Okay me, listen up:
You may get impatient with me when I suggest you question the truth of your stressful thoughts.
You may think it’s all fine and good that I believe no stressful thought is ever true, but that it doesn’t help you right now in the real world. You have a problem and you need solutions. Now. I understand. I have no solutions for you. I only have solutions for me. But my solutions for me might open something for you. Test them against your own wisdom. That’s how I found mine.
In my experience, there is no solution in the “real world.” There’s no way to make anything happen in that world because there is no way to make anything happen outside my own mind.
The only way I know to solve a problem is to discover that it isn’t a problem. It sounds crazy, like a denial of reality, like an annoying refusal to see what’s plain as day: that there are objective problems in the world.
But my experience is that there are no objective problems in the world.
What I think of as objective reality is in fact SUBJECTIVE reality. Everything I’m aware of filters through, and is interpreted by, my mind. Everything. That means “awareness” of the world is an interpretation of the world. Whose interpretation? Mine (...for me. ...Yours, for you). Which means every problem is a subjective problem. Which means there are no “real” problems (as in “real” for everybody: objective, fixed, unchanging - as real as they may seem to me in this moment).
The problem exists only in the mind. If that’s true, which is my experience, then that’s the only place to effectively address it. I’ve found that this is the key to unlocking a lasting sense of peace for myself.
Before coming to this understanding (and whenever I forget it), every problem I have continues to crop up again and again like an eternal whack-a-mole. It does not stop. ...until the “problem” is exposed as a lie, as a speck of dust on the lens of my own thinking that I can clear out if I want to.
If I say, “I don’t want to hear philosophy about how no stressful thoughts are true, I want solutions to a problem,” I’m saying I want to solve the problem while keeping it a problem. It can never happen. The only way to be free of a problem is to...be free of it.
If I want my hand to stop being scalded by boiling water, I can kick and scream, I can yell about the temperature, I can accuse those in positions of authority of being idiots or monsters, I can rail about justice and right and wrong, I can try to manipulate people’s behavior to my benefit using a million different tactics, I can curse God, the universe, existence...
...or I can do one simple thing with myself: pull my hand out of the damned pot.
If someone or something is holding it there, then I can get my hand out of the “pot” of stressful thinking: I can question ideas like, “My hand is burning up!” or, “I can’t get free!” or, “I need my hand.”
If I’m attached to my stressful thoughts, if I guard them as “reality,” if I keep them close and present in my mind in order to protect myself from future harm, I am choosing to boil in the pot. I can turn to all those clever approaches and they won’t do a thing to help me or those I’m determined to protect.
In my experience, when the “water” of my thinking gets hot enough, the only thing left to do is leave the “pot” of stressful thinking. This is a good development presenting an opportunity for genuine peace, but this is also where suicidal thinking comes from. Suicidal thinking is an intermediate step: a clear desire to escape the suffering of the pot - just before I realize I can get out of it alive. I don’t need to throw away my life to be free from suffering, though I completely understand believing it’s the only way. I thought it was the only way once (and sometimes return to that misunderstanding). It’s not. There are other - WAY better - ways out.
Though there have occasionally been moments I thought death was the only way out, I have never actually seen killing myself as an option (gratefully - I can’t take credit for it). So gradually - very gradually - I have become open to other ways. That openness, born of the suffering I no longer wanted, allowed me to discover, with the help of others, that it is possible to just climb out of the pot of stressful thinking.
It’s not even hard ...when I’m ready to question what I’m believing. The only thing that makes it hard is wanting to keep my stressful thoughts.
It’s as simple as getting quiet and honestly questioning my stressful thoughts for the love of TRUTH. Sometimes it takes a guide, if only to help me sit in the questions, but if I can sit in them honestly, the innate wisdom that rises within me (no person has more or less wisdom than another) will always take care of the rest and deliver me to peace.
For most people, the water never gets hot enough to require an escape from the pot. And good for them. They’re okay.
But I truly believe that any person who honestly wants to be free of suffering can discover, through their OWN WISDOM, that suffering is nothing more than a signal that they’re believing something they can never confirm is true. And with work and attention, they can live, from that moment on, in peace.
If that idea angers you, I get it. And if you feel that way you must be right.
Because the only person I can really confirm that about is the one who believes it.