(What if you’ve done it all wrong)
It’s the feeling that I’m banging on the walls sometimes. That’s what led me to think about prison.
Not in the literal sense.
That feeling of being confined – by your own thinking. By your mental habits.
It’s hard to test yourself, check yourself, upbraid yourself if that’s what’s required.
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And how do you end up feeling? However the way the cookie crumbles and however you judge yourself, how do you then feel? How do you feel when you go to bed? And how do you live with the suspicion that you’re doing it all wrong?
(Escaping) A Prison You Don’t Know
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure they don’t know they’re in prison.
Fyodor Dostoevsky said that. Or something like it. I can only agree.
It sounds like an obvious kind of statement – a ‘yeah, and so what’ kind of statement.
That changes when you think how it might apply to you.
Prisons come in different guises. All – and that means all – your prejudices and your beliefs: they’re all actual or potential prisons.
And if you’ve become used to them, if they are just your normalities, then the gaolers have succeeded.
You have to question everything. And you have to learn how to question effectively.
You have to ask who or what might have put you in the prison you might be in. And what’s in it for them.
And if – or is it when – you realise you’re in a prison of your own making, you have to ask what’s in it for you.
Those aren’t easy questions to ask. They’re even tougher questions to answer.
Arguably
You could say that there is little to say or discuss about one’s own mental freedom.
Actively protecting it, exploring it, expanding it – these should be everyone’s constant focus.
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