None of the voices in your head are real, and all of the voices in your head are real. Once you can accept this idea, actually this fact, then the experience of being a human being becomes one of participating in the enormous dance of the universe.
Our brains are literally designed to make things up. There’s a big part of our brain that works unconsciously, keeping us alive. Keeping our heartbeat going, our breath going, blood, everything going. Our thoughts really aren’t that different from blood. The heart is pumping out the blood. The brain is pumping out interpretation of signals. Read any sort of book on neuroscience and the one thing they try to tell us is that interpretation of a dog isn’t really a dog.
What do you actually see through your eyes? It is only reflections of light. You see a thing and interpret it as a dog Through the ears we hear vibrations that we interpret as sounds. You can feel with your hands and feel the fluffy warmth of the dog. The brain puts it together and interprets a the dog.
Everything that’s going on in our brain isn’t real, but the dog itself Is real. And actually all of our interpretations are real too. They are physically real and cognitively real.
If you want to look at it from simply a biological point of view your interpretation of the dog is neurons. These are actual physical things shooting electricity from molecule to molecule in your body and sending pieces of information back and forth. The neurons in our brain and body are busy all the time collecting information about the experiences that are happening to us. That’s very, very real.
Why do we go crazy then?
The reason we’re all so crazy is because of the relationship we develop with our interpretations. One thing that Buddha said, and numerous enlightened masters have said, is to see your mind and observe it. Observe your mind, which is the interpretation of things that are happening. See it as a river flowing by.
In so many situations of life, this is just really easy to do. Particularly in watching your emotions.
Somebody walks by and it’s your friend You have this wonderful emotion. You’re like, “Oh look, there’s my friend.” And then you hear from somebody else that this friend has been bad mouthing you, talking bad about you. All of a sudden the surge of emotions completely change. You’re like, oh now that’s my enemy!
Then then a little bit later you find out, Oh no, they didn’t say anything that was a lie, and all of a sudden your friend is your friend again. So these things are like a river flowing by.
The really cool thing about the brain river is that it can be managed. It can be enjoyed, and it can be taught. That’s what’s so amazing about the brain You can actually learn something.
I’m sure it’s happened to you, it’s happened to me so many times. I learn something and snap! My perspective changes. Suddenly everything is different. Our brains are very pliable as long as we keep from being sucked into the drama of us.
Balance
So many spiritual teachers teach that you always have to be happy. And if you’re always happy and thinking positive thoughts you will create your own reality and all these wonderful things will happen. You’ll get a car, you’ll get a girlfriend. Or maybe you simply stay happy for the sake of being happy. Which is great, I mean, who doesn’t want that, right?
The problem is this state can only be maintained in the most privileged of situations. If you’re privileged enough to be able to live in a fantasy world of your own happiness then you see other people that aren’t happy, and now you feel important and elevated. Obviously their lack of happiness is their own fault.
There’s been so many times in my life where it’s been the selfishly happy person who is causing my misery. But it’s Catch-22. They are all superior from being happy. Bleigh!
The brain can go in so many crazy directions. It can’t be trusted and yet it’s very smart. That’s what we need to learn.
The real teaching of Enlightenment traditions is to try to find the ground of reality. Strive to find the truth that’s behind things.
That perspective can change, in fact it’s guaranteed to change.
Sometimes something that seems bad to start with turns into good, something that seems good to start with turns into bad. So the whole thing, the trick, the secret, the thing that the enlightened teachers we are exploring are teaching, is how to be detached from our own craziness. To be detached enough that we have a slight, slight chance of having interpretations that are useful.
Everything changes. Particularly in today’s age, where change is so rapid and so all encompassing. The more and the faster we can change with it the better we, and everyone around us, will be.
The voice is in your head are useful and useless at the same time.
Different Voices
If we look at Jill Bolte Taylor’s she’ll tell us that different parts of the brain fire up distinctly different voices. This can seem disconcerting from inside the human head. It’s like one minute you’re a scaredy cat. Next minute you’re philosopher. Next minute you’re a lover. Next minute you’re so happy. Next minute you’re so sad. The mental experience is a constantly changing landscape.
