Making Peace With Mental Confusion and Transforming the Mind

by | Jul 2, 2016 | Article (Translated From Turkish)

* Visit this link to read the original Turkish version of this post before translation.

When I was thinking about how to start after the title, I decided to start with a story I had heard. There was a person who lived in a room closed to the outside world all his life. Food was served through a small window without any human contact and he lived his whole life in this room. In the story, the door of the room was opened years later, I don’t remember exactly, but I think the man died of shock.

If you lived in this room and all you knew was your life in this room, your mind would adapt to this life and produce a coherent reality accordingly.

I think people also live in invisible chambers in their lives. Chambers in the mind. Everybody has their own mental world. It’s a mental world that is shaped by repetitive stereotyped experiences and new experiences if they are open to them.

For example, if a person has been tormented and continues to be tormented throughout his or her life (if he or she has no other inner experience), it means that he or she sees the world in his or her mind as a place of torment.

So there is a strong connection between the experiences and the representation in the mind.

So, if the mind is just a reflection of lived experiences, then how can a person who has lived in a room all his life imagine the world outside that room? How can new experiences come into his life?

If I can somehow access all the possible experiences in the universe in my inner world, if I can live them in my inner world, if I can change my inner experience in this way, then my mind will have to change because when I do that I have had new experiences.

The mind has to change when there is a new experience. For example, when you eat an apple, now your mind will produce a representation of life that includes the experience of eating that apple. You will mentally know what it is to eat an apple.

The mind is a kind of understanding tool, it gives meaning to the experiences you have. You look at the mind and observe this meaning. In this way you understand life in terms of meaning. To think about your experiences, to contemplate, is to understand life using your mind.

And the mind is not only shaped by your experiences with the 5 senses. It is also shaped by the experiences you have in your emotional, mental and extra-mental world.

The experiences you have in your emotional world will find a reflection in your mind. For example, a person who has experienced sadness throughout his life will have an understanding in his mind associated with that sadness.

Someone who has experienced happiness throughout their life will have a view in their mind that is compatible with that.

Now let’s talk about how we can access new experiences and transform the mind:

But before that, I’m going to talk about how the confusion I wrote about in the title comes about and how we can make peace with it.

Mental clutter is a perception that can arise in the mind of a person who is habituated to a certain routine reality, when that person becomes open to new experiences and starts living them serially. Mental confusion is a state that continues until such a mind is able to understand new experiences.

So why do people fall into mental confusion? A mind that is already delusional or has a narrow perspective on life becomes confused when it has experiences that change its perceptions. If there is no illusion, there is no confusion.

In other words, if the person inside the room closed to the outside world had been aware that there was an outside of that room in his inner world, if he had not been under the illusion that life was just a room, he would not have fallen into confusion when the door opened.

My last years in particular have also been filled with a lot of mental confusion. Because my desire was to understand life as a whole, because I had opened myself to new experiences, the narrow perspective in my mind gave way to a period of awakening that included serious confusion.

To understand life as a whole. That is, to be able to find the deepest truths of life, to be able to face them. Why would anyone want that?

For me, the answer is to get bored with the closed room I was living in. I started to feel that the identity and the life that society had imposed on me had become boring and limiting in every dimension.

We have defined Mental Confusion, how can we make peace with it?

There is a conceptual answer to the question, and then there are the practical things that need to be done in order to personally live the experience that lies in this answer. In a way, the conceptual answer includes what needs to be done, without doing these things it is not possible to fully comprehend the answer to the question.

