People are becoming more and more aware of the illusion; they hide from it, vent about it, or feel like they’re stuck in a prison with no parole.  No wonder so many people are depressed.  Others fight the illusion or rebel against it, but they never win.  Why are we so afraid of this giant cartoon?

You see, if we’re bothered by another person’s illusion, it has taken up residence in our OWN mind.  Freedom is about destroying the beliefs in OUR mind that have cast us into roles in other people’s illusions.  We must realize that their illusion can’t affect us if we don’t believe it.  If we believe that we MUST fix another person or get them to see they’re wrong so we can be free, we still share their belief.  The more we let go, the more clear this becomes.

Fear Rules the Illusion

Letting go allows us to see that we’re all victims of the illusion; we’re not really victims of each other.  If we’re getting something we don’t want from another or from life, we believe that what we got is real or true; or we believe that the person who cast us in the feminine role has power over us.  Getting free requires using our emotions to go inside our mind and find our causal beliefs.

People want guns because they fear other people are bad and could harm them.  People join religions because they fear their soul was stained — they want a better afterlife or next life.  People adopt diets, exercise routines, or practices because they fear death, aging, weight problems, or illness.  People follow authority because they fear punishment.  People take jobs they hate because they fear being without money or believe they need the benefits.  Most of our doing is simply to counteract fear and paranoia.  It’s not creative.

Paranoia and fear make us vulnerable to clever marketing.  In fact, we can often see our beliefs by looking at what we’re tempted to buy.  We wouldn’t want to fix the problem if we didn’t still believe we had it.  You can be sure that the minute we fix one illusory fear, someone will find something else to scare the shit out of us  Then they sell us yet another product or service.  We win when we no longer believe we need anything from another — that’s freedom.

The True Self has no emotion because it holds no beliefs; the false self is filled with beliefs and emotions.  Emotions are the effect, not the cause.  So if we think we need a gun, we need to look at the beliefs causing our fear of other people.  If we think we need religion, we need to follow our fear of sin to the causal religious beliefs.  If we think we need our partner to spend more time with us, we must follow our emotion to our loneliness.  If we think we need a food or exercise regimen, we should follow our fear of illness or fat to find the causal beliefs that were probably learned from an expert.  As we let go, we’re relieving the experts, which have ruled our lives, of their duty.

Often we think that mental solutions fix the cause.  We’re attracted to spiritual teachers, mental techniques, and practices like positive thinking, visualization, meditation, yoga, Tai chi, EFT, new religions, hypnosis, or NLP because they seem to put new and improved beliefs in our mind or relieve our emotions.  Sometimes we grasp a moment of clear sight, which causes us to let go.  But that is rare and often not easily repeatable.  We eventually grow tired of these techniques too.  Now we’re ready to let go.

By the time that we realize this, we’re often exhausted.  We’ve tried so many things.  We have no desire to do much of anything; and that’s good.  We’re finally tired of fixing problems.   Fortunately, it doesn’t take physical energy to let go.  But it takes desire, persistence, and courage.  Then we see the horrible truth.  We meet all the things we thought we fixed because we didn’t fix the cause; we fixed the effects.  That’s a real “Oh FUCK!” moment.  It looks like we’re going backwards before we can go forward; this causes many people to quit letting go before they even get started unless they understand what’s going on.

Getting to Freedom

To get to freedom, we have to heighten our awareness of our own mental processing by witnessing our thinking.  We observe what we’re driven to do and constantly ask ourselves why we’re doing it.  We stop living on automatic.  We must get painfully honest with ourselves; and stop looking for others to fix our emotions and problems.  And we must stop fixing the emotions and problems of others.

“Why?” becomes our best friend.  Why am I feeling that I need to do this, be this, or want this?  Why do I think I need this product, practice, or person?  The answer points to the cause; and it won’t feel good.  But you now know that you were doing all that work or spending all that money only to fix a stupid belief that didn’t even feel good.

We have to realize that every time we fix the effect, we give the causal belief more power.   And that’s why we often feel so much emotion when we stop fixing the effects.  We’ve been covering that emotion with products, practices, or practitioners for a long time.  It’s like going cold turkey with an addiction.  Actually, the biggest addiction on this planet is fixing the effects of our beliefs to eliminate our emotional discomfort.  Nearly everyone has that addiction.   We thought we desired the thing that fixes the effect, but all those emotions were just begging us to remove the causal belief.  When we remove the false belief, the false desire disappears as well.  We won’t see that particular problem again.