Life Consists of Two Things

Life consists of two things: life itself and your thoughts about life.

The first one is what actually happens, while the second is a fiction created in your mind. In order to really live life to the max and connect to your inner strength, you need to be in your body. We experience life only through our brains and our nervous systems. We have no other means to experience it. As a result, how you experience life depends entirely on how you use your brain. If your senses are wide open, it means that the signals received through your sensory organs are not distorted by a veil of fictions created in your mind, so you can experience life itself. What usually happens, though, is that your thoughts, the fiction created by your mind, sits above your senses, meaning that your connection to life has been cut off. The circumstances we live in may draw us away from real life and keep us in a virtual world. If you want to “live,” look and see, listen and hear, use your body, and feel your senses and emotions. Spend time with children and remember your own childhood. Go out in nature whenever you can. Smell the flowers, and notice the taste of every morsel you eat.

If you can manage to shut down all those contraptions creating the fiction in your mind, you may start to really live again. Otherwise, you will stay a prisoner of your own mind, watching the same film over and over again and believing that you are actually free. Then you will blame life, which has offered you all it has to offer, and put yourself in a virtual prison created by your mind.

If you really want to be free, “to live,” you first need to realize that you are actually not free and that you are not really living, and then you need to give up all your “thoughts” about life. A part of you might think you would die if you ever let go of these thoughts, but the reality is quite the opposite: As you get rid of your thoughts, the fiction you built, you really start to live.

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Once the virtual reality our mind creates through words and images suppresses the reality we perceive through our senses, we lock ourselves in the prison of the mind. This is a phase one needs to walk through to reach a certain level of development, but to what extent should it be taken? Once the virtual reality you have created loses its functionality and collapses, and when you begin to feel uncomfortable with it, it will be possible to go beyond your mind, to simplify this virtual world, and to knock down its walls in order to achieve a healthy balance between your senses and reality. If you open up your senses and experience the real world from a clearer point of view, you will see how many things you previously thought were problems are actually melting away, because any problem that is not a physical threat or a health issue is not really a problem. In short, when you feel down for no obvious reason, realize how the images your mind creates are crowding your senses. In a situation like this, if you can silence those images and open up your senses instead, you will see how everything is moving in a perfect, harmonious order.