Finding Peace in Reality: A Journey from Disillusionment to Clarity
As far as I know, everyone I met during my lifetime, hate people who gave reasonable and realistic world view. They were being viewed as pessimistic, motivation destroyers and vision less. Do they really have passionless attitude toward life, or is it just a misunderstanding?
I was born with positive attitude toward world, I saw the world as a playground where I could be anything I wanted to be, and get whatever I wanted to get. I also had tendency to see other people who did not see the world as I did, were having illusion and lazy.
However, later on, during my teen's years, I discovered that there were many things I couldn't get or to be. The world wasn't a playground, where everything was there for you to get or to be. There were many limitations I discovered, within my body, my mind, and also my family. I was crushed mentally, and for the first time, I felt depressed, frustrated and needed some answers.
During that time, everyone who gave me any advice on how to get or to be what I wanted to be, certainly attracted my fragile mind. Motivators, mentors, and religious figures who could give me assurance on my futures, I would take their classes or sermons. Sadly, realities hit me back harder this time. Those who I deemed as my mentor, guru, or someone to look up for, were struggled and disillusioned with life as well, they couldn't achieve their dreams as well. If they couldn't, how could I?
That was a turning point in my life, and I begun to rethink about life and how should I live my life. After several days of contemplating, I decided, that depression and frustration were terrible feelings to have. I needed to figure out how to tackle this feeling first, how to mend my broken and frustrated heart, and how to never experience it again.
Then, I learned about meditation, the first meditation technique I learned was shamatha meditation.
The Stillness That Reveals Everything
Shamatha, or calm-abiding meditation, seemed deceptively simple at first. Sit down, focus on the breath, and when the mind wanders, gently bring it back. No grand promises, no immediate transformationsâjust the instruction to watch.
In those early sessions, I experienced something unexpected. As I sat observing my breath, I began to notice the relentless movement of my mind. Thoughts arose like wavesâmemories of past failures, anxieties about future outcomes, fantasies about who I wished to be. Each thought carried an emotional charge, and I realized I had been living my entire life swept along by this internal storm, mistaking these mental movements for reality itself.
But shamatha taught me something profound: I could observe thoughts without being consumed by them.
After weeks of practice, something shifted. The frantic quality of my mind began to settle, like sediment falling to the bottom of a shaken glass of water. And in that clarity, I started to see things I had never noticed before.
Seeing the World As It Actually Is
Impermanence: The Dance of Change
The first insight that emerged from my shamatha practice was aniccaâimpermanence. Not as an abstract concept from Buddhist texts, but as a lived, visceral reality.
I noticed it first in small things. The pleasant feeling of sitting comfortably would inevitably shift to discomfort. A moment of mental clarity would dissolve into distraction. The sounds outside my windowâa bird's song, a passing carâarose and vanished without my permission or control.
Then I saw it in my life. The dreams I once held with desperate intensity had already changed. The person I was at sixteen was not the person sitting here now. The mentors I had idealized were themselves changing, struggling, evolving. My family, my body, my thoughtsâeverything was in constant flux.
This wasn't depressing. It was liberating.
I had been suffering because I was trying to hold onto things that were, by their very nature, designed to change. I had built my identity and happiness on sand, then wondered why I felt unstable. Shamatha showed me that clinging to the unchanging in a changing world was the root of my frustration.
Causality: The Web of Conditions
As my practice deepened, I began to observe causality with unprecedented clarity. Every mental state I experienced had causes and conditions. My depression wasn't a personal failure or a cosmic punishmentâit arose from specific conditions: unmet expectations colliding with reality, beliefs about how life "should" be meeting the truth of how life actually was.
I started to see this pattern everywhere. My initial positive attitude toward life hadn't been wrong, but it had been incomplete. It was conditioned by the privilege of youth, by limited experience, by well-meaning but simplistic messages from society about success and achievement.
The mentors who couldn't fulfill their own promises weren't frauds or failuresâthey too were operating within a web of causes and conditions: their own limitations, changing circumstances, the complexity of human psychology, the unpredictability of life itself.
This understanding of causality gave me something unexpected: agency within reality. If suffering arose from causes and conditions, then by understanding and working with those conditions, I could influence my experience. Not control it absolutelyâthat was the old fantasyâbut work skillfully within the constraints of reality.
Interdependent Origination: Nothing Stands Alone
The deepest insight came gradually, like watching a sunrise. Through shamatha, I began to perceive pratÄ«tyasamutpÄdaâinterdependent origination. Nothing existed in isolation. Everything I experienced arose in dependence on countless other factors.
My "self"âthis person who had been so crushed by unfulfilled dreamsâwasn't a solid, independent entity. It was a fluid process, constantly being shaped by my body, my thoughts, my relationships, my environment, my history. The dreams themselves hadn't been purely "mine"âthey were conditioned by cultural messages, family expectations, peer comparisons, biological drives.
Even my depression and frustration weren't isolated personal problems. They were part of a larger web: a society that often sold oversimplified narratives about success, an economic system with limited opportunities, a human nervous system evolved for different challenges than modern life presents.
