This Is The Cause Of Your Suffering

Who, in the past, made you doubt yourself so much that you can’t believe in yourself now?

What trauma did you endure that makes life so difficult today?

Who is it that robbed you of your confidence meaning you can’t do the things you want to do?

Your mother…

Your father…

The teachers at school…

Those mean children…

Maybe you saw something or heard something so unpleasant it scarred you for life….

Humours and Miasmas

Let us diverge for a moment.

The year is 1846. Common illnesses like cholera, the plague, and various fevers ravaged populations.

By now, it was understood that these diseases were caused by miasmas, or bad air, which carried harmful properties emanating from decomposing organic matter. The stench of rotting waste and decaying bodies wasn’t just unpleasant - it was toxic. Disease spread rapidly in filthy environments, and the conclusion was clear: exposure to bad air caused illness.

The symptoms of these illnesses were well-documented: fevers, redness, and swelling, all signs of an excess of blood. The logical treatment? Bloodletting. Removing the surplus blood would restore balance to the body. Other symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhoea, indicated toxins or imbalances in the digestive system. These harmful substances needed to be expelled, so purging through induced vomiting or laxatives was the obvious course of action.

For centuries, it was known that human health was governed by the four humours. When these humours fell out of balance, sickness followed. Restoring harmony among them was the foundation of medicine, and treatments like bloodletting and purging were time-tested solutions. And of course, if it wasn’t one of these then it must’ve been a spiritual imbalance instead.

This framework had stood the test of time for over a millennium, guiding the efforts of healers across generations.

After all, it worked! Not all the time but enough…

Hold up… wait a minute…

Obviously this is not medicine as we know it today. So what was happening? Why did the academics and brain boxes of the time have such ludicrous solutions to the treatment of sickness.

They were working with a model that was incorrect. An assumption, albeit one that made sense based upon the information available to them, that was treated as a fundamental truth… an absolute.

Based on this absolute, they would create remedies, preventative measures, medical procedures… cures, in order to combat sickness and physical suffering.

What seems absurd to us now made perfect sense at the time.

When Assumptions Fall Apart

The humoral theory explained health as a balance of the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humour corresponded to specific symptoms, making treatments like bloodletting or purging seem obvious. Similarly, diseases like cholera and plague, which spread in filthy environments, were attributed to miasmas—the harmful “bad air” that seemed to emanate from decay and waste.

Diseases were treated as external forces or mysterious conditions beyond comprehension, and the framework for addressing them was unnecessarily complex and often ineffective.

Another problem was that the treatments sometimes appeared to work. The observation that rotting matter and decaying bodies smelled bad, and people should avoid them, will have prevented sickness somewhat. But what was more likely the case was that symptoms would subside on their own and correlation was mistaken for causation.

A Radical Shift

Then came germ theory, and with it, a radical new understanding of disease. Scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that illness wasn’t caused by bad air or imbalances in humours, but by something unseen: microscopic organisms. This single insight dismantled centuries of assumptions and revealed a simpler, more effective way forward.

This simple yet revolutionary insight changed everything. Once people stopped working within the framework of miasmas and addressed germs directly, disease prevention and treatment became way simpler and far more effective. Concepts like sterilisation, handwashing, and vaccines followed naturally, saving countless lives.

Of course this transition was not a smooth one. Many of the times brightest minds and most influential academics rejected germ theory for quite some time. After all, there is some logic to the previous framework. But ultimately was the only thing that stood in the way of a simpler more effective method was trying to work within the assumed fundamental truth.

As soon as society let go of that which previously seems so real, an new and radical era of medicine began.

What Do We Assume?

Which brings me back to my original questions.

The idea that our past experiences serve as the root cause to our present suffering is an entirely convincing model for mental well-being, but what is the implication?

It’s that resolving past events is necessary for mental freedom.

This makes well-being feel like a monumental task - one that requires revisiting painful memories, fixing unresolved stories, or confronting people and situations that may no longer be accessible.

But what if that assumption isn’t a fundamental truth?

What if suffering isn’t caused by the past itself. What if it’s caused by how ‘real’ our current thoughts about the past feel?

Freedom Through Recognition

When you see that memory is a present thought… happening now… labelled ‘the past’, the framework shifts.

This shift changes everything. Instead of working within the complexity of “resolving the past,” you see that there’s nothing to resolve. The weight of suffering lifts because what seems to be the source of pain - your current thoughts - can be recognised for what they truly are and the complexity dissolves.

Just as germ theory simplified medicine, recognising this truth simplifies well-being.

It opens the door to something radical: the realisation that there’s nothing broken, nothing to fix, and no past event that can define you. The story you’ve been telling isn’t reality - it’s just a thought, happening now. And in seeing through this illusion, true freedom becomes possible - not through fixing the past, but by recognising that it has no power here.