De-conditioning self-inquiry
for breaking through limiting and untrue beliefs of the conditioned mind
When we are born into this world, there are no such things as perceptions, judgements or preconceived notions encoded in any child’s mind at birth.
From such a state of innocence and pure joy, like pure white sheets of paper, we were gradually taught and commanded by our parents, teachers, people in the communities, and pressured to conform by society as a whole, to accept and follow the familial and societal definitions, perceptions, conditions, and beliefs of what is: right/wrong, good/bad, should/shouldn’t, lovable/unlovable, like/dislike, beautiful/ugly, acceptable/unacceptable, polite/impolite, real/surreal, possible/impossible, etc. So, from very early on, our ‘white sheet of paper’ has started being painted with so many layers of different colours. And whilst growing up, we also keep adding onto and constantly adjusting our sets of values to adapt into and be accepted by new environments or people who we meet along the way.
We inevitably experience tensions and unsettling feelings in our daily interactions with other people around us, and/or our own restlessness or inner conflict within, as in every moment of our life, we constantly analyse and evaluate things, events, and people, including ourselves, based on our current set of values. We think endless thoughts (in fact, random thoughts take control of our thinking), and we experience all sorts of disturbing emotions coming along with thoughts, without realising that we get totally lost in our own mental world with no conscious choice on our part!
We live in thoughts in every second of our waking life and have been mistaking our own thoughts and our own judgements/interpretations of things to be reality. We in fact have been seeing just a distorted version of things through the lens of our own ‘tinted’ or conditioned mind, and we live our whole lives in this self-interpreted version of reality. This version of reality only exists and makes sense specifically to us given our own mind’s perspectives and conditionings.
De-conditioning self-inquiry is a set of questions (can be generally applied for most issues or personalised for some specific ad-hoc issues) that help you to uncover the untrue nature of your own thoughts and beliefs, to be able to see beyond your own conditioned mind and the ego’s perspectives.
This set of questions facilitates the unfolding of this transformative process:
​
1. Uncovering the REAL thoughts underneath the complexity of emotions on the surface.
​
2. Identifying the grasping nature of the Ego in maintaining and protecting its self-image and individuality.
3. Realising how incomplete and untrue/unwholesome your assumptions of reality are by using objective analysis self-inquiry.
4. Unveiling a fuller picture of how things actually are beyond your own beliefs and assumptions.