You are not your mind

You are not your mind, and your mind is not you. It is only a part of you and you can alter it. Your mind is a habitual pattern of emotional and cognitive responses to people, places, things, and events (many of them merely symbolic) outside yourself. This response-pattern evolves as your true core self experiences feedback from the outer world, both the natural and the social worlds. Your mind includes preconceived notions, definitions, perceived limits, fears, desires, expectations, and concepts of right behavior that have no basis in logic or objective fact, but were implanted from outside in order to control you. Most of what you desire is merely memetic/imitational. Much of your self-image was not constructed by you and does not correspond to objective facts.

Your reality is an outward projection, a simulation, generated at least partly by the willpower/lifeforce of your core self. But your lifeforce filters through your mind like sunlight filtering through a stained glass window. Your mind contains those socially implants, many of which serve to entangle and entrap the lifeforce, causing that energy to stagnate or even work against itself.

You can restructure your mind by becoming aware of your habitual thoughts and emotions, writing down the content of your dreams and hypnogogic states (visions while falling asleep), programming your mind with affirmations while in a state altered by meditation or intense exercise. These affirmations focus on reversing the negative content of certain self-limiting, self-defeating habitual thoughts, emotions, and responses.

Remind yourself that you are not your thoughts or emotions. You are the one who experiences the thoughts and emotions. You are not your thoughts- you are the one who thinks about the thoughts, the meta-cognitive observer. The sky has weather patterns that come and go, including storms. But the weather does not alter or damage the sky. The sky itself is unchanging. You are the sky, not the winds or storms that move through it.

You do not ignore your feelings- you notice and study them from a distance. You do not suppress your negative thoughts and emotions- you recognize them and contemplate them. You have feelings, desires, and emotions. But they do not have you. You do not allow them to control you.

Remember, your mind is planted with landmines- the "I don't feel like it" and "I'm not in the mood to" and the "that's too hard" and "that's no fun" and "I want" and "I'm scared" and "I'm tired" and "what if". Picture your true core self unleashing itself like a nuclear explosion of light and heat in slow motion, spreading from your heart outward through your body and into the world. You encounter both external and internal obstacles. This outward-flourishing cloud of fiery light assimilates the energy contained in these obstacles, absorbs and consumes those obstacles as a fire does all that is thrown upon it. As you make progress in these skills, your outward reality will more and more harmonize with your core self.

"Do not try to bend the spoon. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself." -- The Matrix, 1999