My origional essay written in 2005 that has become the foundation for my future as a counselor and my determination to help others overcome dysfunctional belief systems in an effort to elievate chronic depression and varying forms of PTSD.

We are born into a world of theory and opinion.   We are born into the world made by man.   In Sanskrit, the verb root “man” means, “to think”.  Given this, “mankind” would mean “thinking kind” or “thinking species”.   We are the species that thinks, the species that creates thought.  We are also part of the animal kingdom… in fact, in some areas, we’re still part of the food chain.  But, we have, for the most part, jumped off the menu in pursuit of a better life, which allows us more time to think.  The fact that we lived in large, intricately built, cities off the cost of India and Mexico over five thousand years ago proves that we’ve been “thinking” for a very long time.  So, the question is, what are we thinking about?   Well, aside from what’s on television, what’s for dinner, or what’s the best time to leave for work without hitting traffic… we, for thousands of years, have devoted a tremendous amount of thought on where we came from, where we’re going, and why we’re here.  In fact, the human race has become a bit obsessed with it, creating thousands of very elaborate and often imaginative theories that outline our origin, our purpose, and our death… which is a very odd thing for an animal to do… some would say borderline neurotic.  Some of the more established theories include; the theory of evolution, where we evolved over time from single celled organisms; the big bang theory, where a cosmic explosion created the universe sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago…. give or take a few billion; and creationism, where matter and all things were created by a god.  Because these theories don’t support each other, many theorists have combined them by suggesting a god caused the “big bang” which then lead to single celled organisms that would eventually crawl out of the sea to create human beings that would evolve into an advanced form of civilization and spend a great deal of their free time creating theories. 

One theory that came out of the human mind was that the Earth was flat.  Scientists knew it was flat, books said it was flat, teachers taught it was flat, and the theory was accepted by many as their reality.  Those who were born into this reality were born onto a flat world.  Then Christopher Columbus set out to prove that the earth was round.  He did this and changed the reality of those who believed the world was flat.  Columbus and his discovery were passed onto future generations who then passed it onto the generations after them.  Then, as modern scholars began researching the Middle Ages, they discovered that Columbus wasn’t trying to prove that the world was round, it was Washington Irving who romanticized this idea when he wrote the “History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus” in 1828.  Apparently, this novel was accepted as fact by millions of people and eventually found it’s way into our history textbooks and our cultural belief system proving that even our concepts of history are just theories.

As we create our belief system, many of us do not consider the possibility that the beliefs provided to us by others may not be true.  When we are children, and someone tells us the sky is blue, we eventually ask… “why is the sky blue?”  To this question we can receive several answers depending on who we ask.  Someone may say the gods painted it that way.  Or someone may say, “it’s because of the way sunlight enters our atmosphere and collides with the oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the air.”  Or we may get, “because it just is.”  We would have to take whichever version we choose on faith since we ourselves cannot prove it to be true, creating a faith-based belief.  In fact, if we think about it, most of what we hold to be true is really a faith-based belief which we've used to create our perception, the world we’ve created inside our mind that filters the reality outside our mind.  Our perception is created from the moment we are born as our brain cells record and assimilate the information we soak up from the world around us.  This forms a neurological network where our brain cells are connected by an endless number associations.  When someone asks us about the sky, our neuro network brings together everything we’ve attached to the word, “sky”; blue, windy, beautiful, or possibly smoggy depending on where we are at the time we’re asked.  Our mind also connects associations to what we’ve used to define “sky”.  For example, “smog” is associated with brown, dirty, toxic, and so on.  In less than a second our mind has used our vast neuro network of associations to create a complete perception of the word, “sky”.   As our neural net becomes more focused, elaborate associated pathways connect our beliefs to our past, present, and future.  As we grow older, our mind creates a neurological filter that accepts only the input that supports our perception.  If something does not support it, our filter will alter the input or disregard it completely.  At this time we can only see what our perception allows.  Perception is created from a collection of personal experiences and beliefs accepted from others.  These beliefs were originally theories that became fact.  We do not see the world we created as theory; we see the world we created as fact.  If we have no reason to believe the world we created is not fact, we have no reason to question our reality.  When we’re met with the realization that our perception of the world may, in fact, be fiction, we may react by intensifying the strength of our perception instead of recognizing that our neuro network may be running off inaccurate information.  This means that, if our definition of “sky” is questioned, our neuro network strengthens as we continue to activate the associations connected to our definition to defend our belief.  This is a natural reaction because, if we change our perception, our entire world changes; the way we see, hear, smell, touch, and interact with others while altering the way we see our past, present, and future.  In short, our world, the world we created in our mind… would end.  So, we can see why we would go to great lengths to protect our world since the alternative seems a bit catastrophic.  

Many of us build our perception by using the faith-based religion we were born into, creating a world filled with gods, moral codes, and mythology.  For example, for a great deal of their history, the Israelites were polytheists who believed in more than one god, much like those who worshiped gods in Greece, India, and Egypt.  According to their history, when Yahweh, the god of war, after a brief stint as the god of thunder and rain, lead the Israelites out of Egypt, they agreed to worship only Yahweh by making a covenant with him stating that they would forsake all other gods and worship him alone.  Many of those who created their perception of the world using this mythology became so strong in their belief that they ended up killing those who chose to worship other gods.  This was not a battle between gods, it was a battle between perceptions... the perceptions of people who were trying to protect the alternate reality they created in their mind.

