General Rules for Overcoming Mental Problems

See also
The Main Obstacle,
One Wonderful Technique,
The Hell Gate 

 and here

At the heart of all mental problems are always ties (attachments in traditional Buddhist terminology); they hinder the expression of your true self, which is a pure negation. By mistake you identify yourself with your attachments, ie, instead of identifying yourself with your potential, you identify with the past. Therefore, in the long term, it makes no sense to separate attachments into 'bad', which cause suffering, and 'good', which cause positive emotions: to get rid of the former, you should start with the later, and there are several general rules how to do this effectively.

The Hell Gate

See also
The Main Obstacle,
One Wonderful Technique,

 and here

So, What Makes the Female Aspect So Special? 

Let me remind you my thesis: if you have mental problems, obsessive thoughts, for example, you can't just remove them like a sick tooth leaving everything else as it was: you have to change yourself, change your attitude to the problem - sounds logical, but what does this really mean?

From my own experience of depression, if you feel depressed, in the end you still feel better, and only then you can change something. But if you already feel good, is it necessary to change anything?  And if yes, in what way? The first step, therefore, is to realize that you have problems not only when you're depressed but also when you're feeling high so the recovery will require much greater changes than just getting rid of some unpleasant symptoms. When we're depressed, we're obsessed with unpleasant thoughts, but the very thought obsession usually begins when we're feeling high - that's when we usually get seduced by tempting, happy thoughts, and later when we're exhausted, nightmares overtake us.

This is a general rule: unpleasant thoughts are preceded by pleasant ones; before unpleasant thoughts invade, pleasant thoughts must already prepare the ground for them: make us malleable. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin: pleasant thoughts are the cause of unpleasant - somehow they are associated - there is some reason why we became attached to our nightmares. So to get rid of a neurosis, you should start with its pleasant aspect - this at least will deprive the unpleasant aspect of its energy. What seduces you - I called it the female aspect - acts as a Trojan horse when it comes to entering within you, and the same substance is also the reason why negative experiences associated with it linger inside of you, so to reverse the neurosis, you should start again with its pleasant aspect.

One Wonderful Technique

I continue describing the technique that will allow you to handle your mental problems - if you think you don't have any, perhaps you don't need this practice and this post is a reminder that for that you should already be sufficiently prepared. It's also about why the correct Zen practice is better than psychoanalysis, and in the end, I'll outline in general terms how works the very process of understanding, which would be just pointless philosophizing if in the following posts I weren't be going to give concrete practical recommendations how to have such an experience.

The Main Obstacle

I already wrote that there is also one more thing that I can't disregard anymore since this can hamper your practice. Sometimes you find that it's very difficult to perceive things as they are - truth seems clouded - why is this so, and what can be done in this case? Strangely enough, this can be not only your fault: I won't reveal a secret if I recall that people tend to mislead each other. At a certain stage, your practice should become more versatile, and the question should be put this way: what aspects of the human personality hinder objective perception? In other words, what tends to deceive, and what to be deceived? The technique that I start describing will eventually allow you to understand people, yourself, and even how the very process of understanding works.

When I began practicing Zen (I was 30 then), I tried to achieve objective perception by seeing the world as if I'd been dead; for me, unfortunately, this wasn't enough: there still were people that could mislead me - I believed those masks they were wearing - but you can't become enlightened until everything becomes understandable, your particular case, so I learned to understand people. In a few