programming

We're each perpetually bearing witness to a series of internalized narratives playing out and believing them to represent reality. What appears to be a monologue or dialogue in our heads is actually a set of programmed interpretations and beliefs interacting while we emotionally react to them. These voices aren't composed of "us" and "the thoughts", it's just thoughts and more thoughts pinging off each other, essentially hypnotizing and bamboozling us into believing the stories that are being generated.

It can be looked at as an interactive television screen or a psychological entity that's taken possession of us, one composed of images and voices that have been conditioned into us by our families, cultures, education, media, authority figures and so on. Since it's so close, being experienced within our very minds, we mistake what we see and hear for reality and ourselves.

While more of us are becoming aware of this to some degree, we haven't come close to grasping the significance of it as a collective. We might use therapeutic methods to alter the narratives so we can feel better but we're still engaging with thought stories - ones that we've essentially made more pleasing so we can continue in the same basic direction as before with less emotional discomfort. Still pursuing and acquiring what we've been programmed to desire and avoiding or destroying what we've been programmed to fear (all of which appear to us as thoughts).

We can keep going around in these circles, or we can redirect our energy towards disengaging and moving into a different way of being. One in which we're no longer controlled by the delusional narratives of this obsolete, unsustainable and mutually destructive programming. If we keep going, history will continue to repeat in ever-mounting intensity and scale, with us eventually becoming subsumed entirely by the increasingly fearful and greedy babbling in our minds. We'll lose all contact with things like love, joy, beauty, fun, creativity and connection and be reduced to subsisting on hollow consumption, stimulation and drudgery.

This is already the reality of millions across the planet. We still have room to change course as individuals, though that space appears to be shrinking by the day. Each of us can choose whether to continue pouring our attention and energy into fueling and expanding the old programming or into understanding and detaching from it through self observation and inquiry. If we invest in the latter, this other way of being will gradually take shape and expand on its own. It's already within us, buried beneath the programmed noise.

The programming depends on our ignorance to control us. All that's needed to dispel it is awareness.