A Conversation About Your Mind
My name is Jonah and let’s have a conversation.
Let me challenge your individual instinct. I want to talk to you, yes you! I want to ask you some questions. Please ride along with me, let’s have a conversation.
Have you felt dangerous before? Like you were going to do the unthinkable if you were not disarmed? Have you felt like everyone around you was a potential enemy and you have to be armed with whatever you could find? Have you felt like even the items you were armed with were incapable of providing the right physical security? Have you felt betrayed by your guts, your belief? Have you felt like the walls in your room could give in to cracks and have you exposed to uncertainties? Have you felt scorned and abandoned before? Like no one remembered you existed for a cause and you just lived a dead life? Have you felt like you have been misjudged and as such, you couldn’t find reasons to live among peers?
If yes, then you are being hunted by the fears of your shadows, of nothingness!
My name is Jonah and let’s have a conversation.
Let me go further to add more questions, just so I can open up some other parts of the discussion. My intention is to make a point about how you have wronged yourself and others. Please ride along with me, let’s have a conversation.
Have you perceived some people as being unnecessarily stubborn? Like the cage housing their emotions was built of stones, as cold as the arctic tundra, as numb as a bladed limb – bereft of life? Have you assumed that their desperation and dead end had festered for too long, and was now boiling like a blister, left too long in the sun, burning like the fires of hell? More like their hearts were cloaked with wrappers of thorns? Have you judged some people based on the language they speak or based on the food they eat or based on their general appearance? Have you seen them at some point, as being uninspiring because of their cultural orientation? Have you labelled people of other religions as being unbelievers and hence condemned to ruin? Have you personally generalized a common trait and formed a stigma for people with such trait?
If yes, then you are being hunted by the fears of the unknown, of emptiness!
My name is Jonah and let’s have a conversation.
Let me stop the questions. Now you understand that at some point, you have wronged yourself and others because of the fears of your shadow and the fears of uncertainties, of what you don’t know and you need to know. These fears are self-made and are induced by your experience and and what you feed into your mind. Your mind acts as the work environment where various signals interplay to show your disposition as a person.
So to conquer these fears, what you need to do is to filter what you feed your mind with. Filtering what you feed your mind with means you need to analyze the narratives that goes into your mind. If you can do this, it means you are enhancing your integrative complexity which measures the analytical strength of your mind. To identify extreme or violent or dangerous narratives, this is what you need to do!
As a young person, this is one responsibility you owe yourself, to educate yourself on what to do with the narratives you have and how to go about it. Educate your mind, educate your being and educate your disposition. And afterwards, help in educating others and open their mind to possibilities. This is one of the roles you can play as a young person in countering violent extremism.
My name is Jonah, and thanks for the conversation!
Jonah Obajeun, Extremely Together
