Other People Are Constantly Trying to Seize Control of Your Mind…

By Brian Cates

The above meme is teaching a valuable lesson about life, which is why I regularly repost it on my social media.

It is a key moment in the life of someone seeking wisdom when he or she realizes that the only thing they have total and complete control over in this life is…themselves.

Look carefully at the world around you and make this important realization:

In this life, you will always be surrounded by others who want to control and manipulate you for their own ends.

Vast amounts of time, energy, and resources are spent by many on this planet trying to get OTHER PEOPLE TO DO WHAT THEY WANT THEM TO.

For some people, their entire lives revolve around this.

They put real effort into learning crafty, manipulative tricks that provoke emotional responses in others to get targets they have selected to react how they want to see them react.

Bruce Lee was a damn good martial artist because he recognized very early in his study of Kung Fu and in his later development of Jeet Kune Do that the purpose of martial arts ISN’T to get control of or dominate OTHER PEOPLE.

True martial arts are about the exact opposite of that:

The purpose of training oneself both physically and mentally is to gain ABSOLUTE CONTROL OF YOURSELF. The kind of full self-control where nobody else can mentally or physically unbalance you and seize control of you.

One thing I learned from 8 years of training in Aikido is that life is FULL of people trying to assert control over you, trying to manipulate you, and get you to do what they want you to do.

You will always be a slave to someone else’s control until you learn to master yourself.

This present world is full of master manipulators who are constantly trying to stir you up, to move you into doing what they desire to see you do.

The first step in mastering yourself mentally is learning to reject each and every attempt by others to manipulate you.

You have to recognize when another person, through their words, actions, or both, is trying to put you in a state where they can ‘guide’ you into either saying or doing what they demand of you.

If you are in full and total control of yourself, you will be able to spot and reject master manipulators’ attempts to use words and even physical actions to ‘unbalance’ you, unsettle you, and make you angry, despondent, or fearful.

A chief sign that you are learning to do this will be your successful rejection of the usual emotional clickbait headlines and narratives that are launched at you weekly in mass and social media.

I was 33 years old when I started figuring this out. I’m now 60. The earlier in life you learn this and begin putting it into practice, the more powerful you will be.

Many regrettable life decisions and irrevocable actions have been committed by otherwise good people while they were in an unstable emotional state after someone else had successfully manipulated them.

Manipulators cause real harm to others by their words and their actions. Never underestimate how far some will be willing to go to get others to do what they want. Many master manipulators do not care what happens to the people they harm with their manipulations; they are totally focused on getting what they want, and that is all they care about.

There is real value in learning to make yourself ‘manipulation-proof.’

In this Great Awakening currently underway, those trying to stop it as they furiously promote The Great Reset are constantly resorting to manipulative lies crafted to provoke emotional responses from those not trained to resist such tactics.

Every single day, these manipulative liars are carefully and deliberately crafting stories they rush into print and onto the internet to try to trick you, enrage you, stir you up, and hopefully push you into rash actions.

One of the best examples demonstrating what I’m talking about here appears in the Akira Kurosawa film “Sanjuro”.

Here is a very perceptive commentator discussing how a group of young samurai trying to fight government corruption are easily manipulated into rash emotional action by the local superintendent, and only the intervention of a wise older samurai saves them from being arrested and executed as criminals.

The film “Sanjuro” can be watched in its entirety here at this link.

Every day, in many ways, both in real life and in the digital space where we spend more and more of our time in the modern age, other people seek to draw you in and guide you and control your thoughts.

It is of paramount importance that you learn to guard your mind.

Thus endeth today’s lesson. 🤗