Some of us start to accept the fact that we are living in illusion, and that we see world and things directly but delayed by half a second and all of it is affected by our gender, our emotions, culture background, etc. And that we are made and created by the programs of our bodily processes and production of various hormones as well as invisible handicaps of stressed pregnancy of our mothers or over-medicalized hospital births.
For those who are trying to come to terms with questions of who we are, where we come from and where we’re going to by using logical thinking, there is a trap set by the logic itself: Can a word be conquered by word? Or differently: Can one’s mind work out what a mind is? It is necessary to find a trick, a way to understand what a mind and thinking means, how it controls me or how it can serve and help me.
That can be done for instance by incorporating much more brain capacity into process of thinking (by uniting left and right brain hemisphere as it happens when practicing meditation, which can be followed by enlightment) and at the same time suppressing all ineffective and disturbing elements of normal everyday life of homo sapiens sapiens. Or in another way, just by using words and so called illogical questions (or by consistently repeated mantras singing) I can short-circuit the usual process of thinking so it will ‘switch off’, giving a chance to other parts of my brain to offer different, rather than usual solution based on assumptions. Our brain is like an old dog and you won’t teach him new tricks by using the same old methods.
It’s the same thing with dreams and dreaming. We’ve been taught by the cultural indoctrination that we can not influence our dreams and dreaming. But there is an increasing number of people who have decided to give it a try and learned how to manage and change their dreams. If we intervene (as we found out in certain moments of this changing process of managing our dreams) we often change even what we didn’t want to change (as happens with ecological environment).
But what we can do is to change the atmosphere, the feeling of it: enough to think of it, or briefly imagine how it could be different (and the less detailed the better) and the scene, the situation in your dream will change that way.
In that sense we are true gods, creators of lives and worlds far more than we are
willing to admit. We don’t have a real clue how much we really are what we want to be (even though we realize it somehow subconsciously but unfortunately it’s usually in negative way).
We don’t have a real clue how pointlessly we picture our worlds and lives in dark colours and we just don’t get the connection between negative thinking and the way we perceive the world (and it doesn’t matter whether it is because of our birth which programmed our mind for life to initial negative set-up or that we have to live in an environment that is polluted chemically, verbally, is full of noise and media and our mind is contaminated by it, too and as such produces a contaminated way of thinking and inevitably a contaminated world).
But as I’ve indirectly mentioned the examples from area of dreams and dreaming or zen koans or mantras, our free will has always been there and always is. The most important factor is your intention and then all you have to do is to choose a method and stick by it. It is possible to re-program the way of how your brain is perceiving world in all its illusions, and it is possible to learn how not to see the world and life as a problem but as a joy. By that you slowly change chemical and other processes of endocrine glands as well as that point-switch which (subconsciously in the above mentioned half of a second) switches all your perceptions to the negative ‘problem’ rail track. Then a man (in the sense of his free will) will stop being just a passive puppet controlled by his genetic code, culture, society, his body and negative media information and by choosing what he eats, drinks, breathes, sees and reads or who he talks to and how he eliminates all the damaging and polluting elements, will discover a way of living in harmony with his body and soul in his environment and time.
One’s thinking that: “if Siddharta’s mind was structured just a little bit differently, he could have ended as a great Indian monarch. His Buddhist spirit could have stayed hidden, just as it is hidden in billions of other beings. A man who tries to find enlightenment, is already enlightened but he doesn’t know about it. His success is not entirely in his hands. His mind and his body do what they have to do and a man can only humbly wait whether he’ll reach his enlightenment. But who caused, that this is what I want and not that?” – but such thinking is a product of somewhat contaminated mind.
The Buddha’s idea that we are all enlightened since our birth can be proved by comparing EEG report of a baby in womb and EEG of experienced yoga or zen masters – they’re practically identical which suggests that babies in wombs do not sleep through 80% of their time as science claims but they spend this time meditating. And as such we are naturally spiritual (and it only got out of control by all the science surrounding birth giving in hospital using lots of medications, and all things that follow). And because they didn’t tell us, or perhaps we have given up on our way to purge all that is separating us from understanding the principles of our minds.
It’s comical how much anyone can change just by deciding that he will not be acknowledging and listing reasons why he feels bad and trapped but searching for and practising methods and ways that will lead him to realization that despite all the handicaps and limitations he is a free person capable of miracles. Yes, such is the world. But once we are here, why (despite all the imaginary limitations) wouldn’t we use it? This is all in our hands.
A very long time ago there was only God and energy. But gradually there was so many forms of angels that God decided to change it. He created the earth and offered a chance to enter human material bodies to all his angels. But all of them refused: should we want to be limited by a material? You won’t trick us into that. And so God invited everyone to a musical concert. The music was heavenly beautiful but then God suddenly stopped everything and asked: “it was beautiful, wasn’t it? And now imagine, how even more beautiful would that sound in those resonating human material bodies!”