LESSON 3:
Improving Sensitivity to Healthy and Unhealthy Understanding
How do we know when a person's understanding is healthy and helpful?
When a person's conscious and unconscious understanding of life is healthy and free of mistakes, they get a steady flow of fresh, accurate, helpful and clear thinking. This gives a person a very balanced perspective of life and that ensures that they behave healthily and live in a stress-free state of mind. We are designed to do this naturally and automatically.
It's impossible to know exactly what your unconscious thinking is. However, we don't need to know what it is, we just need to be aware of the state it is in - healthy or unhealthy. Feelings are the best way to assess the state of your unconscious understanding. If there is a feeling of quiet, of space, relief and peace, your unconscious understanding is healthy. If you feel serious, angry, insecure, anxious, overwhelmed, etc, its unhealthy.
When we are healthy, we know that 100% of our thought content is never fundamentally real - its just experiences that the brain creates that come and go. Here, we appreciate the fact that the brain doesn't create anything real that we can hold or put in a bucket. So, we see that we truly know nothing.
When this is recognised as fact, you will feel like yourself again. Seeing this brings a strong sense of being or presence. For me, it just feels like being a little kid again and all my muscles relax. I get beautiful feelings throughout my body. You are a human being and here you have become aware of the being part.
This experience signals that your perspectives on life are accurate and clear. Here, you have no beliefs about yourself or life that are taking all of your attention. When we stop paying attention to all the content that our brain creates, we start to notice a deep silence that is always there in our world. Once your understanding is quiet enough for this to be sensed, you are in a very healthy state of mind.
To experience this is a very natural thing. You cannot force it to happen. All we need to do is get interested in what is not solid, fixed, true and real in life. As we truly appreciate that none of our reality is any of these things, we get an immediate sense of relief and we feel whole and alive again. We have now returned to our natural state of reality.
In this state of mind, you can always trust yourself. You'll find that you feel creative and confident in dealing with any situation. You'll experience excellent common sense and natural intuition.
In this state of mind, you also experience complete:
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Fulfilment
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Love
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Comfort
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Happiness
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Freedom
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Satisfaction
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Connection
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Creativity and innovative thinking
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A sense of not knowing anything
You have a sense of being nourished and renewed - this is experience is unlimited. However, don't look to try and stay in this state all the time. Our experience of the world will always shift and change - trying to hold on to one particular feeling or experience is inherently stressful and will very quickly disturb your sense of peace.
How can we tell if our understanding is harmful?
When a person's sense of reality contains a sense of seriousness, negativity, anger, insecurity, anxiety and stress, it means that their understanding of life contains threat and distortion. This will lead to negative behaviours and lots of problems in their life.
99% of the time there is no immediate threat in front of us. However, if you check to see if a person's stress-response (their fight or flight response) is activated, it will be. For most people, their stress-response is over-activated most of their day but they are so used to doing this that they cannot tell what is happening.
The problem is that the brain constantly creates conscious and unconscious understanding about life. Past expereinces lead to us creating beliefs about ourselves, others and the world. These thoughts are not fundamentally true, but it's easy to innocently and unknowingly believe them.
When these beliefs become part of our understanding in life, they become real to us. Many of these beliefs are negative and they lead to us then living in a world that is full of threatening, scary beliefs.
To get our understanding back to its healthy state of being belief-free, we have to stop consciously and unconsciously taking some of our thinking as solid, fixed, true and real. Once this occurs, our stress-response will settle and we'll regain our natural state of wellbeing.
For instance, a person might unknowingly believe that negative judgement from others could hurt them. This will mean that they will believe that other people can cause huge psychological harm to them through judging them negatively - this will make other people a significant threat. As a result, this person will become very guarded around people and struggle to make intimate, healthy relationships. Their unhealthy understanding will create a near-constant sense of discomfort and stress for them as they will be permanently concerned about the next social interaction.
Yet, if this mistake is seen clearly, we notice that suffering doesn't come from other people's judgements, it comes from the beliefs that we make about their behaviour. Catching this invisible misguided belief undermines the story that unhealthy understanding generates about the situation. If you see that it is impossible for other people's negative judgement to push feelings into you or control your thoughts, you realise that it's not a real threat, it's a believed psychological one. These cannot go in a bucket and don't ever really exist. It's just a lie that your unhealthy understanding created - probably the result of a mistake that you made when you were a toddler.
It's the same when we look at the idea of being stupid or unlovable. These are very threatening things if they are believed to be true. However, when viewed clearly, we appreciate that they are just thoughts and don't ever really exist.
Over time a person starts to become aware of all the unconscious misunderstandings that have ben created over their life. This destroys the belief in ALL psychological threats, which means that your reality becomes a very pleasant place to experience.
In this state of mind, you also experience:
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Insecurity
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Confusion
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Anxiety
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Anger and frustration
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Guilt and shame
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Loneliness
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Hopelessness
Here, we don't have a clear perspective or common sense, so we don't have the abilities that we need to thrive in situations in life.
KEY CONCEPT SUMMARY:
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It is easy to tell whether we have a clear, healthy understanding in our reality or a distorted, unhealthy one by looking at how we feel and what we are experiencing - we will only experience peace and wellbeing when our understanding is clear and free of unconscious distortion
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It is extremely likely that we will recognise that our thought-made understanding of life is unhealthy when we check - this signals that thinking is taken to be solid, fixed, true and real.
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If we can appreciate that all experiences are made of thought and so can never be solid, fixed, true and real, we undermine the belief in our thought-based version of the world and come back to the fact that we truly know nothing in life