A Tale of Two Cities, the most printed original English book, starts with the following words, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
What exactly goes on in this stream of awareness? From moment to moment you receive vast amounts of information from the outside world through your senses. Your awareness jumps from point to point in your external experience, sorting for what is important to you as your minds engages in the process of interpreting and evaluating the incoming data. External information is filtered through beliefs, attitudes and memories and associations are activated. Emotions arise and generate responses; speech, actions and behavior.On the screen of your mind you flash images, snapshots and run movies. You hear sounds and voices and often narrate the film with your own voice. The pictures and sounds of your mind occur all in sequence, one after the other, which results in an ever changing flux of experience which changes from moment to moment.
Directing and guiding this stream of awareness is a system. We can think of the mind as system that directs our information processing. This system is made up of numerous elements, all interacting and influencing one another to generate our experience. The way we experience the world is through the process of representing, sequencing and ordering the information we acquire from the outside world. The system of information processing we call "the mind" can also be called our internal reality. We each have an external reality- the environment we live in, the circumstances of our lives - and we each have our own unique internal reality. It is this internal reality that lies behind emotions, behavior and results. Our inner reality is far from a random mess of mental chaos. Human subjective experience has a structure. Knowing the specific elements that make up the structure of our internal reality enables us to alter the structure so that it serves us better.
For thousands of years we have believed that the mind was complicated and elusive; a mystery waiting to be unraveled, a cipher waiting to be cracked. We now know that the mind is much simpler than we once thought. When we know the building blocks of human subjective experience, the elements that make up what we call "mind," we can change them.The components of a system can be reorganized. The processes we use to encode information and the sequence data can be optimized to produce desired results. When we know the elements of a system we can change the system so it functions more effectively and efficiently. When we know what is going on behind the scenes of behavior and emotion, we can change it and transform our experience.
And, as if that was enough, it gets worse. It is also from that bank of references that our fundamental beliefs are created. Beliefs about our identity, about life in general, about religion, relationships, about mankind and about just every subject under the sun.
Those beliefs can be accurate, irrelevant or simply false but they have an almost total hold on the way that we comprehend our reality. It's as if we had been hypnotized to accept those beliefs and forced to see a reality that is in complete concordance with those beliefs.
Emotions and behaviours don't come out of nowhere. They result naturally from our internal programming. For whatever emotions you feel and whatever behaviours you produce, your programming must be perfectly optimized to produce that result. If you are depressed, your mind has been programmed to produce depression. If anxiety is your constant companion, your mind has been programmed to produce anxiety. If you find yourself lacking confidence, or giving into to self-sabotage, it's because your mental software permits it. And if you live a life of joy and success, it's because your internal programming has been optimized to generate that result. Problems are learned, and if they can be learned, they can be unlearned. Change your programming and you change the result.
After the objective reality has finished being distorted by our previous references and our fundamental beliefs it has to contend with the ubiquitous mediatic barrage, most of which is taken at face value. What shreds of truth could maintain its integrity once it has been through all these distortions? No wonder that most of us are walking contradictions.
If you open the task manager on a computer you can see all of the applications running. When you look at this list you see precisely the programs that you know are operating. In your mind, these would correspond to the things you are aware of at any given moment. However, click on the list of processes and you get a whole array of programs running behind the scenes. There are far more in this list than in the list of applications running and when you look at this list of processes, you can't even identify what most of them are. They are operating in the background, out of awareness, permitting you to think, feel, act and react to your experience of life.In order to reprogram our minds and upgrade our mental software to produce superior results, we must begin by bringing those hidden programs to the surface. Once we know what is operating in the mind we can run some antivirus software, uninstall outdated programs and upgrade where possible. Most of us race to have the latest cell phone and the newest gadget, but why do we keep running obsolete mental software?Don't worry, when you begin to explore your mind you won't find inner demons waiting to be freed or terrible things wanting to bubble up as Freud would have you believe. You will, however, very likely find some old programs that you may no longer want. Remember, they are just programs and if you installed them, you can uninstall them.
