Money and the comforts it can purchase can’t protect you from fear. A big house, in a gated community can’t protect your mind from thoughts, self judgments, and emotions.
A private plane doesn’t protect you from the fear of flying. A life insurance policy for $10,000,000 doesn’t insulate you from the fear of death, ill health, or the fear of losing a loved one.
No amount of money can protect you from an untamed mind that can take your emotions into a downward spiral of suffering.
If money buys happiness then Howard Hughes would have been one of the happiest people in the world. As it turns out his money didn’t protect him from his thoughts, beliefs, and fears.
The reason part of the mind looks for simple rules to describe the nature of emotions like happiness. What people find difficult to accept is that one exception like Howard Hughes breaks the rules. Money doesn’t by happiness. It’s just one factor of how your mind affects your happiness and your emotions.
What can protect you from fear, self judgment, and false beliefs is awareness and love. Awareness and Love can create and insure happiness.
Faith is a force you command. You have the power to put faith in something or someone. When you do we say that you believe in an idea or a person.
Confidence is the feeling you create for your self by investing your faith in something or someone. Oddly you can create this feeling of confidence even if the idea is a lie or the person you believe in is a fraud.
A spiritual warrior is aware of how his or her belief in something can create a false sense of safety.
Practices for spiritual warriors in Self Mastery
The Mitote (me-toe-tay) referred to in The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz is a lot like blogs on the internet. People are pouring out the thoughts in their head and filling virtual cyberspace with opinions, ideas, rants, and their personal knowledge. It is an overwhelming volume of words that other people read, form opinions about and then write words about them in their blogs. Then more people read those opinions about opinions and write their opinion.Very seldom do any of these add any real value to one’s life. Even when good writing has a chance to have an impact, the reader isn’t likely to hold their attention and awareness with it long enough to have a real impact. Their undisciplined short attention is overwhelmed against the onslaught of more information and opinions to surf.
In the same way the mitote in the mind is like those layers of opinions. It is the cacophony of voices that make up the incessant thinking in your mind. The world of your imagination is filled with opinions, information, description, rants, judgments, and victimizations.
It has developed such a momentum that when you will your self to be still long enough and step back from them, you can’t help but notice them. You will likely be surprised at how loud those voices are. And usually right after that moment of awareness where you detach from the mitote and observe it, you form an opinion, or make a statement about what you observe.
And in that moment of forming an opinion or making a descriptive statement about the mitote, you have just lost your attention to the cacophony and contributed another layer.
