When a baby is born it is helpless and it needs the protection of its mother and father in order to be able to exist. It needs to be helped. It is help-less. So at birth, the baby is under control of someone else. As it grows it stays under control, mostly of its mother, and then goes off to school. And then it comes under the control of its teachers, and this period lasts until the child is about 10, 11, or 12 and then it becomes under the control of its mother, father, teachers, and friends. And this continues to go on until the child finishes school, and then the child is out on its own.
What happens when it’s out on its own? It’s picked up a lot of things. It’s picked up the attitude of its parents, it’s picked up the attitude of its teachers, and it’s picked up the attitude of its friends. So now, this child being 18, 20, 21, or 22 years old goes out and attempts to interface with the world and work with the world. What is the tool that it uses to work with the world? It uses its mind. And what has the mind done up to this time? It’s absorbed the attitudes of the parents, and the teachers, and the friends. It now comes into the world ready to go with all of these attitudes, and all of these perceptions, and all of these ideas as to how things should be. Of course, there were other things thrown in: television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and movies.
The child is accosted by the culture of where it has been brought up, and every place has a different culture, somewhat, and it takes this culture as reality. It accepts it as it’s been told the truth by all of the teachers, mentors, associates, influences that it’s had up to that point in time. What the being, at the age of 22 or 23, doesn’t know is that the mind has no wisdom and that the mind is not necessarily your friend. That the mind takes you places because that’s what it does. It doesn’t matter whether it knows what it’s doing or doesn’t know what it’s doing, or knows where it’s going or doesn’t know where it’s going, it just goes.
Imagine having a Garmin in your car, these things that tell you the directions to where to go, and imagine if that one wasn’t plugged into anything other than itself, and it just spontaneously gave directions which had no connection to where you wanted it to go. Well, you’d still be going, you just wouldn’t be getting anywhere, or at least not with the intention of getting to the place that you were going.
The mind doesn’t know where it’s going, it has no idea what it wants to do; it just knows what people told it. Think about that. The mind knows what people told it. It knows what you read, it knows what you looked at, it has responded to all of your physical senses. It’s learned smells through your nose, it’s learned vision through your eyes, it’s learned touch through your sense of touch, it’s learned hearing through your ears. A lot of what it’s learned you already have with you and the outside world pushed these things on you, and you’ve accepted them.
Very few people are skeptical about what they’ve learned…