What exactly goes on in this stream of awareness? From moment to moment you receive vast amounts of information from the outside world through your senses. Your awareness jumps from point to point in your external experience, sorting for what is important to you as your minds engages in the process of interpreting and evaluating the incoming data. External information is filtered through beliefs, attitudes and memories and associations are activated. Emotions arise and generate responses; speech, actions and behavior.On the screen of your mind you flash images, snapshots and run movies. You hear sounds and voices and often narrate the film with your own voice. The pictures and sounds of your mind occur all in sequence, one after the other, which results in an ever changing flux of experience which changes from moment to moment.
Directing and guiding this stream of awareness is a system. We can think of the mind as system that directs our information processing. This system is made up of numerous elements, all interacting and influencing one another to generate our experience. The way we experience the world is through the process of representing, sequencing and ordering the information we acquire from the outside world. The system of information processing we call "the mind" can also be called our internal reality. We each have an external reality- the environment we live in, the circumstances of our lives - and we each have our own unique internal reality. It is this internal reality that lies behind emotions, behavior and results. Our inner reality is far from a random mess of mental chaos. Human subjective experience has a structure. Knowing the specific elements that make up the structure of our internal reality enables us to alter the structure so that it serves us better.
For thousands of years we have believed that the mind was complicated and elusive; a mystery waiting to be unraveled, a cipher waiting to be cracked. We now know that the mind is much simpler than we once thought. When we know the building blocks of human subjective experience, the elements that make up what we call "mind," we can change them.The components of a system can be reorganized. The processes we use to encode information and the sequence data can be optimized to produce desired results. When we know the elements of a system we can change the system so it functions more effectively and efficiently. When we know what is going on behind the scenes of behavior and emotion, we can change it and transform our experience.
And, as if that was enough, it gets worse. It is also from that bank of references that our fundamental beliefs are created. Beliefs about our identity, about life in general, about religion, relationships, about mankind and about just every subject under the sun.
Those beliefs can be accurate, irrelevant or simply false but they have an almost total hold on the way that we comprehend our reality. It's as if we had been hypnotized to accept those beliefs and forced to see a reality that is in complete concordance with those beliefs.
Emotions and behaviours don't come out of nowhere. They result naturally from our internal programming. For whatever emotions you feel and whatever behaviours you produce, your programming must be perfectly optimized to produce that result. If you are depressed, your mind has been programmed to produce depression. If anxiety is your constant companion, your mind has been programmed to produce anxiety. If you find yourself lacking confidence, or giving into to self-sabotage, it's because your mental software permits it. And if you live a life of joy and success, it's because your internal programming has been optimized to generate that result. Problems are learned, and if they can be learned, they can be unlearned. Change your programming and you change the result.
After the objective reality has finished being distorted by our previous references and our fundamental beliefs it has to contend with the ubiquitous mediatic barrage, most of which is taken at face value. What shreds of truth could maintain its integrity once it has been through all these distortions? No wonder that most of us are walking contradictions.
If you open the task manager on a computer you can see all of the applications running. When you look at this list you see precisely the programs that you know are operating. In your mind, these would correspond to the things you are aware of at any given moment. However, click on the list of processes and you get a whole array of programs running behind the scenes. There are far more in this list than in the list of applications running and when you look at this list of processes, you can't even identify what most of them are. They are operating in the background, out of awareness, permitting you to think, feel, act and react to your experience of life.In order to reprogram our minds and upgrade our mental software to produce superior results, we must begin by bringing those hidden programs to the surface. Once we know what is operating in the mind we can run some antivirus software, uninstall outdated programs and upgrade where possible. Most of us race to have the latest cell phone and the newest gadget, but why do we keep running obsolete mental software?Don't worry, when you begin to explore your mind you won't find inner demons waiting to be freed or terrible things wanting to bubble up as Freud would have you believe. You will, however, very likely find some old programs that you may no longer want. Remember, they are just programs and if you installed them, you can uninstall them.
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