Introduction about my articles.
I will be posting articles where I will be exploring a lot of realities in trying to understand how, we as human beings, interact with existence in the way we do and from that, try to understand how we can know ourselves and experience life in a better way. By understanding this, one can learn how to evolve into a better being and enjoy life in the best way possible. Enjoy it and benefit from it.
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Article One
As we grow older we start longing for truth. What is meant by the truth? It is simply to know who you are and your purpose in the life you live. If you think about yourself as to who you are, the answer will generally be defined as to the way you perceive yourself compared to others.
I should point out here that this way of reasoning about who you are is the work of your mind. It is important now to understand what is this mind that defines us in this way and why.
Man has always wondered and asked questions seeking to know who we are and why are we here on this planet. This has led to the development of science and philosophy among other fields in a quest to understand this existence. However, by doing this, man has been seeking to understand the outer part of existence rather than our inner part. In this article, the journey is an inward one; where we shall try to understand our inner selves.
It is important to understand that there are barriers blocking our path to reach our inner selves so that we can work towards removing those barriers. So let us explore certain aspects of ourselves in trying to understand what those barriers are.
We do exist in this physical world and interact with our surroundings through our physical beings. This interaction is done through our brains. What we sense through our senses are explained and interpreted through our brains. It is in this way that we see reality and interact with our physical world. We develop an understanding about things and through our memories, we start creating and correlating concepts and we start leading our lives accordingly.
The brain is the biological part dealing through its neurons with all the electrical impulses and chemical reactions and transmissions, but the mind is the part that processes all this and forms the perceptions through thoughts. It is important to understand this distinction as the discussions that will follow will be mainly about the role of the mind where the thoughts and memories are processed.
We therefore exist in a physical state through our bodies and interact with reality through our physical senses and this interaction is translated within our brains into certain thoughts and stored there in our memories. Those thoughts can be recalled at any time to correlate with other thoughts and define our understandings and form certain guides that we can follow. This aspect of thoughts correlation is what defines our characters as to the way we interact with each other and how we behave in certain situations. Those thoughts are taken and developed from our daily experiences as we grow up. What we are taught to be good is therefore registered as favorable thoughts and what we are taught to be bad is registered as something to be avoided. Between the good thoughts and the bad thoughts and our daily experiences, the mind forms opinions and concepts as we grow. The thoughts become associated with happiness, sadness, anger, and so on.
We end up interacting with the physical world according to our mindset of rules set by previous thoughts developed over times from what the mind has learned. We therefore live in this world through our minds. But is that who we really are? What about the inner being that is referred to as the subconscious part of the mind? Let us try to understand that part of our being.
When we are born, the mind as explained above is not there because we have no experience yet and thoughts have a long way to go before they can start correlating to form patterns and understandings. This normally takes a few months before a baby can start having a bit of memory that eventually starts to develop. So a baby with no mind formed is our true inner self being without the mind. A baby only interacts through instincts of survival. Innocence and love is all that a baby knows; there is no hatred, no anger, no jealousy and no greed. This is our true inner being when the mind is not there.
So understanding the above will make us realize that the mind, once formed, becomes the barrier to our true beings. We start to live and act through our learned minds and become detached from our true inner beings. This is not to say that we should live without a mind; the mind is important to our survival as we learn how to cope with existence and overcome the challenges we face.
The important point to realize here is that the mind, however, must not be allowed to control you. You must not be living totally according to the mind and you can only realize that if you know that you are not the mind. You are the true inner being that were born before the mind came to be part of you. The mind must be used by you only as a tool that you control in order to interact with the physical world in accordance with your true inner being. Not living in this way and not realizing this distinction between your true inner being and your mind, will render you living a meaningless miserable life; one that is based on a continuous struggle that is fueled by greed.
With this basic understanding of yourself and how you exist on these different levels, it will now be easier to work on yourself in order to become a better being and enjoy living in a true and better sense.
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