How hard is it to change thinking, to really change the way that we perceive the world? It’s really not that hard. Usually, if we have something going on that’s not working in the way we’re thinking, then we naturally change. Think of a really simple example, like if you’re always angry at everything.
There’s a perception down at the bottom of it all, something that you’ve miss-seen or gotten wrong. Like if you’ve always been told you’re a terrible person, then that is going to inform everything you do in your life. Now, you can’t go to the opposite of it and start thinking that you’re a good person because nobody really is that good. But when you get down really to it, you see that it doesn’t matter, good person, bad person, these are not definitions that are useful. It has nothing to do with reality to try to define things that way. So the second you see that, boom, you pop right through it. If you’re constantly trying to make yourself be a better person because you think you’re a bad person, you’re never going to get there. The only way to really change that kind of thinking is to see, “Oh, that’s not a useful way to look at it at all.” And this is the same little mechanism that changes every bit of erroneous thinking that we might have. That’s why I like to teach non-duality because non-duality says, go way down to the very bottom of all these things, you’ll find that there’s nothing there. And out of that, you can rebuild useful ways to interact with the world.