The greatest misconception that exists in society today is the commonly-held belief that the world is happening to us. We innocently, but mistakenly believe that we are dealing with a world of circumstances, situations, systems and other people. Read any newspaper, watch the news, or listen to those around you, and you will begin to notice the pervasiveness of this belief, the idea that our experience of life is fundamentally determined by issues and circumstances ‘out there’.
We routinely talk of high-pressure jobs, stressful workloads, difficult bosses or colleagues, and frustrating relationships. We take it as a given that other people and situations make us feel a certain way. The economy, technology, parenting, traffic, change – the list of factors perceived to affect our mental and emotional lives goes on. For anyone interested in the current state of the world right now, the outlook doesn’t get much better. War, terrorism, violence, racism, mental illness, poverty, domestic abuse…it can be hard to look at the scale of the challenges the world is facing and not wonder if we aren’t heading in the wrong direction.
This belief, however, is a simple, innocent misunderstanding of what lies behind the human experience. As difficult as it can be initially to see, and as much as it flies in the face of every commonly-held notion in the world, the only thing we can ever be up against in life is our state of mind in the moment: we live not in a world of circumstances, systems and other people, but in a world of our own transient thinking.
— Read the rest of this story, first published by Susan Andrewes
