Not Where You Wanted to Be…

… where you are.

The mind is a funny thing. We might be the only species which can talk itself to death.

The mind (not the brain, how we interact with the world) loves to apply a pattern to what’s happening. The mind does not care if the pattern fits. The pattern is comforting because it promises to predict the future.

The mind does not ask for permission to apply a pattern. Most people apply patterns their whole life without meaning to, and without seeing that a pattern is being applied. Memory, culture, experience are full of events the mind weaves a story around, with every plot twist getting farther from reality as the story is told.

Stories distort reality, though they may have a little real life in them.

There’s an old joke in philosophy: you can go your whole life without meeting reality. It’s a joke and it’s true. Reality doesn’t even know perception, a nasty fact that tends to make people ignore it.

It takes a certain amount of training (and experience) to understand that the mind is not a good master. It takes even more training and life experience to understand that perception is a poor tool for understanding reality.

I urge you to be wary of your mind and its desire to fit a pattern: you can and will die demanding reality to resemble what you expected, the pattern you thought you knew.