Discard mental baggage

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You want to harness the power of your mind to alter your reality, yes? That’s really an invitation to chaos. Lots of people are in the market, offering quick and easy solutions. You flow into them with anticipation and excitement. You follow their prescribed formulae, their chants and utterances, wear their beads, read their books, watch their DVDs, dress as per their code, hang on to their every word, hoping, pleading, fantasizing.

It’s a pointless journey, just leading you deeper into delusion. Years later you find yourself at the same spot where you started — clueless, a bit confused, with a sneaky suspicion that nothing really happened outside your imagination. Your reality was never altered, you are still the same guy, and the world around you is just as it was.
This is the undiluted truth. There are no quick-fix solutions to altering your reality, no magic mantras you can utter. Know the frog doesn’t turn into a prince with a kiss. Know the world doesn’t change with the wave of a wand. Know some hairy guy in designer clothes can’t make you richer, wiser
or luckier than you would otherwise be. The sooner you start accepting this bittersweet truth, the better off
you will be.
I said bittersweet because there are two opposing layers inside this revelation. The first is disappointing when you finally understand that there are no quick-fix solutions. The second is elevating — when you finally understand that nobody outside you has the power to change your world, and so it’s time to get acquainted with that stranger within — your mind.
The quality of mind is that it operates at several levels simultaneously. All you have been able to access so far is the most superficial surface. This is the world of thoughts, words, hopes, wishes, daydreams and dreams. Remember, everything you read, hear and see translates itself into mental constructs, as thoughts. What is a thought? It’s a mental projection of some input you have grasped. Thoughts are the extension of your senses, they are the first line of defence you have when dealing with the world.
Having thoughts are very important. But there is such a thing called excess of thought. This happens when, like jungles, they take over our minds, growing wildly, completely beyond our control. Now the mind starts losing its ability to conjure a thought, consider it and then make it fade it away. Thoughts start roaming through the mind like bandits, creating havoc at will. The mind surrenders, eventually becomes a slave of its own thoughts. Add to this the chaos of the Age of Marketing Madness we live in — where everyday you are exposed to a thousand needless desires, baseless fears and mental conditioning. It’s enough to make a sane guy crazy. But you have already made yourself crazy, and the result is that your fears and hopes create thoughts that recur in endless loops, making you salivate, palpitate, ruminate, agitate and decimate your potential to even address your reality. Your ability to alter that reality through the mind is now a far dream.
The time has come to take you beyond thought, into deeper, purer levels inside yourself. The time has come to leave this chaos behind and rise into higher levels of being within. You can’t do it by attaching yourself to more books and chants and shibboleths. You can only do it by gently leaving it all behind — by dropping the mental baggage, until the sheer lightness of being makes you float away. More on this next week.