FIRST, HELPMEPLEASE.COM
The first in my series of websites is called HelpMePlease.com. There you’ll find down-to-earth words to help people who are in crisis. Depression, abuse, suicide, unhappiness, if you or anyone you know is in crisis and you haven’t found a lifeline elsewhere, please visit that site first. Many of my articles there are equally helpful in clearing your mind, but they are written in a way that resonates more with people who are in crisis. Like this website, there are no ads there, nothing for sale, and all articles and photos are by myself.
THE NEXT: CLEARYOURMIND.com
This is the second website of my helpful series of sites. This site is for you who are no longer in crisis, for you who are past the stage of simply trying to survive and cope, and are now seeking further words to help you remember and clarify the wisdom you already have inside you. You are now stable in your mind, and are seeking tools to help strengthen your balance and allow forth more of your inner evolution.
The more clearly your mind operates, the more beautifully and perfectly other aspects of your life will clear up and fall into harmony. It works on an evolving and unified scale: as your mind clears in increments, then too does your life clear up in increments; as your life clears, you become a more healthy and healing actuary in your world; when many people clear their lives, the world begins to clear up… suffering, war, crime, starvation, pollution, poverty, violence are cleared up incrementally, in accordance with how many people involved in those clear their minds.
One mind, one life cleared up, even yours, even mine, can radiate outward like a droplet entering the water and rippling out across the world. This mind-clearing process of mine began more than twenty years ago, through my own intense transition of life and mind. I have written the first part of my biography, about my state of life that fell apart and led me to this journey, on the About Me page at HelpMePlease.com. That part of my story belongs on that site because, during that time, I was in a severe state of crisis. The second part of my biography, where I entered a phase of clearing my mind, will be written for this website and will continue here.
Back then, looking for clarity, I could not find any singular source, be it religion, self-help books, meditation, spirituality, a teacher or guru, or any system or practice, that could open my mind to eternal truths, wisdom, quiet, a new and more authentic state of being, and even simply to the coping skills my dying life was crying out for.
During my crisis years, so many sources either were too confusing, or involved adhering rigidly to belief or behavioral systems, or weren’t clear and powerful enough, or were simply unrealistic or even delusional. Most were geared toward forming my life into some controlled shape that someone else says is right, some belief system, stopping things I didn’t want to stop, and starting things I didn’t want to start.
But I wanted to find truths that could clear my mind, and clear up all aspects of my confused, unfulfilled and unhappy life, from health to job to relationships to income. I wanted truths that were intrinsic, already within me, already here to be remembered and re-discovered, and totally free to use. I wanted these truths to be usable to me whether I was a blue-collar worker, or rich, broke, dull-witted or a spiritual master. To everyone, regardless of position and belief.
I wanted these truths to be self-evident: you read them and realize ‘I already knew that!’ I wanted to make them clear by writing them out, for myself and for you. We already have these tools within us, all of them, and we already use them to some extent. I simply strive to clarify them, so we can use them consciously, more purposefully, effectively and skillfully. If you’re just dabbling with clearing your mind, these tools will mean a little to you, will help in little ways with your everyday life. If you are suffering deeply, lost spiritually, or really grasping for a stronger inner evolution, these tools may affect you as much as air is needed by someone whose head is being held underwater.
This site will offer many mind tools to help you in becoming clearer with what’s happening in your head, and what some possible solutions may be. They are in random order, there is no progression or system to them. The tools on this site do not contain any exercises, there are no new spiritual words or concepts for you to learn.
These mind tools are already inside you, you’re already using them to some extent, and reading them will reveal that. You’ll just know them. My writing them into clear copy, and your reading them, makes them a more conscious resource to you. These tools are universal, you can apply any life situation or problem to any tool and the tools will still work. The tools help to clear your mind, clear up your business, your relationships, your finances, your happiness, your confidence, your wisdom, health, decisions, success, problems, addictions, take your pick because they apply to everything.
As you’ll read in my bio (whenever I finish it), I’ve seen many sides of life. So I can write for the many sides of your life. My writing in this site is not a ‘niche’ you can put your finger on or define narrowly. This is open to all religions, and beholden to none. It is open to all spiritual practices and genres, but caught up in none. This website is not targeted only to ‘spiritual seekers’, because I am a very meat-and-potatoes guy and no one would ever meet me and then think I’m spiritual or even ‘flaky’. By necessity much of my writing will sound ‘spiritual’, but it’s actually very grounded, everyday stuff.
These mind tools work for everyone, because they are in everyone. Knowing about them consciously makes them work even better, because you open to them more. In some way, small or large, they will help you.
WHAT EXACTLY ARE ‘MIND TOOLS’?
Simply knowing what mind tools are, and how they work, is the first and most essential step toward the clarity that will open to you through this journey. You do not actually need to read here about what they are or how they work, the tools are already being put to use within you whether you are conscious of them or not. You have already been given this step, you already intrinsically know what they are and how they work. The act of bringing them from the subconscious into conscious thought is all it takes to kick-start them into becoming a skill, something you use with purpose.
A tool is an item used to aid you in effecting a change. It can build, alter, or destroy, just as a hammer can be used to build a house, renovate it, or tear it down. Mind tools do all three at the same time. Each of the tools you read here will nudge old, ineffective ways of thought to dissolve, will free your thought processes into a clearer, more liberated entity, and will help you transition between the old shape of your thinking and the new. These tools do not tell you what to think or believe, they show you how to clarify this mind you use to think thoughts and to experience your life and all things in it.
