It goes something like this. Our brains solve problems, they are real good at it to. Ask a question and your grey matter will crunch away at it night and day, it can even imagine fresh possibilities. Ask it a question based on false assumptions and it may never stop.
Yes this is going to be another mind bender, so grab your favourite legal stimulant,(if desired) or close your curtains at least and get comfortable. I have been banging my head against this for years and it is still eludes me. So lets see if I can spit it out in simple language. Not bad to work all this stuff out for ourlselve's anyhow.. this is only my take, not “the truth”.
Knowledge is power, yep won't argue with that, but how often is power used wisely?
Power over who and what? what is power? is it the ability to change what is happening to alter the course of events?
What are the downstream effects of altering events? is there any end to it and can we ever know that, or is the power to change always greater than the knowledge that enables it?
If knowledge provides power but can not provide the wisdom of consequence, why do we value it so much?
I did warn you, this is going to get deep ;)
That is not the main thrust of todays expedition however, what I want to explore is what happens when we mistake a concept for a fact and try to embed that into our worldview, how does that effect our ability to focus?
Gaining Knowledge
Relatively few have access to the greatest teachers and universities, (none of my relatives anyhow ha ha).
Many of us can, however, access thousands of hours of video on any of the sciences. (even without torrents).
While knowledge may be getting cheaper, the time and ability to memorise it and the opportunity to practice applying and testing it actually remains scarce.
Children's brains may work like sponges when they are new and undamaged, but after a steady diet of sugars and polyunsaturated fats, (in the absence of anti oxidants). Add in some trauma and that sponge performs like that old thing under the sink in the laundry. It still absorbs, but may leave more mess than it can ever remove.
It's no secret that memorising useful patterns is actually not that easy, and it is only fun if we are interested in the subject.
Few of us take what we need from nature, so we must earn money and trade that for what we need. The way we value ourselves and each other can get confused with the way we display knowledge and the earning or “changing power” it provides. Their is a lot of pressure on us, and the quality of knowledge can suffer as much as the people who live under its influences.
What happens if we memorise something that is not strictly true?
Well it makes it very difficult for our minds to sort things out later.
We make connections between points of logic, that we like to call facts.
When we can verify these with experiences they gain credibility and become pivotal in our growing understanding of what our opportunities may be. (This is trust, which we have touched upon before)
A brain attached to a healthy nervous system playing in a safe environment full of rich sensual experiences learns like a super computer - (the kind of thing that AI is trying to emulate and exceed).
It learns fast because everything around us is accurate, inter-elated on some level and checkable, therefore it is easy to link "facts" together. It is easy to verify and cross reference the events that we can sense directly.
This is why experience is such a powerful teacher and book learning, while useful can leave us a little inept when it is time for action.
In reality everything is cause and effect - its perfect, to our senses, (if not our minds) everything balances, our biology does homeostasis, and its really good at it. Thats why it manages all the key life support systems and only lets us play with motor skills, (and thinking) we get to drive the bodymind but our biology keeps the wheels turning.
It takes us a year to learn to walk, longer to use our fingers with dexterity, about 20 years to build all the bone, muscle and organ structure of an adult. By that time, if we have not suffered undue physical or mental injury, if we have had time to move and play. It is possible that we can have a highly attuned, sensual, well balanced high performance mind/body.
So what's the problem?
If we are using our processing power to create real world solutions that increase playfulness, freedom and abundance that is pretty cool and super fun.
If we are coming from a place of fear and control or resistance to what is. If we are not playful, we become manipulative, miserable and addicted, what a waste of a life that would be. Misery loves company and power addicts love control. It’s just fear though.. fear born of mis understanding.
Misunderstanding born of trying to run on a broken world view. The world does not actually need our world views or our control, it was doing some pretty interesting things before we got organized.. (you know like biodiversity).
I will probably spend the rest of my life discussing this, so I don’t have to totally nail it in one blog lol... it is very hard to see the scale of Forrest from within it.
Un-tested "knowledge" may be the problem that keeps us in solving mode
"Facts" that we have taken on-board and never checked or no longer check become trusted "nodes" or reference points that we try to build the framework or our understanding upon. When we cant find a fit, our mind goes of into space trying to create one so that we can keep the damaged piece.
