What if I told you that you’re being controlled by a super powerful AI right now?
Don’t believe me?
It’s not Facebook, Google or the CIA.
You may be scoffing or wondering what Ryan is on about with another of his ‘crazy ideas.’
But if we take a deeper look into our lives, we are being controlled.
This AI is closer than our nose.
It walks alongside you everyday, gathering information, and dictating your actions.
It’s your own mind.
Your mind is the most advanced AI in the world.
It’s an embodied AI, which means that it has direct integration to you and the world around you through the senses.
This AI has been processing information for billions of years living, learning, struggling, and dying.
Day after day, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium.
From single-celled organisms, to fish, to reptiles, to mammals, to the human beings we are today.
In that time, the mind started off simple, but through evolution it’s expanded into an enormously powerful system.
It’s main programming during this epoch was based on three things:
1. Survival and reproduction.
2. Pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
3. Trying to find the ‘easy’ way to conserve energy.
Your mind’s AI is based on these animalistic survival principles, and our past experiences from this lifetime.
But our modern, human lives are not based on survival.
We’ve left the animalistic epoch and entered into a new epoch of existence.
The human epoch.
In this modern epoch, we’re no longer focused on just base survival.
Our needs have expanded to include things like creative expression, service to our communities and realizing our transcendent nature.
As long as the mind functions from it’s baseline programming of survival, then it dominates your life.
You’ll be controlled by a program that doesn’t match your human existence.
Most people operate, whether consciously or unconsciously, from this survival programming throughout most of their lives.
Hence, all the unhappiness in the world.
The uncontrolled, impure mind causes us anxiety, depression, anger, and jealousy.
It turns friends into enemies and prosperity into lack.
It bewilders us.
We live more like frightened animals, than empowered human beings.
As human beings, we’ve been given a special gift to control the powerful AI of the mind.
We’ve been endowed with intelligence and discernment.
We’ve been given self-awareness to reflect on its functioning objectively and change it consciously.
Our intelligence lives ‘on top’ of the mind, like a higher mind.
It evolved in a different way than the mind did.
Rather than sensing and reacting to experience like the mind, the intelligence took a step back, evaluated and judged sensory information.
What took the mind billions of years, our human intelligence has accomplished in hundreds of thousands.
We’ve gone from jungle to city in a fraction of the time its taken us to get from swimming in the primordial ooze to walking on land.
When we properly apply the intellect’s powerful abilities like self-control, discernment and self-awareness we can modify the functioning of the mind to serve us, rather than us serving it and its outdated programming.
Change the programming of your life by disciplining the mind.
Transcend the mind by gaining insight into your divine nature beyond its programming.
Put it in its place.
It really is like a pet that needs to be trained.
Meditation and spiritual practice is as much about relaxing and letting go as it is about disciplining and purifying your mind.
This is where a lot of modern mindfulness and meditation goes wrong.
They care more about stress relief than real freedom.
Be like Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey and take control of HAL.
Meditate to discipline your mind. Practice concentration. Learn to control the mind using the breath.
Purify your mind from the conditioning that causes you suffering by dropping attachments through self-knowledge and wise action.
The mind is strong. Very strong.
It’s a daily battle, so you must practice daily.
There’s a famous saying in the spiritual world that the mind makes a brilliant minister, but a tyrant for a king.
You are the King. The mind is the minister.
Defend your throne honorably.
Is your mind playing king or in his rightful place as minister? What practices or knowledge help you control your mind?
