You should put good things in your brain

This started out as a shorter post, but hopefully the message remains simple. For the first time in my life since infancy I find myself without obligations to any institution of learning or wage earning. I have almost complete control over what goes into and out of my brain, and I'm trying to be more conscientious of what I put in it in particular. So far, it's going medicore (I am trying to get better!), but it's blown my mind how little I've thought about this in the past.

If you want it, you can actually take near complete control over what goes into and out of your cranium. You can be personally responsible for it, and you can make your head healthier. If your mind is filled with crap thoughts and largely empty experiences, it's because that's all you are putting in there.

There are probably three brain-gears you can shift into as you move through your environment:

(1) Passive. Akin to eating the cookie someone else baked and handed to you, it's the easiest level of intake. When you let (note the passive verb) information, emotions, and experiences into your head at this level a very specific group of people are the only ones taking the time to feed it to you. Really meditate on this - who would bother forming ideas and then working their asses off to find and deliver them to a passive shlup? What is their motivation?

I have answers to this but I'd rather you think about it and come up with an answer yourself.

Now how scary are those possibilities. And they might not even be possibilities, it might be happening to your brain. Right now.

(2) Dependent Active. This is the type of intake that requires our active participation, but not full responsibility for the direction taken. You are entrusting the reigns of your head to another who will hopefully guide it well, and then you bust your hump to get the most out of the journey. Your basic classroom setting with a syllabus fits here, so does a workplace. Sure, you are putting in your own sweat, and you might even be thinking critically about the tasks in front of you. A lot of value can come from this situation, especially if the person you've entrusted your brain's direction to (the teacher or boss) is wiser than you and focuses on things of value. But it is still incredibly difficult to have an autonymous brain in this situation. The teacher or boss still chooses what is important to think about, and what is not by omission.

(3) Autonymous Active. Here you take complete responsibility for and exercise near complete control over what you feed your mind. You have to determine what knowledge is important, and how you go about getting it. You are completely free to read, watch, and otherwise spend time with what you desire and value. You must also face the dull terror of this absolute responsibility and scrap together decent brain food out of the immense and anarchic sea of emotion, information, and experience that confronts you. Conversely, if your mind gets fat and lazy on reality TV, it's your own damned fault. Now what a tragedy it is to voluntarily give control of perhaps your most precious asset over to the small and disturbing group of people from #1 who would want it. Dictators, exploiters, profiteers, megalomaniacs...

As a human rights/social justice activist I spend plenty of time worried about people who don't have the freedom to control their speech, religion, conditions of survival, and other aspects of their economic, social and cultural environment. We call these things violations of human rights or human dignities. But perhaps the most fundamental is control over our own brains. That so many people give up this fundamental freedom voluntarily, and refuse to take any significant measure of responsibility for it, is profoundly disturbing and saddening.

[I do realize that one must be in a certain economic/social/political position to liberate their brain and take responsibility for everything going into it. But if a free mind is anything like a human right, it is co-dependant and interlinked with other rights. So the more you free your head, the more you can work for the realization of other rights, the more you can free your head, and so on...]

This is as much a pep-talk for myself as for anyone reading. So take as much control of your mind as you possibly can right this instant, and don't let go.