The mirror was distorted as its lens was hewn of dents and cracks.

Most of the conflicts and misunderstandings between men are by fault of how each individual believes in their own reasoning and logic. This faculty of alleged intelligence anchors to associations, those dominoes of thought and recollection which follow one after the other without actual effort and intention. The mind festers with thousands of associations, connecting every word and idea to a hundred others which share some arbitrary affinity. By way of these strings tied between ideas that are borne in the mind of each man in a very unique way, specific to their personal experiences, everyone operates from a perspective which encourages discord and friction.

We all think quite wrongly about a great many things. A simple change in mood can alter how we perceive a situation which ought to be, without condition, weighed by an objective measure. This seems impossible except by recourse to a mental discipline which takes oneself out of the equation, or at least attempts to lessen the load of personal exaggerations conjured by the ego. A man needs to realize how jaded he is by nature, how his mind is apt to twist and contort the clear white light of reality into various colours which will, by necessity, conflict with how he and others see the same situation. He needs to beware of himself.

A long period of wrong thinking leads to an emotional life rife with imaginary fears and an unnecessary dose of negative emotions. For the emotions of today are the product of the wrong thinking of yesterday. If a man wishes to clean the air of who he is, he must begin by intentionally widening his thoughts in this moment so that, like a good farmer, what is sowed now is reaped next season. Yet the problem lies with the fact that an act of right thinking on-top of a foundation of wrong thinking is often a short-lived endeavor. Men very soon forget the need to compensate their natural flow of associations with volitional, corrective, thinking.

This vehicle of association should be valued for what it is, a conveyor belt that pops up references to past experience; sometimes useful and sometimes not. What it shouldn’t do is become the primary faculty from which judgments and decisions are made. To permit this to happen is as absurd as allowing a court of law to be juried and judged by people on the tip, bribed to argue and agree in a preconceived direction. The naked truth needs to be stripped of all clothing, these articles of association, and allowed to be weighed as objectively as possible. We might as a result just realize that happiness does not depend on exaggerated beliefs, and that the world is far too complex to relate to it purely by past associations.