Most of us are good people, or at least we try to be. We want what’s best for the people we care about, and people in general. But, do our actions always line up with our intentions? We may very well feel like we are going about life with everyone’s good in mind, but we creatures of habit have a way of unconsciously sabotaging ourselves.
Photo by Nina Strehl on Unsplash
Often, we live in a state of cognitive dissonance, which goes unnoticed when we run on autopilot all the time. We warp the world to fit our own narrative, functionally rewriting our own memories the moment we make them.
“Protect the ego at all costs,” says the brain to itself.
Our brains regularly trick themselves by valuing an incongruent model of reality over the real thing. It may bring comfort to live in our safe versions of the world, or have been conditioned to distort the world a particular way. This alters the way we make our decisions, leading to us falling short of our actual potential.
But, the brain can be tricked in our favor! All it requires is a change of perspective. To see the world through a different lens, we change what information the brain has to work with. Let me illustrate something for you to show you exactly what I mean.
We’ve all heard the philosophical nugget: if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around, does it make a sound? Jumping ahead to the answer, no it does not. This is more of a problem with language than any metaphysical quandary.
Let’s break down what’s physically happening when there is someone present, step by step.
First, a tree falls. It is a large object of significant mass, so it perturbs a great deal of air as it falls and crashes into the Earth.
These waves are called sound waves. Note: sound waves do not equal sound. Think of light. It exists in a wave. With our eyes, we interpret a small band of the wave as color. The wave itself does not contain color; the subjective experience of color exists as an interpretation of the objective phenomena of waves.
The sound waves radiate outward, eventually reaching the observer’s ear. The waves are channeling inward, which bounce off the ear drum.
The ear drum is a taut membrane which vibrates exactly like a drum. These vibrations cause two small bones, the hammer, and the anvil, to knock together, which causes the percussionary force to be translated into a fluid in the cochlea.
The cochlea is a spiral-shaped chamber with small hair-like projections throughout. These act like transistors when they are pushed around by the percussions in the fluid, translating their back and forth motion into electrochemical signals, which travel to the brain.
Finally, the brain processes that incoming information and creates what we experience as sound. When there’s no brain receiving information, there’s no sound, just sound waves bouncing around.
Now we can see that there are certain elements of reality that we can shape our perspective around. We have the objective phenomena which happen outside the body, we have the subjective qualia which is what the brain creates, and we experience, and we have the in and out communication of these two things in relation to each other.
If you’re familiar with computer networks, you can think of this relationship as the server, the client, and the internet connecting them.
When you reduce the reality we are creating for ourselves to consist of these three parts; you change how you treat anything and everything that crosses your path. This is because you take out all the prejudices and bias that have been conditioned to experience. You will come to see everything as a relationship between yourself and a singular other consciousness. Like a conversation, it will speak to you by all that you experience in your mental world, which you reply to by all your actions and decisions going outwards.
Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash
When every person you come across is of equal importance to you, by the nature of being an immutable part of an indivisible vision of unity, you will treat them all as your brothers and sisters. Not only people, but nature and the world as a whole will be seen in a way that directly relates to you.
It is an easy trick to train. You need only be mindful and willfully try to see the world through this lens. It is an ability that grows over time. By consistently trying, you are training yourself to perceive that way by default. Then you don’t need to try anymore because you are doing.