Identifying the Colonized Mind
I teach a concept in my workshops called the Colonized Mind. It is the idea that as much control as we would like to believe we have over the development of our own beliefs and values, there is an element at work that is just as active and powerful as our free will. It is our membership and indoctrination into a community or society at large. The values and cultural beliefs of any society, group, and organization we affiliate with profoundly influence our paradigm and perspective. In this culture, that paradigm is founded and propagated on the concept of colonization in all things. I have an upcoming post on the origins of this paradigm — stay tuned.
In our research, we’ve come to call this paradigm The Colonized Mind. It is the social indoctrination we’re each baptized into within our family of origins, k-12 educations, communities we live in, social circles, and most importantly, the media we consume. We’re explicitly taught values, ideas, biases, and perspectives through these collective means of inculcation.
These elements, or pillars of socialization, are expressly and inexplicitly absorbed by us throughout childhood and adulthood. Some actively engage with us through algorithmic social media and programming. In these mediums, our choice of indoctrination material becomes reinforced through a feedback loop of digital coding that fortifies our ingrained opinions, biases, and perspectives. Other pillars, such as social norms or community values, materialize subtly. The latter are often taught through social feedback loops of nuance and indications when we do something right or wrong in a social setting.
This indoctrination and communal agreement process is the individual and collective human minds at work, weaving our reality into existence. It isn’t easy to see this process because our culture currently lacks a proper paradigm for contextualizing it. This blindspot is caused by our civilization’s obsession with the archetype of individualism, making the reality of a collective human mind or consciousness challenging to conceptualize. We don’t have a common vocabulary or language to describe its effects and relationship on our social system or individual decision-making. Interestingly, the absence of this paradigm of the commons in our social language is just as influential as the presence of the reinforced paradigm we all live with daily.
Paradigm & Perspective
Let’s take a moment to define the concept paradigm in a systemic context. A paradigm is the frame in which you view the world, built by influences beyond your control. For example, I am an American citizen, born in the 1970s to a Christian family of origin on the West Coast of the Republic of the United States of America. These elements of my upbringing inform my paradigm in ways that I do not influence. Just as if I were a Chinese citizen born in communist Guangdong province in the 1970s to a Taoist family of origin. The frame in which I view the world would be completely different.
To complete the concept of paradigm, we also have to consider the idea of perspective through a systemic lens. Your perspective is the lens within the frame through which you view the world. Perspective is within your direct influence and designed by your life experiences, successes, failures, mental models, reinforced thought forms, and influences from the medium you choose. Perspective is the egoic manifestation of your ideals, values, morals, and beliefs, all rooted within the frame of paradigmic indoctrination.
Our particular indoctrination comes out of a social system seeped in a paradigm of consumption, dominion, action, and materialism that is thousands of years in the making. We view it in our cultural myths, such as the Age of Discovery, or our collective beliefs, such as a historically Christian culture that has moved to secularism. That is the colonized paradigm through which we view the world from our unique perspective.
Cultivating a Systemic Paradigm is crucial to our national and global culture at this juncture in human history because it is the model for observing, interpreting, engaging, and influencing the collective human mind. Incredibly, systems-model finds its origins at the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s as a means of understanding the complex and non-linear outcomes of algorithmic input. Computer scientists who viewed algorithmic outcomes through a traditional deconstructionist or Cartesian lens had difficulty understanding the data outputs they were receiving. They designed a new way of perceiving their digital world.
At the dawn of this new millennium, the digital world has evolved into an interconnected and globalized human interaction. We now find ourselves emerging into unfamiliar and non-linear outcomes that previous generations never had to encounter. And why wouldn’t we? Our modern world is an intricate binary web of ones and zeros that lattice every part of our daily lives. We are connected with invisible algorithms everywhere, constantly creating feedback loops with our biases, prejudices, opinions, and egoic perspectives.
The alarming part of this realization is that these powerful algorithms, and the AI they are birthing, were conceived in the paradigm of this colonized mind. Fundamentally, just as our collective human actions have over each other and nature, this emerging AI would intrinsically seek to colonize as it reaches out to solve our problems and woes. The challenge we face is that this chaos is largely misunderstood collectively without a proper paradigm to contextualize it, creating massive individual and social anxiety, depression, and confusion. Does this sound familiar?
How you, whoever you may be, construct the world around you is not solely and completely your own design. However, by learning to perceive systems and how to engage with them, you can influence the system around you toward the greater good. Your actions really do determine the system’s trajectory, especially in this immense interconnected world of social communication and mass-personal broadcasting.
Even though our indoctrination into collective norms occurs early with our family of origin and expands outward via K-12 education, every person reinforces a perception of the world for themselves just as they influence the others around them. It’s called the systemic feedback loop of the human mind, an algorithm of our creation. The individual and collective consciousness work in a dance of invisible synergy to construct our reality’s values, myths, and morals.
