This prison is a by-product of the story you continue to tell yourself and others about who you are and who you want others to think you are. You defend this story with all of your energy, and this has become your life’s purpose. But it has absolutely no usefulness except to keep you locked within. Leaving it forever is not easy. The main barriers to doing so are your belief that you can’t escape and your not knowing that it is possible.
In fact, this is why you have come to earth. Whether you choose to regain your freedom now or continue to live in this prison for many more lifetimes is up to you. For prisons, even if you have become used to them, are not pleasant and certainly not free. They are confining, hypnotically repetitive, and built to keep you locked up – to prevent you from discovering your true being, the greater universe. The prison of your mind is no different, except that you have co-created it by agreeing to remain locked up within. And as the co-creator, you have the capacity to simply unlock the door and leave, as many have done before you.
For if you are honest and fully observant, you will realize that the thoughts generated by your mind have little or nothing to do with anything of real import. They just pass by, one after the other, and are nothing you would want to spend time with or pay any attention to. For you are an integral part of the greater universe, which is your mother, and you have nothing else to do but play this out in whatever way you can.
What does it mean to be at one with the greater universe? Let’s pretend that your hand believes it is separate from your body, and that it needs to control the external universe and act in a way that ensures its own and your survival. Obviously, it would not work to have different parts of your body taking their own course. Yet, this is exactly what your ego-mind is already doing. And it is sending you signals that it knows will cause certain emotional reactions in you so that you never clearly see this entire process taking place. It creates mazes within mazes, an endless hall of mirrors that you remain lost in until you decide to stop, to realize that you have been tricking yourself all of your life. Until you see clearly, and this is both very sad and very humorous, that none of it was ever real. It was all, quite literally, a story you told yourself without end.
So what do you do now? With great compassion, you have the opportunity to recreate all of this. The greatest law is that it is all up to you, even though your mind tells you at every moment that you have little power or control over your life. That is why so many people say that whatever you believe to be true is true. But this is far more real, far more literal, than even they believe. For all your mind is doing to keep you in prison is to convince you that you can’t do anything about it and that there are no real options available to you.
What an opportunity! For the first time, you can live without your programming, your habits, your inertia and your emotions determining all of your actions, both consciously and unconsciously. You can be aware at every moment that you were never separate from all the others you have spent so much time trying to impress, to defend yourself against and to control.
Why wouldn’t you want to do that? The only possible reason is that you are so used to being a prisoner that you cannot appreciate the chance to escape.
This is an invitation about starting all over. What fun! Have you really created your life to be so important that it is worth your remaining in prison for? In truth, all you have created is your story. Your real life cannot begin until you are free of your thoughts. They spring endlessly from a mental computer run amok, a software pattern spitting out tape loops with little relevance to anything. And you are the programmer.
There is a wonderful parable in Kafka’s book, The Trial. A man seeks the Law, the Light, and spends all of his life bribing the doorkeeper to the door he knows he must pass through to be free. He bribes him with everything he has, waiting for permission to pass through – which is never given. Finally, with his last breath and after he has nothing left to give, he asks, “How come in all of these years, no one else has passed through this door?” And the doorkeeper replies, “Because this door was made only for you, and now I am going to close it.” The man does not discover until the very end that he is both the prisoner and his own jailor. And so are you.
This is the very challenging situation you now find yourself in, which we call “life on earth.” What you do – or choose not to do – is up to you, and no one else can decide this for you. For it is the gift that you have given to yourself. It is true that escaping from the prison of your mind runs counter to all of your conditioning, inertia, habits, programming and fears. And very possibly, this is what your have come here for.
Jonathan & Johana – It was great meeting you at the Conference on Awakening this weekend!