Once a religion becomes the foundation of our perception, whether it be some form of animism, occultism, agnosticism, atheism, polytheism, monotheism, or any other ‘ism… the beliefs of that religion become the unconscious programming we use to evaluate and process the world outside our mind.  This is what we created them for.  Organized religion provides the answers to the questions that are otherwise unanswerable.  How was the world created?  Why is the world as it is?  Where do we fit in?  What happens to us after we die?  The answers to these questions provide the framework we use to shape our perception of reality.  So, the question really is, what has become our reality?  Or, more to the point, how is the world we created inside our mind affecting how we exist in reality.  A painting of the Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life shows that the world of our mind can range from blissful complacency to mental anguish.  The world of our mind represents our attempt to create a permanent perception of an impermanent world.  Since reality is transient, our attempt to define it will ultimately lead to some form of suffering.  To end suffering, we must first find a way off the wheel of life… we must find a way out of our mind.  This can be a bit difficult since many of us have lived in our mind for quite some time, and the origin of our suffering has completely infected our neurological pathways.  For example… if we are told when we are young that we will be punished for doing something wrong… we become afraid of doing something wrong.  From this we create guilt, judgment, anger, depression, and other negative states of mind that become part of our unconscious programming and affect the way we perceive our past, interact in our present, and visualize our future while affecting our self-esteem and how we relate to others.  One belief can alter our entire perception of the world and envelop our mind with fear.  By releasing the belief that gave us fear, all associations attached to that belief change, our reality changes, and we see the world with a completely different perception.

Our reality, our entire perception can change by letting go of just one single untruth.  When we were young, our understanding of the physical world radically changed over and over again as we progressed through the endless folklore, myths, and legends given to us as truth throughout our childhood.  For example, many of us were born into a different reality than the one we live in today.  We were born into a world where nymphs, leprechauns, man-eating giants, ogres, mermaids, pixies, unicorns, and fairies either existed, or possibly existed at one time, in secret places and otherworldly communities hidden from human eyes.  These fairy creatures have existed for over a thousand years in cultures all over the world.  At one time, many of the people in Ireland and Scotland combined their Celtic beliefs with Catholicism and believed their fairy creatures were angels who refused to take sides when Satan tried to take over heaven.  They believed god cast these angels onto earth rather than into hell where they became goblins, imps, dwarfs and other creatures that would plague mankind.  According to the Irish Catholic church, these creatures were unable to partake of the grace of god and achieve salvation. [i]  Overtime, these creatures evolved from belief and superstition into myth and legend.  A myth is a person or thing that we understand to be fictional or imaginary.  A legend is much different, it is an unverifiable person or thing that may possibly exist or have existed at one point in time.  As we’re eventually told that one or all of these creatures were produced by someone’s imagination… we decide which category we place them into as we restructure our perception.   

For many of us, the most popular and widely accepted myth was Santa Claus, an ageless, possibly immortal, white-bearded man who lives at the North Pole in a magical workshop where he and his elves make toys for all the good boys and girls around the world.  On Christmas Eve Santa Claus flies through the night in his sleigh, pulled by eight or nine reindeer, and climbs down our chimneys to leave gifts for us to find the next morning.  Because a great deal of the adult population supported this reality, we were left with no reason to question it or the rules that governed it.  Rules like having to be good all year long… with the definition of “good” varying from household to household.  This rule caused some of us a great deal of anxiety when we were asked if we’d been good all year.  We would reply, “yes”… knowing that this, of course, was a lie… but we figured the less people who knew we had been naughty the greater the possibility that Santa wouldn’t find out.  Sure he could see us when we were sleeping and he could see us when we were awake… but we hoped he was to busy or senile in his old age to catch all the “naughty” things we’d done over the year and made it our goal to make up for all our naughtiness between November 1st and December 24th by being extra good in an effort to even things out.

By accepting the Santa Claus belief, we changed our neurological filter so we could see and process the external support of this mythology.  From this support we created vastly complex neural network of associations using songs, movies, books, toys, decorations, billboards, television specials, Pez dispensers, poems, and a lot of positive reinforcement involving presents and sugar.  The more our society reinforced this belief, the more hardwired it became as our reality, and the more we were psychologically unable to conceive of a world that existed without it.  Because of this we had no reason to doubt the world we created in our mind because we believed everyone lived in the same reality we did.  

Of course, there comes that time in our lives when we stop believing in Santa Claus.  Someone may tell us that he doesn’t exist, or we somehow figure it out for ourselves.  Then we begin to realize everything associated with Santa Claus doesn’t exist either… reindeer don’t fly, snowmen don’t talk, Santa’s workshop doesn't exist, and Rudolph the red nose reindeer was actually invented in 1939 by an advertising writer for the Montgomery Ward Company.  Yes, the entire mythology that surrounded Santa Claus wasn’t real.  What we once thought was reality turned out to be a combination of ideas and images dreamt up by Washington Irving, Henry Livingston, and the Coca-Cola bottling company.  One would think this realization would create a ripple effect through our entire neural net that, over time, would categorize all mythological creatures as myth or legend and completely change our perception of the world… but many of us held onto the belief that some of these creatures may still exist.  Not necessarily Santa or the tooth fairy, but demons, witches, and other creatures.  This is because Santa Claus did not provide the foundation for our perception.  Digging deeper into our neural net we find another more dominant mythology… the one provided by our religion. 

If we were born in Japan around 500 BCE, we may have created a polytheistic perception of the world based on a mythology that attempted to explain the Japanese version of creationism.  We would see the world as created by the divine coupling of Izanagi and Izanami, who’s children, the Kami (deities), became the islands of Japan, the waterfalls, trees, mountains, rocks, rivers, wind, and all other forms of nature until Izanami died after giving birth to the god of fire.  Because these gods made up the very fabric of nature, we would worship nature as separate sacred deities; the river god, the wind god, and so on.  Because our family, social group, and emperor reinforce this belief, it would become our reality.  Once this happened, we would be unable to conceive of a world beyond this mythology.  

