“My friend often asks me, half sarcastically, ‘Don’t you trust your own mind? The question always receives a few chuckles. ‘Of course I trust my own mind!… Though, to be honest, no, I don’t trust my own mind at all!’ On a simple human level, the vast majority of us are puppets to the inconsistent, random, ungraspable qualities of our minds. We don’t even know what our minds are. We don’t know what our thoughts are or where they come from. For most of us, our minds are like monkeys or wild horses – and ‘we’ as beings, are completely at the whim of our crazy, chaotic minds. Even in our times of relative tranquility, peace, joy, alignment – we are caught grasping at the experience, hoping that it will not flee us. Why don’t we have the reigns of our own internal landscape? Why must we grasp as though we are servants to a greater power?

The reality is, as Ram Dass famously put it, ‘The thinking mind (or rational mind) is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.’ In other words, the ‘mind’ as we think of it, aka the brain, is a tool. Like the stomach, it has a very important function for our well-being. However, should it be the one with the finger on the nuclear bomb? Perhaps not. Perhaps the heart-mind, intuitive mind, or ‘Hsin’ as the Chinese would put it, is more equipped for such a job.

Naturally, our being is not this black and white. However, perhaps we can begin by feeling into the intelligence of our inner being and come to our own conclusions. As our society functions right now, we are a temple to the ‘rational’, ‘thinking’ mind. We idolize it. We do not recognize the magnificent tool that is the heart-mind. We do not see the short-comings of the thinking mind in being the ‘governing agent’ of the self. Naturally, each of us who idolize the ‘thinking mind’, are contributing to a macrocosmic societal model. So it is no wonder that in a society of folks who idolize the thinking mind, our society as a whole takes on that model – and vice versa.

However, in truth, we CAN trust the human mind. Just a different ‘mind’ than what we are used to trusting. We can trust the ‘heart-mind’ as the control center, and the ‘thinking mind’ as the lead general. This is a recipe for a compassionate, wise society.