LESSON 2:
The brain creates its own understanding. This understanding is full of invisible mistakes.
The brain creates its own thought-made version of the physical world and then adds past understanding into that world as well. This results in the reality that you experience every second you are alive.
A healthy human understanding of life gives a person a very clear perspective. As humans, we are designed to do this naturally and automatically.
When we are born, we have no understanding of ourselves, the world or life in general. As we grow, we start to build one consciously and unconsciously.
However, we start doing this very young and toddlers can make some very misguided conclusions about themselves and the world around them. When we are young, we are also very influenced by the people around us. We unconsciously start to believe in the same things that they do. All this forms the foundation upon which we build our conscious and unconscious understanding of how life works - and it has a lot of mistakes in it.
This is like building a software programme on incorrect code. It means that the programme won't work properly. The code will need to be corrected and updated in order for the programme to work effectively. This is what we need to do with our conscious and unconscious understanding of life.
Scientists are suggesting that up to 90% of our understanding of life is unconscious. Even though we can't appreciate that these beliefs are there, they are and they have an impact on the world that your brain builds for you.
If there are mistakes and misunderstandings, it will mean that your reality will be distorted and this could cause a lot of psychological suffering for a person. Therefore, it is essential that we notice and correct the unconscious mistakes in our understanding of life, so that we experience an accurate, thought-based version of the world around us.
For instance, if a person believed unconsciously that they weren't good enough, this would have a massive impact on how they experience the world and how they behave in it. It's likely that believing you're not good enough would lead to the world looking threatening. It would mean that you would have very low self-confidence. You'd be judgemental of yourself and constantly monitor your behaviour and others. It's likely that you wouldn't step into new opportunities, so you would experience a lot of limitation in your life and that could bring a lot of other challenges. Basically, this belief would make life stressful all the time.
However, if this person truly realises that this belief is simply a thought – something that was made of energy and was never solid, fixed, true or real, then they would immediately feel happier and lighter. This would alter their understanding of life, which would alter their experience of reality. With a clear perspective on life, they would find living a pleasurable experience. They would also start to see potential where there was once only limitation.
For humans, the world that we experience can change drastically in a second. In a distorted understanding, it looks like a threatening and awful place. However, as soon as the distorted thinking gets corrected, the world will look fun, safe and inviting again. Our understanding is then fresh and belief-free. We are no longer suffering.
If you're not sure which thoughts you can believe in as solid, fixed and real... the answer is that no thought is ever true. Some thoughts are extremely helpful and the fact that our brain creates a thought-based version of the environment around us is also extremely helpful, however they are still all just illusions made of energy - just as a VR experience is an illusion made of light. We have to see this very clearly in order to have a strong sense of mental wellbeing.
It can be very easy to miss the real reason for psychological suffering because our understanding of the world is largely unconscious and it's made of thinking that changes all the time. The important thing is that we recognise the signs of unhealthy understanding and we don't trust our experience of life if we notice these signals.
We then need to check the health of our understanding regularly. If we listen to the way we feel and we take a look at what is occurring in our experience of life, we'll know which state we are in. We'll now look at what we need to do to restore a strong sense of wellbeing.
KEY CONCEPT SUMMARY:
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The conscious and unconscious understanding that the brain adds to reality is likely to be full of innocent and invisible mistakes because this understanding of life started to be created from being a toddler and they regularly misinterpret situaitons
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It is essential that we increase our sensitivity to these unconscious mistakes and correct them once we are an adult