Years ago, I used to have these lucid dreams of flying. I would run and take off, flapping my arms like wings and fly. The feeling of inspiration and restfulness in the mornings was exhilarating. I miss those dreams. It was around 2010 when I started meditation, and quickly I was able to reach long sessions of total mental silence with very minimum thought activity. Meditation helped me release tensions and experience virtual flights at night. I felt free. It was a gradual realization to understand what was happening in my mind that led to those experiences.
The mind is a virtual space generated by the brain and gradually filled with virtual content throughout our lives. Every experience and interaction with the environment is recorded and stored in the brain’s memory centers and recalled as required or stimulated. From the moment the interactions occur, the brain starts to interpret the incoming information; from that point forward, perspectives and perceptions are formed around that interaction and possibly on other pre-existing entities in the mind. Concepts start to form or be modified, which is how belief structures are shaped.
For instance, assume you have a traumatic experience with an individual of a particular socio-demographic; your brain will naturally attempt to form new or influence and modify the pre-existing perceptions and interpretations, concepts or ideas related to those characteristics in your brain. In essence, through experiences, we build an incredibly complex and ever-changing network of virtual entities, all related and connected. This way, we construct frameworks of doctrines and ideologies, collectively interpreting and defining versions of self and others.
The mind’s framework of beliefs has the potent power to dictate the boundaries and extent of possibilities, the achievable and the impossible. What we could become and what we aren’t capable of becoming. For instance, what one’s father has told them in their childhood may impact the way the person perceives themselves or their achievements for years to come. The perceptions and perspectives related to those imposed concepts by their father are now the virtual entities of their mind.
As we grow older, we become increasingly dependent on our belief systems and are nearly always limited by the contents of this framework. The non-constructive, destructive, and empathetic contents of our minds have made us too heavy to take off, too heavy to fly, too grounded to experience freedom, and too levelled to dream and fulfill those dreams. The very objects that we have made up and stored in some virtual space, the very non-real, non-existent contents that we add to the existing framework, the very architecture we have designed and manufactured have become the dictator of the doctrines that hold us down, the conductor of the music of our lives. The nodes on this network are the mind’s entities, and the edges are the connections, each influencing the rest.
We hold the key to redemption from the self-guarded framework of destructive contents. The weights holding us down originate from the confluence of self-limiting and discriminating contents of the mind. I am referring to the criteria by which we perceive and judge ourselves and others, the standards by which we measure personal success and abundance, the perceptions by which we distinguish ourselves from others on the basis of gender, race, age, belief, etc. If we take the responsibility of cleaning up the mess we have created in our minds, we can begin to recognize and eliminate all non-constructive and biased contents of the mind. By doing so, we can shed the weight and experience the potent power of an individual outside the power structures. We can build communities of visionaries free of resentment and greed, free of guilt and envy, and open to exploring and transformation.
By cleaning up the mind of the imposed doctrines of religions, we can coexist in harmony in communities that inspire the world to transform as such. We must recognize that what we have constructed in our minds is virtual and need careful examination and reformation. We must acknowledge that our mind is an illusive construct capable of realizing a world of harmony or exploitation. The world doesn’t change the world. It is the communities made up of free-minded individuals that change the world.
I encourage every one of us to examine our minds and create new constructive content, modify the existing ones or eliminate them if necessary. The process is lengthy, and requires persistence and openness; it requires independent thinking.
Payman Janbakhsh, Ph.D.