Imagine if you have a box full of jigsaw pieces in your mind/body - some are missing and can be found along the journey of your life as you gain rich experiences.
It’s actually not that hard to put together a working model of reality that you can use to recognise useful patterns.
The more easily we can recognise why events are happening , the less we need to work for our food and shelter. The more time we have for getting good at playing with what we really enjoy, (those activities that hold our attention effortlessly), the more unique pieces of jigsaw we find. Thats a beneficial loop - if we pick up pieces that dont fit - something else happens.
** Flow states revisited**
The magical flow state we covered a few posts ago, simply re-allocates circulation more evenly in our brains, while dosing us with natural pain killers, anti inflammatories, smart drugs and pleasure chemicals that reward acccurate jigsaw piece recognition.
Flow state is the biology, giving us a reality trip, so we don’t break it by acting out our fantasies.
The biggest thing it does, is shut down the stratigic imagining part of our minds - why?
Simple - that is where the noise in the system is, that is where all the jigsaw pieces that don't belong are still being churned, its where we store, what is not true, but can not be let go of.
The problem with solving is that in any one moment - everything in the universe is how it is because it can not be any other way, the events that led to it have already happened. Right now, we almost never need to be in our heads, in our thoughts. We are there because we don't accept the reality of right now and are working damn hard to alter it. Now that is not a bad thing, I kind of like this machine I am typing on, that began as a series of problems that were progressively solved.
Those kind of focused thoughts are not the noise in the system, they are the signal that we manage to tune into and develop into wondrous actions. Strict environmentalists may disagree here, but I am not anti technology. I am pro responsibility.
Have you ever caught yourself re-playing an argument in your mind....from 5 years ago!
Or a bullying incident, or some other time when you "let yourself down"?
How many hours a day is lost in fantasising about crap that is not helpful?
Now some day-dreaming is extremely healthy and can be fun and creative.
What about that other crap, the ceaseless commentary, the stream of opinions and labels about everything that we see and hear. That is noisy, and while our attention is with that it is not in our body, in our real feelings. It is our 5 senses that interact with the jigsaw pieces, we wont even notice them if we are in la la land.
Our biology responds to all this noise also, and we communicate our mood to others through body language voice tone and even our body odour. We are always the signal and the signaler - only the quality varies.
What if that mental noise is a function of our immune system?
Our body does homeostasis and keeps the party going, it fights infections and heals itself.
Why wouldn't it also try to kick out jigsaw pieces that don't belong to any picture representing reality?
Why would n't it give us the opportunity to be rid of mistaken beliefs, opinions and "false facts"?
We can't build a working 3 dimensional network on faulty nodes, or bad reference points - when we try to, our expectations are continuously challenged. This sends false warning signals to our biology constantly putting us into low level stress, it messes with our real motor skills, as covered in previous blogs. It sends strange signals to other people messing up the congruency of our communications. Its low level constant toxicity and we use alls sorts of addictive behaviour to cover it up, over-ride it or tone it down.
What if those noisy thoughts are our opinions being bounced back at us?
What if we have 2 choices?
1. Question the belief behind the thought
- can I absolutely know that this is true?
- who would I be if I did not believe this
- is the opposite possibly true?
(This is Byron Katies - the 3 questions).
2. Or keep imagining alternate version of reality where we get to be right.
where we dont have to let go of the toxic jigsaw piece.
where we keep trying to be in control
where we may seek knowledge for power
where we may not even be able to verify it
or care about the real world consequences for others.
Thoughts that carry the emotions of contraction or resistance, are usually just our immune systems way of saying “really, can we let go already?, do we still believe this?” - ok stay in tension, stay with the intension to control.
There are many ways to dis-charge these faulty programming loops.
Many ways to dump the toxic jigsaw pieces. To make it so much easier to build a more clear picture for our lives.
One that is verifiable by the senses and therefore in relationship with reality. Lets have a look some of those methods in future blogs.
this is psychobiology - its the comic version of the instruction manual I am writing for myself.
Its deep, but then so is the hole we have dug for ourselves.
ok so that was not funny...not everything is.
=8-P