Below you will find a thought bubble diagram where I was laying out my ideas about human minds. This was drawn about nine years ago in 2014 while I was focused on what tools could help a person change their beliefs and thinking to achieve more happiness, peace, and a higher quality of life.
To achieve something, we must first know what it is we want to achieve. For most humans that is to feel happy, good, and similar adjectives. Or to not feel bad. Now, how can we humans do that? This has been a key question for many humans throughout history.
For most of humanity, there have been clearly discernable physical impediments to happiness - war, famine, slavery, persecution, and survival. More recently, as humans have overcome physical obstacles, we have had to deal with an overactive mind and how it deals with boredom, emotions, and the lack of a finite problem to solve. This has caused a lot of unhappiness and cannot be changed by altering our physical surroundings. We must deal with our internal selves.
While past humans have thought deeply about the internal self, what the purpose of life might be, and other deep philosophical matters, never before have nearly all humans been in good enough physical circumstances that we all had to contemplate such things. We are now in a new period of human evolution, we are evolving emotionally. To do that we need to increase our awareness about our mind and possibly beyond.
While we have a lot of past thinking on these topics, some of them are outdated or have been misinterpreted or misunderstood. While we need to add to our knowledge, we must also revisit important thinking from the past, including spiritual and religious texts and ideas.
But again, what is the goal? The ultimate goal of our species is likely to survive, and that means to evolve, now mentally and emotionally. But for most individuals, the goal is more happiness and peace. Both these goals require the same things:
Awareness - we must identify the ways in which the human experience operates.
Decision - as a species, we must decide upon rules or morals, and as individuals, we must decide on what we will do or change in order to get what we want.
Tools - we must develop or find tools that work to help us achieve our species and individual desires.
Few people are aware of how helpful spirituality can be, even though it is the most promoted idea of nearly all human ideas in this regard. Most people that are aware of spirituality as a tool for greater happiness, or for becoming a more evolved species, follow templates or religions. This misses the mark and does not provide the true value of spirituality, which is not only a collective idea but an individual one as well. We must develop our own unique individual spirituality to truly benefit.
Back to the chart - there are many influences on our minds, which means on our happiness and peace. It also affects the species-wide morality and decisions about how to evolve. Here are my key propositions:
As humans, our happiness is ultimately determined by how we manage our minds, and how our minds process our experience. No matter what relationship we have with other influences, including God or spirituality, it is our thoughts and how we interpret and manage them that ultimately determine our happiness and peace. This is also true for how our species will evolve, for example, as a species is the most important thing for all other beings to have the same peace and happiness or not.
We must humble our thinking by recognizing that we do not know. This concept of embracing the fact we do not know many things is critical and keeps important doors and paths open. It will also allow us to update and change what we think as we learn and grow.
We must stop creating dogma, we cannot rest on one idea lest we lose out on important modifications.
We must allow multiple, even infinite, answers to the same question. This is outside our current way of thinking about things but it is provably true when it comes to biology. Not all things behave the same way with the same inputs. For example, God can be felt in an infinite number of ways and still be God. There is no requirement for things to be experienced, or even exist, the same way for every individual.
The chart shows many influences on the ultimate endpoint - our individual mind. Chemistry is an important component, as are the beliefs we choose to hold onto, whether we have a purpose in our lives, our physical circumstances, how we interpret our experiences, and so forth. But again, if the goal is greater happiness on an individual level and a more fruitful evolution of our species on the human level, we must change how our mind interprets, processes, and makes decisions.
It becomes clear to us when we start our quest to become better humans that we must gain greater awareness, develop a more global perspective, and be more flexible in our thinking, even when that means we must modify or change our interpretations of past experiences, knowledge, and learning. These things are extremely hard to achieve. We use psychological tools and therapists, spiritual tools and gurus, chemistry, and everything else we can lay our hands on. My goal with this chart was to determine the most valuable tool. I believe that tool is God.
But what is God? How can God become more accessible to more people?
First off, we must stop limiting God. We must allow our interpretation of God to grow. Even for people who do not believe in God, the tool of God can be used more powerfully than any other tool available.