The Fixated Mind

The Fixated Mind

Prophet Neb Naba stated that one should always be cautious of having a fixated mind. When we fixate ourselves, the placement of our focus, if too strong, can cause us to reject everything else outside of what we are concentrating on. We’re only able to see or think about what our mind is locked on to, and this behavior can become very dangerous. Prophet Neb Naba also inspired us to strive to maintain a “universal perspective”. By doing so, he was guiding us towards a way of approaching our day-to-day lives so that we don’t fall victim to tunnel vision. 

If daily, one is able to keep in mind the “universal perspective” or the larger dimensions beyond the one we perceive in front of our eyes (for example this article you’re reading), one has the ability to keep their thoughts and perspective in a context that fits the greater reality that we are a part of. One is then able to keep their thoughts in a proper context. This context or “universal perspective”, when analyzed, keeps our awareness open to the profundity of existence. 

This greater reality is that we are living on an enormous planet, and as we maneuver on this planet, our planet is also maneuvering within a greater universe. So, in approaching life with our minds open to the “universal perspective”, we can begin to look at our lives differently. We can examine ourselves from a higher dimension; looking down and seeing all of our daily struggles that are driven by our will to survive. When we take this perspective, we can see that when we go through our lives fixated on only ourselves and our personal experiences, we easily begin to think that our successes, failures, desires, ambitions, etc. are the only things that matter. 

This problem of being overly fixated on ourselves stems from how we’ve been educated in our modern societies, which has conditioned us to think that we are special, great, unique, etc. Being fed this belief over time builds the ego and self centered approach towards how we live our lives. This then becomes the major challenge that we end up facing because it creates within us a sense of entitlement. Though we may look around us and see people suffering and our planet deteriorating, we are too often fixated on our own personal goals that we have set for ourselves to the point where we don’t care. 

We are the only ones that carry this illusion that we are special and deserve to be treated in certain ways. The truth of our situation is that our planet and the universe are very rigid domains that can easily destroy us. Whether we live or die, prosper or suffer, the world and the universe around us continues to transform itself without any disturbance, and this is a very humiliating reality that punishes our enlarged egos that wish to hold on to the thoughts that we are something greater than what we are. 

We are creating more and more problems for ourselves in our modern societies based on our individualistic approach towards our lives. As more and more people across the globe seek to become “modernized”, more of humanity is beginning to carry this “modernized” mind-set. In many ways this mind-set fixates the individual and the society to behave as if they’re the only one’s on the planet. We advance in life with blinders on, fixated on our desires and ambitions as if we’re not sharing this planet with billions of other human beings like us, as well as millions of other species of life that are all connected to us, and even more importantly, that we all depend on for our survival. 

A major problem that we face is that our means of survival keep us only fixated on the realm of our society that we live in, which excludes many of the other aspects of the nature and existence around us. To provide an example, we can see our situation in the modern world similar to a bird that has been taken from nature, and placed within a cage. The bird, upon entering the cage, becomes stripped of its natural way of living. Over time it loses the knowledge that it once had to survive in nature based on the fact that it is now forced to only know the limits of the enclosure that it is contained within. Not only does this weaken the bird, but also it creates an illusion of reality for the bird to focus on. Depending on how long the bird is caged, it becomes virtually impossible for it to then return back to the wild and survive if let free. 

We, the “modern” human beings no longer have the need to know all the elements of nature and the universe around us as our ancestors of the past did. All we must know is how to graduate from school, get a job, get our pay check, pay our bills, buy groceries, fill up our gas tanks, etc... then come home, eat, relax, watch our favorite TV programs and then go to bed, only to wake up and do the same things over and over again. Though the aforementioned example is an oversimplified version of our lives, it still touches on a rhythm of life that many of us share... a life when simplified to the above points doesn’t seem worth living. 

Though we carry the mind-set that we have evolved away from the more primitive or indigenous ways of the past, what we don’t see is that this “modern” way of living is transforming us into beings that no longer have the physical or mental ability to survive on our planet outside of the societies (cages) that we’re fixated on and continue to choose to live within. Our modern lifestyles are very different from the lives of our ancestors of the past, because in the past, in order to survive in nature, our ancestors were forced to know as much as possible about the existence around them.