Jill Bolte Taylor divides the brain into four main areas.
Left
What we usually call the left brain is actually the top left brain. It’s our logical mind. Without the left brain, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word I’m saying or read these words. That’s where our language lives. That’s where our meaning of things, and naming of things, lives.
The left lower brain is the primative cousin. It’s job is to always be fearful and looking out for danger. The left lower brain likes to use the left upper brain to convince us that terrible things that are happening. Like that friend who was talking bad about me. How eating this particular food is dangerous. Or perhaps, the government is trying to force us to have this or that.
That’s the left brain talking. Always be skeptical of any voice in your head that uses language. Much of what it tells us is true, but it’s always interpretation, and often interpretation of fear.
Right
The lower right brain is actually as primitive as the left lower brain. It’s the part of the brain that is creative and happy. This is also the part of the brain that helps us do things. It makes us uniquely human in the fact that we can guide our hands to make a pot. We can sit there and concentrate long enough to do things with our hands, like weave a cloth, chop stone into an arrowhead, learn to type. We can learn millions of things with this concentrating force.
The right top brain, helps us do enormous things. We’ve learned to knit a stitch, but it takes that enormous right brain to have the concentration and focus to knit an entire sweater. We can pound things and enjoys shapes and colors, but it takes the sheer involved concentration of the full right brain to be able to tan a hide, or even mop your floor from beginning to end.
The Balance
Everything we do all day long is constantly firing all the centers of our brain.
The voices in our head may sometimes feel weird, not in sync, disjointed. But they are all working together to interpret the world, give meaning to our experience, and create a life. It’s useful to get a sense of how they work. To Listen to them.
When emotions shoot through our body, whatever it is love, fear or disgust it shoots out certain chemicals that stream through our tissues. You can feel it if you’re paying attention. You can feel the chemical change that goes through your body as emotions change.
Jill Bolte Taylor says it takes 90 seconds for those chemicals to surge through and dissipate. In the physical reality of neuroscience, anger only lasts 90 seconds. Love only lasts 90 seconds. It will completely dissipate unless it’s restimulated.
Every time you stimulate the emotion it will shoot up again so that it feels continuous.
It’s like you see a snake. You run away. You’re only going to keep running for 90 seconds unless you remember the snake. Being able to renew fears through our head is very handy… Up to a point. We really don’t need to stay upset for weeks or even months, just because we heard that our friend said something horrible about us.
Give it 90 seconds and then let it go.
What’s Real?
We have many voices In our heads. They’re all just voices, but they’re all about something. Everything’s illusion, and everything is also real.
We can watch a movie and feel real emotions. You know it’s fake but you’re sitting there and watching it, and you feel all these surges of emotion. Is that really real? Or is that really fake? Or is it real and fake?
A good way to think about it is: Nothing is real, but everything matters.
One of the problems with Buddhism, what I like to call White American Buddhism, is that it teaches total detachment: Nothing matters. Nothing is real. Nothing matters. Your goal is to become this floating bubble of bliss.
Unfortunately, this affects everyone around you. You are non-commital and cruel.
Who Are You?
Yes. The brain is a crazy place to inhabit. It can’t be trusted, but it’s our only way to get information. We live in this ever-changing landscape, but we must somehow learn to trust ourselves.
The bottom line is that learning to trust yourself is the only way you can reduce your own narcissism.
Yes. You. Your narcissim.
It’s really easy to see narcissism and other people. But learning to see it in our own selves… Now that’s what you call spiritual development.
This thing that we call spiritual development is simply becoming strong in your ability to participate with your brain in all of its beauty and madness.
Trusting your brain is a completely un-magic bullet. It’s not a trick to get the things you want, it’s just a daily striving to be less mad than you could be. No matter what you do you’re going to be wrong all the time. You’re going to constantly be wrong. It’s the constant state of life. That’s where a sense of humor comes in.
Let’s dip into some fun science.