This is a worthy review of human perception and orders one's approach to living. It is fair to say that all can reach similar positions over enough time and with enough experience. It is better though to have a list such as this acting as a road map to guide one's thinking and general introspection.
It is one thing to study theory, but quite another to experience theory.
Thus if any of this gives you pause, set it aside but make sure you soon revisit it to understand what you are missing. .
9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down
Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for
making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant
improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major
breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely
rocked my world and redefined reality forever.
The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I
lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics
of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed
really, it was how I thought of it.
Maybe you’ve had some of the same insights. Or maybe you’re about to.
1. You are not your mind.
The first time I heard somebody say that — in the opening chapter of The Power of Now
— I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What else could I be? I had
taken for granted that the mental chatter in my head was the central
“me” that all the experiences in my life were happening to.
I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences,
and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience.
Thoughts are no more fundamental than smells, sights and sounds. Like
any experience, they arise in my awareness, they have a certain texture,
and then they give way to something else.
If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s
doing the observing? Don’t answer too quickly. This question, and its
unspeakable answer, are at the center of all the great religions and
spiritual traditions.
2. Life unfolds only in moments.
Of course! I once called this the most important thing
I ever learned. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t part
of a single moment unfolding. That means life’s only challenge is
dealing with the single moment you are having right now. Before I
recognized this, I was constantly trying to solve my entire life —
battling problems that weren’t actually happening. Anyone can summon the
resolve to deal with a single, present moment, as long as they are
truly aware that it’s their only point of contact with life, and
therefore there is nothing else one can do that can possibly be useful.
Nobody can deal with the past or future, because, both only exist as
thoughts, in the present. But we can kill ourselves trying.
3. Quality of life is determined by how you deal with your moments, not which moments happen and which don’t.
I now consider this truth to be Happiness 101, but it’s amazing how
tempting it still is to grasp at control of every circumstance to try to
make sure I get exactly what I want. To encounter an undesirable
situation and work with it willingly is the mark of a wise and happy person. Imagine getting a flat tire, falling ill at a bad time, or knocking something over and breaking it
— and suffering nothing from it. There is nothing to fear if you agree
with yourself to deal willingly with adversity whenever it does show up.
That is how to make life better. The typical, low-leverage
method is to hope that you eventually accumulate power over your
circumstances so that you can get what you want more often. There’s an
excellent line in a Modest Mouse song, celebrating this side-effect of
wisdom: As life gets longer, awful feels softer.
4. Most of life is imaginary.
Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive
that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most
of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about
it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests
in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without
confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what
we experience in life is imaginary things.
As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life,
some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found?
Cultivating mindfulness.
5. Human beings have evolved to suffer, and we are better at suffering than anything else.
Yikes. It doesn’t sound like a very liberating discovery. I used to
believe that if I was suffering it meant that there was something wrong
with me — that I was doing life “wrong.” Suffering is completely human
and completely normal, and there is a very good reason for its
existence. Life’s persistent background hum of “this isn’t quite okay, I
need to improve this,” coupled with occasional intense flashes of
horror and adrenaline are what kept human beings alive for millions of
years. This urge to change or escape the present moment drives nearly
all of our behavior. It’s a simple and ruthless survival mechanism
which works exceedingly well for keeping us alive, but it has a
horrific side effect: human beings suffer greatly by their very nature.
This, for me, redefined every one of life’s problems as some tendril of
the human condition. As grim as it sounds, this insight is liberating
because it means: 1) that suffering does not necessarily mean my life is
going wrong, 2) that the ball is always in my court, so the degree to which I suffer is ultimately up to me, and 3) that all problems have the same cause and the same solution.
6. Emotions exist to make us biased.
This discovery was a complete 180 from my old understanding of
emotions. I used to think my emotions were reliable indicators of the
state of my life — of whether I’m on the right track or not. Your passing emotional states
can’t be trusted for measuring your self-worth or your position in
life, but they are great at teaching you what it is you can’t let go of.
The trouble is that emotions make us both more biased and more forceful
at the same time. Another survival mechanism with nasty side-effects.
7. All people operate from the same two motivations: to fulfill their desires and to escape their suffering.
Learning this allowed me to finally make sense of how people can hurt
each other so badly. The best explanation I had before this was that
some people are just bad. What a cop-out. No matter what kind
of behavior other people exhibit, they are acting in the most effective
way they are capable of (at that moment) to fulfill a desire or to
relieve their suffering. These are motives we can all understand; we
only vary in method, and the methods each of us has at our disposal
depend on our upbringing and our experiences in life, as well as our
state of consciousness. Some methods are skillful and helpful to others,
others are unskillful and destructive, and almost all destructive
behavior is unconscious. So there is no good and evil, only smart and dumb (or wise and foolish.) Understanding this completely shook my long-held notions of morality and justice.
8. Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.
Believing something is not an accomplishment. I grew up thinking that
beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but
opinions one refuses to reconsider. Beliefs are easy. The stronger your
beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because
“strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist
questioning yourself. As soon as you are proud of a belief,
as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made
it a part of your ego. Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal
talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who
will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless
you believe the same. It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is
gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are
chasing. Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door. Take on the
beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never
be afraid to lose them.
9. Objectivity is subjective.
Life is a subjective experience and that cannot be escaped. Every
experience I have comes through my own, personal, unsharable viewpoint.
There can be no peer reviews of my direct experience, no real
corroboration. This has some major implications for how I live my life.
The most immediate one is that I realize I must trust my own personal
experience, because nobody else has this angle, and I only have
this angle. Another is that I feel more wonder for the world around me,
knowing that any “objective” understanding I claim to have of the world
is built entirely from scratch, by me. What I do build depends on the
books I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had. It
means I will never see the world quite like anyone else, which means I
will never live in quite the same world as anyone else — and therefore I
mustn’t let outside observers be the authority on who I am or what life
is really like for me. Subjectivity is primary experience — it is real life,
and objectivity is something each of us builds on top of it in our
minds, privately, in order to explain it all. This truth has
world-shattering implications for the roles of religion and science in
the lives of those who grasp it.
***
In my life, empowering new perspectives like these come mostly from
reading what others have written. Recommended reading on these concepts:
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