Most negative emotions, such as a depressing thought, internal conflict, arguments, feeling hopeless, etc. all these things are due to a lack of understanding.
You may think you understand, and that is why you see a thing as hopeless or negative or the other person as wrong, but you must fight your opinions and remember that it is because you do not understand it fully. No matter how clear and simple it may seem, the truth is, ironically, a lack of truth.
Here we define truth as full and complete knowledge of the event, situation or thing. The three levels of certainty are very important to consider; knowledge, vision and truth of certainty.
Knowledge is when you think you know a thing because you know something about it, but it does not take much to remember something you thought you understood and later found out you had no idea about the reality of it.
Vision is a level deeper than knowledge, but still lacks true depth. For example, you may see a car and know that it moves around and transports you. If you only look at the body and seats, but do not learn about the engine or petrol, in time it will stop working and you will not be able to fix it and get it to go again.
Truth is to know something intimately, how it works, what is its purpose, how it can be used or handled in a way that it flourishes. Truth is objective, which means it is what it is, not what you want it to be.
If you get depressed, sad, angry, hopeless, lost, or any emotion that in a way paralyzes you, or even just makes you feel blah, that is because you do not fully understand the situation.
If you think you do understand, then you do not really understand your own mind and human nature. Thus the first step to understanding anything in life is to understand the apparatus behind your ability to understand.
The Tower of Babel is not just that we do not understand each other, often we are babbling to ourselves. There are many hidden meanings in ancient stories which often go missed, especially the stories that tell us why we miss things.
The ego personality is a complex thing and always wants to think it knows everything, so that a person can feel strong and confident because they are intelligent and understand things. But it is this very need to know that prevents us from deeply knowing anything at all. The result is we live imagining that we understand when we do not, and that is what is behind making wrong decisions.
Our mistakes in life can be put in a simple analogy. You have to disarm a bomb. There are two wires, a green one and a brown one. Those happen to be two colours that are commonly confused by people with mild colourblindness. They tell you to cut the brown wire. You think you know which is brown because you have ignored your colour blindness, and you blow up yourself and everyone around you.
If you take every negative feeling you have and see the cause being your colour blindness, and look for the very fine, tiny print on the wire that says which colour it is, you may find life progresses much better with far less negative emotions. The first thing is to know that the answer is printed there somewhere, and be willing to look for it and read.
Join the discussion
Your ‘disarming the bomb’ analogy makes a huge deal of sense to me thank you. I will strive to be more patient and assess all options and repercussions and, as you say, read the fine print before going ahead and taking action that may affect others around me negatively.