The Roots of Confusion
“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”
Lao Tzu (6th cent. BC)
“Stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand.”
Sengai (1750–1837)
We all long to ease the negativity in our lives.
And we usually carry strong views about what is wrong in others and in society as a whole, along with ideas about how things should change for the better.
Our consumerist societies have convinced us that all we need to do is take care of the symptoms and the problem will disappear.
But any good doctor who truly wants to heal his patients doesn’t stop at symptoms — he seeks the root causes. The fact is that, very seldom — if ever — do we see anyone daring to ask the real questions:
What causes human beings to generate so much suffering for themselves and others? How have we lost touch with the beauty and the mystery that are inherent to existence itself?
Why have we become so dissatisfied and aggressive, to the point that we brought our world to the brink of destruction?
Those questions may sound naïve — as if the current state of chaos and despair in which the world finds itself were a fatality.
Yet the example of some among us who live differently shows that it isn’t the case — if some people can be content and spread kindness independently of circumstances, why not others too ?
The root cause behind all our psychological suffering is, after all, not so difficult to understand. The issue is that almost no one wants to see. Generally, everyone prefers to deal with the symptoms only.
There's a reason for that avoidance. We’ve been conditioned by certain belief systems since childhood; they became part of us. Questioning them usually triggers extreme defense mechanisms.
Yet there is no way around it: it is these beliefs that shape the way we experience ourselves and the world we live in —
and one of the direct consequence of all the confusion generated by them — is the world as we see it today.
There isn’t a belief that is better than another. All are equally misleading when they are mistaken for the truth.
So, as long as we stand on those beliefs to try to understand what is wrong, we are bound to create more and more confusion. We must look for alternative ways.
The heart of the matter is this: we are not experiencing our real self, nor the world as it truly is. What we experience are our own beliefs and projections about the world.
We look at life through a dead instrument — thought —. that has no life in it. In other words, we think about life instead of being it. Therefore, we are never one with it.
It’s hard for us to appreciate the repercussions this simple fact has on our lives.
Over millennia, the thinking mind has grown so absurdly important — the hub around which our entire sense of reality now revolves — but this has come at the expense of the perceptive mind, which has in turn lost much of its natural sensitivity.
As thought became our almost exclusive instrument to apprehend reality, we can’t see why, or in which way, that instrument is fundamentally limited and flawed.
And so we fail to see that what we are experiencing through it is not life itself — only a pale representation of it. We act as if we were awake, without realizing we are deeply asleep.
Thought was meant to be an instrument, not a master.
Isolation, fear, conflict — are not a fatality. They arise from a mistaken reading of reality — from our over-investment in abstractions at the expense of the direct taste of the present, which is — is it even necessary to remind it — the only true reality.
It is important to notice that, our entire life, since the very beginning up until this day, has been known only through, and as, pure perception.
Be it thoughts, emotions or sensations, anything experienced is experienced because it is perceived.
Perceptions, in themselves, are never the issue. A sensation is simply a sensation; an emotion is simply an emotion. They are neither good nor bad, neither desirable nor threatening.
What happens to create the disturbance is the story thought usually weaves around them — the narrative, the interpretation that gives a certain orientation to what actually takes place.
At the center of all this weaving sits the “me” who supposedly feels, who suffers, who worries, who hopes. But this “me” is nothing more than the echo of its own stories.
Thought invents the self, and the self, in turn, fuels thought’s endless activity. The observer and the story he tells are born together.
Yet, when the mind becomes quiet enough to look directly — without interpretation, without a center — something extraordinary happens, that normally goes unnoticed:
The whole narrative around the “me” fades like mist in the morning sun. Not because it has been eradicated, but because it was never substantial to begin with.
What remains is direct perception — unfiltered, unburdened — pure experience of life as it unfolds in this very moment.
In that eternal stillness, which is what existence is at its root, the basis There is no judgment, and so no conflict whatsoever— only the simple fact of what is.
The raw texture of sensation reveals itself. Reality appears as flowing naturally, unified and without resistance.
IMF - Lausanne 21 November 2025