Conceptual answer: If we experience that we are the awareness that encompasses mental clutter, if we live our life in that state of awareness, we gradually begin to make peace with mental clutter and find peace. But there are many things in our life that attract our attention. When they attract our attention and we forget the state of awareness and get drawn into these things, in a way we lose ourselves in them. Try just trying to be aware of what’s going on in your life, and you’ll find that you get distracted and caught up in things and lost in them for quite some time. At this point, we need to anchor our attention somewhere, but this anchoring place is very important. Because wherever we give our attention, that’s where our energy goes. Here, if we give our attention to the Spiritual Heart, after a while we begin to experience ourselves as the energy of love, which is our true being. So we are actually the all-encompassing love energy that is the building block of the universe, and deep down we are the state of awareness that encompasses it. If we anchor our attention in the center of the Spiritual Heart where this love energy enters the human body, if we make an effort to hold it there moment by moment, and in the meantime remain aware of what’s going on in our lives, we begin to realize ourselves as awareness, and as this love energy. To find the Spiritual Heart, focus on the center of your chest, bring your attention here. At first it will help you to sit somewhere and close your eyes, because your attention will not be drawn to visual experiences as it would be with your eyes open. It also helps if it’s somewhere relatively quiet. But wherever you are, if there is actually an opportunity to sit down and close your eyes, you can do that. When you focus on the Spiritual Heart you are actually focusing on your own essence, you are focusing on the energy of love. In the beginning you may not feel anything. But when you keep your attention, your awareness in this spiritual zone, when your intention is to find your own essence, to feel love, you will inevitably discover it. Practice this for a while, you can also start doing it with your eyes open. So part of your attention will be in the Spiritual Heart and part of your attention will be in your 5 senses, in your emotions, in your mind. But the Spiritual Heart is where you are anchored, and your first priority should be to make an effort to stay there and refocus on this center when you get distracted.

When you start living with this first priority, after a while all the activities in the mind start to appear as activities that are happening within you. You begin to experience yourself as the energy of love that you feel in the Spiritual Heart and the state of awareness that is aware of it. And the longer you stay in this state, the more you realize yourself as this state.

Of course your mind is not idle while you are doing this. You go through a lot of confusion because what we are commonly taught in this world is that we are human beings, that we live and die, that we are just this body, sometimes we are also taught that we have a soul. Society gives us an identity, you are this, you are an engineer, these qualities are good, these qualities are bad, you should want these things, you should not want these things. We are taught what we should do, what we should adopt, we are taught morals. But we are not taught who we are. Because those who teach us don’t know that either.

As you discover yourself, your true being, the patterns in your mind also undergo a kind of destruction. Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, you throw away everything of your old identity like a shell, or you gradually leave it behind like a rotting relic.

It is in this process that the most profound mental confusion occurs. Because this is the process of getting rid of all illusions. If you practice focusing on the Spiritual Heart and staying in the state of awareness as I said, if you keep it as your first priority, as you do that, you will awaken, your mind will be transformed, the patterns will be broken and gradually you will become a person who is aware of your own being.

This is the most authentic way to make peace with the chaos, because we discover our own essential being, by remaining that being. And our mind takes on a new form as we create this experience.

So far I’ve written about the definition of chaos, what our true being is, how to make peace with chaos. But actually, if you focus on the Spiritual Heart and live in awareness (by nurturing your intention to make this your first priority), you open the way for new experiences to enter your life. Here’s why:

The whole universe and creation is already a creation within the state of awareness I mentioned, where infinite kinds of experiences can potentially happen, can be within the realm of possibility. It is possible to transition to any of these potentials, as long as you find this state of awareness and start living the state of love, which is the life energy that is formed within it. Because all possibilities are formed by the embodiment of this love in different frequencies. Whatever reality we turn our attention to as awareness, we reach that reality after a while. And when we turn our attention to the deepest divine love energy, we gradually begin to realize that we can do anything. In other words, we realize that we are created in the image of God, that he created everything, and that we are not separate from him.

I would like to mention here that for me there is something very attractive about creation. It is so beautiful and interesting that sometimes I lose myself, I forget myself and get lost in it. For example, the last time I was playing a game called Witcher 3. I have played it for over 200 hours… This is actually a very good example of souls getting caught up in the allure of creation and getting lost in it. Mankind has now reached a stage where we can create virtual realities. So alternative worlds can be created within creation. Worlds within worlds. Sometimes we believe so much in the reality we are lost in, we forget ourselves so much that we don’t realize what we can do, that all the infinite possibilities of life are actually open to us. I guess these are the inexperiences of our soul.

