“The best prison for a soul is one it cannot touch or feel; if you do not realize you are a prisoner, you will not want to escape.”From El refugio del corazón
Let me put something to you: disconnect from the system, stop paying your bills and run off to a cave. What will happen?
We know we cannot leave everything behind to live apart from the world, but that does not mean you are lost. As human beings we have always believed that we are prisoners of our lives, without realizing that what we are prisoners of is our own mind.
You became the prisoner of your own creation, just as if you were playing in virtual reality. Do you want to get out of this prison you cannot touch?
The locks we inherited
The beliefs you carry inside were inherited from our ancestors. They taught us to relate to life through those beliefs.
Over time, those beliefs became locks within our psyche, in our tendencies and in our ways of thinking and feeling. They are locks that keep us from the revelation that God is omnipresent and exists in us.
And we are not alone in this. Just as personal thought arises, collective thought is the sum of everyone's thoughts. Humanity as a whole creates thoughts charged with fear and suffering, and here we have the world we live in. Think of when people believed the earth was flat: when that idea fell, collective perception changed in a momentous way. Beliefs clear up in each person as they also clear up in the collective.
Do you want to change the world? Change the way you think. It would be hard to wait for the world to become benevolent and sweet before you lower your guard, because everyone else thinks the same way. Start with yourself.
You are not the mind
The mind is the prison that leads you to generate dilemmas and beliefs, to which you give all your attention until you are trapped in them. But you are not the mind. And I assure you that if it is good for anything, it is for instilling fear: in your eagerness not to suffer, or to keep someone else from suffering, you generate more suffering, which is inoculated into you through fear, above all the fear of dying or of losing what you hold dear.
That only proves that the mind is operating from the field of pain, of suffering and of the ego. So I ask you: how will you trust a mind that operates within the spectrum of pain to guide you in your spiritual process?
We jump from one experience to the next, between pain and pleasure, gain and loss, pride and guilt, and the mind sells us the idea all over again that the next experience, this time, will bring us happiness. How much longer are we going to trust this cold, calculating mind?
Look at something very simple. Our Being is, in essence, love and happiness, and that is why the mind moves with this urge to seek them. But the mind is inert: it cannot feel that love or that happiness by itself. Since it believes it is the person and that love is not in it, it goes out to look for it outside. The mind imprisons you in the search for a happiness it is incapable of feeling.
Asking yourself “Is that so?”
If you take an idea to be real, it will become your reality, all the more so when you do not even question it. And I assure you of one thing: no one can question it for you. How will you change something you do not even realize needs to be questioned? That is how we fall into dogma, taking as true what someone said, like the idea of being afraid of God.
The best way to free yourself from those patterns is by questioning them, constantly asking yourself: Is that so? It is intelligence that questions, not the constant noise of your mind. Your beliefs depend on your perception: question them and free yourself from the prison of the mind.
You do not have to clean all the mud out of your mind. You will only have to clear away the little mud it takes to find the key that sets you free. As you cut the chains fastened by those mental locks, you will feel freer.
From the mind to the heart
The mind cannot bring about this transcendence on its own; it is only a mechanism. The one who awakens and becomes aware is your Consciousness, and the first step arises in your heart. Knowing a lot is of no use to you if you do not have the lived experience of what you learn.
However much doubt arises, it will be transcended through the heart, because that is where the wisdom is, known through direct experience, that nothing is the way the mind thinks it is. Devotion is so powerful that, I assure you, at some point it breaks through ignorance.
It may sound very simple to say that you only need to shift the focus of your attention from the mind to your heart. It is not that easy: you really need to learn how to do it, and for that you need to want to do it.
Start by changing the idea that you are different and separate from others. You may see different personalities, but no one is different from you. Do not rely on your mind to give you the answer to something that is already innate in you.
Untangling the mind
I understand that, in the middle of these tangles of suffering, your only thought for God may sometimes be a cry for help. But as you begin to clear all this away, you release doubt and change your perception. The more you unburden yourself of pain, resentment and feelings of inferiority, the more clarity you enter, and that is how you become aware of your presence. For my part, I had to untangle a great deal of pain from my past, and today I can tell you that if I had not let go, I would still be clinging to ideas of what the truth is.
Look deep within yourself at what or whom you are giving your light to. Break the cords that move you like a puppet: look at your vices and you will know who your puppeteer is, and take responsibility for cutting those strings.
Perhaps everything you have lived until this moment has been part of the fabric that brought you to the question you are asking yourself right now. There is nothing new that can be developed in you, because you are eternal; what you can do is let what is already within you come to the surface. And though you cannot run off to a cave, you can take refuge in your own heart, where your Consciousness is, the essence of what you truly are. Untangle your mind and you will flow from love.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's books: Devoción · El refugio del corazón · Deshojando el Corazón de la Eternidad