If we were born in ancient Persia, now Iran, we would have created a perception similar to that of the Japanese and worshiped nature through a series of deities known as daevas, with the most important and popular deity being Mitra, the god of light.  But, if we were born in Persia around 500 BCE, we may have created quite a different perception, that of Zoroastrianism which was noted as one of humanity’s first attempts at monotheism.  This religion would have provided us with a god, Ahura Mazda, and lower deities in the form of good spirits and evil spirits that fight against each other while using the world as their battlefield.  We would consider all gods worshiped in Persia before Ahura Mazda as false gods and believe ourselves to be our god’s agents on earth with free will to choose whether we wished to be on the side of good or evil.  We would believe that what we did on earth would affect the entire cosmos, so being moral would be our “cosmic responsibility”.  When we died, we would be judged by Ahura, if our good works out numbered our bad works, we would go to Heaven.  If our bad works outnumbered our good works, we would go to Hell.  But, lucky for us, in this religion, Hell is not an eternal… it’s more like a “time out” where, at the Final Judgment, once good has conquered evil, all the dead will be resurrected to live in the world of good.  This would be our belief, creating a perception connected not only to creationism, but also to a moral code that influences all of our thoughts and actions as we try to save the cosmos and avoid Hell.  So, we can see that, by using a religion to define our beliefs, we are unable to see a reality beyond the perception they create. 

A good example of how our perception replaces reality is seen in Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII of “The republic”, in which he shows that reality is created by how we interpret what we see.  He does this by describing a group of prisoners chained since childhood inside a cave with their heads immobilized so that their eyes can only see the shadows on the wall in front of them being cast by a large fire that sits behind them.  The shadows they see are of themselves and shapes created by men walking behind them carrying various vessels, statues, figures of animals, and other things.  The prisoners cannot see the fire or the men, all they can see are the shadows they make on the wall in front of them.  The cave also has an echo, which makes the voices of the passers by appear to come from their corresponding shadow.  Because the prisoners are unable to see behind them, the shadows are the only reality they know.  Plato describes how the prisoners attempt to talk to each other in an effort to define and name what they are seeing.  Here Plato is pointing out that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, they only see their representation of it.  He shows that language was our attempt to describe our surroundings and, because we cannot see beyond the limits of our perception we live in a shadow of reality.

So, how would we think to question our reality when we are unable to comprehend anything other than what our perception allows?  Hummm… that’s a good question.  Later in Plato’s allegory, a prisoner is released from his chains, and is able to turn his head and see reality for the first time… but Plato fails to mention how or why the prisoner was released from his perception.  The Tibetan painting of the “wheel of life”, suggests there are influences in each realm of our existence that can help us see beyond our perception… a way off the wheel into reality.  It suggests that art, music, knowledge, and other forms of physical, mental, and emotional experience or distress may trigger an awakening… a sudden and often unsettling realization that there is another reality beyond our perception.  An awakening is not created by a specific object, act, or occurrence.  It can happen to us at any moment for any reason.  Once it does, we are changed forever. 

For those of us who created a neuro network that included the mythology of Santa Claus, something had to trigger an awakening, a sudden change in perception, for us to consider a reality other than the one we created in our mind.  It’s possible we found the boxes for the presents we received from Santa hidden in our parents closet several days before Christmas, our parents may have told us, or we may have heard it from someone at school.  Either example would cause our perception of reality to change as our mind attempted to discern fact from fiction.  Lucky for us our social group supported our awakening.  Some even offered to continue the charade as a ritual, which gave us time to adjust to our new reality.  Some of us had parents who enforced the “if you don’t believe you don’t receive policy”, making some of us want to put off our awakening until we were much older in an effort to avoid the risk of loosing out on all the extra presents.  Whatever may have triggered our awakening, our social group supported our transition.  What would happen if we questioned the existence of Santa Claus in a world that believed he truly existed?  What would happen if we woke up from our perception without support?  For instance, if a young girl suddenly realized that she created god in her image, her perception, the mythology supporting her perception, her concept of morality created by her perception, and her understanding of her place in the world would shift beyond the boundaries set by her social group.  Because of this, her family members and peer groups would probably be unsupportive of her awakening because they would be unable to see the world from her perspective.  Later, this rejection may cause the girl to resume the beliefs of her social group, or it may give her the strength to question them, and question the society they created with their beliefs. 

The problem we may face if we’ve used a religion to create our perception is that religions are ultimately designed to perpetuate our belief, and therefore do not support the concept of an awakening… unless that awakening is within the boundaries of our religion.  Fortunately for us, we may be given the opportunity to see how the religion we used to create our perception was created by others.  If we were to research the history of Buddhism, we would find that it began in India as a philosophical eight-step program around 400 BCE.  As it spread across Asia, it combined with the religions of the people who began practicing it.  For example, Buddhism and Confucianism were combined with the polytheistic beliefs of the Japanese around 4th century CE, creating an entirely new religion.  This happened because the Japanese believed the Buddha was just another “Kami” or deity birthed by Izanami.  After a few hundred years many of the Japanese people realized that Buddhism was a completely different belief system and tried to distinguish it from their original belief by creating Shintoism in the eighth century CE.  Interestingly enough, the Japanese created Shintoism in an effort to protect their beliefs from other cultures.  This form of trans-cultural osmosis happened all over Asia as the beliefs of several communities combined with Buddhism to create a form of religious Buddhism specific to that region. 

The western monotheistic religions evolved through the same form of trans-cultural osmosis as the religions of Asian.  Mormonism, the newest of these, evolved as the teachings of Joseph Smith combined with Christianity.  Christianity evolved as the teachings of Jesus were combined with Judaism, pagan rituals, Greek and Egyptian polytheism, and Mithraism.  The creators of Christianity were like skilled horticulturists who are able to graft two completely different plants together to create a new species.  Although the plant will have similarities to the originals it came from, it cannot be defined as either one… so it becomes completely separate from them.  A new creation.  Something that has never existed before.  Just as Santa Clause was created when different legends and mythical creatures from all over the world were combined together; just as the modern fairy world was created when the different European cultural myths, beliefs, and folkloric traditions combined together; just as the religions of Asia were created when Buddhism mixed with the religions of each region it came in contact with; Christianity was created when all of the religions in the Roman Empire were brought together to create one belief.  In his study on Mithraism, Martin Luther King Jr. said that, though Christianity copied and borrowed from other religions, “it was generally a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action”.[ii]   Christianity was created by religious propagation.  Looking further back in history we can see that this form of religious propagation also created the religions Christianity would eventually borrow from.  For example, Mithraism evolved from Zoroastrianism, which gave us our first look at the concepts of demonology, a savior, an afterlife, an adversary, a day of judgment, and a perception that humans were caught in a bitter dualistic struggle between demons and the lesser deities who served one god.  Judaism, the other main contributor to the mythology attached to the teachings of Christ, evolved from the early polytheism of the Israelites.  Interestingly enough, the combination of these two religions allowed the patron storm god of one desert tribe to become the god worshiped by people in every hemisphere. 

