In the last post in this series, I explored the fundamental conflict at the heart of the human psyche. We’re at war! A war between who we are, who we think we are and who we are choosing to be in daily life. The cost of war is always immense, and the suffering can blight an entire lifetime. We become prisoners of our own mind, thoughts and concepts about ourselves.
The answer, as I suggested, is to lay down our arms, hold up the flag of surrender and learn to create a harmonious synergy between the the three aspects of the human ego: the essential self, the imagined self and the social self. I’ll be exploring this in greater detail later on; the art of living an authentic life that is in alignment with who we really are. As Socrates said:
“Give me the beauty of the inward soul: may the outward and the inward man be at one.”
A life without authenticity, without living in harmony with one’s own nature, is never going to be a particularly happy one. It took me a number of years to realise that it’s simply not possible to find lasting happiness when there’s a disparity at the core of our psyche: a gulf between who we are and who we are choosing to be in daily life.
Addressing this imbalance does takes a little time and work. It rarely happens at the click of our fingers, as nice as that would be. Before we can move forward, it’s important to recognise how the mind keeps us in bondage. That is the key to everything. Our entire experience of reality is filtered and distorted by the mind. The only way to be free is to understand this and learn how to make our mind work for and not against us.
What follows is an inquiry into the nature of experience. This may be the most important section of this series. Once you truly understand what I’m about to tell you, your life will never be the same again.
There is a way out of suffering and the good news is you don’t need to spend thousands on therapy, workshops, seminars, books and training. The mind is liberated by knowledge—knowledge of reality and how the mind works. If knowledge is power, then self-knowledge is liberation. All you need to do is read on with an open mind and be willing to reflect on what I’m about to share.
Out of touch with reality
It was a bright Spring day and I decided it was time to take the dogs for a walk. So I put on my coat, leashed them up and set off. Although I was gone for about half an hour, before I knew it I was back at the door. I suddenly realised that I’d barely experienced the walk at all!
If you’d asked me to describe in any great detail where I’d gone, what the weather was like, and what I’d seen, I’d only have been able to give the most cursory of responses. You see, I hadn’t been walking the dogs at all—I’d been sleepwalking the dogs. I was completely lost in thought the whole time. I was walking around on autopilot, tuning out virtually all sensory stimuli in order to indulge whatever was going on in my mind. I was barely interfacing with my environment at all.
I realised two things that day. Firstly, that this is not a particularly satisfying way to live. And secondly, that human beings actually experience reality through a kind of bubble: an invisible mind-made bubble comprised of thoughts, words, concepts, memories and fantasies.
We tend to assume that we experience just a single, objective reality, but that is not the case. There are actually two levels of reality. Well, actually there are three, but I will go into that another time, as I want to keep this as simple as possible.
The first is the concrete objective reality. This is a shared reality, comprising where we are physically and what’s going on around us. The second is an abstract subjective reality. Made entirely of thought, this is a mind-based and therefore private level of reality. On my aforementioned walk, the latter was every bit as real to me as the first, and virtually all my cognitive energy was being channeled into it.
Even when the mind is comparatively quieter and we aren’t as lost in the ceaseless chatter of our inner monologue, there’s still no escaping the fact that this mind-bubble comes between us and a clear, direct, fresh experience of life. We’re asleep at the wheel, simultaneously inhabiting objective reality but so often lost in a superimposed, dream-like reality made entirely of thought. Pretty far out, huh?
This, by the way, is my cartoon depiction of the bubbles we live in…
So what happens when our every experience is filtered by our mind-bubble? Basically, we no longer have authentic encounters with life, the world and other people. We no longer see and relate to what’s out there—instead we see and relate to our labels, concepts and judgements of what we think is out there. The latter is a level of complete projection and superimposition. We superimpose our thoughts and interpretations onto reality and fail to realise that in so doing we have coloured or distorted reality!
This is a mainly unconscious process and is considered normal for most people. We plod through life, lost in thought and out of touch with the world around us. You might even go so far as to say that every human being is engaged in a mind-created virtual reality. This virtual reality is always distorted to a greater or lesser extent and is often chock full of manufactured threats. We’re literally having bad trips and seeing all manner of horrors, many of which are simply imagined. Our inner world of course determines our behavioural responses and this explains why human behaviour is often incredibly warped and insane.
Where do we experience things?
Let’s take this even deeper. Bear with me—you will be duly rewarded, I promise. This is a radical understanding that, properly understood, is guaranteed to forever change the way you look at life.
As with most cool things in life, it starts with an interesting question. Where do we experience things? Do we experience things outside of us, or inside of us?
It’s natural to assume that we look through our eyes much the same way as we look out of a window, and that we experience reality out there. This is called ‘naive realism’. Here’s another Rory cartoon to illustrate:
“Naive realism”: how we think perception and experience happens
But it’s actually impossible to experience anything out there. If I look at a tree, it might seem that I’m experiencing the tree over there. But I’m actually experiencing it in my mind. Data is being relayed by my senses and processed by my mind, which then creates an internal representation of a tree. What I’m experiencing is a tree thought!
