Spiritual Anarchy

Have you ever had an issue you’re stuck on or thinking about often, and then you read or hear an expression, and the light bulb goes off? ‘Egads, that’s it.’ For me, reading the words “Spiritual Anarchy” was one of those times.

I’d been working to move on from a traumatic past and to change my mindset. I’d been working with a VA therapist on how to think positively and allow happiness (for it turns out it is a choice and a mindset, more to come on that later). The topic of brain training and retraining frequently arose. Still, I hadn’t found a path or mindset that rewired my brain from depression, suicidal ideations, and general thoughts designed to keep me down.

At this point, I would like to discuss the next level of survival of the fittest: survival from yourself. I always thought of the survival of the fittest as a physical competition, whether realized or not, against other humans. An ecological design to keep a particular species strong and healthy, like a human’s ability to stand upright or science’s descriptions of evolutionary developments, like breathing air or opposable thumbs.

Recently, my mind added our brains, the way we think, and our behaviour to that list. A positive mental attitude is key to our thrivall — a negative one to our demise.

If I am thinking about suicide, I’m not thinking about long-term plans. Wait, what? I know exactly. If I am dealing with suicidal ideations, will I be open to marriage, retirement plans, and other long-term life goals? Not really. I may go through the motions or say I want things, yet there is a part of me that is like, “why… I’m not going to make it to retirement anyway,” or “why get married and put her through that. Getting attached to me, and then I kill myself. I’ve been through death and loss; it sucks.”

I went deep there. Did you?

I needed to change my mindset radically, and I didn’t know how. Then I came across the term ‘spiritual Anarchy,’ and it blew my mind. Somehow, that term helped me realize I can change my brain. Consciously work to rewire previous training, training put in place before I knew there was such a thing as a learned mindset. Much of that brain wiring took place as a single-digit human, some of it as a teenager, into my 20’s and beyond. Now, as a human in their 50s, I realize I can keep training my brain to think the way I want it to. I can wire it to be positive; it takes work and mantras, yet it is happening. I am derailing the old thought train and building new tracks.

If I find myself thinking about depressing things over and over, I now realize those thoughts are occurring to keep me down, keep me in a negative place. So I put a positive mantra in place. “I’m awesome. Life is awesome. I’m happy to be alive.” I say it at least ten times in a row. It’s been about a year and a half now, and it is sinking in; now those subconscious thoughts automatically switch from the negative to the mantra. My subconscious is rewiring.

Anarchy is generally understood as the absence of governing bodies or as chaos. I want you to think of your brain as your governing body. I want you to know your governing body runs off the past, not the future. Shake up the thoughts and wiring of your brain and create some chaos, change the way you subconsciously think. Be conscious about your habits, behaviours, and the thoughts that drive them. Apply new thoughts using mantras. Only you can come up with your positive mantras; they exist in your brain, make it conscious and positive until the positivity becomes subconscious.

The word “spiritual” is generally applied to higher powers, God or Gods, or some intangible entity that we put in charge of us. They create the good and evil in us, the Earth, and the Universe. We are but pawns in their hands. Instead, think of spirit as what drives us. What is that intangible in us that we are striving for? If, instead of keeping ourselves down, we rise to everything we’ve dreamed of, then that spirit is fed, encouraged, and brought to our consciousness.

I was a single Dad. Like many parents, I strove to teach the human I was raising to be the best they could be. To not impose self-limitations and to pursue their dreams. I developed this habit of, upon putting my son to bed, when tucking him in, I would say, “I love you. You’re awesome. You can be anything.” It took about 8 years for me to accept that I wasn’t walking my talk in a particular area. I started getting this feeling of incongruence because I wasn’t walking my talk. Years and years of me saying, “I love you. You’re awesome. You can be anything.” Finally, my spirit said, “Yeah, but you always wanted to be a writer, but haven’t.” The spirit started slow and gentle, and eventually it became a mental beatdown. I had to do it. I had to allow myself to write, create stories, and write down my thoughts and ideas. And then, gasp, release them so that others could read them.
I did it.
I allowed myself to write, forced myself to. Viciously, I made myself create a writing routine. Even though my son didn’t know it, my saying those words to him every night, “I love you. You’re awesome. You can be anything,” helped my spirit guide me into writing.

To me, Spiritual Anarchy means creating chaos in your spirit so you can retrain yourself to give yourself what your spirit wants you to be. To move on from unconscious behaviors and to train conscious behaviors into your subconscious, athletes do this, entrepreneurs do this, and the list goes on. You’re next. Training your brain is the next level of survival of the fittest. The next level is becoming conscious of your subconscious and teaching that subconscious through mantras and other forms of positive thought. Training positively into your subconscious allows you to achieve and attract positive things, and even to long for positive events.
Many do this naturally; they’ve achieved the next level of survival of the fittest. It’s never too soon or too late to accomplish. Start now.
Train your mind. It controls you.

(Author note: I started writing and editing this article when I was on my 2nd seasonal contract with the US Forest Service. This time on patrol in Wildland Fire. I was actively stepping through self-imposed limitations at the time — a 54-year-old out there working with athletes of the wildland fire kind. I stretched myself to my physical limits on more than one occasion. I accepted that I am both human and tough simultaneously; they are not mutually exclusive. No one judged me as hard as I judge myself. Personally, I think that is a good thing because it provided me an opportunity to reflect on how I perceive myself and reprogram that perception in my mind. It took active thought and compassion, both of which are something to strive for in day-to-day life.)