“You can sit there and reflect on what you did!” That sounds like a good idea, but you may sometimes find that it was actually mind parasites (complexes) that influenced you to do it. That is not exactly an excuse – life can be reclaimed from those. But first we have to throw the light of awareness on them.

Recently I was walking and outlining an entry in my head about religion vs mind parasites. By a strange coincidence, this week’s broadcast of Happy Science on Air featured an answer by Ryuoho Okawa about destiny and the degree to which one is in control of one’s own life. Okawa answered that one controls about half of one’s life through the choices one makes. A quarter is decided before we are born. And the fourth quarter is decided by spiritual influences, good or bad. So by religious training the part of your life that you can control goes up from 50 to 75%.

That is what Ryuho Okawa says. But he also occasionally says that he is God and comes from Venus, so you may want to call a couple more witnesses before making your final decision.

I think even 50% is actually very rare in typical humans. I mean, I suppose technically you can make that many decisions if you are wide awake while living your life. And there are a number of secular philosophers who just may have lived that way even without religion as we usually think of it. So I suppose the potential exists. And it could be argued that to not choose is also a choice, although I wonder how accurate that is if people don’t even KNOW that they have a choice.

Making people aware that they have a choice, that reality is not as small and bland as it sometimes looks, is one of my major aspirations in life. But I wonder if I should be more selective about it. A number of my friends did wake up a bit and began to think for themselves. They went on to think wrongly and went astray, as in causing suffering for themselves and others. But I guess at least they were not bored. Still, I sometimes wonder if this restriction on seeing the freedom, this “sleep”, may have been put upon people for their own protection.

And yet, to me this is important. Personal growth, as I see it, is the growth of the conscious, reflecting self at the cost of the mind parasites or rote habits. By habits I don’t only mean outward actions, but habits of thought and even habits of seeing the world in a particular manner.  These are usually programmed into us early in life by family, friends, teachers and the wider culture.

This does not mean that everything we learn is wrong, of course! But in a manner of speaking it does not really become ours until we consciously observe it and reflect on it. A good habit may also exist for many years and we have not really made it a part of ourselves because we don’t see what we are doing.

But often the things we do and think and see are not a conscious expression of ourselves, but the doings of free agents of the mindscape, mind parasites or (if we are lucky) symbiotes, and snippets of brain software that runs on its own, somewhat like the Android programs that don’t close down properly and drain the batteries of your smartphone unless you have Juice Defender installed. They may have been useful at some point in the past but keep running in the background without us being aware of them. Most Windows machines also tend to run gradually slower as all kinds of junk builds up, mostly harmless (although the occasional virus or worm may also be there) but not useful, and not really wanted. We just don’t notice it. So it is no miracle that the brain has the same problem, and probably more so, since some of this junk has built up for generations! “That’s the way we do it around here.”

So sometimes we wake up and find that we live in a corner of our own brain, while most of it is dedicated to things we don’t exactly hate (although that may also happen) but just don’t recognize as us.

Whether we – the person – actually exists? That is a deeper question that I don’t think we should try to answer until we have a thorough understanding of how the rest of our mindscape looks, from a long time of direct observation. I will just briefly mention it: The body may look from outside as if it is mostly “one piece”, but inside it is actually made up of many different organs, and these again are often made of smaller structures, which again are made of tissues of myriad cells. And even the cells again are made up of smaller parts and so on. So does that mean the body does not exist?  That is clearly wrong too, if you mean that there is nothing there. It does not disappear and is not reduced by our knowing. Seen from one perspective the body remains, but seen in another way we see many other things also in its place. It is no surprise if the psyche is similar.

It may seem like a horrible idea to expand the conscious “I”, if we want to get rid of it later. But consider the alternative: Letting the brain fall prey to the mind parasites for as long as we “live” – I cannot even fully use the word live, in the sense of living a human life, if we are run by mind parasites most of the time in most of the ways. So dismantling these is a priority. But then we also have to dismantle our pride and our sense of being the greatest and most important thing in the universe. These things can happen in parallel. But until there is some room in the chaotic mindscape for clarity, we cannot really begin to see ourselves.

I constantly see people who have very little control of themselves, although they may think so. The parasites are in charge. And one of these people has been me. It surely still is, in the many areas where I have still not reflected on myself in an objective way.