This wasn't an excuse for passivity. Rather, it revealed a profound truth: I was not separate from the world trying to conquer it, but part of an interconnected system learning to navigate it.
Purpose Arising from Reality
Here's where everything clicked into place. My shamatha practice, by revealing impermanence, causality, and interdependence, didn't destroy my sense of purposeâit reconstructed it on a foundation that couldn't be shattered.
My old sense of purpose had been fragile because it depended on outcomes: becoming someone specific, achieving particular goals, gaining external validation. When those outcomes proved unattainable or unstable, my purpose collapsed with them.
But seeing reality as it actually is revealed a different kind of purposeâone based not on fantasy but on authentic engagement with what is.
I realized that meaning doesn't come from achieving static goals in a changing world. It comes from:
Developing qualities that remain valuable regardless of circumstance: wisdom, compassion, resilience, creativity, connection
Contributing to the web of interdependence in ways that reduce suffering and increase flourishing, however modestly
Working skillfully with causes and conditions rather than demanding reality conform to my preferences
Finding fulfillment in the process itself, not just imagined future states
This was purpose that couldn't be taken away by failure or misfortune, because it wasn't dependent on specific outcomes. It was purpose that arose from understanding and participating in reality, not from escaping or conquering it.
Realism Is Not PessimismâIt's Mental Health
Now I understood the profound misunderstanding I had witnessed my whole life. People who offered realistic worldviews weren't pessimisticâthey were mentally healthy.
The Toxic Positivity Trap
What I had mistaken for "positive thinking" in my youth was often toxic positivityâthe denial of reality in favor of comforting illusions. This approach creates a fragile mental state:
When reality contradicts the fantasy, you experience devastating crashes
You develop anxiety from constantly trying to maintain an unsustainable mindset
You lose the ability to problem-solve effectively because you can't acknowledge real constraints
You judge yourself harshly when you can't maintain the "positive" facade
The motivational speakers and mentors I had followed weren't actually helping me. They were teaching me to build elaborate mental sandcastles, then expressing surprise when the tide came in.
Realism as Resilience
Shamatha meditation had taught me that seeing clearly is the foundation of wellbeing, not its enemy. A realistic worldview:
Reduces anxiety by aligning expectations with reality
Enables effective action by acknowledging real constraints and opportunities
Builds genuine confidence based on actual capabilities, not fantasy
Creates sustainable motivation rooted in intrinsic values rather than external validation
Prepares you for setbacks without catastrophizing when they occur
This is what the Stoics understood, what Buddhist psychology teaches, what modern cognitive therapy has rediscovered: mental health comes from clear seeing, not wishful thinking.
Pursuing Goals from Groundedness
The beautiful paradox I discovered: understanding impermanence, causality, and interdependence didn't stop me from having goalsâit made me better at pursuing them.
With my new foundation, I could:
Set Reality-Based Goals
Instead of "I will become a millionaire by 30," I could set goals like "I will develop financial literacy and create multiple income streams while building skills I find meaningful." The second goal acknowledges realityâuncertainty, causality, interdependenceâwhile still providing clear direction.
Maintain Motivation Through Obstacles
When setbacks occurred (and they always did), I no longer experienced them as existential crises. They were simply conditions changing, requiring adaptive responses. My shamatha practice had given me the mental spaciousness to respond rather than react.
Find Satisfaction in Process
Because I understood that everything is impermanent and interdependent, I could find joy in the journey itself. Each moment of effort, learning, and growth became inherently valuable, not merely a means to some future state.
Manage Mental Health Proactively
Most importantly, I learned to protect my psychological wellbeing as the foundation for all goal pursuit. When I noticed anxiety rising, I could return to shamatha practice, observe the mental patterns creating suffering, and work skillfully with them.
I stopped seeing mental health management as weakness or distraction from goals. I recognized it as the essential infrastructure that makes sustained, meaningful effort possible.
The Integrated Life
Today, I still have dreams and ambitions. I work toward goals with dedication and passion. But I do so with a fundamental shift in orientation:
I'm not trying to force reality to match my preferences. I'm dancing with reality, understanding its nature, working with its principles, accepting its constraints while exploring its possibilities.
When people call me pessimistic for being realistic, I smile with understanding. They're where I once wasâmistaking fantasy for hope, denial for strength. They haven't yet discovered what shamatha meditation revealed to me:
True optimism is seeing the world clearly and choosing to engage with it anyway.
The realistic worldview isn't about giving up on dreams. It's about dreaming in a way that won't destroy you when reality inevitably shows up. It's about building a relationship with life based on truth rather than illusion.
And paradoxically, this grounded approachâthis clear seeing of impermanence, causality, and interdependenceâhas allowed me to accomplish more, with greater peace and less suffering, than all my frantic positive thinking ever did.
Because now I'm working with reality, not against it. And reality, it turns out, has been waiting all along for me to stop fighting and start participating.
The world is impermanent, interdependent, and governed by causality. This isn't a limitationâit's the very structure that makes growth, change, and meaningful action possible. The question isn't whether to accept reality, but whether to suffer unnecessarily while learning what it's been trying to teach us all along.