By understanding how religion was created, we can begin to see how religion influenced the concepts of morality, law, nationalism, and other beliefs we used to create our overall perception of the world.  For example, our fundamental concepts of morality were greatly influenced by the followers of Yahweh.  Their most recognized contributions were the ten commandments, which combined religious observances, social obligations, and five specific moral guidelines.  Christianity took parts of the Jewish halakah; the body of law that regulated every aspect of their religious rituals, criminal law, family and social obligations, and combined them with new moral concepts, beliefs, and rituals based on the premise that all human beings are born sinful and need redemption to avoid eternal punishment.  Over time these beliefs became the foundation for our modern concept of morality. 

Now we may find ourselves asking questions like, “what is morality?”  Well, morality is just a subjective concept that each individual bases on their social structure and life experience.  Our concept of morality is our attempt at defining right and wrong so that we may conduct ourselves accordingly.  Of course, the concept of morality is based completely on opinion… but that doesn’t stop us from creating an endless number of psychological abnormalities when we try to conform to someone else’s opinion.  For example, if we use the Christian religion to create our concept of morality, we may spend a great deal of our time trying to avoid the temptation of something we believe is punishable by god.  This is because we do not see the moral structure of our religion as subjective, we see it as absolute.  So, many of us create a perception of the world based on our desire to live up to that absolute because we fear punishment.  Because of this we may create a mind that focuses on avoiding temptation… which means our mind becomes focused on the temptation.  “What we resist persists.” [iii]  Because of this, we may decide to obliterate the source of our temptation so we are no longer at risk of facing our own fears.  This is the problem with the absolutism of religion; we try to change others so that we don’t have to change ourselves. Unfortunately, this way of thinking diverts our attention from ourselves and places the possibility for achieving eternal peace on the actions of others.  This is quite different from the eastern way of thinking where concepts like Buddhism focus on internal peace instead of eternal peace.  If we consider ourselves to be a drop of water falling into a large pond, by having a sense of inner peace we can transform the entire pond by the ripples we make.  On the other hand, if we use religion to create a sense of eternal peace, we attempt to change the entire pond to protect one drop of water.  We should create our own concept of morality where we are more concerned with the reasons behind our actions than the act itself.  Is morality abstaining from sex, or is it allowing someone the freedom to express their sexuality in a healthy and safe environment?  Is morality being kind because we’re supposed to, or is it being kind because we are?  Is morality punishing people for doing things we don’t want to do ourselves, or is it finding the strength to overcome our own weaknesses?  

Those who create their perception using religious based morality can greatly affect the laws that govern our society.  For example, during the great unification of China during the Ch’in dynasty, between 221-206 BCE, Emperor Ch’in created a new style of government based on the principles of the Legalists.  The Legalists believed that we are inherently bad and should be ruled by strict laws to forcefully govern our behavior.  They also outlawed other schools of philosophy, burned their books, and executed their teachers because they were afraid of civil disruption or revolution.[iv]  Fifteen years later the Han Dynasty returned to older forms of imperial government and, over time, Confucianism became China’s dominant political philosophy.  Unfortunately, even though Confucianism believes we are inherently good, the influence of the Legalists on Chinese government during those fifteen years still affects the foundation of Chinese law two thousand years later.  Imagine, if being regulated by a destructive belief system for fifteen years can affect the foundation of China’s concept of law and government for over two thousand years… what would have happened if their laws were affected by this destructive influence for over fifteen hundred years?     

In the United States, we only have to look at our government’s war on sex and drugs to realize how the moralistic beliefs of western monotheistic religions have greatly influenced our judicial system.  Our laws were created primarily by people who believe we are inherently sinful, basing, their definition of sin on their religious beliefs.  For example, the drug war was actually started by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 when he labeled cannabis as an unholy sacrament of the satanic mass.  In 1937, Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, would request a ban by congress on cannabis using a rather raciest morality defense implying that “satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage”, and that “marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.”[v]  The war on sex began thousands of years ago when the Israelites began judging others for doing things that could tempt them away from the love of their god, Yahweh.  The war on sex and drugs goes back to the drop of water in a pond analogy; they wanted to change the pond to protect the drop of water.  Now we have a police force, or vice squad, that is designed to prohibit, control, or punish us based on the religious beliefs of our forefathers.  As a result, our government spends millions of dollars on failed abstinence programs and imprisoning us for using drugs.         

Now, for our judicial system to be independent of theological influences, it must avoid enforcing religious concepts of vice unless absolutely necessary.  Of course, that opens up an entirely new discussion based on what should be enforced?  Well, actions that harm ourselves already have a punishment attached to them without the help of our judicial system.  If we are harming ourselves, then the punishment is in the action.  Even if we get away with a “crime”, the punishment is still in the action.  For example, if we steal, we believe others will steal from us.  If we kill, we believe others are capable of killing us.  Our actions affect our perception and our perception attracts others who share the same view of the world.  Therefore, if we are angry, we attract those who are angry.  If we are greedy, we attract those who are greedy.  If we hurt others, we invite pain.  If we take advantage of others, we are taken advantage of.  The punishment is already in the action.  This is the true essence of karma without the concept of reincarnation.  We live in the world we create and, with every action, we create a new perception… a new mind for us to live in.   If that perception is created from fear, we suffer, as we become lost in the mind we create.  For our judicial system to punish us for experiences that are not crimes, but moral principals with roots based in religious belief systems, it is inhibiting our growth from these experiences by interrupting our learning process with judgment and fear.  The only thing judgment teaches is how to judge.  Fear only creates more fear.  Therefore we can see how our perception, our understanding of reality, is influenced by religious belief systems and how our beliefs have affected the reality experienced by others.       

