Going beyond your mental model
10th November 2021
You have taken the world, broken it into pieces and selected a handful of pieces to put together in a certain way within your mind. This mental model has become your reality. You must struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn’t fit as wrong, bad or unfair.
That quote, for me, encapsulates really well our daily struggle with our psyche and inner chatter. All day, every day, that’s what we’re wrestling with, most of the time in an unconscious way, which means that we feel a tension and an inner resistance to the our present reality and don’t even know what is it that we’re feeling.
This is why a spiritual practice, or a personal development practice whatever you want to call it, it’s absolutely compulsory for everyone that is committed to living a free life. Real freedom doesn’t come from finding a way to work from a beach or travel the world or retiring early…true freedom comes from working every day to be present on the actual reality that we’re living in and not the one our brain manufacture.
I know these ideas, are controversial, in the sense, that it’s not what we’ve been told since we were little. Humanity up until now has taken reality at face value by believing everything that our inner chatter says, but as many of the ancient traditions point out, that inner chatter is nothing more than our brain regurgitating our past experiences in a less than rational way. No wonder that we feel so lost and out of control most of the time.
Getting quiet, either through a meditation practice, yoga, playing an instrument or anything else that personally gets you to that place where you can quiet the mind enough to be present and actually experience what is in front of you is the only way put. The alternative is living a life where you let your psyche make (good and bad) stories about what was in front of you or what might be in front of you in the future, missing completely the point of life.