Ep.29: Exercise Your Freedom of Mind (no Bill of Rights required)

In this episode, I'm exploring the fundamental freedom of mind: a freedom we all share that does not require permission from any government or authority to be true. Let's learn to exercise our freedom of mind, so we can all become a bit more human. 

Transcript

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human Podcast. In this episode, I'm talking about freedom, a fundamental freedom that we all share and that does not require the Constitution to prove to us that it belongs to us. I'm talking about the freedom of mind. We all know about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. And we can really use those freedoms right now. But the freedom of mind is even more fundamental, more basic, more primal than any constitutional freedom can promise. It's a freedom that's the birthright of every human being, not just Americans, every human being who has ever lived. Yes, we need freedom of speech, and freedom of speech doesn't do us much good if we don't have freedom of thought. So that's where I'm going to be going in this episode. I am going to be touching in on recent developments in our country, the killing of Charlie Kirk and Renee Good and Alex Predi, and the waves of discontent all around, and the divisiveness that's continuing to rip our threads of our country apart. But that's not what this episode is about. It's about freeing our minds, about exercising our freedom of mind, so we can all be a little bit more human. Thanks for showing up to explore this with me. I'll see you on the inside. Welcome to the Wake Up Human Podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing, what we have lost, and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human Podcast, where the topic of discussion is the freedom of mind, the power of thinking for yourself. And at that time, I started to brew on some of the ideas in this episode. And I had planned to make an episode, but I didn't do it. And one of the reasons I didn't do it is because there was just so much I wanted to say. And life was complex for me at the time, at the moment. I mean, it still is, but it felt almost like too much to put into an episode because it's such a complex topic. And it just didn't happen. And now so much more is happening. And with the recent killings of Rene Good and of course Alex Predi, which just happened. Not to mention, I mean, those are high-profile killings, but not to mention the like all the other things that are going on, all of the other disastrous and violent and divisive ongoing developments and evolutions that are happening in culture right now. I just really need to make this episode because I can say something brief here. It doesn't have to be everything. If something feels like too much, we can still do a small piece of it. Because in my mind, it is better to be brief than to be silent. It's better to say something incompletely or imperfectly than not to say anything at all. Because the world needs our voices. Maybe it's late, maybe it's long, maybe it's short, maybe it's whatever. But having soulful, heart-led people putting our voices out matters. It matters to the collective. So I urge you to give your compassionate energy through your voice to the collective conversation. And I also learn, urge you to learn how to do that with a free and clear mind, which is what this episode is about. Like, how do we show up as the people we want to be in a world that is acting in ways that is not the most empowered way that humanity can show up in the world? How do we show up in a way that's the most empowered way that we can be? So this episode is not really about political commentary. I think there's a ton of political commentary out there. And what this is really about is looking at the values of Wake Up Human, you know, the ways we've been disconnected from our native ways of knowing and how we can reconnect to our ancient wisdom, our deepest knowing, in order to be a healing forces in our lives and in our relationships and our planet. So that's where I'm coming from here. When I look at what are the ways we've become disconnected from our native ways of knowing, one of the things I think is a really important aspect of this is that the ways that we have lost control over our own minds. As sovereign human beings who have, there's so much we don't have control over in the world, just even ancestrally over time. Human beings, we don't control the world as much as we think we would like to, as much as we would like to think that we do. But we do have control over our minds, or we can. We do have our control over our spirit, over our soul, over our hearts, over the internal world that we filter our experience of life through that manifests out into the external world. And we've lost control over our minds in so many ways because there are so many inputs that come into our minds. There's so much information, there's sensory overload, there's information overload, there's everything that comes through our screens, through the media, through all of the things, all of the inputs that we take in passively into our senses. It can be hard to separate what is ours and what has come from someone else's. And what we believe versus what someone else believes. And to be able to step, you know, cut through the complexity of thought in the mind to be able to move clearly in the direction that we mean to go and to not be swayed by thoughts and beliefs and emotions. And one of the beautiful things about having control over our minds is that we're able to hold ourselves still in the midst of the storms of life. This