Life on automatic pilot
24th November 2021
You’re the one that throws life away; you waste every second of it. You get into your car, drive from here to there, and you don’t see anything. You’re not even there. You’re busy thinking about what you’re going to do next. You’re a month ahead of yourself, or even a year. You’re not living life. You’re living mind.
The Untethered soul, Michael Singer, p.263
That quote right there, it’s so terrifyingly true to me, that’s exactly how I feel like my life is lived. In the back seat, not really paying attention to what is really happening because I’m too busy thinking about the next thing I’m going to do… Can you sympathise?
The human predicament it’s quite something when it comes to the mind and how it has totally and completely taken over who we are and what we do with our lives. We’re literally zombies walking around following instructions from the mind, which has been conditioned by our society and culture since we were born.
So we’re not able to be really ourselves, we’re just executing orders and commands instead of actively being there living the moment that it’s in front of us. The programming of the human mind, it’s not only possible but it’s real, it happens all around us.
We sometimes wake up for a moment, and we think to ourselves that all the things that we’re doing are not what we really want to be doing and that we rather follow what our real self is telling us in that moment, but the conditioning and social conformism is so strong in us humans that we find it incredibly difficult.
Meditation and the practice of mindfulness, even though they have become cliches of our modern culture, are the only ways that I know of escaping my predicament. When I make sure I meditate in the morning as well as taking some time every day to reflect on how present I’ve been that day, my existence is so much more real, less in my head and more rooted in the moment.