Chapter 1 : The Mental Health Epidemic

The mental crisis is at an all time high. The World Health Organization reported in 2019 that nearly a billion people were living with a mental health disorder, 14% of these people were adolescents. In 2024 that number has likely doubled. Currently 80% of people in the western world will have a mental health disorder sometime in their lifetime.

​During Covid-19 and all it's ramifications the world changed rapidly. Common people got poorer, and the gap between the ultra rich and poor increased staggeringly. Many people faced unprecedented levels of stress and social disconnection. In the west the toll was huge and in the third world the devastation was catastrophic. Many people who were doing relatively fine now had no money to eat and either died of starvation or committed suicide due to stressors such as not being able to provide food on the table for themselves or their family. 

With all the terrible consequences of the pandemic protocols there was a silver lining, a silver lining that keeps growing exponentially. People were reporting that what used to make them happy not longer did. This was coupled with a real experience of distrust of those institutions that were meant to serve the people. 

This distrust and discontentment has a rather surprising result. Many people started to look inward, they started questioning whether society was set up for their happiness, whether the life they were living was really worth living. Looking inward, self reflection and having the motivation to really consciously examine their lives people discovered that the system they were living had little to offer anymore, if it ever did.

People re-evaluated their priorities and also their previously held values and beliefs. Many also started to ponder to the big question 'who am I' and 'what's the point of it all'. That is, what am I here for what's my purpose?

This is no easy inner examination and most of us struggled at this point, I know I did. But what I learnt is that much of this difficulty lies in the fact that in this culture and many others we are not only not encouraged to understand ourselves we are most often discouraged or scolded. What we really want to understand and discover is our authentic self. This self is not dependent on any social institution, leader, societal norm or job. Who most people think themself to be is more a conglomeration of conditionings, memories, beliefs, ideas and thoughts. But to discover your authentic self you don't think about it you need to perceive it, to feel it. This is a skill and it requires training so don't be discouraged if you get stuck here, all of us do to varying degrees.

The first thing one needs to do if your at this point is to understand what is called the inner world and the outer world. 

The outer world is everything that is limited to time and space. The material world, planet earth or everything that's happening 'outside' your awareness. 

The inner world is your subjective experience through the act of perception.

Now many of us have been taught that there is only an objective world. There are many reasons behind this but if you feel that to be false its worth reading on. The key point to understand and examine for yourself is that all we really know about reality is that we perceive and subsequently act.

Cutting edge leaders in the field of psychology such as the one below explain this well. The basic premise is that our experience here on Earth is bound or limited to time and space. Here on Earth we live in what's called some call a physical dimension. However not all of reality is bound by time and space. There are likely infinite other dimensions governed by different laws but like our physical world all these other dimensions have a source and it is this source that animates, if you like, our existence here on Earth.

An appropriate word for this source is called consciousness in some scientific communities deliberately avoiding using other loaded words that have their own various connotations. Not that these connotations are necessarily bad or inaccurate. They may serve much more than a functional purpose for people. However my claim is and what others claim, is that 'consciousness' or the 'source' is not as bound or encapsulated by human concepts or ideas. The word 'consciousness't is thus highly useful to understand the next point. 

“Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.”― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

If we can understand there is a fundamental reality beyond our conception of existence here on the physical plane we can begin to understand that we can not fully understand source through our mind alone. This also implies that any loaded words depicting this source or consciousness are only going to limit our understanding of how we can connect to consciousness directly without running into roadblocks. It is imperative to understand that in order to improve our lives we must go beyond our intellect and words in order to understand the limitations and filters that are limiting our lives and our self growth. These limitations are what is holding us back and are only under the constraint of time and space and not the deeper fundamental reality.

"Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons. Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it".

― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

So how can this acknowledgment of a fundamental reality practically help us live a more joyful and happy life and with that a life of purpose and clarity. The answer to this is if we understand and feel there is a deeper reality we can then connect to it and gain direct information from this consciousness. 

During the pandemic and still to this day many people voice that they are confused and what they thus want is clarity. Most of our ideas about how to live a 'good life' are just that 'ideas'. Many of these ideas are not longer appropriate or helpful. For example, once upon a time getting a job, buying a home and seeing friends on weekends was the Australian dream. After covid-19 this was not only very difficult but even if it was attainable for everyone people would still not be satisfied. By becoming dissatisfied with life during covid and beyond people disconnected and reconnected with themselves. Many people realised there was more to life and one major factor in this realisation was that there is something more going on in reality than cause and affect and the material world (the dimension of time and space).

While turning inward, disconnecting and listening to their inner self people contacted and became aware of a more fundamental reality. A reality that once connected to provides unlimited insight into our problems here on Earth. If people got to this stage where they had pursued methods to connect with a more fundamental reality they too were aware that evolution here on earth is moving in a very positive direction and that all we have to do is keep improving our connection to this deep consciousness and we will have the insight and guidance to implement the changes here on the physical plan that match the deeper intelligence of consciousness itself. 

It is at this point that we get into a deeper discussion that I will mostly leave for the next chapter. There are methods of connection to the source of it all based on natural principles or law (the principles of fundamental reality). Nature of course exists in line with principles. And for thousands of years people very connected to nature and thus consciousness itself have devised and downloaded from consciousness incredibly intelligent methods to get connected.

As Donald Hoffman describes as we let go of space time, primarily our ideas, thoughts, concepts  and 'anything' that interferes with our connection to consciousness, quantum physicists and ourselves find new structures, structures of ancient geometry as the ancients described. These platonic like structures have volume and these various volumes of highly complex shapes code the probabilities of scattering events. The structure of these faces, vertices and edges of such shapes code for features in space time (earth).

What Hoffman is basically saying is that these geometric shapes or dimensions code or make up what we know of as nature on planet Earth and thus comprise the fundamental reality. Knowing that we humans are nature itself we have the potential to interface with consciousness itself.

This is where the ancient embodied practices of arts of cultivation like Tai and Yoga come in. In all these embodied arts one of the constants we are always working with are complex geometric patterns. By doing certain movements in space and time we literally align with complex geometric shapes, dimensions and patterns outside of space and time and thus connect with the deeper reality outside of time and space, consciousness. Over time the more refined our movement gets the more we align with natural principles and are able to 'download' any information we need to create the life we want to live on Earth. We stop thinking so much in a linear fashion and can think and feel in abstract ways but in context with larger fields of information that are geometrically in sync.

This life is subjected to space time but not constrained by it if we are aligned with consciousness itself. If we are aligned though an embodied practice like yoga, Tai chi or Kungfu we evolve our own consciousness which is not seperate to every other dimensions of existence or experience.

By evolving our consciousness we can create the life we want to live with principles based on the deeper fundamental reality and not just space time itself. This reality provides us with the certainty we are looking for so no more anxiety. We become certain that life is always changing and moving and understand that so as long as we are anchored into this deeper reality through an embodied practice we can go and flow with it as we will always receive the insight we need to move forward and act correctly on our perception.

No longer do we have to do a job we hate, watch bad news and feel miserable. We create our own destiny, get money to do what we love, create positive inspiring news, feel joyful and feel empower to live an exciting life. This all comes from operating outside of existing paradigms subjected to space and time and connecting to the timeless and infinite world of possibilities governed by the self regulating system we call consciousness, the deep fundamental reality. 

Next chapter I will discuss how to find a good therapist. As you can guess the most important factor is are they connected to the deeper reality and can they help you connect to it too.

Michael Jakeman

B.Sc.Psych, PGDipED, Cert.III.Fitness