is not an easy thing to do. But when things get really stormy, like they are right now, the ability to be still, calm, and clear, and to speak and relate and act from there is a massive skill. It's a massive boon to the community of life. So when everyone is, when so many people are screaming, yelling, enacting retribution, uh defending, blaming, dehumanizing, othering, to be able to just be a calm presence already is pretty radical. So if you're listening to this podcast, I'm assuming you care about things like this. You care about being able to show up as the kind of human being that contributes to healing rather than more harm. And I'm I'm assuming that you care about what's happening in the world and you want to show up as the best human being you can. And you probably also feel the force of the storm we're in, and you want to keep your bearings there, right? You probably realize that we are being divided and conquered, we people, by various top-down powers. The people who have the power right now, a lot of them are taking actions and putting out rhetoric and narrative and propaganda that is resulting in the division of one side against the other, very strongly. And so we probably realize this, but it's good to remember it again and just state it clearly that so much of the storm that we're in, while it's real, it's also manufactured. It is being manufactured. And if we don't question that, if we don't recognize that and question that, and then take efforts to be sovereign over our own minds, then we're just getting whipped around in the storm. You know, an example of this is 1984 by George Orwell, which I've spoken about here before, which is that in the world of Big Brother, the narrative that is being pushed to the public is a narrative of othering. They're always at war, we're in that book, always at war with someone. And it doesn't really matter who we're at war with, it just matters that being at war with them serves our interests. Being at war with them helps us to control the public mind, the collective mind. And if we decide we're not going to be at war with um you know, Iran, for example, we're gonna be at war with Egypt, then we just shift the narrative and we can be at war with that new entity. And if the people, the collective mind has been sufficiently programmed, then when we change our narrative, the collective mind will march in lockstep. No problem. And whereas in 1984, in the book, Oceania, us, we we the people, are at war with Eurasia or East Asia at one time or another, but somebody is always the enemy. We see that happening today, whether the enemy is Russia or the enemy is China, or the enemy is Venezuela, or the enemy is Cuba. We're just gonna decide who the enemy is, and then we're gonna tell you why they're the enemy. And if we've done our job well, you will believe us. You'll just swallow it whole that, sure, it's totally fine to go and kidnap the president of another country because the narrative that we share about that person makes it okay that we kidnap them, you see, without questioning, taking a step back and saying, wait, is it actually is it actually legal? Is it actually correct? Is it actually the right thing to do to kidnap the leader of another country? Like questioning authority is so important in the world right now. It's so important. So right now we've got internal enemies. We hear it right now with the current administration. They say, you know, oh, first it's the, well, right now it's the radical leftists, it's the domestic terrorists, it's the immigrants, it's certain politicians, it's the Democrats, it's Hollywood, it's the voting machines, you know, whatever it is, it's something else, and we're going to name it, blame it, and turn public sentiment against it. So that the followers of that regime will just buy it hook, line, and sinker. So who's gonna be the enemy tomorrow? I don't know, but if I'm buying it hook, line, and sinker, they're gonna be my enemy too. The enemy of the state is gonna be the enemy of me. And of course, it's not just the state, it's not just the administration. There are plenty of people on the other side of this too. Lots of people claiming that MAGA is the source of all that's wrong in the world. Meanwhile, when we do this, though, we're losing our ability to know where we stand and to think clearly in the face of propaganda and lies. So we need to get control of our minds. We're hearing a lot these days about the freedoms, the fundamental freedoms, especially of being an American. The First Amendment, Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, these fundamental freedoms that we believe we have. Well, we do have based on the Constitution, supposedly. And what I argue is that a foundational, fundamental freedom we need to have and center is freedom of mind. Freedom of mind is not something that needs to be given to us by anyone else. It's not something that needs to be written into a constitution. It is something that already belongs to us, but needs to be protected and cultivated. Because in a world where freedoms are defined for us and we're told what we're free to do or not do, we can forget that we already have freedom of mind and it already belongs to us. And ironically, our freedom of mind can actually be chained by the process of being indoctrinated into the other freedoms that we think we should or should not have. Those actually override those, they're not false freedoms, but they're prescribed freedoms. Those actually can override the freedom of our mind that's already free. So I would say freedom of mind is a fundamental freedom. It's a fundamental freedom if