Control Your Mind, Control Your World

Something I learned from (and credit to) growing up around Buddhism was to take responsibility and ownership of my own mindset and actions.

When you realize that your suffering is not caused by others, but by yourself, you begin to reform the way you view and react to life and its’ obstacles.

This realization brings freedom in knowing that no one can make you feel any sort of way. It is only you who allows things to affect you or not.

I don’t think striving for full disassociation or indifference to the material world is a good end goal to have, but it is wise to realize that you control your mind and your ability to suffer or not, not the others around you.

Even in reference to pain (the easiest argument against this concept), a trained monk or practitioner can remove themselves from the physical sensations of the body, or rather, control the neural pathways associated with their attachment to pain and the phenomenon that it causes within us.

Pain becomes like anything else, an impermanent sensation without negative or positive attachments associated with it, just an experience of the only true constant, change.

All forms of true initiation are meant to be turned inward before they can be directed outward. Not the other way around. This is the premise of what Westerners would call “magic(k).” It isn’t necessarily to control what lies outside the mind as much is it to establish control of the Mind in reflection of its Highest Self or Will.

Remember that if you can control your mind, you can control your world.