Most people basically, deep down from the realm of their subconscious beliefs see life as a battle. In some way, a battle between good and evil. And therefore, almost all approaches that try to help people toward their wellbeing from psychotherapy to new age techniques also came out of that basic fundamentally false dualistic worldview. In this worldview, there is a contrasting idea of us on one side and our enemies on the other side, who in this case are all kinds of our own suffering or unpleasant feelings, from mild discontent to deep psychological pain.
Until we insightfully understand the role of thought in creation of our life experience, we tend to see our unpleasant states or what we think their causes are as something real, something that exists prior to our perception of it.
Then it makes sense to change “the real thing” – to do all kinds of attempts in order to feel better, from vigorously changing life partners to spending hours every day “working on ourselves”. We are trying to chase off the (seemingly real) enemy.
Almost all approaches today are trying to deal with the imaginary “enemy”, trying to correct, solve or change our unpleasant states or whatever is considered to cause them, often making the illusion of the problem seem even more real. Those are application based approaches. You have to do something in order to change something.
A real change doesn’t come from doing, but through deeper understanding of what already is and always will be the case, by just seeing more truth.
Just imagine how people were eager to fly before the discovery of the laws of aerodynamics. And how many application approaches were tried and failed. Until the day of discovery of these laws, these basic principles that were present the whole time. Understanding of them was absolutely necessary for the aviation industry to emerge and enable man to fulfill his age old dream.
It’s the same with our wellbeing. That discovery has already happened.
A revolution of understanding puts an entirely different approach on the table. It’s a shift towards seeing that all we ever perceive is our thoughts, that thought is what has been troubling us the whole time, nothing else. And thought, however much it seems so, is not real. It just seems real, like any other illusion, just as a lake in the middle of the desert.
The key to our wellbeing in all its aspects is insightful understanding of how it all works, of how thoughts make an illusion seem real. When you get this insight and see that which is troubling you for what it really is, the trouble just drops off momentarily, it disappears in a cloud of smoke.