By turning our heads away from Plato’s shadow world, we find that the creation of our perception was influenced by a mass of cultural illusions combining or fighting against each other for over thousands of years.  By learning how it began, not how life began, but how our attempt to describe life began, we, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, unshackle our heads, look behind us, and see a new reality. 

Part 2:  Our Awakening

So, in short, we live in a world we created inside our mind.  We created our world using the belief systems we were born into.  Had we been born in another country, we would have an entirely different perception based on an entirely different belief system.  Waking up from our illusion is the most difficult task we will ever take on because we are literally going out of our mind in an attempt to see beyond the limits of our perception.  In his allegory, Plato describes the process of an awakening as blinding, confusing, and painful.  As we are released from our shackles, and turn our heads to see reality for the first time, we are unable to understand what we are seeing until someone tells us everything we once knew as truth was an illusion.  Well, it’s understandable that a revelation of this magnitude can be quite unnerving if not unbelievable.  But, like it or not, we’ve been knocked out of our minds, out of the cave of shadows, and into the sun where we are blinded by the light of this new reality.  This is not because the light hurts our eyes; we are blinded by our inability to see the full spectrum of this reality because we still hold onto the perception we created in the cave.  We are still trying to see the world with our old eyes.  In order for us to truly understand what we’re seeing, we must begin the process of unlearning what we were taught and let go of the world we created in our mind.  

The first step in the process of unlearning is understanding what blinds us, which is a bit difficult since we’re not sure what’s happening to us in the first place.  Until our awakening, we never knew what an “awakening” was.  This is because an awakening is something we have to experience to understand.  It’s like being reborn, remembering who we were before someone told us, and it begins with a thought or action that knocks us out of our mind… and into the present moment.  What follows afterward is different for everyone because each of us has been blinded differently.  Each of us has created our own perception.  Each of us is coming out of a different cave and into the same sun.  Therefore, though each of us is waking up differently, we can be comforted in knowing that we are journeying toward the same reality. 

So, where do we begin?  Well, some of us may begin by reducing the amount of distractions we create to make life in the shadows quite livable.  This allows us to see and hear what is happening in our head more clearly.  By doing this we often find that a suffering mind is seldom quiet without distraction when it’s filled with self defeating thoughts that judge what we’re doing, what we did, what we’re going to do, can’t do, should do, or should have done.  By eliminating these distractions we can listen to what we are thinking, and begin to understand where these thoughts are coming from.  Over time, we will discover ways to calm our minds so we can analyze the origin of our thoughts and, during this process, we will enter an enlightening stage of self-discovery by bringing our mind and body into a more healthy state of being.  Where once we were deaf and blind, limited by our perception, we begin to see and hear the teachings and experiences of those who have awakened before us.  Many of those we once considered to be subverters, evil, or mislead become our teachers and gurus as we see beyond the prejudice and fear we previously used to define them.  With our new ears we will listen to a speech or song we’ve heard a hundred times and realize we never really heard it until now.  With our new eyes we will read a book or a poem that made no sense to us when we were younger, but now find their meanings quite clear.  We will find it encouraging when we realize people have been waking up for centuries and leaving messages for us along their journey.  Of course, different messages work for different people, and we find that some appear to be speaking directly to us and others seem to be speaking another language.  What we learn from these messages depends on what we’re trying to unlearn.  Are we depressed, angered, resentful, confused?  By using these teachers we can begin skimming the surface of our mind to locate what we believe is the cause of our suffering… which turns out to be the result of a much deeper problem… which we then find is attached to an even deeper problem.  As we chase these problems, we begin to notice a trend; each one is attached to several others.  Before we know it, we’re bouncing around our neuro net chasing associations, and we realize the process of unlearning our perception and ending our suffering could take years if we continue to go about it one thought at a time.  So, by understanding that our thoughts are connected by associations, and that these associations have an origin, we realize a much faster way through our awakening would be to follow a specific negative thought back to its origin so we can eliminate it and release the remaining thoughts it became attached to.  For example, as we let go of our distractions we may realize the insecure thoughts we have bouncing inside our mind are attached to our low self image, which is attached to our fear of rejection, which is a result of constantly judging ourselves, which is based on our understanding of right and wrong, created by our religious beliefs, which came from someone else who is part of the very illusion we’re trying to break free from.  By following a destructive thought process back to its origin, we can unlearn the fear that created it, sending a ripple effect throughout our entire neuro net, transforming each thought and emotion associated with that origin, and completely change our perception to a new reality.    

As our perception changes, we may realize that our biggest fear is of the unknown.  This is why we have created a world inside our mind where everything is either known or will be revealed to us at some point in time.  What we don’t realize is that, by trying to define the unknown, we are limited to that definition and affected by how we’ve defined it.  It is only by letting go of this definition that we can live without fear… because it is not the unknown we are afraid of, we are afraid of what we’ve placed into the unknown.  The future only exists when we’ve defined it.  We often define our future because we are afraid of the unknown.  Many of us have defined what happens to us after we die for the same reason.  Death is the great unknown and should remain that way so we can continue living our life in the present moment.  Unfortunately, many of us have filled this unknown with the concept of god.   So, the question becomes…how do we let go of the god we created to fill the unknown?  Well, we might try to redesign the mythology surrounding god.  Some of us may define ourselves as Agnostics, Atheists, or Pagans so that we can reject god.  Or, some of us may discover that the only way to let go of god is to change the noun, “god”, back into a verb. 

What does this mean?  Well, we have a habit of defining a verb as a noun.  For instance, “wind”… wind is a noun used to describe an action… when atoms move because of a difference in temperature and pressure, we say “the wind is blowing”… when, in reality, there’s actually no such thing as “wind”, there’s only the verb - “blowing”.  We have done the same thing with god.  We have defined a verb as a noun.  There is no creator, there is creation.  If you take all that is around us and look at it through a microscope, you see that the entire make of the universe is in motion, in action.  There is no such thing as “universe”, there is just movement or vibration.  The universe was not created; it is in a constant state of creation.  All we know is, there is an intention holding this process of creation together… this is about as close to understanding god that we are going to get.  Since everything is connected by this intention, we are not made by god, we are made of god.  It is we who have created god in our image.  So, by releasing our definition of god, we eventually let go of our fear of the unknown.  I say eventually because changing our thought process is not always immediate… more than likely our old perception won’t go away with out a fight.      

