mind of our own

What Frightens Us the Most – Having a Mind of Our Own

We all pretend we have a mind of our own. But actually few walk the path. It means literally to form our own perspective, feelings and opinion about every moment of life. But we don’t do that. We’re talking on the cell, to our friends and acquaintances, blogging, blurting, shouting, face-booking, emailing… etc. almost all the time. We’re too busy watching each other, being like each other, bragging to each other, keeping somebody around all the time – merging into one people… except in how we style our hair or tattoo, dress, prance around, have a life style… all of which have the outward appearance of specialty without the substance.
So what is this substance? To have our own opinion… alone, without any need for companionship, including convincing everyone else to agree with us – can’t even happen unless we choose, not forced by circumstance or betraying lovers. One must choose to be alone on a regular basis without any props, games, internet searches, shows, movies, telephone conversations, etc. Just naked aloneness for some length of time, to notice, feel, think, see the contradictions in our self… to commune with us. Indeed one has to have a passion for self-discovery or it will never happen. One has to feel they want to have only opinions of their own, uniquely derived from the suffering and inspiration of their own experience – even if they disagree with everyone else on the planet. If we can’t stand-alone in this way – not just sometimes, but anytime – then we don’t really have a mind of our own.
The best test to know whether we have such determined uniqueness… is whether being alone is sometimes frightening. Why? Because it means we’re going to die. Aloneness has always been associated with death. If one spends too much time as a child alone and frightened, it feels exactly like dying. What’s more, being the only one to think the way we do makes us sometimes, even as an adult, feel paranoid about what all the other people are going to do about it.
Lots of people would say it’s impossible to have a mind entirely our own. There’s truth here. They would insist that we all are conditioned by society to feel and think some things that makes us a part of the culture that we are, the family that we love, etc. Having independent perspective about one’s family, including a spouse or partner, is the hardest thing of all – nearly impossible because to be a touch contrary in all things seems in love to be almost a betrayal. We still deal with the normal contradictions and conflicts of life by being as much the same as we can… if nothing more than to minimize the number of differences with which we have to cope. In the process we sacrifice pieces, sometimes all of a mind of our own.
Having a mind of our own is possible only by paying a lot of attention to our life. If we’re going to sustain an opinion shared by no one else, then we have to provide for ourselves the support, admiration and encouragement our social group, including family, has always given us. We’re going to have to, when alone, be our own companion, creating a mind-space within which we relate intimately with ourselves, spending regular and sometimes extended time in this place.
Yet who actually believes their own life is so admirable and worthwhile enough to command the respect and attention of others? The answer is that we think very little of ourselves. Fame puffs up the lives of a few of us, the only way most of us believe they will ever be important. Having a mind of our own means to regard our own life worthy of such special treatment. There’s no question that ideologically we’ve come to believe this. But who does it, or even knows how?
The answer is artists and philosophers of all types, who seem naturally to have invested a great deal of time and attention in their own life, possible only by taking one’s self very seriously. In the process they are fortunate to enjoy the great pleasure of discovering new things for themselves, perhaps just a special way of using color, a turn of phrase, or of mixing reality and abstraction. But whatever their endeavor, they find themselves very interesting. Perhaps that’s why aloneness has never become very popular, because finding a way to be fascinated by one’s self is very difficult.
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