you want to say it's a fundamental human right, but it's not even a right. It's just part of who we are. You know, in the Bhagavad Gita, that the ancient Indian text, there is a metaphor of the chariot. I might get this a little bit wrong, but I'm gonna use it anyway, um, which is that imagine that we are riding in a chariot, and that chariot is being pulled by horses. And in the story, the chariot is a metaphor for the human, the relationship of human consciousness to the world. And so imagine you're in the chariot where the chariot itself is the human being, the human body. And the horses that are pulling the chariot are the senses, the senses pulling the body, and the reins are the mind. And the charioteer is not us, it's our divine intelligence. It is divine intelligence itself. So when divine intelligence has a hold of the reins of the mind, then the mind, the divine intelligence, can control our actions in the world. When those reins are let loose, when those reins are not, when the mind is not being held by wisdom, then those horses are left to run free. What comes into the mind through the senses, it can take us anywhere it wants us to go, because the mind is being pulled by the senses without being held by the intelligence. And so when we train the mind, as I love this metaphor because what it teaches is that when we train the mind, when we have our hands on our own reins, then we are controlling as things come in and through, in and out of our senses and our emotions, we have control over that. We're not just careening off of a cliff, let in whatever direction those horses feel like they want to go. And being in a place of finding a place of mastery over our minds and our bodies allows us then to show up the way we want to show up in the world. So the freedom of the mind, this fundamental freedom of the mind, it is a fundamental power that we have as human beings to be able to direct our consciousness and direct our lives. It's also a spiritual power because that consciousness, that innate divine consciousness behind, like that's piloting the chariot, is a spiritual power. It's not a power that we, it's not a muscle power, right? It's not a matter of just pulling harder on the reins and getting those horses in check. It's a spiritual power. In Buddhism, it would be that power of Buddhi, the intellect, the discerning intellect that is directly connected to spirit. So, and because it's a fundamental power of the human being, it's a fundamental spiritual power, it also can be used as a political power. It's also a political power. Because when we show up with presence of mind, we're able to stay calm in the middle of the storm, we're able to communicate in the middle of great emotional upheaval, we're able to be present and make the best, choose the best course of action that is needed in any given moment. And when we combine forces as a community of people who all have presence of mind, and we focus that combined presence of mind on a goal, there's so much potential power behind that to be able to achieve change, political change, social change. And so it's multifaceted this freedom of mind. It's multi-powered, this power that we can have by getting control over this thing between our ears. And okay, I realize the mind isn't really between the ears. It's not the same thing as the brain, but you get my point. So I think the conversation about how to train the mind is a longer one beyond the scope of one episode. So I'll just say a few things briefly here. To start with, most importantly, freedom of mind is a skill that can be learned. Like I said, this is something that we already, it's a capacity that we already natively own. No one has to give it to us. And because of the way that our culture is deeply programmed by external inputs, far beyond what's in our direct environment, like external inputs, we could take in external inputs from the entire world just be by jumping on the internet right now. Because our collective modern mind is conditioned like that, even though the freedom of mind is inherent in us, it's seated in us, but at this point it's also a skill that often needs to be learned or relearned or remembered. And so, yes, it belongs to us, and yes, we need to still probably learn it again. And so I want to just give a couple of quick ideas about how we might learn to get control over those reins of the mind again. Um, and personal practices like meditation and breath work all fall into this category. But what I'm gonna focus on here are some practices that are actually perspective shifts that can pull us out of our minds if our minds are caged or otherwise limited by tribal or us versus them thinking that we can actually shift our perspective to be able to see things from another point of view, which is itself a way of freeing our minds from the types of thought patterns that can keep them asleep. Let's do our minds a favor and shake them up a bit. So, one of these tricks is to practice listening to people with points of view different than ours and seeing if we can put ourselves in that other person's shoes. And this might seem like a no-brainer, but if we think about that, how often do we actually do this? It's a shift in perspective. When we don't agree with someone, we can ask the question why. Do they believe this? Or more deeply, what do they want? Or more deeply, what is the need beneath that want? What do they need that is causing them to believe or act the way they do? And there could be so many answers to that question, but even stopping to consider the other person's point of view and what they need and desire and what's important to