Usually we do not notice exactly how life changes its qualities, even when it happens literally before our eyes. Just now everything was fine, and suddenly this “everything” deteriorated … And after another half hour it blossomed and shone again. And the confidence in each new perception is almost one hundred percent, as if life really changes so dramatically, and every time seriously and for a long time. It did well - and the future was lit up with rays of success for decades to come. Five minutes later, the mood soured - and the picture turned upside down - the future suddenly became a tragic road into darkness. The whole comic of the situation is how selflessly we buy into these dreams of the mind, taking the shaky illusion of another conviction for the real state of affairs stretched out for years to come. At the same time, we stubbornly refuse to notice our own egregious inconsistency. Well, reality cannot hourly change its plans for decades to come! This is not life so capriciously changeable, but our perception. All problems and joys are in the head.
Problems
Do you want to improve your quality of life? You can forever chase external horizons until attention is directed to the real problem - the illusions to which we are led, each time mistaking them for an indestructible reality. This realism of thoughts is their most insidious feature. In a bad mood, a person sees no reason to work with his perception, because the witchcraft power of his state paints for him the illusion of a problematic reality in the most intense living sensations. That is, when life seems like shitty, it does not come to mind that the whole point is in personal mental projections, because these projections themselves masterly convince of the existence of some real problems.
Beliefs are such thought bubbles. Their main property is to convince us of the reality that these bubbles paint with the help of their rainbow radiance. A belief emerges, and consciousness immediately plunges into the virtual world, convincingly believing in its reality.
Of course there are physical events. For example, if a person falls into a puddle, in order to return to a comfortable state, you need to get up, go to the shower and change clothes. And such an event becomes a problem when a mental slip begins, blocking direct actions to improve its situation. On this topic, a popular meme is circulating on the network about the motivation of a person who wants to pee, but begins to make excuses - they say he cannot afford it, because he is busy, or too tired, lost hope, stopped due to depression, or his someone distracted.
There are also events that in the current conditions are really unrealistic to change, and you just have to put up with them. A wicked witch cannot become good-natured and saint on the same day, a fool - an intelligent one, a private - a general, an old - young. Likewise, when there is no appropriate motivation, it is impossible to learn something, build relationships with someone, take care of health, get rich. And this is completely normal.
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But we are used to thinking that we have to be hardworking, friendly, capable, harmonious - just because we have to. And who cannot - he is guilty and should be ashamed. As if there are some real life laws, based on which a person is forbidden to put up with himself, to accept himself and his life - as it is. Therefore, in our society, it is customary to break oneself, bending into an ideal pose, or to suffer from remorse and humiliation.
The Dalai Lama is credited with a cool phrase:
And that's all.
In this reality, there is no one worthy cause for concern.
You can and want to do something - do it. If you can't or don't want to - live on.
Beliefs
So it turns out that the true problems are not in events, but exclusively in experiences. But no matter how much you talk about the uselessness of worries, the mind does not become meditative from such exhortations, because beliefs continue to convince, and the body chases ghostly horizons all its life, in attempts to somehow establish and equip …
Beliefs are all the same mental projections. Their difference from the general stream of thinking is that it is these thoughts that we obediently take at face value without any doubt, as if some kind of solid support of life itself.
If a person is convinced that happiness lies in a huge amount of money, he will never be happy for more than five minutes. Too quickly, the new standard of living becomes normal and mundane, ceasing to deliver the expected eternal high. And most importantly, at the same time, the very initial conviction, due to which all this fuss began, does not go anywhere, and everything also insidiously influences and convinces that there is no happiness in the usual everyday life, because it is in something like that, that this everyday life is superior.
So it turns out with each new upgrade of life - everything is the same, only ten times more expensive. When persuasion is driven over and over again to newer and more luxurious conditions, the pursuit never stops. Such goals are a hunt for the eternal "tomorrow", which by its nature cannot be here and now.
When a person is convinced that nobody needs him, two attitudes work at once. First, you can be happy only when someone needs you. Second, if you are not needed, then you are some kind of low-quality, and you should be ashamed of your presence in this reality. With this belief, "happiness" is constantly changing places with anxiety and depression. Getting close to significant people brings a thrill, any threat of distance - suffering.
If a person is convinced that there is nothing to love him for, life itself will be perceived as something hostile, strict and problematic. And no matter how much you achieve, and no matter how much the public appreciates you, any praise will be perceived as something absurdly false, and criticism - as a well-deserved punishment.
If a person is convinced that his job must be done flawlessly, he becomes a perfectionist - a hostage to perfection. On the one hand, such a belief can lead to impressive results, on the other, it is fraught with neurotic self-flagellation for mistakes, and sometimes even blocks any undertakings so as not to feel the humiliating awareness of one's own imperfection.
