A society of mental dysfunction

As I observe the ever increasing mental health issues including all the terrible suicides and mass depression that accompany it, I have come to realise that we live in a sick society that desperately wants to be seen as one with a high degree of morality. To apply so much pressure to our children to fit in to our immoral conformity of judgement, acceptance and attention seeking , we have set a seed of self destruction, that cannot be broken with the current obsession with mental health awareness. The solution lies in looking beyond this at the imbalance of the mind that modern living is instilling within us.

To build resources around the inevitability of people falling into illness is itself irresponsible without the question “What is causing the fall?”

This is carefully avoided in case we unveil and reveal the superficial hierarchy and judgement we have instilled throughout our own society. I say we as a collective responsibility because each and every one of us are society and so any reference to it must include all of us.

So we speak of awareness and form groups based on the same hierarchical form of expression. No amount of banner waving, club memberships or colourful campaigns will ever make much of a difference unless we pay complete attention to the structure of humanity and its irresponsibility of creating a separateness between human beings. You will notice that nothing much in life is given much attention unless it gets celebrity endorsement and in doing so, confirmation that an issue is worth raising. How many of us have seen a product or a book that has a celebrity endorsement, that then compels us to take notice and deem the service or product more worthy. This is how we make the world as individuals, by our own decisions and habits. We are the world and every one of us has a part in its continuous creative power.

Why have we become so disempowered? Why can we not make a single decision without religion, gurus, celebrity’s, surfing the web or some other external influence telling us what to do?

I believe our obsession with the analytical, intellectual mind of constant thought has made us ill. The Eastern philosophy of Zen warns of the imbalanced mind of dominant intellectual thought. They are right. This is where we find ourselves in modern society. Thought obsessed, leads to self obsessed. A thinking mind which cannot switch off is an unbalanced mind that is either ill or teetering on the brink of falling into dispair, depression and frustration. The analytical mind of thought is the breeding ground for the ego. It is also a mind that embraces separateness and judgement, even if it is just at the unconscious level. It places itself within the hierarchical structure of society. This mind often lacks compassion and empathy.

We are now a society that walks with a top heavy structure of a continuous chain of never ending thought,making us predisposed to mental breakdown and a fear based existence.

This imbalanced mind is seen throughout the whole of society and it is creating a complacent fragility, where the inability to act is justified through intellectual discussion. Anything to stop us facing the ever present fear that has complete control over our thinking. Anything to stop us looking at ourselves with utter truth. It is this fear that has us constantly searching for super comfort, against our own innate intelligence, that has been silenced by a barrier of conflicting internal, external confusion.

And so we look into our environment desperately searching for order and comfortable patterns but only to realise the only order we can ever acquire is an internal order. It is within, that peace, courage and absolute self trust are discovered. It is not the thinking mind of ideas, methodology and analysis of the past and its continuous cycle of habit but the stillness within. It is this stillness that exists entirely in the present moment, beyond the inherently limited conscious thought. You cannot enter this state through conscious thought, as it is not something to be forced upon us by our own willpower.

So how do we return to this intuitive, instinctual original mind, the intelligent mind that awakens through the cessation of thought? The mind that knows what to do?

Meditation is one way but often we become reliant on a method on an environment. True meditation is to see with complete attention how we behave and think on a regular basis and the result of all of it. We see our own reflection. This takes courage and is often not a popular option for someone that has a strong self image that has been neurologically set for many years.

But it is here where perception explodes in a beautiful realisation of how we create not only our own lives but the world itself.