind?

We inhabit a world of struggle. If you just feel your inner energy field right now, what you will find is that there is a background of unease and discontentment which seems to stay prevalent through most of your waking hours. We are so used to this feeling that we start accepting it as natural or normal, but deep down we know that this is not normal and definitely not natural.

When we look at the birds flying freely, singing tunes and being natural, we start to wonder if there is something that went wrong with humans as they evolved. In spite of all the advancement in technology and improvements in our lifestyle, we are still extremely unhappy. We don’t have the heart to get up and face another “grueling” day, let alone think of singing merrily to the rising sun the way birds do.

We are all no better than the prisoners who spend months and years in solitary confinement. For these prisoners there are the prison walls to keep them in bondage. Most of us live in a similar bondage the only difference is that our walls are made out of our obsessive thoughts. You may have experienced a moment of freedom when you wake up from a deep sleep, your mind is still and you have no idea who you are, but within a few seconds thoughts rush in.

If you want to experience the gravitational pull of thoughts just try to focus on your breathing for a few seconds. Your mind would go silent for a moment when you turn your attention to your breathing, but it would just a second or two before it starts commenting on your experience and pulls your attention back to a thought stream. Try this for yourself to get a first hand experience of the “pulling” power that thoughts have.

Thoughts are nothing but “conditioning”. If you observe your thoughts you will realize that all that noise and chatter is nothing but comments, explanations, judgments, projections, fantasies and dreams, all of which are based completely on your “unique” conditioning. The ideas and beliefs that got learnt as you grew up act as the base on which new conditioning is added almost daily. There is nothing “original” in our thoughts.

Have you noticed that “thinking” has never solved your problems? It may give you an illusion that you are solving your problems and taking decisions or working through life, but in reality none of that is actually true. There is a huge rift between what you “think” and what the reality brings forth. Of course there are a few rare, in between, instances when your thoughts become congruent with reality and this gives us an illusion that we are getting what we “think” we should be getting.

We are never happy because we are constantly “wanting” something or the other. As soon as a particular want is satisfied a new one takes its place almost instantly. The short lived moments of happiness arise when our wanting or craving is satisfied, and we wrongly assume that it was the achievement that gave us happiness. The truth of course is that it was not the achievement that made you happy but a temporary moment of “not wanting”.

Most of our thoughts are based on “wanting” and the rest are based on “fear” that our wants won’t be satisfied. It’s a vicious cycle, may be this is what Buddha called the “wheel of samsara”. There is a cycle of continuous craving with the hope that something or someone in the future will give us long lasting bliss. We fail to realize that even this goal of “liberation” is just a thought coming from our conditioned mind.

Article by Outofstress.com staff author. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce.