“All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never-departing shadow.”

—The Buddha, (from The Dhammapada, translated by Gil Fronsdal)
 

he world is created through the context of your self-talk. When I say “self-talk,” I’m referring to the constant stream of unconscious voices in your head that play on without you. They are assessing, analyzing, deducting, drawing meaning, and evaluating everything. They are the filter through which life passes before it reaches you. They present the world to you in a way that makes your experience of life consistent and intelligible to you, according to the structure you live within.

The nature of this conditioned mind, which was created during childhood to socialize you, is mired in “something wrong/not enough.” Why? You were taught to abandon who you authentically were in exchange for what you needed so that you can become fit into society. It left you with the psychological premise, “I am wrong. Something is wrong. I need to change to fit in because what is wrong is somehow my fault.” The very nature of being conditioned implies this assumption. Why would you be conditioned if all was okay the way you were? So there’s no escape for anyone. It’s a tough transition for all children—one that is unconsciously perpetuated through the generations and leaves us a byproduct of this process.

Your experience of the world can be summed up as nothing more than you staring directly at a mirror reflecting the posters, snippets, and fictions of the conditioned wallpaper lining the inside of your head. Yet we all walk around through life as though there is some objective truth to be experienced and a “right” way to proceed based on that truth.

My own insight into conditioned mind occurred while I was sitting in meditation at the Zen monastery one day. Suddenly I heard the thoughts start in about how “everybody at the monastery” hated me. Let’s take a step back for a moment. Here I was, minding my own business, counting my breath, sitting facing a blank white wall, and the story of “everybody hates me” passes through as clear as day. Keep in mind, nothing was going on. No one was actively saying anything to me me (it was a silent monastery) and yet somehow the feeling that “everyone (at a compassionate Zen monastery) hated me.”

Absurd. Unbelievable. Obviously untrue.

Yet completely real to me.

My realization made it extremely clear to me why this work is so vitally important on many levels. One, people, for the most part, are oblivious to this deep inner way of experiencing the world. We look out at it with our own two eyes and assume what we’re seeing is true. Two, I was in a Zen monastery where I was training so that I could have this shift—and it’s an extremely challenging perspective to attain. Three, the world is being destroyed by our identification with the illusion of a separate self. This delusion must be addressed and can no longer be ignored. We cannot address the pandemic issues the planet faces while failing to see that the very system that created these issues exists within us. The conditioned monster of our mind is working to stomp its image over all the world. If we don’t work from the inside out, nothing we do will sustainably rid ourselves of it.

It takes practice to pull the background of our minds to the foreground and recognize what corrupts and what is peaceful—and to choose the one that brings happiness.