This is because the neurological pathways that form our perception have been completely infected by this concept of god.  Therefore, it may take time for us to unlearn the beliefs created by this infection.  During which some of us may discover that the god we created to fill our unknown is equal to that of an abusive, conditionally loving, father figure.  By allowing something to stand in authority over us, even if it is something we created, there is a potential for mental abuse.  By accepting the concept of a judging god, we create a judge inside our mind.  As fear becomes the judge over all our actions, we create guilt, anger, depression, and other destructive concepts that evolve into satellite belief systems and unconsciously affect our entire thought process.  We also create bliss when we feel we will avoid punishment.  Neurosis, psychosis, mania, hysteria, panic attacks, schizophrenia, bi-polar personality disorders… all of these are created by an abused mind.  Abuse affects the way we perceive our past, interact in our present, and project our future.  Abuse affects our relationships, our confidence, our self-esteem, our understanding of other cultures, and our entire perception of the world.  Thankfully, by letting go of our need to define god and the fear it created, we can finally see that we were the abusers of our own mind.  We created god, we created judgment, we created the abuse… now that we understand this we can let our creations go. 

The process of letting go of the god concept, and the mythology surrounding it, is an amazing part of our journey as we begin to see the world with an entirely different perspective.  Many of us were taught that god created the objects of our suffering to punish us for our sins and the sins of our forefathers.  Because of this, anything from the thorns on our flowers to the pain experienced during childbirth may have been a punishment from god.  How wonderful is it now to know that a rose has thorns only because it is a rose.  Many of us have also associate natural disasters with punishment.  For example, during the 2004 tsunami that devastated the coastlines of the Indian Ocean, a woman in India screamed “Why did you do this to us, God?  What did we do to upset you?”[vi].  When Hurricane Denis hit Florida in 2005, a seventy-seven year old woman said, ‘‘the good Lord’s trying to tell us something or other”[vii].  Because of their belief systems, what was a natural shift in the Earth’s crust or change in climate condition, became a deliberate action against them.  What a wonderful day when we can see events like these as tragedies, not punishments.  When we survive a tragedy, we have the opportunity to grow stronger; when we see ourselves as the victims of punishment, we learn nothing.  How many times have we thought our god was punishing us?  How many times have we repented?  How many times have we asked forgiveness?   How interesting is it now to know that we are asking forgiveness from the god we created in our mind?  

Perhaps the two most amazing shifts in our consciousness occur when we let go of our perceptions of birth and death.  The western religions never really say anything about the process of birth except that we are born imperfect and must be taught rituals and guidelines so we can avoid punishment and rejection.  Now, though very little is said about birth, a great deal of thought and theory has been put into our death.  From these theories we’ve created the concept of an “afterlife”, a life beyond our death.  This concept of life after death is prevalent in every religion.  Weather it be the belief in reincarnation, Heaven, the underworld, or the hundreds of other ideas we’ve come up with over the past five thousand years, most religions, except Judaism, appear to be focused on directing us toward a better death or afterlife.  There were two ways for us to get into this afterlife, one being death, the other being the Judgment Day, Armageddon, the end of the world.  Judgment Day is the archetypal ending of the world provided by most monotheistic religions, and was considered by some to be a day of immense joy:

Pack up your troubles and just get happy
Ya better chase all your cares away
Sing Hallelujah, come on get happy
Get ready for the judgment day

The sun is shining, come on get happy
The Lord is waiting to take your hand
Shout Hallelujah, come on get happy
We’re going to the Promised Land

Actually, the concept of judgment day is possibly the primary reason we treat the world with such disregard… why clean up when it’s going to end anyway?  How and when the world will end is debated among religions and their denominations.  Apostle Paul, noted as the founder of modern Christianity, believed that Judgment Day was coming during his lifetime and wrote his version of the gospel according to that view.  Well, how relieved we must feel now that we know there’s no day of judgment… though it may take our species a bit of time and effort to clean up the mess we’ve made.  It’s amazing to think that our species, if careful, could exist for thousands upon thousands of years into the future… and just imagine the change it will make when, during those years, our children are no longer told they were born sinful. 

As we begin to free ourselves from our concept of “afterlife” we’ll discover that we’ve been led to believe the events after our death will be better than the events during our life.  Because of this, the afterlife has become a reward for living and we’ve conditioned our minds to look forward toward death.  Many of us may find it a bit unnerving to think of how many times we’ve actually asked to die so we can go to this afterlife.  Since we’re not dead, we can recondition ourselves to live without reward because the reward for living is life.  Once we understand this, our perception of life will change considerably.      

As our perception changes, we may discover that we still harbor negative thoughts toward the people we believe hurt us in the past.  These thoughts may grow as we realize the abuse we created was based on an illusion they still support.  This is an interesting part of our awakening, where we learn to forgive those who hurt us based on their belief system.  To do this, we just have to understand that they are the victims of their own illusion.  They are trapped in their mind, unable to see beyond their perception.  Racists truly believe in segregation, because they can’t conceive of a world without it.  Terrorists believe their actions are justified because of the perception their mind has created.  Christians believe that Heaven is above them, Hell is below them, the Devil is tempting them, and Jesus will save them.  They cannot see a world beyond their belief, because their belief is their world.  They interpret anything that conflicts with their perception in a way that still supports it… or they disregard the contradiction entirely.  Getting angry or frustrated and telling someone that their god doesn’t exist will probably only anger them and force them to defend their perception.  In fact, if we spend our time trying to prove to others that the god they created exists only in their mind, their illusion may gain even more power over them because, in the eyes of a believer, we have become their god’s adversary.  If we continue our journey with anger and resentment toward others who are still trapped in their belief systems, we run the risk of deepening their belief while delaying our peace of mind.  So, we must release our anger, allowing compassion to become our countermeasure for those who attempt to give us their confusion.  Our inner peace will become strong enough to withstand the beliefs of others as we realize nothing can destroy our happiness but our own fear.  A person can only change their belief after they stop defending it.  Therefore, we must allow others to continue in their belief so they may eventually see beyond it just as we have seen beyond ours.         

