My Mind is Lying to me

One of the few things we don't question, or question enough, is our own thoughts. We feel a certain way about someone and the mind will come up with the reasons for it. Often we take a position based on emotion then our mind fills in the reasons later. Then believe we took the position was because of what we found to justify our feeling. It's not something we are aware of usually. It often means we are wrong. In essense, our minds are lying to us.

Anyone who has read about or participated in Buddhist practice has heard the term delusion. Most students either coming up with what they think it means or remain not quite sure.

To understanding delusion, you need to know a bit about the mind. The mind is a construct of the brain, within which we experience the world. It's easy to forget everything we are, everything we've experienced, everyone we know, everything we witness is all inside the boundaries of the mind. We never sense anything directly. We are born, live, and die within this universe.

This leads into understanding how the brain functions. Aside from its job of running all the autonomous processes, as a controller over voluntary actions of the body, and as a memory storage medium, it is a prediction engine. This is how we evolved, so we can avoid dangers, attract mates, find food and shelter. All of which requires predictioning what can happen next. If you glimpse a tiger at the edge of the field where you're picking blackberries, it might be important to realize even though you no longer see him, he is still there and perhaps hunting you. A baby quickly starts to expect a ball rolling behind a box to reemerge from the other side.

You can view consciousness as a controlled hallucination representing reality. The mind isn't showing reality, only an analog. Given the brain is a prediction engine, everything we see/sense/hear in our mind is influenced as much by our past experiences, our desires and fears, as it is by the outside world. Researchers estimate fifty percent of the movie experience we see in our heads is not directly from sensory input, but added by the predictive mechanisms in our brain, coloring everything.

This may seem far-fetched but consider how a dozen people can witness the same crime and not one description is the same. This goes well beyond simply physical perspective. Some of the witnesses can and have reported the incorrect race or gender of an assailant. This is due to past experiences and expectations. We've all known of the person who constantly suspects their partner of cheating, seeing hints and evidence in any and all actions. When the partner is on the phone they're assumed talking to someone they are cheating with; anytime they are late it's because they were with someone. This is the reality that person sees. It's not uncommon to hear of someone who had an accident swearing the tree or telephone pole jumped out in front of them. Their mind filled in something that didn't happen due to a prediction failure.

To understand how this can occur, it's important to understand we've evolved a 'most probable' rather than a 'most correct' prediction system, one favoring the worst case. If you mistook the wind moving the tall grass for a tiger and ran, it cost you much less than the converse. Our system is good, but hardly foolproof. It gives us a lot of false positives. This is especially true when our past experiences are powerful or our emotions are intense. If you are depressed, even what would normally be good news can be seen as yet another disaster.

We omit, as well as add, so much in our mapping of external reality to our internal constructs. There was a psychology demonstration a bit back, still on youtube, called 'Selective Attention Test'. If you want to try it now, don't read any further until you look it up and watch.

The instructions state you should count how many times the ball was passed by players in white, on the video. It shows a group of about six players, passing two basketballs. Half the players are wearing white the others are wearing black. The video goes on for little over a 30 seconds, in a fairly small space.

After the time is up they tell you how many times the ball was passed, then asked if you saw the gorilla walk through the set. Most people miss that a gorilla walks right through the middle of the people passing the ball, stops and beats his chest, the proceeds off stage.

In the abstract, most of us understand our brain does add/subtract stuff but deep down we still feel we are seeing things as they are. Almost everyone reading this will have subconsciously thought the same thing. Somehow we're different. We're not.

For others, we subconsciously attach a lot of emotional and informational baggage, much of which is specious and based on poor, if not outright wrong information. It affects our interactions and beliefs concerning them. We attach motives to what people do, we intuit causes for actions of people, animals, events, which are guesses at best. The problem is we tend to act as if, and believe, this were hard fact. This alteration of the facts can make them almost unrecognizable. One need only watch a heated political or religious discussion to see how people see the same things and derive completely different sets of 'facts' from it. If we were passionless beings perhaps the added information we associate with people and events would be less distorted, but humans are what we are. To assume this is only something other people do is a mental trap fostered by our own egos.

In essence delusion is unquestioned thought. To accept a thought without question is delusion.

It's easy to see certain groups, political, religious, or otherwise, which tend to operate in an echo chamber. The information they believe is constantly being bandied back and forth reinforcing what they 'know' to be true. It's heard so often it ceases to be something questioned. This is what happens in our own minds with regards to our own known truths. Our thoughts are the echo chamber, constantly solidifying and reinforcing our 'truths'. We are so used to this it is almost impossible to see.

This is why the process of meditation and becoming aware of our thoughts is important. Our desires drive much of our thoughts and our thoughts drive our suffering.

In our mind, there exists the Watcher and the Commentator. The Watcher senses all that is happening. The Commentator is the voice we have in our heads. It is easy to confuse these as who we are. A common question seen in Buddhism is 'Who am I'. If you go over this with someone like a teacher, it quickly become apparent this has no a simple answer. All of the first answers can be swept away, your name isn't you it can be changed, your job isn't you, you can change jobs, being a father, mother, sister, brother, all these can be changed without you being a different person. Your body can undergo serious change (through accident, surgery, disease, etc), and you still are you. All too often, we identify 'me' as the voice in our heads (the Commentator). Once you've meditated a while you realize that voice can go silent, and you are still you.

The ego is tied to our self-image as well. It can guide and drive thoughts which vilify others, aggrandize ourselves, as well as totally distort our perception of the world and people around us. Meditation has a second aspect, that of calming the ego. After a lot of meditative experience, it also yields a sense of the oneness of all things.

The goal of Buddhist training is to end our suffering. The suffering is brought on by our attachment (mental preoccupation) with our desires, whether for something or avoiding an unpleasantness. The key to ending our mental preoccupation with our desires is understanding, at the deepest levels, the delusory nature of our thoughts. All our thoughts. It requires investigating each and every thought, to the point you see that thought is a not true. Some refer to this as breaking your mental habits, i.e. your habitual thought processes and reaction pattern.

This can be a very long and difficult process. You cannot realize your enlightenment while you still believe your own thoughts.