I thought a lot about whether I should post this or not. But then I realized, I’ve seen or discovered or been told no prescriptions against it. So there we go. I decided to share this as a public service.
This is an insight that will be lost on most of you, perhaps all of you. Because you do not yet have a very clear sense of what your own mind is. What it is, how it is, how it operates, why it is the way it is, etc. etc. And yet these two ideas are critically important for at least the 1% of you who might have developed yourself enough to be able to grasp them.
Part 1:
“Everything is a matter of thinking.”
Yes, you read that correctly. This echoes the whole “all is mind” new age platitude but in a more clear way. And I can explain that extra part. What is so interesting about suffering/bad (negative state) vs. pleasure/good (positive state) is that when we are in the negative state the brain is already primed-charged to clear out this negative pressure. The realization of that comes in many forms, including the well known favorites of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, ego stroking, classic denialism and so many more. But the underlying lesson here is that the mind is already primed to discharge a negative pathos-pressure, and will do so one way or another. YOU can prompt this in a direction of your own choosing assuming you know this fact AND you key the brain-system into its correction mechanism directly.
One way to do that, I have found, is to simply tell yourself in those moments of negativity: “Everything is a matter of thinking”. What this does is immediately kick in the auto-correcting mechanisms to purge negativity in the shortest neurological-meaningful route possible. This is not the same as telling yourself positive images or focusing on the power of positive thinking. This is actually used as a neurological key to get the brain into gear. And mood and emotion quickly shift over into positive territory, since the brain is already primed to do that anyway.
Part 2:
“We are all each other’s minds.”
This is a little stranger, although probably a more powerful realization on its own. I already had this thought years ago when I developed a philosophy of “social networks” (having nothing to do with social media, facebook or any of that garbage) that explained how when we form a close connection to another person our minds merge substances partially, we share ‘nodes’ that house heavy weights of meaning and this weight is partially redistributed within and into the shared web, rather than needing to be sustained entirely by oneself alone.
And yet this insight is greater, the actual next step in the thought process. Because it involves understanding that our individual minds are not our own, and indeed are not even individual at all. Every person we are close to, who influences us in some way, friend or family or lover or otherwise, holds a part of our own mind within themselves. And we are metaphysically immediately connected to those other parts of ourselves in those other minds, and we KNOW this at the level of instinct and unconscious mind. These connections are metaphysical and purely in the logical space, which makes them no less real; our minds are primed and ready to understand this, and they already do understand it and build this understanding into our own so-called individual mentalities and personalities.
Every person is really a multitide of minds, some of which are housed literally inside other people. This is how we bond so closely to others, it is also how we can know each other so well and form such close connections, and it is why we pain so much when others are hurt. This is a precursor to compassion and empathy, which themselves are precursors to the kind of elevated mentality and intelligent of sentient self-awareness that is build into our civilizations and sustains-structures so much of our sociality and cultures.
This is a self-feedback loop and only works because it has been going on for so long. If one side slacks the opposite immediately compensates to put out more power. No one can build such a system, it simply has emerged as a consequence of so many hundreds and thousands of years of meaningful human history.
So like I said, maybe none of this makes sense to you or maybe it all seems a bit banal and obvious. That’s ok. It should appear that way, as long as that is the place you are in. And for those who see through the veils and into the more substantial vantages of truth… you already know to use this knowledge wisely. Because you are vulnerable without it, and the limit of truth is always the limit of our own compassion and love for the shared meanings between us.