And what is a mind tool? A mind tool is a thought that aligns other thoughts into a clearer, more usable form. It is a simple truth, a simple idea that ripples out to permeate and grab hold of the many random and loose, disjointed and confused, fuzzy and unconscious thoughts that sail daily through our minds in fractured, disjointed, repetitious and often patternless chaos. Each humble tool is small and isolated, yet once clarified it immediately sets to work in collecting those other mixed-up thoughts and groups of ideas, and brings them out into the open, aligns them into a clearer, more workable, more conscious entity.
Every one of us, to some extent, is trying to organize and clarify our thoughts, relationships, circumstances, lives. We all want to see clearly, see the truth, work out everything that confuses us, but few of us ever discover the tools that lead to this more purposeful, clarified operation of our minds. We are daily and subconsciously trying to clarify things; some of us progress to dabbling with consciously improving our mind’s clarity; some of us immerse our entire beings into the clarifying process, so that it is happening during all our activities day and night, quietly running in the background, non-invasive but ever-present for each thought, each event.
The more common and physical tools we use to help clear our minds and improve our lives are religion, self help writings, spiritual and life gurus, and exercises and systems such as meditation, creative- or positive-visualization, journaling, self-quizzes, and hundreds more techniques out there in the mind-market. Books, videos, courses and retreats are offered to us by experts, frauds, authentic experiencers and delusional crazies. It’s all out there inviting us to join, some of it even trying to threaten us if we don’t join.
While much of this material may actually help us clear our minds and evolve our lives into some change we want, every process I have seen out there involves adopting an active method. We are asked or ordered to study them, try new things, try exercises, adopt new beliefs (or at least pretend to), sometimes alter or completely leave behind things familiar to us like certain foods, sexual likes, job, lifestyle, clothes, hobbies, friends, family, old beliefs and traditions, and we often need to learn new words, whole new activities, lessons, rules and laws, histories, and systems.
For most religions, and for many mind- and self-help courses, we must also immerse ourselves in a whole lifestyle that we didn’t necessarily want, use words and beliefs we don’t agree with, all to receive those few, isolated, pure benefits we do want deeply. It seems almost impossible to find outside help for our growth, evolution, healing, and clarifying, without having all the other baggage that comes paper-clipped to it. It’s as if the soul help you really want cannot come without also having to embrace a ‘big pile of lifestyle’ that doesn’t work for you, a pile you might even feel aversion to, don’t agree with, don’t believe in, or is simply meaningless to you. Conversely, maybe you are deeply embedded in one of those lifestyles or religions and it is working well for you, even beautiful for you; then it becomes difficult to find outside help that does not clash with what you believe, does not ask you to ignore it and change to something new.
I went through a long, deep search through the above lifestyles, keeping an eye out for the right book or guru or religion or system; but none of them scratched the itch I had for a purity of tools, a purity of being, that would clarify my mind without me having to ‘buy into’ any system in the world. I needed these to be truths, something each and every person already has inside them. And as such, I knew I could find them without guidance, if they were already within me and within every human. I needed thought-tools that would be immediately recognizable by myself, and anyone who hears them, as a truth. As a good truth, a helpful truth, and a truth that transcends yet includes everything in our lives. The most pure, clean, concentrated, undiluted, no-frills tools to clear my mind and improve my life, are the only tools I would allow for myself, and the only tools I would allow myself to clarify for others. And these tools needed to be universal, not uniquely-tailored to me and my unusual lifestyle. If it didn’t work for a truck driver, an actor, the Pope, the Buddha, the president, a street person, a rich person and the destitute, and everyone in between and sideways, then it wasn’t a true mind tool.
‘Spiritual seekers’ are an easy audience, they are hungry for these kinds of tools and are openly willing to find them. But I wanted tools that would also be immediately understood and usable by a tough biker, a crusty old farm granny, a spoiled rich teenager, a quadriplegic, an imprisoned criminal, a remote tribe that has never seen civilization, a healthy religious seeker or a fanatic, a complete atheist, as well as being reachable to anyone, anywhere, who never ever wants to try a new exercise or process to ‘improve their mind’.
YOU READ IT, AND IT STARTS TO WORK.
That is the only requisite I have, now, with these mind tools, apart from the unique intent of each one. There are no exercises here, no new knowledge, it’s all something we already know. I am saying it clearly for you, but it is something you already intrinsically know and always have used. You won’t be learning new spiritual words or scientific terms. You don’t need to write anything down, and you especially do not need to study these writings or actively try to memorize any passages or ideas. You can keep all your beliefs or lack thereof, keep your present way of life, keep your money, belongings and relationships.
These tools come with no excess baggage, nothing stapled to them for you to do, change, or adopt. Beyond reading them, they are passive. If you ‘try’ to make changes to your life based on anything you read here, you’re missing my purpose behind giving you these tools. If you read a tool here and then walk away forgetting what you just read and forgetting who wrote it, then I am really getting somewhere!
Each tool is effortless. If it is true then it will pierce right to the marrow of your bones, and at the right time it will nudge your memory and ‘just start to work’. It’s always been there, so your new awareness of it will be all that is needed for it to work more efficiently and beautifully.
You just read it, and it starts to work.