Challenging our reality and the constructs that generations before us have built is more essential today than ever. That may sound threatening or on-point to you, depending on your choice of social or mainstream media you consume and its constant challenging or defending of the status quo. Some want to burn the entire system down and build a new one from the rubble. For others, their instincts are to rage against these calls for change, to stalwartly defend the status quo because the way it’s always worked will see us through. Unfortunately, neither of these binary options can be the way forward.
Binary thinking comes from the Colonized Mind, which limits our ability to see a way forward in the present moment because the way forward can’t be rooted in any part of the current model. We find ourselves at a pivotal point in history in which the ways of the past no longer serve us. Just as a child who learns coping responses from trauma that no longer serves them as an adult. The way forward is grounded in creating new paradigms from new ways of being. We can’t get there by embracing old methodologies that no longer serve us or wasting time working to tear down the old. We have to create, cultivate, and lean into coherent practices. That requires us to look within for solutions, not constantly outside of ourselves.
To understand this concept, we need to discuss mind and how we perceive it. We all have an understanding of what our mind is. Some of us believe our minds to be collection of thoughts and memories. Some use our minds to solve consequential problems. Most of us identify with our minds in a way synonymous with being. I am my mind. This identification with mind is the Cartesian ideology made famous by Rene Descartes in 1637 — contigo, ergo sum or I think, therefore I am.
We’ve built an entire global culture around this concept. I think: In other words, I am the one who thinks; I am the one who is here, who is conscious, who is observing the world around me and can define and categorize all of existence into manageable and understandable idioms. Let’s examine the second half of Descartes’ Cartesian principle — therefore, I am: In other words, I exist, I am real, I am all there is and all there ever will be of me. It’s a profound statement that has defined our Westernized paradigm of mind for the past 400 years.
It has been a successful model for building a world of 8 billion human beings. When combined with other pillars of our colonized social order, such as Newtonian Physics, Linnean Biological Classification, selective principles of Darwinian evolution, and the propagation of the Christian Empire through global colonization, it has lifted more humans out of poverty and into a new class of living than any other era of human existence — that we know of. It has also reached its limits for propelling humanity forward in healthy and sustainable ways. The chickens have come home to roost.
Environmental degradation, rampant consumption, resource extraction with no balance or boundaries, and forcing human purpose and life’s meaning into the mechanistic servitude of the gigantic machine of progress are taking their toll. Our visionless adherence to this trajectory of self-destruction doesn’t bode well for us. Furthermore, the silent hope that algorithmic AI will propel humanity beyond the consequences of our colonized mental models is specific evidence of our inability to see the current system for what it is: a profoundly ingrained mind virus designed to keep humankind in a constant state of doing by removing our connection to being.
This is The Colonized Mind — the egoic self constantly seeking satisfaction, satiation, and success. I need to get mine. I have to work my way towards more. I want what I want. In the words of Gordon Grekko, the Micheal Douglas character from 1987’s Wall Street film, Greed is Good.
The Egoic Self
Let’s take a moment to understand ego. This concept was made famous by the 19th-century pioneer of the Id, Ego, and Super-ego models of the mind; Sigmond Freud considered the ego a type of sense-organ for the perception of internal and external stimuli. His pupil and, by all accounts, successor, Carl Jung, took the concept further and saw it as the part of the conscious mind that witnessed and accumulated thoughts, memories, and emotions as a process of making meaning through identity and continuity. Jung postulated the concept of the Shadow-Self as an unconscious layer under the egoic self that held the conceptualization of the desired projected image of the self, how we secretly wish to be seen and identified. Ekarht Tolle, a modern philosopher and influence on contemporary mental health, has taken the concept of the Ego one step further. Tolle proposes that the individual ego manifests the collective ego and vice versa, just like a systemic feedback loop at work.
These concepts of ego have been social pillars for conceptualizing ourselves and our world. Still, they lean into far older philosophies, such as the Sanskrit word Mu, which entered many ancient Asian cultures. It means to be without awakening or self-awareness. The ancient Hebrew concept of khata is similar to this idea. Our word for this state of being comes from the Greek word hamartia, which means to miss the mark.
When translated into English, it tends to cause cognitive dissonance for many. It is the word sin and is traditionally associated with evil or immoral acts of doing by the modern Christian church. However, that is not a proper understanding of the word. Sin does not refer to the actions taken by a person but to the state of being in which the person’s actions manifest. For a moment, imagine the distinction in paradigm that subtle difference creates. In a word that refers to one’s misguided actions and the church’s sole ability to absolve them, it puts hierarchy in control of an individual’s state of being. However, when the word sin refers to one’s internal state of being, it becomes the individual’s responsibility to steward their internal perspective — mind.
