The essence of the basic human problem is that we live a substitute life. From our basic human need for protection, security, and comfort, we’ve fabricated a whole maze of constructs and strategies to avoid being with our life as it is. And as a consequence of believing in this substitute life we are disconnected from awareness of our true nature, our naturally open heart.
Our substitute life is made of many different constructs: our identities, our self-images, our concepts of what life is, our opinions and judgments, our expectations, our requirements. All these we take as reality. As a consequence of these tightly held beliefs, we develop certain habitual behavioral strategies to deal with life as we interpret it.
All these strategies are based on core decisions that we made early on, about who we are and what our life is about. They are decisions we made to help us cope with the many inevitable pains of growing up.
Ezra Bayda