Imagine you put a baby in a diaper by a computer. What is she going to do? What do we expect her to do?
Probably just bang at the keyboard and produce gibberish. Uncontrollable exuberance resulting in incomprehensible output.
How is that different from what humans do with our minds which are no less than a super computer itself?
Are we able to control it or is it controlling us?
I think we all know the answer. In fact the stress and anxiety that our supercomputer produces is enough to drive most people insane. I would go as far as saying that if you reduce the power of the human brain, the reduction would linearly result in increase in happiness. Because then your brain is not hyperactive and bored all the time looking for “something to do”. Boredom is frequently the source of evil.
So why do we let our minds control us instead of us controlling it?
Well, the answer is simple. We don’t let it happen, it happens because we don’t know how to control our mind – much like that baby sitting on the computer. If we had a manual and knew how to control it, perhaps the output would be different. But we don’t.
Now consider the possibility that there was a way that we could turn things around and gain the ability to bend this super computer to our will. Imagine the magnitude of power and control we would have if we could control our own mind. Imagine the happiness we could produce at will.
There’s a concept of separating yourself from your mind and your body. The more space you create, the better you feel. When you first hear this concept, it just does not make sense or at least it did not make sense to me the first time I heard it. I could not imagine myself separate from my mind and body. I thought that my mind and body are “myself”. What’s the difference I thought? But the more I thought about it the more I realized that my mind and my body are items that I have accumulated since birth. My mind is made up of all the thoughts since birth and my body is the accumulation of everything that I ate and drank or was fed by my mother in the womb. “Myself” is different than these items that I usually identify with. Some can call it the soul, the noor, the force, particles of the universe… whatever you call it, that’s the thing I’m talking about. That is what’s truly “yourself”.
Let’s look at an analogy of what it’s like to separate yourself from your thoughts and your mind. Imagine you are sitting in traffic. It’s early in the morning, the sun is hot, traffic is jam packed, you are late to work, you forgot your coffee, people are honking their horns around you and everyone is frustrated. You are frustrated. This is similar to what happens in our minds all the time. Lots and lots of traffic and we are right in the middle of it all.
Now let’s say that you get out of your car, leave it where it is and you step into the carriage of a hot air balloon. It’s a nice big beautiful multicolored hot air balloon and the carriage is very comfortable. You get inside the carriage and it starts elevating. You get to 50 ft then 100 ft. You look down at the traffic. These cars and people that were around you are now below you. Everyone is still frustrated but now you are not in the middle of it. You are an observer from above. Your stress level drops a bit.
The hot air balloon keeps on rising and now you are at 500 ft and then 1,000 ft. Now the cars look even smaller from this distance. It’s hard for you to relate why these people below are frustrated. The whole scene starts looking a bit comical and beautiful at the same time. The balloon continues its rise and now you’re at 10,000 ft. Now you are literally seeing the big picture and wondering to yourself why you were ever frustrated to begin with? Your perception of reality has changed. Your thoughts of being late at work have evaporated. So what if you’re late. What does that all mean in the big scheme of things anyway?
This experience of you rising in the hot air balloon and separating yourself from the traffic is exactly what it would be like if you separated yourself from your thoughts. If you become an observer, a witness to what’s going on in your brain and separated yourself from your thoughts, you would become much more attuned with the processes in your brain since now you are observing them much more objectively rather than subjectively.
Of course all this said, none of this is easy to do otherwise we would have a lot more happy people around the world. But hey… let’s not stop trying. A conscious mind has a lot of potential. No need to numb our minds with excessive alcohol, drugs and other substances to temporarily slow down our supercomputer just because it’s hard to handle. Instead, let’s practice ways that will get us better equipped to control that power we have on hand. It will be worth the effort for sure 👍