CHAPTER 1
who's running your mind?
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Each of us is born into this world in intimate possession of a personal biocomputer so vast and mysterious that even our best scientists admit that – considering the staggering interactive complexity of the organ – they know very little about how it actually runs and what its ultimate potential might include. And the average person remains in virtual darkness concerning the neurobiology of consciousness and the underlying mental forces that shape our lives.
There's certainly no owner's manual for our brain – and our parents, who are initially in charge of fine-tuning its performance and data entry during our formative years, receive no formal training at all before taking over the massive job of orchestrating our mental and emotional development. Furthermore, we then go through at least twelve years of academic schooling, during which our minds are required to perform mental gymnastics and download great quantities of information to clog our cognitive storage units, and yet we never receive significant guidance in how to manage all the complex emotional, intuitive, perceptual, and spiritual dimensions of our mental functioning.
We know the end result: We do our very best to manage and hopefully even excel in our mental performance. And sure, we somehow survive one after another emotional and spiritual crisis. But ultimately, when we ask ourselves who's really in charge here, the answer is all too often uncertain, discouraging, or even downright scary.
When queried gently, most of us admit that we all too often feel like helpless victims of our various mood swings – for no seeming reason at all, we sometimes find ourselves engulfed in worries or even caught up in a full-blown panic attack. At other times we may sink unexpectedly into bouts of depression, or flair up with uncalled-for hostility – or perhaps find ourselves shrinking back from the world with thoughts and feelings mired in guilt, shame, apprehension, or self-loathing.
Of course most of us have our better days, when we wake up bright and eager, full of love and fun, spreading joy and laughter wherever we go. But even our brighter, more joyful moments tend to come to us not because of anything we have done consciously through wise mind management, but seemingly out of the blue. We might feel thankful for our good feelings, but still we know we're not in charge – and at any moment we can get dragged down again into another bout of negative thoughts, emotions, and physical symptoms that turn an otherwise beautiful day into a bother, or even sometimes into a living hell.
Obviously I paint this initial somewhat depressive picture of our present social condition not to further depress you, but just the opposite – to say loud and clear that such emotional suffering and mental anguish are not necessary. With the proper mental tools they can be dealt with directly and consciously put aside.
As a psychologist who has been studying mood swings and their underlying cognitive causation for thirty years now, I can say emphatically that chronic emotional suffering is not our natural state, nor is it our necessary destiny. Yes, something is haywire inside our collective minds; somewhere during the development of our giant thinking brains still wedded to ancient survival emotions, we missed an essential cognitive leap. The good news is that we're just emerging into a period of history when we can identify why we're continually torturing ourselves with unwanted emotions; blow the whistle on the root cause of our inner torment, confusion, and agitation; and then act to shift into more enjoyable, fulfilling realms of consciousness.
This book will spend just enough time on psychological and neurological discussions to make sure you understand the science behind our common dilemma, and the logical course of its resolution. But the ultimate aim isn't just to create a new intellectual concept. Instead, you're holding a hands-on manual that will teach you step-by-step psychological tools that can realistically liberate your mind from the grip of negative beliefs, thoughts, and emotions.
Some of these techniques have emerged from ancient meditative insights and practices, some from cutting-edge neurological and psychological research, some from far-out New Age experiments, and others from the more conservative realms of psychoanalysis, Gestalt and reality therapy, cognitive behavioral studies, and so on. Recent books, such as Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Judith Beck's Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond, and John Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening, have clearly elucidated specific academic dimensions of this progression toward a new vision of how the mind works and how we can act to become masters of our own inner destiny.
The introduction listed the dramatic changes that can be generated when we choose to quiet our overbusy thinking minds and open ourselves to new experience in the present moment. The positive effects of quieting our thoughts can also be readily seen through the personal experience of one of my recent clients.
Let's take a couple minutes to enjoy a short retelling of Richard's shift from no-choice to full-choice living. (Names and life details have been changed throughout to preserve anonymity.)
Richard Sees the Light
Richard's alarm clock went off with a loud jangle. Letting go of a vague dream, he blinked his eyes and woke up, his mind already starting, out of habit, to fixate on the most urgent challenges facing him that day. His wife woke up beside him with a welcoming smile, but instead of cuddling with her for a few moments, he sat up and began to mull over the details of a marketing presentation he had to deliver at 9:15 at the downtown office. Worried thoughts assaulted his mind as he realized he was still unsatisfied with some of the wording in his PowerPoint delivery.
Heading into the bathroom, Richard was already fully in problem-solving mode, his emotions tense and his body presence hardly acknowledged at all. Brushing his teeth, he found himself engaged in an imaginary argument with one of his coworkers, Oliver, defending his business logic and trying to come up with the exact words that would make Oliver look wrong at the meeting, rather than himself.
Twenty minutes later at the breakfast table, Richard had his laptop out making changes, fussing over details as he struggled to come up with some better wording for the first lines of his presentation. His teenage son came to the table wanting to talk about his tennis victory the day before, but Richard had no time for chatter – he was so consumed in his business worries that he barely focused on his son's presence at all. And when his wife put a comforting arm around him as he was heading out the door, he brushed aside her...
