What prevents us from wanting to change?

What prevents us from wanting to change? What prevents us from moving out of suffering? Inwardly we would like to get away from suffering, but we are tied and bogged down because of how we have been conditioned. Our mind is nothing more than a product of conditioning.

What we do through meditational practices, is to re-model the mind, to re-pattern the mind because man is a creature of habit.  Man is a creature of habit and this habit is not necessarily the mode of thinking positively.

A negative thought is worse than a rabbit—it just breeds and breeds and breeds. It duplicates itself, triplicates itself, quadruplicates itself, and it does it thousands of times throughout the day.

There are religions that teach that we should believe, believe, believe. They are not wrong. It is not wrong for a child in Grade 1 to be given Grade 1 lessons. Although we know the time will come when the Grade 1 child will reach Grade 12, where there are different lessons to be learned, the Grade 1 lessons are a necessary beginning.

Belief stems from the mind. That is why scriptures and most religions start us off by saying, “Believe”—believe in something above us which is abstract and cannot be proven by the mind. The creator of belief is the mind.