A person may be mistakenly convinced of his low value, unattractiveness, worthlessness, inadequacy, in some kind of external threat, in fatal punishments for minor mistakes, in the prohibition on the manifestation of his thoughts and feelings, the selfishness of others, in the need for total self-control, in that, that people have obligations to him.
There can be any number of such mental bubbles. Sometimes, in the mind of one person, they are intertwined in such combinations that life itself begins to seem like a restlessly gloomy depressing hopeless labyrinth.
Pictures on the screen
All our problems are such understandings. Here, the person understood that everything is “bad”, and he immediately becomes bad. The energy of projection, which I believed in as a reality, instantly charges the space of consciousness with the appropriate mood.
Projections are a "witchcraft" force that can inspire anything, and even in the consciousness of a completely adequate person, some absurd nonsense can become a holy conviction. The more we believe in our projections, the more powerful their impact on life.
Each person is such a potential of projections. Any event prompts our psyche to unfold in a certain direction. It is in our power to accept this self-disclosure at face value, or to begin to doubt at least those beliefs that obviously interfere with life.
Sometimes, in order for a problem to stop bothering, it is enough to look at it and somehow voice it for yourself. At the same time, something vaguely negative becomes clear, and stops frightening, or completely dissolves in the understanding that there is no problem at all.
In addition, the concretization of the “problem” allows one to separate from it and look at what is happening from the outside. It happens literally. The consciousness has just been captured by the projection and identified with the dream that the projection conjured up, and immediately this veil either falls or shrinks to a tiny idea in relation to which concrete actions are applicable.
Likewise, when you buy into positive thinking, you are charged with a good mood. But my outside observations show that all sorts of visualizations and affirmations cannot give a lasting effect, because they are incommensurably weaker than deep-rooted beliefs.
No matter how a person hypnotizes himself, deep projections will prevail over superficial ones, and all positive attitudes dissolve with such an unpleasant aftertaste, as if the positive side of life is deception, and the negative is truth. This view can become another false negative belief. Reality itself destroys everything that is false, so initially it is worth relying on the truth. And negative and positive distortions are unproductive.
Fortunately, almost all bad beliefs about life are illusory through and through. All the most terrible understandings about oneself and one's life, the whole weight of samsara are in thoughts. Apparently, even physical pain without thoughts does not cause suffering, because there is no one to suffer in this situation. All problems are from the mind, they are our little fantasies.
It is not for nothing that Castaneda has one of the main practices - stopping the internal dialogue. And Eastern teachings promote meditation, because it is thanks to this practice that one can escape from the unrelenting sleep in which we enthusiastically savor the melodramatic dreams of the mind. Modern psychology is quite successfully digging in the same direction - in particular, cognitive psychotherapists work specifically with beliefs.
Dreams of reason
A bad mood is a negative self-hypnosis that, in its advanced stage, leads to depression. The immune experience of depressive states is helpful when you begin to pay conscious attention to your automatic responses. In this sense, one sinks into depression out of inexperience, when the skill has not yet been developed to catch one's own negative projections by the tail.
At first, such trapping begins at an advanced stage - when the negative state has already completely captured. At the next stage, the projections still manage to create their own haze, but a pre-set psychic "alarm clock" goes off reminding about the insidious nature of projections. At an advanced stage, thoughts do not capture, but calmly sweep, without developing to the level of illusory dramas. This, of course, is a highly simplified view of the process. In practice, there are a lot of nuances here.
We hypnotize ourselves and drive ourselves into such a framework when happiness begins to depend on conditions. The belief that happiness cannot be just like that, but is a consequence of having something is the cause of all possible painful addictions.
Life is such a fun game. But as soon as bets arise in this game, problems come. The stronger the belief that happiness is a consequence of the possession of a certain income, a set of things, someone's society, the more strongly such happiness is mixed with the fear of losing all these conditions.
Believing that happiness must be earned is an erroneous belief that plunges cause and effect into the karmic millstones. No matter how heavy karma may seem, it is just a set of beliefs, which in turn attract emotions and moods.
In other words, the backbone of all this dual samsaric colossus, in which we are so enthusiastically bogged down, is an illusion - just a shaky, barely perceptible thought without any real reason. But by the strength of our belief in the realism of thought, it is perceived as true reality.
It's helpful to be able to question your beliefs. Sincerely. We don't know what life is. No one knows. It is useful to be able to understand and accept this fact, and not to pretend that you are tired of the world. There is no weariness from life; it arises only from hackneyed illusions.
Psychological counseling, ideally, is based precisely on catching such illusions that distort pure perception, and checking all these glitches for realism. A lot has been said about projections on progressman.ru, but the deeper I dig this topic, the more I am convinced of how comprehensively it permeates our entire life.
Igor Satorin