Taoist philosophies present the Tao as ultimate reality, and realizing the Tao leads to improvements in mental health. The Tao Te Ching is central, with elements from the Zhuangzi and the Liezi also included. Concepts such as Wu Wei and other topics are briefly covered. Like earlier approaches discussed, Taoist methods follow the same underlying mechanisms, showing from another unique angle that realizing ultimate reality significantly improves mental health.
Humans have at least two fundamental ways of perceiving reality, associated with the left and right hemispheres. The left hemisphere adeptly re-presents reality into symbols, aiding goal-directed behaviors but potentially harming mental health through rigid language use and narrow attention that fails to contextualize information. The right hemisphere supports globalized, novel, and contextualized views focused on nonreductive analysis. Neither hemispheric view adequately conceptualizes ultimate reality, so maintaining balance is crucial. Attention, primarily linked to right-hemisphere functions, is discussed along with neural mechanisms, types of attention, and a basic working model, with the premise that training attention enables deeper realizations of reality.