Sea Within the Mind, Harmony Beyond the Thought

How do you react to criticism?

It used to be my soft spot.

Nature and nurture combined their forces and shaped me toward constant conflict avoidance. So I found the solution in positioning myself on neutral ground, but my inner truth knew I couldn’t stand to be told I was wrong.

I call that aggressively neutral.

That’s why, at the time, Socrates’ famous saying kept appearing blank to me.

“I know that I know nothing.”

In time, my operational force shifted, and I learned not to accept any idea blindly, not even my own.

That was when one of my greatest learnings appeared:

No idea is inherently better than any other.

I realised that in a vast universe where things remain unknown far beyond our awareness, for one to think they know it all is a giant ignorance.

If it weren’t for shared dialogues and discussions, philosophy would have been long gone with the first man who ever dared to ask questions.

It didn’t begin as a monument but as a ripple.

Without challenge, ideas cannot outgrow what is no longer relevant.

Yet grace remains crucial, and mutual respect should always be invited when there is a discussion.

Even so, acceptance comes from within, and the same treatment should appear when facing oneself in the mirror.

I gracefully accepted other’s criticism, but kept being cruel when it came to my mind, blaming it as restless, pointing to it as the source of all my problems, separating it from its essence.

Wasn’t it the same force that shaped my reasoning I was so proud of?

I never stopped to ask that question, keeping tenderness and compassion away from this equation.

One day, I realised my dreamer side — the very part I call my favourite — was a creation of my mind, serving as the bridge between intellect and spirit. Transcending its own structure, a means of touching what reason alone cannot reach, becoming a living force of creation.

Some describe it as “memory in motion.” Aristotle called it “movement of thought.” Goethe saw it as “spirit in form.” Locke called it “ideas recombined,” and my favourite, “consciousness unbound,” was Kant’s.

I couldn’t help but question my other thinking patterns.

Then it became clearer, the same force disguised itself as the inner storms I struggle to calm. The more I blamed it for my anxieties, overthinking, and doubt, the more I drifted from understanding the mind’s protection. Slowly, my intrusive thoughts and rumination began to appear as my unmet needs and unresolved fears.

By reinterpreting loss through meaning, the mind transforms suffering into wisdom. When pain leaves silence, it gets registered, and one searches for coherence. Unresolved emotions turns into thoughts, and it begins to extract meaning from loss.

Insight is distilled from experience, transforming suffering into wisdom and integrating pain. Once acceptance arrives, the suffering is reframed through perspective which becomes what we call, self-understanding.

In time, the truth that brought my deepest sufferings, became the very thing what I call freedom: I cannot change what has already happened.

That realisation shifted the whole course of my inner war, leaving me with the decision to wave the white flag toward the enemy and ask permission to join forces.

When I read the “The Power of Now” by Echarft Tolle, the learnings became very clear.

Fighting back invited forcefulness, an act that carried the same relentlessness as Don Quixote fighting windmills.

When I declared myself not a thinker but a watching thinker, I stopped identifying with the noise and left space for peace to enter.

I realised that a thought was just a thought and nothing further. Its existence did not define my essence. Taking a step back gave it a space to float like tides, rising with storms, teaching that stillness is not found by stopping the waves but by trusting their return.

Detachment changed the scenery. I was no longer a prisoner but instead a passenger.

“The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realise that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realise that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.” — Eckhart Tolle

Resistance only keeps freedom drifting further.

The storms were never against me but part of the same sea.

Understanding the rhythm beneath chaos is to recognise without reacting.

What I once tried to quiet was the very thing guiding me home.

Freedom is not silence of the mind, but harmony that awakens when we stop trying to control.

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