Corruption sounds like a willful crime, but people don’t come into the world with corrupt intentions. We were born hungry for the truth and eager to love. Corruption happens when we put our faith in thoughts and ideas instead of what we perceive. We believe most of what we’re told and, in the process, we lose our connection with life—with truth. We create rules and structures that conform to what we’ve been taught to believe.
Love is one example of how our natural impulses can be poisoned by ideas. Too many of us were taught that love is conditional, that it comes with specific rules of engagement. To put it simply, love is corrupted by if.
We may not always hear if spoken out loud, but we sense it often enough, even between people who are devoted to each other.
I will love you if you do what I want.
I’ll love you if you stand by me, no matter what.
I’ll love you if you do this or believe that.
If you embarrass me, disagree with me, or leave me … I will stop loving you.
Amazingly, we say things like this to the people we care about most, just as we say them to ourselves. Yes, we set conditions on loving ourselves—conditions that are often too strict to meet. Real love comes with no conditions. And yet that’s not how most of us were taught to offer love and to receive it.
When we think of love as conditional, it becomes something else, something corrupt. Of course, this kind of corruption can be repaired, because it begins in the virtual world of the mind. Virtual reality is a reflection, an interpretation of what is real. The mind gives us an impression of everything we can touch and see, but it’s an impression. Ideas aren’t made of matter. Beliefs aren’t part of our genetic makeup. The mind isn’t actually real, and the fanciful world it creates doesn’t actually exist.
So what is the mind, and what does it do?
The mind is a function of the brain that turns perception into language. The ways we describe reality are unique to each of us. You have your way; I have mine. The difference depends on how our brains work, of course. It also depends on how we’ve been taught to perceive the world.
When we see an idyllic scene—such as a mountain range, green meadows, and open expanses of wilderness—some of us think of paradise. We react with excitement and pleasure. Others, seeing the same scenery, imagine extreme hardship and loneliness and react in fear. Where some see tranquility, others see disturbance. If we were taught to be afraid, we will likely continue to be afraid. If we believe that unfamiliar things are dangerous, we will avoid new experiences.
We were taught to interpret what we see. We were told what to believe and believed what we were told. We’ve been guided by private and public opinion since we were born. Reality is made of impressions and experiences to which we give personal meaning and value. It changes constantly, of course, since events keep changing. Our personal perception of reality is affected by our opinions and our fears.
Many beliefs encourage fear. Many beliefs are influenced by fear. Fear has had a big effect on the way we learned to view the world. Physical fear is natural and essential to our survival, but it’s important to remember that irrational fear is not. It is irrational to be afraid of what doesn’t exist. In fact, it can cause actual harm. And yet we’ve learned to let irrational fear shape our reality. We’ve learned to react emotionally in ways that other people do and to fear what we only imagine.
These reactions took time and practice to perfect. We followed the rules of our families and cultures. Our parents and teachers showed us how to behave in a world of humans, and we took those lessons with us into adulthood. Now we tell ourselves how to behave in much the same way. We follow the rules of society, but we’ve applied most of society’s rules to our own lives. We rule ourselves through self-made laws, personal judgments, and mental intimidation.
As children, we observed how our own family and our local community were governed. We followed the protocols of school, church, and the front office. To go against the rules usually resulted in a loss of respect among our peers. Sometimes the losses were far greater. We obeyed the rules of our city and state governments and the laws of our nation’s government. Breaking those rules meant paying bigger penalties. All of this influenced the way our minds work, and so you could say the way we run ourselves mirrors the way things run in the world.
It’s no surprise that we all have a little government operating in our heads. The mind is the government that sets the rules, and the physical body follows those rules. We’re willing to pay real penalties for breaking the rules we put in place—and, very often, we make someone else pay as well. Like most governments, the mind tries to impose its laws on other bodies.
When we are aware of the way the mind functions, we can alter the way we rule ourselves. When we see how our own little government works, we can change it. We can amend our own laws. Whatever we’re able to imagine for our own sake we can create. We can become better caretakers to our bodies and allow ourselves more freedom of expression. We can end the strict penalties we’ve inflicted on ourselves—penalties that make it impossible to experience the love we deserve.
We all want to be the best humans we can be. We want to contribute to our own personal evolution. We want to know what we’ve been doing wrong and what we could do better. We want our secret questions to be answered and to see how the answers can be applied to our own lives. We’d like to discover what is true.
We can all use a few pearls of wisdom. Wisdom improves our relationship with life, with truth. It allows us to rise above our fears and our common beliefs. It gives us the will to walk through one new door, and then the next.
The journey begins with three essential questions:
Who am I?
What is real?
What is love?
Who am I? You will know who you are when you see who you are not.
WE THINK WE know all there is to know about ourselves. You may believe you’re the reliable one, the optimistic one, or the melancholy one. You’ve probably decided you’re either an introvert or the life of the party. Sometimes we experience a disturbance of some kind in our lives, a trauma or a loss. Seeing ourselves in action during a crisis, we’re sometimes shocked. It could be that we never imagined we could be so strong. Or maybe we’re weaker than we expected or more fearful. There comes a time in most of our lives when we’re ready to admit we are not who we thought we were.
In such cases, it could be that the values we defend aren’t reflected in our actions. We’re in conflict with people around us. Our minds are in conflict with our hearts. We blame or we lash out. We shout at our kids. We insult a friend. “Where did that come from?” we ask ourselves. Confused and discouraged, we begin to wonder what makes us do the things we do. We wanted the truth but seemed to have missed something in our search.
Asking yourself, “Who am I?” means taking the first step back to authenticity, or truth. Our instinct is to cling to the picture we have of ourselves, which makes any new discoveries impossible. Questioning who we are gives us a chance to bring down a few walls—a few stubborn beliefs—and reconnect with life.
Most of the stories about who you are come from things your parents told you—what you like, what you dislike, or what you’re good at. You heard more opinions from brothers, sisters, and childhood friends. As you grew up, you got descriptions of yourself from everyone