Shackled

Mental Skills

Just a sudden attempt to express the concept of crime.
Photo by niu niu / Unsplash

We follow our thoughts and those of the collective into a type of living oblivion. An oblivion devoid of any real tangible meaning.

We work jobs we don’t like. Put ourselves in ridiculous financial situations that make us slaves and we long for the weekend so we can have a drink to numb the pain under the guise of it being a celebration.

We have become so accustomed to material and social slavery that we fail to see our own shackles. We are slaves because we believe we should be, as everyone else is. We will do anything and everything to avoid the enormity of being alone with our own consciousness.

Slavery, it seems, is a safer option.

Keeping busy keeps me away from the bandwidth that I don’t have the time nor the ram to process. But if I can’t process my own consciousness then I have no chance of knowing the love that we all long for. At the end of the day, whether you realise it or not, everything you do is for for some form of love. But, love is not a thought!

Imagine being trapped on a desert island alone. I think that most people would be in more danger from their own thoughts than they would be from anything on that island. Where is love now that I am here alone?

The truth is, we need community, we all need love. But I also know it’s mine to give to myself and I can’t get that from my thoughts.We don’t authentically give love to one another if we don’t have it for ourselves.

If we lack love for ourselves, we tend to love each other as an object, not for who we really are. So, we project love rather than understanding we are made of it. The lacking ingredient in that projection is awareness.

Life is not objective and nor is love. We can’t love someone else for what they do. That’s not love. You either love them for who they are, or you don’t really love them. Love is not a contractual arrangement.

Our inner landscape is the same. If I only love and define myself by what I do, I am objectifying myself and I have qualified my own love as a contract. How many people have fallen off the edge in failing to meet that mental arrangement I wonder?

This is why relationships are under so much pressure right now. It’s a two street, first the relationship we have with ourselves and then the relationship we have with each other.

The love lost in me is the love lost to you. Objectification of life and love is all just a head..k!  Oh man, has that ever been a sledgehammer lesson in my own life.

Everyone you know is subject, not object. If we don’t know ourselves as subject then that’s where our work waits for us.

Why have we allowed ourselves to get to a point whereby our thoughts are posing the biggest threat to our lives?Hey, I feel the pressure too:I feel like I should want more and do more.

That’s the message my conditioning and society sends me, but the truth is, I don’t. I want less! I want less stuff, less rushing, less noise, less worry, less debt and less pressure. I want more nature and nurture, more of you too. I want to know who you really are.

Time is life, life is love.

Photo by Harrison Mitchell / Unsplash

I want to know the nature of my own consciousness. I seriously suspect if I can do that, then I can understand more about the nature of the world and you. Because consciousness is what we are made of, and the world is made of us. Only I can give myself that, but I have to decide I’m worth it, just like you do.

This is the paradox of modern life. We think we are giving to ourselves and others through this objective pursuit, but we are steadily becoming more uneasy, more anxious, paranoid and disassociated from ourselves and each other. We can talk for hours on end about our objective pursuits without saying a single subjective word that holds any real experiential value.

Each time we walk away none the wiser and carry forward a hollowness that lacks substance. As within, so to without. I have to stop running away from the depth of my own consciousness.

This is only a conversation I can have with myself.

I share it with you in the hope that you will drop your mental shackles too.

Gilesy