How do we develop a sense of open awareness from which we can observe our thoughts, emotions and habits from a neutral, clear place? How can we recognize what’s really going on within us and understand the causes and conditions that form the basis of our experience, and in turn, our future context of meaning?

As long as our consciousness is consumed and overtaken by thoughts and emotions, our essential awareness is focused and limited. We move through time thought by thought, emotion to emotion, in constant habituation. Breaking this endless process requires us to see through the habituation. We must gain the power of resistance to habituation. Freedom of mind and fundamental change can only be obtained by not being moved by thoughts and emotions. Emotions which are based on past interpretations of experience move us habitually in the present moment, thus limiting the potential freedom of the current moment. But to gain this freedom, resistance to the habitual flow must be continually brought forth. This resistance requires reflection, patience, concentration, honesty, vulnerability, and many other traits that can be cultivated. This resistance requires practice over time. It fails constantly and must be reignited at every moment.

This is the challenge that faces us in the contemporary world. We have the potential for profound freedom, but we are overtaken by sensory overload and powerful forces of persuasion, all demanding our attention. These sirens know our habits well and are programmed to uncannily feed the objects of our desires back to us. We have the illusion of choice but feel an essential dissatisfaction emanating from our moods and relationships. In some deep intuition or premonition we know that freedom being sold to us is, in truth, a profound brainwashing and ever efficient programming of our neural pathways. The sense of open fluidity without traditional expectations and relational patterns that is found in our current youth culture—disconnected from the cultural values of mainstream society yet still under the radar of the narcissistic world of the X’s and Boomers—embodies a limited recognition of our sense of enslaved freedom. There is a deep dissatisfaction gnawing in us.

We know the whole thing is doomed, but how do we get out?

Our sense of freedom must progress from a paralyzed cynicism that justifies a fruitless, meaningless hedonism to a real freedom gained through cultivated resistance to our habituation. The hidden habituation holds us hostage, controlling us through our own fetishes. Once released from the habituation, we are free to experience the infinite possibilities of mind and relationships.