Over time, these realizations will heal years of emotional trauma as we let go of the negative thoughts and feelings attached to our memories.  As each memory is freed, we’re able to see our past, present, and future without fear, without pain, and without judgment.  Our neuro pathways begin restructuring themselves and relaying information back and forth between each other, sometimes for the first time, as we guide our mind through the process of living in the present moment.  Once we free ourselves from the restraints of our mind, we begin to understand how it feels to live in peace.  Plato tries to describe this feeling in his allegory as the moment we not only believe everything around us is good, but are able to live in that belief.  To actually describe this feeling would require words that are in themselves limiting.  This is because, like god, peace is an action, not a noun.  Peace is not wandering barefoot, in earth tone colored clothing, through a disserted field playing a guitar with flowers sticking out of our hair.  The only way to truly understand peace is to experience it.  The only way to experience peace is to live without fear.   To live without fear requires us to not only unlearn what was taught to us, but completely let it go.  In doing this we witness the end of the world we created in our mind and begin living in the world that created us.

During this journey there are a few things we may want to think about:

• Some of us may become trapped in a thought and unable to move forward.  This is a natural part of our progression where we are given the opportunity to guide ourselves in releasing our fears, propelling us even further out of our mind. 
• Some of us may create a conflicted mind where we still anger, worry, doubt, fear, and crave acceptance, but are able to bring ourselves out of these states of mind by remembering that we changed our perception.  If we are counteracting the same thought process over and over, we find ourselves in a permanent state of conflict.  We become stuck in a battle between the world we knew and the world we know, and are in a constant state of reminding.  This is because we have not taken time to deal with the specific root of this conflict.
• Some of us will use the theories of others to help change our perception of god.  While this may prove to be an invaluable part of our awakening, there comes a point in our progression when we realize we’re exchanging one illusion for another.  For example, there are books that alter our concept of god in a way that we can release the angry god of our childhood.  This allows us to release the abusive emotions we attached to our experiences based on that belief.  It is a wonderful form of therapy, but limits us if we continue using it to define god.  There comes a time in our awakening when we must release god to continue moving forward.
• We now live in an era where religious leaders of various faiths try to respect each other in an effort to maintain peace.  We too must respect the faiths of others as we wish to be respected.  Hopefully, in time, everyone’s gods will put their guns down.  Of course, in order for that to happen we must all see that we are all gods.
• We will have to heal our body down to each individual cell.  Because every particle of our being, from the way we talk, think, act, digest… even create hormones and protein receptors during cell division, is somehow affected by our perception.
• Though we may not practice the religion of our childhood, it may still be unconsciously affecting our perception of the world.
• When depression becomes the creator of our perception, that is all we are able to see and all that guides us. 
• The judgments we made may still be affecting our perception of others.  During this time we must make a conscious effort to let go of all judgment as it no longer serves us. 
• Many of us had a habit of giving responsibility for our actions to imaginary beings.  If god wasn’t punishing us for something, then the devil was tempting us.  This was because we believed we were caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil.
• By letting go of our god we take responsibility for our creations, choose our experiences, and create our own reality.   
• Rarely do labels define what they’re labeling correctly… even the labels we give ourselves.  
• We must let go of all definition, as they hold no purpose but to confine us to a single possibility.
• Everyone lives in a world of their own design while thinking that everyone sees the world as they do.
• This is not a process of learning, it is a process of unlearning.
• It’s amazing how seriously we took what we believed in.

 Part 3: The End Of My World

Well, like most of my journals, I leave this one completely changed.  I wasn’t really sure where this would take me when I began as all I wanted to do was get this out of my head in a way that would organize my thought process, free up some space, and unlearn what no longer serves me.  Here I’ve combined a great deal of theory with personal experience in an effort to understand how beliefs are created, how they affect us, and how to let them go.  Interestingly enough, to do this I used the same process that one would use to create a belief.  So, I guess I created my own belief; which is a bit unnerving since my original goal was to let go of my beliefs, not create more.  Looking at what I've written in this perspective, it would seem that I have only substituted one belief for another, but there is a difference between creating a perception based on a religious belief and creating it based on a non-religious belief even though both are based on theory and experience.  It was only by creating a belief that I was able to understand how beliefs are created.  So, I created my religious belief so that my experiences were judged based on a predefined theory that I considered fact.  With the non-religious belief, experience now outweighs theory and theory will remain theory and never be considered fact.  This allows my perception to evolve without constraint.  The difference between these two beliefs is as different as my perception is now of the world.    

So, once again my perception is changed.  That’s really the only reason I write any of these journals.  By organizing my thoughts I’m able to understand where I am in my life so I can quiet my mind and move forward.  I’ve actually been working on quieting my mind for about four years now and this journal marks the end of this part of my journey.  Honestly I can’t believe it’s actually over.  I feel like a patient about to be released from a psychiatric ward.  After looking over everything I’ve written, I find it amazing how insane I was.  I don’t think people realize how absolutely insane most of us are.  My insanity began the day the church I belonged to taught me about eternal punishment… actually, it started on the day I believed there was a possibility I could be eternally punished.  I was ten years old and, before then I didn’t really fear anything.  I didn’t even know what hell was.  Sure fear existed, like the fear of being eaten by something bigger than me… but that’s nothing compared to the fear of hell.