them is already a powerful practice for getting our hands back on the reins. We're being pulled all over, and they think that because this, because they're just an idiot, because they don't understand, because they don't get it, because they're not as intelligent, because they're on the wrong side, whatever it might be. All of that is mind stuff. All of that is vritti, which the you know, again in the Vedic text, vritti, it's all just the vicissitudes of the mind. But we have the power to stop, put ourselves in the other person's shoes, and look at the situation from their through their eyes. If we don't have that ability as a human being, the ability to empathize with the other, we are partially blind. We're actually missing or undeveloped in an essential power of our humanity. And if we don't have that ability, we can learn it and we should. We really need to right now. Um, another uh perspective shifting exercise that is really powerful. This comes from Gestalt psychology. I think it originally came from Gestalt psychology, and this is the two chairs exercise. It's a great perspective shift, and that is that you literally use put two chairs in front of each other, or you can do this in your mind. You can imagine it. You sit in one chair and you explain why your point of view is correct and the other one is wrong. You explain that in detail, and then you physically get up or get up in your mind. It's better to do this physically, I promise you. You go to the other chair and you look back in the direction at that version of you who was just speaking. And now you take the other side, you take the other argument, and now you explain in detail what is my perspective? How do I see this? Like explain why this side is right. And often it's harder when we're in really charged political times, but often we can see that the mind is really good at convincing us of one way and the other way, you know, and convincing us that they're both true. So I have an example of this in my own life. One time I was seeing a counselor back when I was in college, and I was going through something that was very confusing for me to navigate, and I was having a really hard time making the decision about what to do. And the counselor asked me to do this two-chair exercise, which I was not familiar with at the time. And she said, you know what, sit in the chair and explain why it was, I'll say, it was a choice that I was trying to make whether I should stay in or leave my current relationship with my partner. And I was very confused about this. And she said, why don't you just sit in that chair and, you know, imagine that you're talking to yourself and you're going to explain all the reasons why you should stay, why it's really important that you stay, why that is really the best idea. And I did that. And after I spoke for several minutes about why it was really important for me to stay in my relationship, I went, huh? Well, it is really important for me to stay. I'm so glad I did that. And then she said, no, no, no. That's we're not done yet. She said, now I want you to go into that other chair. And I want you to turn back and look at yourself, you know, you're now you're now on the opposite side of the argument. And she said, I want you to now take all the time you need to explain why the better thing to do is to leave the relationship. Just explain that to yourself. And I did. And I was really good at explaining that one too. My mind was so sharp and clever. And I got to the end of that part of the process, and I went, oh, well, it's really clear that I should be leaving this relationship. That is so clear, like really well argued. But then I realized immediately that I was caught in a bind. And that's exactly the bind that that's meant to put you in. Because I went, well, wait a minute. It's really clear I should be leaving. But just a few minutes ago, I was able to convince myself that it was a really, really good idea that I stay. Okay, that is what the mind is really good at doing. It can convince us, whatever we wanted to convince us about. So if our mind convinces us one way or the other, or an external input like a leader or a media source or an influencer, you know, lands inputs on us that convince us one way or the other. It can be really smart, really skillful to remember that, oh, that's just the mind doing what the mind does best and making this true for me. But the mind would be equally capable of making the other side true if I really wanted it to. So clearly, the mind is only a tool for helping to shape our responses to stimuli. But the mind is not the truth. It's like ChatGPT. At the bottom of ChatGPT, it says ChatGPT can make mistakes. Anyone who's using ChatGPT right now should be very, very careful asking ChatGPT a question and believing that the output is the truth. And to a certain extent, to a large extent, it's the same with our minds. So being able to recognize the mind for what it is, which is a perspective collector and organizer rather than a truth teller, is really smart. Good practice, the two-chair practice from Gestalt. And another reminder of how important it is that we have sovereignty over the mind and not the other way around. So at this point, I'm ready to wrap this thing up. But before I do, I do want to come back and give a nod to Charlie Kirk. Because when he was killed, it was the, like I said, the seed of this episode. And here's what happened. When I heard that Charlie Kirk had been murdered, immediately the people, a couple of people who were in my vicinity, said some things about Charlie, like that guy deserved it. Oh, well, we could have seen that