The Madness of The Mind
One of the greatest challenges we face right now in the present is just this;
The human mind has become so programmed to constantly seek distraction. Our lives have become all about doing more. We pack our lives with things to do and we keep so busy, its almost manic.
Why do we conduct our lives this way? — Because the human mind is filled with madness and sickness. If you think about all the problems we face as individuals and as a species, they all start in the mind; world wars and genocides, just to name a couple. On the other end of the spectrum, its the sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction that we usually experience day to day.
We don’t want to face this reality of ourselves, so we keep distracted; we work longer hours, we watch more television, we eat more food, we take more drugs and alcohol and we become addicted to our technologies.
All of these things is partly because we are too afraid to face the madness going on inside each of us. As a result, we have become incapable of sitting still. We always have to be on the go — run, run, running away.
I spent many months away in a very isolated environment. I was living in a quiet Cambodian town and my only contact with people was when I was teaching at the local school. Other than that, I was all on my own. I was stuck with my thoughts and I learned after so many internal battles that there is no escaping what goes on inside.
As ugly as it can get, the mind will always be ticking over in the background, most of the time controlling how you feel and behave, especially if these thoughts occur unconsciously. There were times where I thought I was on the path to insanity, only to realise I had been there all along. There was nothing new going on here.
The mind was ticking over in its compulsive, mundane loops as it has always been. I was just more aware of this mental madness because I was forced to sit still with it. There were so few distractions, I had no place to run any longer.
Just like tragedy or death in the external world, we try and avoid some of these uncomfortable truths of our internal worlds. We don’t like to confront these things because most of the time, we don’t like what we see.
Right now, we have the perfect opportunity to self inquire. People are on lock down and we now have no place to run or hide. So, go inward and watch the mind. Its in confronting our internal reality where we can begin to face our fears and then let go, without masking the truth with our short term band-aid solutions we are so accustomed to applying.