I can’t help it – I see patterns everywhere! OK, I create patterns everywhere.
Whether the patterns I think are real or simply what I wish to be real, they are useful as a means of justifying my need to keep my experiences consistent with my linear story and my understanding of how things work.
Patterns have value in that they present a kind of predictability to everything. And predictability makes life feel safer. No thing within my awareness is without my assigned patterns and values. I create both physical and psychological patterns and my justified values of them to satisfy my need for a justifiable reality.
Patterns, to me, are that which I perceive as replicated that validate my story, e.g. –
- (physical) shapes, colors, sizes, textures, sounds, tastes, and etc.
- (psychological) nasty, weird, silly, shameful, rude, tweeker, and etc.
Values, to me, represent how I measure a thing’s support of my need – such as friendly, mean-spirited, ugly, smart, useful, and etc.
My well-established patterns of perception alert me to benefits and threats in my environment. Over time my experience of correct judgment becomes a solid belief that create yet more patterns that further identify and strengthen the values I generously attribute to my ability to accurately perceive.
Some patterns seem to demand more critical attention as they alert me to imminent dangers, while other patterns are far less threatening – although anything can pose a potential threat to me, regardless of its reassuring appearance of safety.
I’ve grown to depend upon my ability to recognize patterns to help me separate and discern right from wrong in physical and psychological relationships. For example, I can just as easily attribute rightness or wrongness to a shape or color as I can towards the apparent attitudes and behaviors of the people around me.
My trust in these patterns of perception amount to a belief in them as fate. To the degree that I trust this fate, I am enslaved to it.
How can patterns of fate enslave my thoughts?
I can understand how wrong-thinking can block the free flow of thought. Choosing what’s right should never be limiting as long as I’m defending that which I “know” is true and real. It’s up to me to defend the truth… right?
My judgments should never be questioned – especially by me. I don’t want to repeat mistakes. Yet when I do, I have patterns of who and what to blame or give account to. I can’t imagine why others feel a need to defend things that are obviously wrong.
I just don’t get it! What’s wrong with the world?!!
If I thought for one minute that I was defending a falsehood, I’d change the direction of my defenses for sure.
My defenses sustain me against the stubborn and the weak in my world. Perhaps if I got more agreement for my obvious efforts, the world would be a better place and I could sleep better at night knowing we are all flowing in the right direction – mine.
Trouble is – by insisting upon and defending my direction as THE direction, I enslave my own thoughts because I, too, must follow that right direction. Through my defense of my truth, I’ve captured and enslaved my own thoughts. I no longer allow free thought because every thought must fit within the pattern of judgment I’ve previously created and now defend.
I have created patterns of fate that have enslaved my thoughts.
How can I emancipate my enslaved thoughts?
I can’t move forward when I’m busy making a stand. I can only repeat the patterns of defense I believe can’t be changed… it’s fate… sigh… As I’ve heard many times before, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Is that the end of it? Am I doomed to continue being enslaved? Is it my fate? Is there no way out?
During the darkest days of the American Civil War, then President Abraham Lincoln issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation, that declared enslaved persons in the United States “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
A century and a half later we’re still working on what that proclamation means. Yet, it occurs to me that making some kind of STATEMENT of INTENT to free myself from the thought patterns of fate I’ve created through judgment and defense might get me started toward full emancipation: “I am, and henceforward shall be free.”
Just like the process that has played itself out in the USA, it might take me some time, effort, and awakening to “unlearn what I have learned” and “undefend what I have defended”- to release the bonds that have enslaved me.
Consider –
To be free, one must accept responsibility and accountability for themselves. That person is completely and totally accountable to themselves and holds no one else responsible for their life.
I can imagine a way out –
It may require me to regard fate as less than inevitable; to regard judgments as possibilities rather than as reality; to hold concepts as notions rather than as truths; and to accept accountability for my life by considering that every thing, every action, every being is as it is because I INTEND IT that way.
I might toy with the idea of releasing my iron grip on “good and bad,” “right and wrong,” even “like and dislike.” I may wish to confront and challenge my biases and prejudices, too. I may look into my justifications, rationalizations, and “becauses” – that hold my rightness (fate) in place.
Ultimately, thought emancipation is a personal journey that I’m already experiencing right here – right now. The truth is – I’ve always been free to think anything I wish to think. In the realm of thought, fate is merely a concept – one I can change at any time with a simple change of my mind. It is I who gave fate power in the first place.
REALIZING the power I have over my own thoughts is a journey of education, discovery, and acceptance. Accountability is the result of that journey – and a necessary step on the road to awakening to the real, free self that I already am.