coming. Oh, well, when you put out hate into the world, hate comes back to you. Oh, well, I guess that's karma for you. And I started hearing these things coming from, you know, circles around me. And I thought, oh, that all okay, does that make sense? Okay, karma. Okay, what comes around goes around. You reap what you sow. But I thought, you know what? I don't actually know who Charlie Kirk is. I've never heard his name. And clearly, these thoughts I'm having about him are not coming from me. They're my mind parroting what it thinks it knows based on what other people are saying. So I need to be careful not to make assumptions about this person until I know a little bit more. And I saw a post, I started looking through my Facebook a bit, and I saw a post that one of my friends had posted. And she said, you know, whatever you think about Charlie Kirk, what I see in Charlie Kirk is that he was a person who was willing to calmly argue his beliefs with people who believe differently from him. And whatever you think about the beliefs of a person, she said, I respect someone who is willing to debate ideas rather than to hate ideas. And I went, huh. So this guy was a debater. So he was someone with strong beliefs who sounds like he was pretty good at debating around those beliefs to the extent that he has become very influential. So I went to do a little bit of research myself. And I listened to Charlie give interviews and to debate people in his public forums. And I listened to a couple of his podcast episodes. And I will be honest, there were things he said where I just went, oh God, no. This is such a horrible, horrible point of view. I don't agree with this at all. And I also recognized what I was doing was just taking in information. I wasn't, the point was not to decide whether I agree with him or not. The point was just to educate myself on who this person is without coming to judgment. Because as soon as I put myself in judgment, like an emotional harsh judgment on someone, I am losing a bit of my sovereignty over my mind. I've said control a couple of times before in this episode, but I think it's more sovereignty, which is what I'm trying to say. When I rush to judgment to put judgment on someone else before I have actually taken the time to focus my mind on the question, those horses are off running without me at that point. And an interesting thing about Charlie Kirk is that when I was listening to him, even though there were a lot of things that I didn't agree with, there were actually some things that I did agree with, that I feel where I feel aligned with his line of thinking. And what I will say about Charlie Kirk is that regardless of politics, it's very clear that he was a sovereign mind. He was, at least to a certain extent, he was a free thinker, and he was exhorting other people to be free thinkers. Of course, he wanted them to come to his side. He wanted them to see his point of view, but he also wanted them to have freedom of mind. And I want people to hear my side, and I want people to have freedom of mind. So at least in that one aspect, Charlie Kirk and I are not so different. I respect him for being free. And I grieve the loss of him. I grieve the loss of him anyway, as a human being, a fellow human being. I grieve the loss of Renee Good. I grieve the loss of Alex Predi. I grieve the loss of the people who have been who have died in ICE detention centers. And whoever else has died who we're arguing about in this me versus you war for our consciousness. I grieve the deaths of war. And we're all a victim of this war. There is a war for our minds. And if we're smart, we are going to fight to win it. How? With our sovereignty. Because this war isn't about me against you or left against right. It's about the free mind versus the mind in chains. The Bhagavad Gita, where the metaphor of the chariot comes into play, it's the story of a battlefield. It's the story of the battlefield within. This is nothing new. The story is thousands of years old. This is part of the human experience, part of the conundrum and the complexity of being human. So, fellow human, with that said, I wish you freedom. And I wish me freedom too. I'm not perfect, I'm not on another level. I'm living through this same evolution too. I know it's not easy. I'm here with you. It feels good to share it with you. It feels good not to be alone. And I wish us the remembrance that we are so much bigger than this moment, that we are so much deeper and more powerful and more connected than this current moment might show. Keep the faith, everybody. It is a tough time right now. The world is messy. There's a lot of pain. There's a lot going wrong. And there's also a lot of beauty. And we have a lot of power to make the kind of change we want to see in the world. We're not alone. Let's get free together. That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me in this effort to be free, sovereign, and more alive. If you like this podcast, if you like this episode, please do me a big favor and share it with someone who you think would enjoy it or benefit from it. This podcast, as always, is a labor of love for me, and I am thrilled if it can be of benefit to someone else. Oh, and if you want to find me, you can find me on my website at shannonwills.com. And also, if you do like this podcast, please give me a review on some kind of platform where you can get the word out and help people find me. Because they, if they are kindred spirits, I want to find them too. Okay, friends, I'm wishing you safety, community, and love. And I'll catch you on the next episode of the Wake Up Human podcast.