Breaking free

If you absolutely love the state of the world today and feel that our culture is totally sane and making you feel happy and fulfilled, you can go ahead and skip this post. Otherwise, please go on reading.

I want to begin by saying this: You, whoever you are, whatever you have done and wherever you are, are valuable. You are valuable simply because you are you. There is a God who loves you and cares deeply for you. A God who sees you, sees your pain and what the values of the world has done with you. 

That being said, I basically believe that we live in an invisible control system. I also believe that there is malevolent intention behind this system. But this is debatable. What I don’t believe is debatable, is that we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with appeals to our lower natures, whether it is in the form of food, sex, money, competition or something else. Our culture appeals to our animal sides, making us live in a way where we react to outside stimuli, rather than taking conscious action.

The alternatives that are presented to us seem to be to either fit into someone else’s (who’s?) definition of success, or just letting life happen to us and try to be as fine with it as we can be.

I believe that the first step to breaking free, is simply to decide to bring more awareness into our lives. Then we need to start questioning the values that we take for granted. To try and understand how conditioned we are to believe and think a certain way. To want certain things. Next we need to become clear about what our values are. What we really find important. And compare this to where we actually invest our time and energy. 

Then comes the really hard part. To start looking honestly at ourselves. What I’ve noticed in my own life, is that I’ve unconsciously wanted to preserve a certain self-image. And to pick this self-image apart has been a painful process. I’ve kept pushing so many problems away, telling myself that they weren’t there, until I had nowhere to run anymore. 

Here is what I realized after a while: My life consisted mainly of unconscious thoughts, unconscious behavioral patterns, unconscious ways of interacting with other people, unconscious beliefs, unconscious attitudes and unconscious assumptions. I say “unconscious” a lot here, don’t I? And there is a reason for this. Because as long as we do not realize that most of who we are and what we do, are in most cases not products of conscious choices, we can never hope to break free.

Freedom does not start with you forcing the world to change. Freedom starts on the inside.