The Ultimate Game of Cosmic Hide-and-Seek | Thoughts on the Mind, Facing Fear, Role-Playing, and "Interior" Design

A muse blew in on the soft wings of summer, and the girl at the mailbox taken back to her native nexus. Engulfed in the swells of poetic and scientific contemplation, she opened to the universe meditating on the nature of reality, human knowledge, and how she fits into this transcendent weft of life and, with a hand full of letters and bills, wondered how she might come to love the unknowing of it all.

The Making of Mind

My egoic mind wants to assert complete control over my life, and it seeks to eliminate uncertainty excessively. My mind will take past experiences and project them into the future as a means of unlaying this uncertainty. To little avail, as this has the tendency to raise the levels of my anxiety because much of life is uncertain after all.

Modern life in the western world is the birthing place of new forces at play that contribute to unprecedented levels of stress, which I often crave release from. Outside of any trauma or shadow work there is, I figure the interplay between consumerism, social media, and the endless sanctification of the individual (which could tie into shadow work) may be one place to look. As people of the western world, we live in a highly commodified social structure that regularly tries to convince us that we are not enough in order to successfully market trinket services and gadgets to address our perceived deficiencies.

In today's society, one cannot turn their head without seeing images of what female beauty is supposed to look like or what prescribed male success is supposed to be. Layer in social media, that not only banks our unique algorithm as a means to market to us but also becomes the forum to prove that we are enough. The result of our relationship with this reality, of which is exhausting and psychologically emotional, eventually takes a physical toll leading to dis-ease.

The Unmaking of Mind

Buddhists, guru's, and generally anyone who knocks their spile into the sap of ancient wisdom says that suffering: the desire of the egoic mind to control its environment, can be relieved through presence. Perhaps the antidote to this nightmarish existence is to redesign the subconscious mind. By dissolving the mind's limiting beliefs, thus tapping into our human potential. If you can commit to that idea of liberation, then I'd like to invite you to join me in imagining ourselves henceforth as "interior designers."

Have your new business cards come in yet, interior designer? Because there's work to be done - and undone

The work we now face is redesigning our inner thinking space by delineating what I assert are the primal constructs we live in, which act fundamentally as our constraints. If we continue to function within that small-minded space, then we agree to live predominately based on survival instincts. Whilst on the other side of these deep-seated limitations in the primal programming of the subconscious mind is freedom, authentic expression of character, and liberation.

Isn't that, after all, what everyone is seeking? Freedom. Authenticity. Liberation. I know I certainly am.

Identifying the Limitations

What are the limitations? Simply: anything that is an inhibitor to possibility or potential. More caused explicitly by the entanglement of the linguistic limitations that dwell in the perceived ideas we hold of ourselves.

In plain terms, the words we use shape what we think we are and are not always an accurate representation of who we are.

Redesigning the Interior

It occurs to me that only through my (re)cognition of the deep-seated subconscious patterns I've developed (which give rise to my experiences of anxiety and depression) am I able to realize the freedom that resides on the other side of them. I can cleanly break away from all of the limitations I've created by realizing that whatever I believe myself to be fundamentally at the deepest level isn't an actual truth but is merely the way that I've developed my relationship to myself in life.

Traditional therapeutic advice invests my success in shifting my behavior(s) as an action step against the depression and anxiety I experience. To reiterate, I find my inner work is becoming less about strategizing and perfecting my circumstances and more about working on redesigning the interior constructs (the roots of what I believe to be true about myself) that give rise to the issues I externally manifest.

Freedom is the transcendence of all of my perceived limitations; doing that requires that I inquire about the validity or truth of what I am fundamentally believing, which is an internal proposition. Instead of looking to exogenous surroundings and/or strategies, substances, seeking surface social acceptance, or whatever that I feel might give some respite from my suffering.

The Story Limitations Tell

The feeling of inadequacy or that I am not enough is a collective human experience that, by virtue of maturity, I know I can grow beyond. I might attend therapy or transformational workshops, which help guide me through doing the inner work where I can begin to realize that those beliefs I adopted from earlier experiences listening to others don't represent the full scope of who I am. Thus I work to liberate myself of the limitation altogether. However, in the self-excavation, I still manage to find some limiting beliefs - storylines - that I've been subject to (unable to see). And as these storylines unfold, I notice some limitations still play an active and dominant role in my life, which presents in me a character to the outside world that is not my most authentic self.

Action Step: Investigate the validity of your self-perceptions instead of trying to solve the problem, thus re-enforcing the belief that you have one, work on digging up the root cause(s) that give rise to the limitations you experience.

It has be written that the truth that will set you free. If you find that "your truth" isn't setting you free, it might be because what you're holding onto as a belief isn't the truth at all. It may well feel genuine and real, and you may even have evidence that re-enforces this belief of who you are, but if in your inquiry you find that it isn't always true, then it dissolves, and you redesign the interior.

What have you learned about yourself in your growth work? Are you emerging as your authentic self or still playing a character from an old storyline?