You Are Not Your Brain — How You Are Standing In The Way Of Your Own Happiness
This article was inspired by the book: The Power Of Now. For further depth into the topic and the experience of a veteran in the spiritual realm, seek the intricately and thoroughly explained concepts of this article on there. Now, let’s dive into it.
Call me spiritual or not, this article walks a fine line between consciousness and believing in the artifact of centuries of generations’ ill-defined concept of God.
This article, in no shape or form, is a depiction or portrayal or a certain religion. Whether you are muslim, christian, Hindu, or anything of that matter, the concept at the hand is much deeper than the identification and correlation of certain beliefs and convictions into a representation of who we are as human beings.
This is the whole point of this article:
Your Thinking Brain Vs. Consciousness
Very separate entities, yet distortions so pernicious, such as that most people live their lives, including myself, in a state of denial and self-aggrandizing.
Your brain is a mechanism of billions upon billions of neurons and cells dying and regenerating as we speak. It’s so vastly intricate that it baffles the greatest of scientists. In fact, there’s a great deal of our brains that we still are completely clueless about.
In a very shallow way though, doing our brains a great disservice, it is essentially a tool used for survival, a mechanism responsible for every conceivable action you take.
All in favor of ensuring your survival and procreation.
The task is simple: live to see another day.
Consciousness on the other hand, in a state of Being, a state of acceptance of life as it is.
Your True Essence
You are not your mind. See, we are so entrenched in our perceptions of the world, we seize to realize our real truth. Deep within the layers of our conceptions and notions of what is good and bad, emerges the light of reality: our truth.
This seems very distant and cultish, thus why it is so trivial to explain it. The true gems arise in exploration and the lack of thought. Like entering a vortex into the realm of utter awareness, the separation of your two entities: mind and body.
Our mind is merely a survival tool at our disposal for use when the need occurs. Yet, we are moving at the speed of light, only ever detaching from the identification of our minds in speechless instances.
For example, have you ever been in a situation of great danger, where you were acting rather simply on intuition and reflex?
A quick second later, when you are starting to rationalize things again, oftentimes, the immediate response is: I have absolutely no clue what happened, I reacted without much thought.
You feel this sense of exhilaration and heightened awareness in a brief moment of time. Perhaps it was a near-death experience. Although, you feel much more alive than you ever felt throughout your life.
Paradoxes
Love is the manifestation of deeper consciousness, your true self.
See, love and physical affection often get confused. Sex is a fleeting moment of pleasure, intertwined with a load of pain down the line. Pleasure and pain are opposites of the same coin. This is the reason post honeymoon phases of attraction are often accompanied by a state of neutrality or sadly, a state of hatred and dissatisfaction.
The reason being: it’s only after endorphins regulate that you reveal the state of your true feelings.
In order for pain and pleasure to manifest, there has to be past and future. You are either lamenting the unfortunate events of the past, or manufacturing a brighter future down the line, where it’s pure bliss and no pain.
Pain is a constant throughout our lives, but unnecessary pain is not. To get the point across, think about the times you felt physical pain. More often than not, physical pain doesn’t last for prolonged periods of time. Even if you ended up being sick for weeks at a time, in the grand scheme of things, our exposure to physical pain is rather brief in an average person’s life.
It is the emotional scarring that steadfastly clings onto our minds and refuses to let go. The present is therefore obstructed by the past and the image of the future.
Look around you, is there any danger, anything petrifying occurring around you?
Chances are, not at all. I say that partially since there’s a very minor chance you’re reading this article while saving a cat’s life from a searing house caught on fire.
Yet, there is a good chance you are somewhat dissatisfied within yourself, worrying about past mishaps and hoping for a better future.
On a quick note, all of this knowledge applies radically if not more onto myself as well. I, in no circumstance, have been enlightened or patronizing you. We’re all in the same boat.
In order to function properly, you’ll obviously have to make use of time. But, in reality, most of what goes on in our minds on a day to day basis is rather obnoxious and questionable. Imagine having the ability to read people’s minds. Chances are, you’ll lose faith in humanity instantly.
Meditation, at its essence, is an exercise of creating gaps in the incessant barrage of thoughts. Practiced regularly, it can be one of the most soothing and blissful experiences in your entire life.
All of a sudden, you no longer require the need of materialistic pleasures to render your life worthy, because as it turns out, everything you had was everything you were missing.
The Burning Monk
Back in 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was a prime minister in Vietnam.
Despite endless Buddhist protests and revolts, Diem stubbornly led the persecution of the Buddhist population. In fact, he did little to nothing to ease the turbulent tension that was rampaging the better part of Vietnam.
Buddhists' festivals and celebrations were shut down, and Buddhists were taunted loosely.
On June 11, 1963, as an act of ultimate defiance and opposition, monks gathered at a busy Saigon road intersection. One monk in particular, Thích Quảng Đức, sat in front a car, being drenched in gasoline.
He proceeded to immolate himself, sitting in a meditative stance, not even once showing any sign of struggle or pain.
This is a pitch-perfect portrayal of a man who stilled his mind, understanding a fundamental truth foreign to us: while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
This story blew my mind to pieces.
Suffering, in essence, is ourselves rejecting the present moment. Rejecting the notion of an awareness beyond thought and emotion, rendering ourselves merely creatures of superficial depth.
We give our powers to the mind to instill happiness and joy in our lives, when all it is able to supply us with is problems and dilemmas, solving one and moving on to the next.
A whopping majority of our rationalizations aren’t even based on reality.
As an ex-addict would tell you. The notion of a life barren from any stimulatory drugs wasn’t even fathomable for them, but through reconnecting with a higher sense of purpose and power, they were able to detach themselves from the physical need to escape reality.
Instead, they attentively observed the mess that’s going on, without having to act out on it.
What To Make Of This
Tune into your intuitions, tune into your true self. You may ask, well if I stop thinking, what is left for me to achieve.
I tell you, do things as a reflection of your true nature. Do good because you are good. Give love because it’s right. Trust because it is right. Achieve and inspire because it is right. And in that journey, you’ll come to find, you’ll receive bountiful more.
This journey into higher awareness is erratic and can take you on a rollercoaster of emotions. But, I personally think that it is life’s work, the thing that matters most.
Everything else is rendered a compulsion, an attraction to a shiny object, nothing lasting, all based on a fantasy. But, tapping into yourself, as I mentioned earlier, but needs repetition:
Everything you had was everything that you were missing.
