A Definition of Mind
The personal ego is nothing more than a collection of things that you identify with. It is this collection that wholly comprises your balance of karma. Your karma is that fun thing that you get to carry around from one incarnation to the next trying to understand and resolve.
From the Cartesian model, the loftiest goals for a Westerner derive from the idea that the mind is senior to any and all things around it. It is my ability to think that can solve any problem, remove me from any harm, create the most beneficial circumstances and provide me with the most freedom. With this as the loftiest goal, you’d be a fool not to identify with your ability to think, and that is, of course, exactly what we do.
Most Westerners don’t actually think, but rather just have thoughts. We have some thoughts that we’ve internalized from our life experiences, and we have a lot of thoughts that are channeled through us from the collective consciousness. Internalized thoughts usually come from traumatic personal events that precipitate in us making some kind of decision about ourselves and/or our world. Surprised by the “thoughtless” tyranny of our more powerful attacker, we repeat the thoughts about the event over and over in our minds. Thoughts from the collective basically boil down to a bag of rules, things that you should or shouldn’t be doing, the right things to do and the right times to do them.
In both cases, these thoughts stem from, or actually are, incursions from forces outside of ourselves. Does it really make sense to identify with this endless stream of foreign propaganda? Unfortunately, most of the things that we do, most of the time, we do unconsciously. This comes almost entirely from our fear for survival. One of the primary rules for survival is to go along with the group.
It’s astronomically easier for the collective to remain in control of you if you identify with the thoughts that are channeled through you. When you treat these thoughts as your own, as coming from you, you automatically become your own enforcer. You make yourself stick to the rules, even when it’s really not in your best interest.
For the Westerner, then, the mind and the ego are the same thing. What we identify with is our ego. We identify with our mind.
It’s a natural course of events, really, to become mired in the world. It’s part of the evolutionary path of a human being. Identifying with the mind makes it a much more complicated affair. We have become mired in a world that is almost completely conceptual. We put our life force energy into things that are representations of truth, and not truthful in and of themselves.
This is natural, too, this heightening of the entanglement with this reality. The stakes will always be made to go higher. Fortunately, as Eckhart Tolle says, “When you have suffered enough, you will be enlightened.”