It should not go unnoticed how, In just a few thousand years, the individual and collective egoic mind has achieved such an incredible wealth of opportunity for many human beings living on the planet today. Because of this success in a paradigm, almost nine billion humans are alive on this planet simultaneously. And yet, what meaning is there in pursuing relentless delight and consumption? What consequences do we ultimately reap as we perpetuate our inherited model? To answer that, we must look deeper at the concept of mind.
The Mind
What is our mind? Is it the chattering voice within our heads? If you don’t know what voice I am referring to, it’s the voice that just asked: what voice? Eastern paradigms, in direct contrast to our Westernized notion of mind, inform us that we are not our minds or the chattering voice in our heads. Closer to home, it is a fundamental Christian tenant that we are more than the egoic personality of the mind — this sin nature.
We are not the logical, problem-solving, creative, biological mechanism that dwells between each of our ears. Instead, we are the presence that can observe this mind if we learn how. We are the awareness that is aware of: I think. This being, this presence, is beyond personality and thought form. It is simply the I Am that exists within each of us. In this new era of understanding self, it’s imperative we learn to cultivate a new way of being, a new paradigm for what it is to exist and be in this world. We need to discover for ourselves — ergo sum, ego sum or I am, therefore I am. The concept is that all our collective efforts of doing come out of our cultivated, individual states of being.
For many, this is an entirely foreign and ridiculous concept. It’s the opposite of everything we learn about living our lives, and yet, how is that working out for all of us? There is a way to understand what I am referring to; the most straightforward path to experience this sense of I Am rather than I Think is simply sitting quietly. It is a risky proposition in our age of constant entertainment and distraction, but one that can create a profound shift in your perception and paradigm of the world around and within you. Here is how you do it:
Seeing the Colonized Mind
Find a quiet spot during a calm moment, before bed, or before anyone else is up in the morning. Sit with your feet flat on the ground and your posture relaxed but upright. Place your open palms loosely and comfortably on your thighs. We aren’t going to meditate, so take a breath and relax. You can close your eyes or keep them open. It’s up to you.
Take a deep breath through your nose for 5 seconds. Hold it for a second at the top and then release it through your mouth for 5 seconds. Repeat this process until maintaining this pace of breath comes easy. Now, start at your eyebrows and relax them. Now, your cheeks. Your jaw, shoulders, lower back, and the hands-on your thighs. Breathe in for 5 seconds. Hold for 1 second. Breathe out and repeat.
Keep breathing…
Follow the pace…
Keep breathing…
And now, stop thinking. Stop the chatter in your mind. Do your best. Try this for one minute. Two, if you’re brave. Keep breathing and quiet the voice or images in your mind until it is silent.
Not easily accomplished, right? It may even feel impossible, and noticing that is excellent progress! The goal of that exercise was not to get you to silence your mind but to observe it. That moment in which you are conscious of your breath and trying to quiet the chatter of your mind is the moment you are experiencing the observer becoming observed. Your mind, the constant observer of your inner and outer worlds, the ergo sum we all identify with as me, is being observed!
But by whom?
If you are able to monitor the mind’s chatter consciously, then who is the consciousness monitoring it? It’s not your mind. Your mind is too busy rattling off things like:
I’m bored. Is it cold outside? What’s for lunch? Did I take my vitamins today? This is stupid. What’s that sound? This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why am I doing this?
That observer of the mind is the I Am within you. It is a part of yourself that is eternal and connected to something greater than yourself. It’s connected to something so much more significant than any material thing, floating on this rocky ball, moving at 143 miles per second through the Milky Way galaxy. Observing your mind and connecting with this deeper sense of being within you takes practice, patience, breathwork, and some heart focus. In time, like any exercise routine, the I Am within you grows in awareness. The chattering mind becomes the background, even silent altogether at times, which is a profound experience worth cultivating.
Why is this important? Because we have built a society founded in the mind, not the soul or the heart — whatever you are comfortable calling it. We have constructed a culture-bound to the rational, not the emergent. That may sound woo-woo to you, and perhaps it is, but that doesn’t mean it is any less real. After all, what is real except what we make real, collectively and individually, through our paradigm and perspective creation? Understanding this concept is the beginning of Wu — Awakening.
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Jeremy Tunnell is an author, facilitator and consultant with Co3 Consulting. Jeremy writes and presents on dismantling whiteness, personal and organizational resilience and our reality in the Unified Field. Together with his partner, Dr. Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, they lead teams and organizations through powerful workshops such as, Healing the Colonized Mind and Whole Systems Leadership. Gerry is the principle consultant for Co3 Consulting and author of the upcoming book Evolution of Aloha. Together, they host The Plowline Podcast.
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