The quiet art of attention

I agree with some of what you say, although I think it idealizes the past more than it deserves. My mother fled small town America exactly because it was intrusive and allowed very little divergence from small-town values. The embrace and care came with a price tag.

Being a human has always been hard. Peasants struggled with material scarcity, a system that was brutally unfair, and very constraining social expectations.

And I have suffered from depression, particularly post-divorce. I know what it is like. Mindfulness won't eliminate that, but it does help, and it's far more than a band-aid. Mindfulness is, in many ways, clarifying your thoughts... realizing that you have have a tape loop repeating things that don't seem useful or related to the circumstance. Seeing that your emotional weather comes and goes. We don't escape the weather, but to be aware of it allows us to better account for it in our thinking.

Overall, as human beings in 2024, we are advanced technologically, but not spiritually (yet).

At the basis of our being is the most etheral and fundamental of our connections to the multidimensional universe, which we are a part of, ofc. That pair are our free will and our mind. We use our mind to control our free will, which we use to choose what we do with our physical body.

What you have noticed is that our inner world is always experiencing external thought impulses that seek to direct our attention this way and that; for most of us, we merely let it lead us as it suggests.

Note that what I describe here is born of my Sufi tradition's teaching, but can also be found in a much different sense in Carlos Castaneda's very bizarre and dubious books, which I read many times in my younger years, and have yet to validate as true, but have found to contain many valuable lessons (useful allegory or strange reality? idk which yet).

Regardless, we are multidimensional creatures in a multidimensional universe, that contains six onion layers of differing vibrational planes, one of which our physical bodies inhabit, and another our energy bodies inhabit (our souls). Another pair contains sources of thoughts/feelings that are suggested to our mind as courses of action. Our job as the only moral beings of our plane is to ascertain their positivity/negativity and act according to loving positivity.

One negative example of our reality is the child's urge to steal a candy bar, but we can see a more deleterious example in cultures that have adoped falsehoods as a foundation of belief (they are particularly dangerous here in America now). Note that we are free to choose to believe in anything whatsoever, no matter how untrue or ridiculous. It takes a lifetime of careful consideration to hone one's ability to know truth from falsehood, which is part thoughtfulness and part feeling. One cannont develop that ability without committing oneself to a life of compassion. (Finland is directly teaching its children about misinformation; good job, Fins!)

As to the physical multidimensionalness of the universe, 5/6th of the universe is dark matter, as the matter in the other layers of the onion do not directly interact with ours but yet (somehow -- I don't know the details yet) still affects the combined gravity (as evidenced by our measurements of galactic inertia). Dark matter is undetectable in our plane because we only have our plane's members to do the detection, but high-energy physics experiments can cause fleeting cross-over between the planes (I do not understand the details) since de Broglie (IIRC).

It's a huge topic, so I'll stop here, but my contact info is in my bio, and let me wrap with saying that we are not forced to become better or worse in terms of our contribution to the well-being of our fellow human beings and the Earth, itself, but a progression towards becoming utterly compassionate bearers of truth is the entire puspose of the "spiritual path", regardless of which flavor. Do note, please, that the liars of the world lose their ability to discern the truth, as a result of their abandoning compassionate service to humanity, which requires learning and living the truth of compassionate existence through choice.

You can also find a horrific example of what I describe here in the life of the Golden State Killer's, who describes how his being was invaded by an external entity that compelled him to do the awful things he did. The negative impulses we experience have the purpose of making creating unhappiness via the ramifications of our choices, both for ourselves and those around us. If you consider this carefully, you will begin to understand why the world is so polluted, is dangerously heating, and is filled with oppressors and the misery they inflict. It is our widespread ignorance of the truth of our beings that has left us mostly at the mercy of the selfish impulse-stream, instead of the drive to compassionately serve the happiness of others. The important fact is that we can each choose compassion as the basis for our choices, and that there are ways to purify our moral compass to effect a more perfect integration with the greater good.

Note that this is also the only path to personal peace and happiness, because karma is a fundamental law with our human-only moral plane. It is human-only because only we make moral choices in this physical plane. And all our choices affect all other human beings, to some level, and billions of us sure do add up.

I’ve watched my choices for about a decade now and have not been able to find anything like independent choice.

Everything I observe is dependent on something else (genetics, conditioning, environment, external or internal event), or a manifestation of a preference, currently active desire, emotion, thought or need.

Once I noticed that these are all spontaneous or predetermined I can no longer see the concept of “free will” as anything but an unpacked box containing a bunch of phenomena.

Another pointer of Advaita is that our brains tend to hold a view of a free will universe, or a pre-determined universe - which is a limit of the mind not the universe itself :)