Free Your Mind: Mindfulness Without Conformity

Many people believe that responsibility means conformity: That when someone is bad, they simply need to fall in line. For this reason, we talk of reforming people: Putting them back in line.

We switch the patterns. One wonders why. How can the answer be in patterns at all? Let's investigate.

Since childhood, we have followed patterns: Old patterns. Patterns set forth by the family, by school, by the economic system, and by religious orders. We have no minds of our own. We simply conform.

And it hasn't proven effective. There is still conflict, corruption, and misery. I'm afraid we've failed.

The economic system creates conflict, competition, struggle and, therefore, total inward and outward confusion and misery. The religious divisions are ways of being in conflict between groups, ways of subjugating, distorting thinking rather than lending clarity and lucidity, and make thought and perception stagnant in a pool of doctrine people are forced to follow. That is conformity.

Patterns are old.We can't superimpose some tired doctrine on a situation which is alive and moving and expect it to give us true answers. That thinking is backward. And thinking that way will lead us backwards.

The problem is not specific patterns but the tendency to follow and imitate. And in falling in line with the pattern, identifying with it, we become separate from the rest of humanity; each person and group contained in their supposedly safe units, fearing and fighting each other. We have gone terribly wrong.

What is different, what is new, what is not the pattern, is far removed from safety and security. For this reason, we avoid it. We would rather rot in a jail cell than come out for fresh air. Because, locked up in the pattern, we are assured the right job, food on the table, and lots of friends.

Yet, we fail to realize that our own minds deteriorate, caught up in the same movement, and wearing down in the process. We fail to see that our thinking divides, divides us inwardly, and divides us from each other. In that division is conflict, distortion, misery, pain, confusion and a constant struggle. In it, there is no clarity, lucidity, no understanding, and,so, no love, care, attention, compassion, or true affection.

Because we won't take that leap into what is not known, we stay where we are, stuck in the machine of our own making, the machine of conformity and complacency.

Having become accustomed to patterns, feeling safe and secure in them, we feel the answer to the world's problems is either a reversion to old patterns or concoction of new ones.

Patterns mean conformity. Conformity means comparison. Comparison means division, conflict, chaos, confusion, and violence. There can be no adequate answer there, in that milieu of fantasy. That milieu is merely the operation of thought in psychological time. The repetition and reliance on patterns does not change a thing. It is, in fact, the problem. And we expect to answer the problem with the thing causing the problem.

The first thing to do is to stop looking for an answer. We've already concocted answers. Answers are conclusions and if you conclude first, then you can't begin.

We have to start at the right point. We have to look at the problem directly, correctly, not hampered by conclusion. The conclusions are the patterns of conformity, the obedience and fear, the struggle for security and fear of loss.

We must be able to face ourselves, face our concocted divisions and separations, face our illusory authorities, and face our time-based psychological fear which keeps us stuck in the circle, keeps us trapped in the machine.

It is then, when we see all that clearly and with no inward interference, that we are whole and see comprehensively into the totality of the problem, without division, without confusion, but with direct and clear insight. This will be the dissolution of the problem and the end of all barrier to total awareness.