Our entire experience of reality is simply a representation of reality created by our mind. We’re not experiencing a world of things out there, what we’re actually experiencing is a world of thoughts, in here.
The mind is the instrument by which we perceive objects; the mirror that reflects objective reality. We cannot perceive anything outside of our mind. No mind, no experience. So everything that we perceive and experience in life, even though it may appear to be outside of us, is actually perceived and experienced in our mind.
“Representational realism”: how perception and experience actually happens
The implications of this are pretty staggering! If you’re still reading this, you deserve a muffin.
Twice removed from reality
This obviously turns a few things on their head. The general assumption is that we simply experience things. When we actually stop to analyse the nature of experience, we come to realise that, as I said above, it’s not the things themselves that we experience, it’s our internal representation of those things.
And because of the mental overlay that filters our interpretation of experience, we rarely have an accurate, unbiased interpretation of experience. We lose touch with objective reality and get stuck in our own little subjective reality.
New stimulus is constantly coming in through the senses, creating new internal representations of reality. And the mind is constantly filtering those representations. Attempting to make sense of the input and discern a narrative pattern, the mind is constantly churning out thoughts and stories, based upon past conditioning, experiences and memories, beliefs and opinions, likes and dislikes and numerous other factors.
So not only is our perception of reality taking place within the mind, but it’s also filtered and interpreted by the mind. Our experience of reality is actually twice removed from reality!
Two levels of reality
One of the conclusions we can draw from this analysis is that it can be very difficult to separate the objective (what is) from the subjective (what we think is). We naturally assume that what we are experiencing is objective, but it’s almost always subjective.
It’s on the subjective level where the problems lie. The bubble, as I call it, gets in the way: the mental repository of all kinds of faulty scripts and coding; self-sabotaging errors that colour everything we experience; everything that we think and do. Our mental filter gets distorted and this in turn generates a painful experience of reality.
The understanding that there are two levels of reality is an important one. In fact, it is the key to liberating your mind.
To summarise again, the levels of reality are:
The objective: the ‘real world’; the world of tangible ‘things’, namely objects and experiences. The reality we seemingly experience out there and which is more or less the same for everyone.
The subjective: the ‘inner world’; the filtered reality we experience as shaped by our thoughts, experiences and conditioning.
The problems arise when we confuse the two through a process of superimposition—and this happens all the time! Mistaking our interpretation of experience as being concrete reality is a surefire recipe for disaster and is in fact the root of just about all human conflict in the world. We’re not actually seeing things as they are. We’re instead trapped in our bubble; and the bubble can be a pretty miserable place to be!
Perhaps you can see how this creates all kinds of chaos in human interaction. Let’s say you come into the room and start talking to me. Here’s what will inevitably happen. My mind will filter and interpret what you are saying in line with what I already think and believe. It’ll be coloured by my general mood and any past experiences I may have had with you, be they good or bad. Accordingly, it won’t really be you or what you’re saying that I’ll be experiencing—it’ll be my own interpretations of you and what you’re saying.
Objective reality is always value neutral and it’s usually very simple. You entered the room and started talking; nothing more, nothing less. But I’ve lost touch with objective reality. I’m in my subjective reality. As far as I’ve concerned you’ve interrupted me when I’m busy, are talking crap and are a bit of a jerk. I see that as the reality of the situation. Only it isn’t reality at all.
Events in themselves are neutral. It’s our mind that assigns meaning and value to experience, either positive or negative. So my thoughts have distorted reality and caused suffering for me—and this will probably make me act in a certain way that causes offence or suffering for you too. Human relationships are so complex because each interaction involves not two people, but four. There’s not only you and I, but there’s your mental image of who you think I am and my mental image of who you think you are. These are almost like mental avatars, and it’s those avatars that are really driving relationships!
Experience is determined by thought
Let’s pull this all together. We don’t perceive anything outside of our mind; that’s simply not possible, for the mind is our instrument of perception. What we perceive are actually internal representations in our mind. Furthermore, we rarely experience those representations objectively. We perceive things as we think they are, for every experience is processed through the filter of our thoughts, beliefs, likes, dislikes and conditioning. Reality is value neutral, but the mind assigns value, either positive or negative. As Shakespeare wrote:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
The mind’s job is to not only process sensory stimuli, but to attempt to make sense of it and fit it into some kind of narrative structure. It does this by creating stories around the things we experience. We relate to life through a veritable library of mental stories. When then tend to get stuck in these stories, which, through the process of projection and superimposition, we mistake as being reality. In actual fact, we’re completely out of touch with reality and are inhabiting a kind of virtual reality. If our thoughts and interpretations are suitably negative and self-limiting, this virtual reality can be our own living hell.
So what can we do about this? How do we deal with the bubble that’s filtering and distorting our reality? How do we stop ourselves getting sucked into subjective alternate realities and the suffering that comes along with them? We do that by bursting the bubble! We apply knowledge about the nature of mind and reality. Quite simply, we learn to reduce the subjective to the objective. Once we’ve got a clear grasp on how to do that, we’re pretty much home free and that is what I will be exploring in the next essay.