So in order to make peace with mental confusion, in order to bring new experiences into our lives and to reshape our minds, we have to continue the effort of knowing ourselves, we have to live the state of knowing ourselves moment by moment. We need to focus on the unconditional love at our core, we need to make the effort to stay in the state of awareness.

Let people judge you. It is a reflection of their minds, and as you go on this path, as you fill your life with self-knowledge, in time you will be able to understand and love them all. Because it is all you, everything is already happening within you. It is a very normal thing to experience mental turmoil during the efforts for awakening, but in our world mental, emotional turmoil is not yet accepted, understood or even judged. Those who have lived in a room all their lives and think it is the only reality, when you open the door and start looking out, at first they may not fully understand what you are talking about, they may react in a judgmental way. They may still be exploring inside the room, and there are many, many rooms in creation… everyone has their own world… let people be themselves… live your own discovery. The divine love that you will feel in the Spiritual Heart will give you peace in all circumstances, you can continue on this path even without anyone’s approval, because the life energy comes to you from the Creator, not from people. Be prepared for all kinds of adventures, let’s see what God has prepared for you 🙂 🙒

I have heard an enlightened sage say that in one of his previous lives he was subjected to public judgment. Even Jesus Christ is said to have been crucified. My opinion on this is this. There is no need to convince anyone, because God has created every possibility in the whole creation. And people are free to choose. You tell those who want to hear and if they don’t want to listen, you shut up and respect them. Love is not forced. This just crossed my mind: “There is no compulsion in religion”.

My knowledge is actually limited. Sometimes I feel it is more important to share the state of love than to write, because I am writing this article with my limited knowledge, but the state of love is a beauty beyond knowledge. There may be those who may not like what I have written, there may be those whom I cannot reach, but the state of love touches everyone in some way. There will still be reflections of my ego in what I write… so I will say… stay with love.

Add-on: One of the reasons for falling into confusion is forgetting yourself. That is, forgetting the energy of love that enters our body from the Spiritual Heart, forgetting that we are awareness. When these things are forgotten, and when we get caught up in the beauty of creation, as we get immersed and immersed in it, after a while we start to focus on a thousand and one different things, our energy can start to get pulled to a thousand and one different places. The way out of this fragmentation is to anchor our attention back to the Spiritual Heart. Confusion, in a way, is the fluctuation of energy in our mind as our attention is drawn to a thousand different places, as our mind is jumping from branch to branch like a monkey. Because energy flows where we give our attention, and because we forget our center, when our attention is drawn to the objects we are attracted to, our energy fluctuates like the lines going up and down on the meter of a music equalizer. This state of confusion is more common in people who are convinced of a fixed and stable identity, who live in a narrow… or… very unchanging mold, rather than in people who have questioned and fragmented their identity but have not yet discovered their center or learned to focus on it.

There is one more thing I would like to add. Foods can create a kind of fluctuation in sensitive bodies energetically. Or sensitive people are more aware of these fluctuations. For example, when I eat dairy products, wheat products, especially products containing refined sugar, convenience foods, I feel intense energy fluctuations in my body. I can lose my clarity of mind and these fluctuations can distract me like a kind of cloud. So we have to pay attention to what we eat when we are creating stillness, and as we feel the energy of love in the Spiritual Heart, we start to be able to eat more pure foods because our inner hunger decreases. Our habits continue, but over time they start to change.

About the translation: This writing has been translated into English from Turkish with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version/2022). It uses AI and deep learning algorithms to provide translations with very close ratings to human translators. It was the most accurate computer translator as of 2022 and I am using it to be able to make available all my writings in Turkish or English in both languages, making minor edits to the translations when I have the time if I notice any need of improvement and also to make it possible to provide translations of as much as possible of my site’s content in other languages in the future. 

A note about the writings in this site: I recommend you check these two articles (article 1) (article 2) about the writings on this site if you haven’t already.