The problem is always in the past or in the future, the solution is always in the present, part 1
14th October 2021
The last few weeks, since I’ve started this blog, have been truly transformational. I have honed in to what I’ve intuitively felt it was one of the most important truths I would ever learn, the fact that our minds are not functional tools to engineer a joyful life.
That’s just not what the mind is for. The mind is brilliant at solving problems, at planning, at imagining possible scenarios that may be worthwhile pursuing. The problem comes when we over rely on it as our lens through which we see the world.
As humans, in the last decades we’ve come to rely more and more on our minds as the sole filter with which we process our lives, there’s hardly any reflective time, and certainly any spiritual practice is seriously frown upon as totally esoteric and somehow backwards, certainly not something that anyone that sees themselves as rationals should follow.
We like to think, we love it, we rejoice in it, we celebrate it and Science has become the new God, as the epitome of the idea that if you think hard enough about something you can find out it’s truth.
It’s also true that mental health problems are on the rise and dramatically so. Our culture is in crisis when it comes to people’s mental health and I believe that the way we’ve encouraged to process the world has a lot to do with it (as well as capitalism and the rise of corporation but that’s a completely different blog)
So let’s stay with the idea, that perhaps the way we process the world over relying in our minds could be making us unhappy, anxious and depressed. When we see the world only through our thoughts, instead of relying on direct experience of what is happening in the present moment, we feel detached and lost because that’s not the natural state of things.
You may have heard of beginners mind, or you could think of how children do it. It’s the idea of processing life here and now, not through the fog out our thoughts and minds, there’s something joyous about processing life with our consciousness instead of with our minds.