I just had a grotesque flashback of some vivid movie about black slavery in the Southern part of the United States. I wonder what can justify that kind of treatment of other human beings? Pop, another flashback, a scene in a Star Wars film. The rebel pilots say that all the bad things they have done and all the killing they have performed were justified because it was done for the right cause. The mind is a powerful weapon.
All these horrible things happen and they are condoned because of what we believe. That doesn’t seem right but it is does seem to be how things work. There is a bumper sticker that I like a lot, which says “Don’t believe what you think”. It is a major emphasis of many spiritual practices to learn how to evade our own programs of mind control, to see the illusions of our dysfunctional patterns of thinking. Embodiment practices such as meditation, martial arts, chanting, drumming, ritual, singing, and dancing change the way we access our minds.
Another powerful tool that interferes with thinking is pain. Whether it is physical or emotional, the experience of suffering stops us from thinking. It humbles a person right up. If it is acute pain, that works a little bit and then once it is gone, we forget about it as soon as possible. Chronic suffering really amplifies this process. We can not really forget about it or get away from it so we have to keep chipping away at the overbearing mind in order to survive it. Once we have suffered long enough the edges of things fade away and we see what really matters. Living and respecting all forms of life, freedom in the breath and the beautiful waking existence that we all share. And then we get bogged down in thinking again.
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