So after a long time masturbating intellectually about what freedom is and isn’t, I’ve come to certain conclusions. Of course, I didn’t use all of this time to “enrich” myself, but for a solid foundational subliminal.
This post is divided into 2 parts, first is for issues and second for solutions. Also, this post can’t explain all the intricacies of our perceived reality.
** Part One **
1. Survival: I think I don’t need to say much about it, but our survival instincts were build for conditions far different than we are in. It is the main driver of everything we do mostly. There are other instincts which override this one a few times.
2. Sex: This one is also as potent as the first, sometimes more. As it has the added bonus of pleasure. Whomever we meet, we subtly analyze their sexual market value, for a lack of better term. If not for the next culprit, it wouldn’t have made it to this list.
3. Social Programming: Books upon books, are written on this one. Irony, that they end up contributing to it. Whatever be the domain of human performance, it is present there. Validation, authority, consistency and commitment, attachments, judgements, the list goes on. This is the most buggy code ever written running on the greatest computing machine ever build (brain).
4. Emotional Conditioning: A subset of social programming, but I wanted to make it more precise. Each and every thing we perceive has an emotional impact, and it strengthens with further encounters. Another thing, We want everything to be emotionally challenging or impacting it gives us a high of it’s own. *People don’t want to see life as a life, they want to see it as a “hero’s journey” where they face hardships and “conquer” them. All forms of marketing (product, idea, thought,…) is based upon us wanting to feel different emotions.
5. Ego, perceptions, reality: Again, social programming. People live their whole lives over the superficial social beliefs that society has established. Someone opposes your opinion – Fuck! that’s a threat to my tiny little ego. My “social value” will decrease, I should say something fast which brings the power back to me, so I can feel content once again. That’s how we perceive everything. Through the ego filter.
6. Language: We think in some sort of language always, it is used as the ultimate tool for reinforcing all the faulty social programming. We consciously think in language, and it gets imprinted into our unconscious through the feelings the words elicit. Great tool to bridge conscious and unconscious.
7. The need to feel special and talking oneself too seriously: Everyone wants to feel important, feel special, I call it unique snowflake syndrome. We believe we are special, entitled and that everything should be given to us on a sliver platter. Or in other cases, we want to feel that there’s some “special” purpose for which we were born. And that our “journey” should be legendary. And everyone should admire us after we fulfill our “destiny”. Also we tend to take ourselves too seriously, as if we are the enlightened ones who are intellectual and has great depths of character and knowledge.
** Part Two **
1. Destruction of social programming: It is the general objective of the foundation, to detach from “negatives” is more efficient than keep loading “positives” and yin-yang-ing them. It would be more desirable to uninstall all the buggy and heavy social programming and installing much lighter efficient code.
2. Destruction of faulty patterns: If I start addressing each issue, for example, each of my fears, it’ll take me forever to complete, it’s more efficient that I destroy the fear creating mechanism which keeps popping a new fear a new day. These “mechanisms” are just thought patterns, which can be retrained.
3. Reframing: Used in therapy, changes the perceptions easily. Can be used to reframe all the meaning we give to things, IN REALTIME.
4. Awareness: Becoming aware of us following all the social programming, is half the work done. Easy to remove any unhelpful pattern once we’re aware of it. Awareness also transcends thinking, under awareness, thinking becomes non-destructive, and more intelligent. “Power of Now” talks a good deals about awareness.
5. Minimalism: Less amounts of thoughts, or “still mind” makes the mind work much more efficiently and with more focus. The “positive” Inner voice isn’t as helpful as a still mind also called, magnetic mind.
6. Language and tags: The tags we give to everything we perceive is how we reinforce all the faulty beliefs in ourselves. “Good” “bad”, “positive” “negative”, and many other twins which leads us to judgements and adding the meaning society wants us to. Better is that, we use helpful and unhelpful which makes life much easier to navigate.
7. Ego taming: Could be added into awareness, ego is the social identity of a person. It is what makes us so vulnerable to social programming and getting triggered or emotionally unstable. It makes us feel hurt and all other unhelpful emotions. This is why we impose meaning and judge everything. With awareness, we turn off the ego at will, and see everything with more clarity.
Master Key: Indifference
It is the most powerful practice for self mastery. We can be indifferent to social programming, we can be indifferent to meanings and tags. We could be indifferent to emotional impacts things have on an everyday man. This is what I think is freedom. We can be indifferent to all the unconscious instincts and cravings. All it requires is awareness and a strong will.
Note: This post do not contain all the information I gathered and all the insights I got. And there’s more to come