I didn't know whether any of you had ever doubted yourselves like this, but I truly couldn't accept it!
They were clearly my own thoughts, so why did they rise and fall on their own, again and again, controlling my mood?
Most infuriatingly, they could make me happy, make me depressed, and sometimes even make me angry.
My little emotions were completely toyed with in the palm of their hand.
Ever since I began doubting the reality of my own thoughts, I kept thinking about this.
One day, while scrolling through short videos, I happened upon a video of Master Meng Can telling a story.
Because I liked many strange and unknown things, whenever I came across Master Meng Can's videos, I would stop and listen. It was the same when I came across videos of Master Zhang Zhishun.
Although I basically couldn't understand what they were talking about, Master Meng Can's stories were easier to follow. But when Master Zhang Zhishun spoke about cultivation, the Primordial Spirit, the Conscious Spirit, and so on, he left me completely bewildered. Still, I really liked listening.
This time, when I came across Master Meng Can telling a story, I suddenly gained an insight unlike before. In the past, I had only listened to it as a story, perhaps with some principles about how to conduct oneself and handle matters. But this time, I actually heard a method of cultivation within the story.
How should I put this? I didn't know how to describe it to you either.
For example, Master said, look at those little animals. Don't think that just because they look different from you, they are different inside. They also have hearts. If you hurt them, they will be afraid, and they will hate you too, and so on.
At first glance, there seemed to be nothing special about this story. But if you thought carefully, if aside from their outward appearance, they also had thoughts just like humans, then wouldn't they be like humans who simply looked different from us?
Now look at people. Aside from not being covered in fur, couldn't you say that we were actually no different from animals?
Then wasn't this story teaching a mental method for breaking through appearances?
It was telling you to understand that all life was the same and equal, differing only in outward form.
After that, I began thinking about things according to this understanding and trying to understand all living beings that way.
For example, if mosquitoes bit me and left several welts at night, I wouldn't get angry or resentful, because how would a mosquito know it was biting someone else? It was only eating.
Think about it—if you were eating, and someone suddenly slapped you to death, would you be willing?
So if I got bitten, then I got bitten. I just treated it as buying a meal for the little mosquito. In any case, I wouldn't get angry or troubled by it.
Also, the kitchen at home was next to the balcony, and mice would always come into the kitchen looking for food. I generally didn't keep much in the kitchen, just some dried chili peppers and potatoes. As for other vegetables and such, I bought them only when I was going to eat them.
The mice gnawed through half a potato and ate a pile of my dried chili peppers. I wasn't angry or irritated either. I was only afraid they would keep eating chili peppers and get burned by the heat. So one night, I spoke to the mice to myself: "Little mouse, could you stop coming around? Look, there isn't much to eat in my home. Whenever you come, my girlfriend gets scared of you. And even if you come, all you can gnaw on are dried chili peppers. What's tasty about that? Don't come anymore, okay? Haha."
After that, I never saw another mouse in my home, and it had been nearly a year and a half now.
Fun, right? Amazing, right?
From these two things, I again awakened to the power of not harboring resentment: no matter what happened, don't form resentment and don't get angry. Change your angle, and the outcome would be different.
Actually, I had understood these principles before, but I had never thought about them this way or used them this way.
I discovered that no matter how many principles a person understood, it was useless. If they weren't realized by oneself, or if one understood them but couldn't put them into practice, then even if one understood them until the sky fell, when something actually happened, one still wouldn't be able to use them.
That was why people needed to awaken to the Way. Awakening to the Way meant realizing principles, and that was also the best method of cultivation.
Take writing, for example. If you buried your head and wrote bitterly, you still wouldn't produce anything remarkable even if you wrote yourself to death. But if you wrote while also sensing the patterns of writing, then once you grasped even one of those principles someday, your writing would improve enormously.
I was always trying to sense them too, but up to now, I had only just caught a tiny glimpse. I knew writing had patterns and techniques, but I hadn't found that point of rhythm yet. But there was no rush. If I kept looking, I should understand.
Actually, in this life, everything had its own patterns. As long as you could observe them carefully and grasp them, then you would have cultivated a Way.
The so-called myriad Great Ways were, in truth, the patterns inherent in all things and all matters.
Besides cultivating this kind of Way, the foremost and most important thing was for people to cultivate the Way within their own hearts. Or rather, to cultivate the patterns within their own hearts.
To give an example, the human body was like a biological machine, while human thought was the program of that machine. Once this program existed, people instinctively began thinking in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, and so on.
Ordinary, normal people passively allowed this set of programming to control the operation of their lives and their entire existence.
They could not control their own thoughts. They could only be forced to let their habits—or what might be called inertial thinking and habitual cognition—control them.
This was the root cause of human suffering.
Clearly, you wanted things to be one way, yet you couldn't do it. Clearly, you wanted things to be another way, yet you couldn't control yourself.
Because you were not you at all. You were merely an empty shell controlled by habitual cognition, something like an NPC in a game. If you weren't in pain, who would be?
If you wanted to avoid suffering, you had to break the rules, go against Heaven, become your true self, and gain complete control over your own thoughts.
When I said going against Heaven here, I wasn't telling everyone to fly up into the sky, haha. What I meant by going against Heaven was going against your own thoughts—the thoughts and cognition formed under the push of the innate Primordial Spirit.
I didn't know whether I had mentioned this in the previous chapters, so let me explain it here. You could regard the Primordial Spirit as the human subconscious, and the Conscious Spirit as human thoughts and ideas.
And cultivation was a very scientific thing. Don't imagine cultivation to be something impossibly mystical, though it truly was very mystical.
If humans could completely control their own thoughts, that would mean they could completely control their emotions, and through controlling their emotions, influence the state of their bodies.
Because every time humans formed a thought or produced any emotion, their bodies secreted various substances, or rather, the energy within their bodies changed into various states.
For example, the state of your body when you were happy, the state of your body when you were sad, when you were angry, and so on.
Cultivation meant gaining complete control over your own thoughts, controlling your emotions through controlling your thoughts, and then influencing the health and balance of your body through controlling your emotions.
For example, when your body lacked a certain kind of energy, you could directly guide yourself to produce the corresponding emotion, secrete the substances you needed, achieve balance within your body, and thereby gain health.