So, I lived in the mind of a Christian.  When I looked up I saw heaven, when I looked down I saw hell, and I couldn’t see beyond the mythology given to me as a child.  In fact, the depth of my belief in the world I created in my mind, and how it affected my every thought and action, was quite incredible.  My mind was not healthy and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was afraid they would judge me as badly as I was judging myself.  As I grew older, I stopped going to church because it made me feel uneasy.  I occasionally went back when I was feeling particularly evil… but stayed away for the most part.  But, even though I wasn’t going to church or reading the Bible my perception of the world didn’t change, my god was still with me.  He was with me as I graduated from college, got married, and had a complete mental breakdown after my divorce.  The breakdown, for those of you who haven’t had one, is when your brain stops working because there is only so much pain it can handle before it finally has to shut off.  The breakdown happened because I believed that my divorce, and the events that followed, were a punishment from god.  In fact, I believed most of the unpleasant things that happened during my life were punishments.  Not just for big things, but for little things as well like an impure thought or the toy I stole when I was eleven years old.  There were nights when I fell to my knees to either ask god for forgiveness or beg him to kill me.  And, the most amazing thing about all of this was that it was all in my head.  All the pain, all the suffering, all the judgment… I created it all.  I guess one of the most enlightening experiences I had during this was when I realized I created god.  Well, if I created god, that would make me…god.  That would make me the abuser of my own mind.  Well… that was a real eye opener; much like the day I realized hell was something we created in our mind.  It’s funny; I was actually in hell because I was trying to avoid hell.  Ah, the irony. 

So, looking back at my life, now that I’m out of my mind, I see that it was pretty amazing.  I just had to constantly fight against this undercurrent of depression that was always in the back of my mind.  It affected my self-confidence, my relationships with others… and all of the other things I wrote about in this journal, which only caused more depression.  How did I deal with all of this?  I smoked cigarettes, at least a pack a day, drank on the weekends, and tried to keep my mind bombarded with distractions in order to avoid dealing with all the voices bouncing around inside my head.  Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t realize that the voices in my mind weren’t really supposed to be there… in fact, having voices in my head that constantly told me that a good percentage of everything I did was wrong could possibly be considered borderline psychotic.  It didn’t help that I thought I was gay.  Not only was I judging myself, but I also felt the entire world would judge me if anyone found out.  So I kept that hidden, along with every thing else, until I was twenty-nine years old and finally told someone a little about what was going on inside my mind… and he looked at me and told me that it was perfectly natural and that I wasn’t alone.  It was the day I found out I wasn’t alone that my life started to change.  Looking back after that day, all I can see is someone who finally remembered what happiness felt like.  I still had the depression, but I finally stopped judging myself for being gay. 

A few years later I had my awakening.  I was sitting on my couch with my then boyfriend, we were talking about something, and I said, “well, since I’ve been gay…”  He laughed and asked me “how long have you been gay?”  Well, that was a question no one had ever asked me before and my mind began to make connections from that moment all the way back to when I was eight years old.  Then I started moving forward through these connections from the time I was eight all the way back to the present… but this time I started reliving every emotion that was attached to those memories.  It took me and my boyfriend completely off guard.  As I talked through it all, I was reliving all the pain, fear, and confusion attached to those memories and it wouldn’t stop.  Finally, about four hours later, exhausted and emotionally drained, I realized all the pain I felt was because I had thought I was a bad person… when I wasn’t bad at all.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with me.  I was sitting on my couch in shock.  I couldn’t believe what had just happened, my mind had opened up and shown me that I wasn’t the person I thought I was. 

After that day my life completely changed because my perception of myself changed.  My mind wouldn’t shut off.  I found myself dealing with every issue I ever created that was connected to the fear that I may be a bad person.  I dealt with a lot of issues over the last four years, but most of the breakthroughs have occurred while I’ve been writing these journals.  My first one was just a practice run and dealt with how I needed to focus on creating peace within myself rather than search for peace in the world outside.  The second helped me understand how I created my mind and gave me a better understanding of how fear affects it.  My third one was more directed at how my religion affected my understanding of sexuality, and wound up being my belief on how western civilization became obsessed with sex… based again on experience and theory.  During which I realized I wasn’t gay.  That was an interesting day; I woke up one morning, realized I wasn’t gay, and couldn’t get out of bed for a few hours because I really didn’t know what to do about it.  Confused, I continued writing the journal and realized that the reason I wasn’t gay because that would be limiting me to someone else’s definition of who they thought I was.  I’m not gay, I’m just Steve, and I left that journal completely indefinable which got rid of the remaining issues I had with sex.  With each journal my perception of the world changed.  And, just as I was getting used to my last change, I decided to finally write the journal I knew would completely alter my perception.  Actually, I’ve been avoiding this one because I knew it would be a difficult experience and I wasn’t really sure what I would be like on the other side.  Well, here I am.  It’s a bit freaky really.  Coming out of your mind is like leaving home for the first time.  It would be hard to describe how I’m feeling right now without sounding like a flowery greeting card or one of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books that make you want to vomit every time you pick them up.  Basically I feel lighter.  When I look up I see the sky, when I look down I see the ground.  I don’t think about death, I’m just completely in the present moment.  So, the ripple effect theory worked.  I’m not sure what I am going to do tomorrow, but today I think I will just enjoy my new mind. 

There are a few things I would like to say before I end this.  First, I did not write this to tell everyone that they have to live without god to be peaceful.  This is just how I did it.  Second, everything I wrote to get to this point is just a theory I created from my own experiences and the theories of others.  Third, I would like to thank everyone who helped me get through this.  Many of you listened to me, helped me when I got stuck, and often looked at me like I was going crazy… but never said it out loud… well, a few of you did.  And last, I would like to thank everyone who took the time during their awakening to share their experiences with the rest of us.  The more people do this, the more easy it will become for others.

Steve Reedy, July 31st, 2005

“And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.” -Thomas Jefferson

“We, the gods, will live as long as the humans believe in us.  The day the humans no longer believe in us, all the gods will disappear” - Homer, The Iliad

“Have you ever seen yourself through the eyes of someone else you have become… and looked at yourself through the eyes of the ultimate observer?” – What the Bleep Do We Know

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