Continued from Part One

Everyone has a mind, and although each mind is stuffed with different content and different beliefs, all minds work basically the same way.

Most people don’t think about their mind and how it works. They’re too busy doing what they do. The mind is the thing that focuses our thoughts, keeps us on track, and connects us to the world.

All minds do the same things, that is to say they all carry out the same processes. I am not going to talk about how minds do what they do, but rather describe some of the sources for our apparent insanity. What appears to be our insanity has to do with the underlying automatic processes that turn us into automatons.

For example all minds draw information and experience from the past. They use past information and experience to interpret the present, and predict the future.

They do this without our asking and they do it without needing to be taught how. It is part of the automatic processing that occurs before we become conscious of what we are thinking. On the surface it seems like a useful thing to have happen.

While it may seem useful, the process keeps the past always in mind, and it has deadly consequences. It makes us sheeple (sheep-people). It keeps us locked into approaching everything that we encounter in exactly the same way we have learned, been taught, or observed in the past.

We cannot step outside our own mind. We respond with the same emotions and with the same meaning we experienced in the past, and thus keep experiencing the past in the present. We anticipate how to react from the past.  We don’t change. We are locked into a loop.

Before we can move ahead one step, our mind takes a step back, and we wind up just where we started. Everything we know, we know through the past. Reacting out of past solutions robs us of insight, clarity, and innovation. To ensure that we survive tomorrow’s unknowns we can not allow ourselves be limited to yesterday’s solutions.

The mind’s automatic use of the past as a reference is not the only source of our apparent insanity.  Our thinking is both distorted and limited by our use and identification with symbol systems like language, religion, cultural norms.

The content of our symbols, drawn from the past, gives meaning to the present and sets our anticipation of the future. The combination is doubly deadly.

Symbol systems are the way you know and experience all of your beliefs and judgments, and judgments are the second big problem with man’s thinking.

Symbols were necessary for the development of civilization: the very words we use to communicate with are symbols. Symbols will always be a useful part of our daily lives.

But as has been pointed out by Aldus Huxley, the reliance and use of symbols can also be fatal.

“Consider, for example, the domain of science on the one and, the domain of politics and religion on the other. Thinking in terms of, and acting in response to, one set of symbols, we have come, in some small measure, to understand and control the elementary forces of nature. Thinking in terms of, and acting in response to, another set of symbols, we use these forces as instruments of mass murder and collective suicide.
In the first case the explanatory symbols were well chosen, carefully analyzed and progressively adapted to the emergent facts of physical existence. In the second case symbols originally ill-chosen were never subjected to thorough-going analysis and never reformulated so as to harmonize with the emergent facts of human existence.
Worse still, these misleading symbols were everywhere treated with a wholly unwarranted respect, as though, in some mysterious way, they were more real than the realities to which they referred.
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.” (Preface To: The First and Last Freedom)

Huxley also correctly points out that throughout the ages, philosophers, theologians, and educators alike, have repeatedly erred in one of two ways. They have identified their words with facts, or they have committed the greater error of imagining that their words are somehow more real than the thing they symbolize.  We commonly confuse words and the truth.

Part Three – Insight & Clarity continued…

This article was written by Dr Kurt Ebert.

Dr R. Kurt Ebert is a licensed Clinical and Neuro Psychologist. He is also the world-renowned creator of both the Acupuncture4TheMind system and the Attractor Field Techniques (AFT). AFT is a system using sound technology and meridian stimulation to promote healing of hundreds of physical disorders.

Dr. Ebert was formerly Director of Clinical Neuropsychological Services, Department of Neurology, Temple University Hospital; Director of Research, Division of Family Study, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in Neurology, Thomas Jefferson Medical School.