About Mind Movies — 12 Ideas

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About Mind Movies — The sto­ries we cre­ate might be inter­est­ing (to us) but they are just that… sto­ries. Real­i­ty is right in front of us, not in our heads.

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We have the poten­tial, in dia­log, to exam­ine and re-exam­ine both our beliefs and the sto­ries of our life. We can lis­ten to what we tell our­selves, how we describe our sit­u­a­tion, and we can begin to under­stand that, far from being “true,” our sto­ries are sim­ply sub­jec­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of neu­tral expe­ri­ences. Once we accept and enact this, we are able to drop the sto­ries, and choose to live in This End­less Moment.

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Let me say a word or two about dia­log, and then move on to exam­ine the sto­ries we tell ourselves.

It is essential that each person has a couple of people he or she can be in dialog with.

The rea­son for this is sim­ple. As we’ll talk about in a moment, one of the essen­tial, and yet very hard tasks is to get a han­dle on how we inter­pret our sit­u­a­tion. And by sit­u­a­tion I mean all of the cir­cum­stances of our lives, includ­ing the dra­ma of our inter­nal theatre.

We all have blind spots.

No mat­ter how far we come along the path to self-under­stand­ing and self-actu­al­iza­tion, there will always be cer­tain issues that occur that lead to brain freeze. 

For exam­ple, I’ve spent decades of my life react­ing quite neg­a­tive­ly to what I per­ceive as the bad dri­ving habits of oth­ers. I yell, I pound the steer­ing wheel, and occa­sion­al­ly wave at the offend­er with only one finger.

I click over into an instan­ta­neous rage, and I then need to vent. I have no prob­lem vent­ing, and I absolute­ly believe that get­ting some of my anger out through steer­ing wheel pound­ing is like­ly helpful. 

After I calm myself down, I remem­ber that Dar­bel­la gets into sim­i­lar dri­ving sit­u­a­tions, and does so with­out the histrionics.

I decid­ed a while back to dis­cuss my reac­tion with Dar, (as opposed to defend it,) and to see if I could thwart its “instan­ta­neous-ness.” With a bit of effort, I occa­sion­al­ly succeed.

Our blind spots are a demonstration of an unexplored or off limits mind connection.

All of our behav­iours are designed and ini­ti­at­ed in the neur­al net­works of our mind. Every­thing starts as a trig­ger, which, through our inter­pre­ta­tions, builds into a thought and/or an action.

There is some sup­port for the idea that both mem­o­ry and brain func­tion are non-local­ized holograms. 

A holo­gram is a wave-inter­fer­ence pat­tern that appears to the naked eye as ran­dom bits of data. It’s like look­ing at the grooves on a record, or the mir­ror side of a CD. The music is right there, but impos­si­ble to “see,”

in its stored state. How­ev­er, giv­en the right play­back device, the image is restored.

Not only that, but dis­crete “bits” of the holo­gram con­tain the entire “pic­ture.”

Accord­ing to Wikipedia,

“Since each point in the holo­gram con­tains light from the whole of the orig­i­nal scene, the whole scene can, in prin­ci­ple, be re-con­struct­ed from an arbi­trar­i­ly small part of the holo­gram. To demon­strate this con­cept, the holo­gram can be bro­ken into small pieces and the entire object can still be seen from each small piece. If one envi­sions the holo­gram as a “win­dow” on the object, then each small piece of holo­gram is just a part of the win­dow from which it can still be viewed, even if the rest of the win­dow is blocked off.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hologram]

Holo­graph­ic mem­o­ry may oper­ate in the same way. All of the data is there, and is made up of bits of infor­ma­tion that are the build­ing blocks of mem­o­ry. These bits of mem­o­ry can be extract­ed, lined up, and formed into any­thing we choose.

Here’s a metaphor for that.

Image you are a film direc­tor, shoot­ing a biopic. You fol­low “Susie” around, and film her for a month. Let’s even imag­ine that you film her 24/7 for 30 days. 

Clear­ly, no one wants to see 5040 hours of some­one’s life. So, you, as the direc­tor, first of all pick a theme. It might be “Susie, exer­cis­ing,” or “Susie, cooking.”

Or, it might be, “Susie, unhap­py.”

Obvi­ous­ly, a lot of “the film of Susie’s life” will be irrel­e­vant to the top­ic you chose. 

Let’s also impose a two hour lim­it on the fin­ished prod­uct. Let’s say Susie was unhap­py 100 hours in a month. This must be con­densed down to 2 hours.

The direc­tor start­ed with a blank screen, and then framed the movie thusly,

What results is a col­lec­tion of scenes from the “life of Susie,” select­ed to rein­force the theme of the movie.

Remem­ber, in our lim­it­ed exam­ple, 4940 hours of stuff is elim­i­nat­ed (the non-sad stuff) and then, 98 addi­tion­al hours of the sad stuff are also dropped — to get us down to two hours.

The end result is a film that runs from the ini­tial fram­ing-point through to the wrap-up. This entire film is designed, and the scenes cher­ry-picked, to make (con­firm) the frame-point. Here’s the premise, and here is the evidence.

This is exactly how our minds construct internal representations of our day-to-day reality.

An idea (“I’m abused!” “I’m help­less!” “Every­one leaves me!” “I’m a fail­ure!”) or judge­ment occurs to us as an inter­pre­ta­tion of an event — some­thing hap­pens to us, typ­i­cal­ly as pow­er­less kids, and we “spin it” to give it mean­ing. We then cher­ry pick scenes from our lives to sup­port the ini­tial premise. 

Pret­ty soon, we have a movie that illus­trates what we believe to be so.

How­ev­er, and this is the prob­lem, this movie is not true. It’s a con­coc­tion out of a bil­lion oth­er pos­si­ble scenarios. 

Because we have invest­ed time and effort into craft­ing the movie(s), how­ev­er, we devel­op a blind spot. 

The blind spot is this: I am the direc­tor, edi­tor, and actor in the fic­tion­al film(s) in my head. 

I for­get this, and assume the film

• a) depicts what actu­al­ly hap­pened, and
• b) demon­strates that I am a pas­sive vic­tim of “life.”

So, we repeat the ini­tial, invalid mantra, and add on evi­dence for a belief that caus­es us misery.

Dialog is one way through the impasse of a stuck and rigid belief.

In ther­a­py, the dia­log is sim­pler, as it is not a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship. The client pro­vides the raw mate­r­i­al, the data, by being com­plete­ly open, and total­ly hon­est. The ther­a­pist helps the client to see, artic­u­late, and dis­man­tle only  the men­tal dra­mas that are not func­tion­al. (No sense fix­ing what is not broken”.)

To repeat: The client pro­vides the data through hon­est and open rev­e­la­tion, and the ther­a­pist uses var­i­ous meth­ods and tech­niques to chal­lenge “the valid­i­ty of the clien­t’s movie,” the fram­ing-point, and the use­ful­ness of the sto­ry the client is telling.

This work also can be done with one’s principal partner, with a few caveats.

Dar­bel­la and I are great believ­ers in hon­est, open, and vul­ner­a­ble dia­log with one’s prin­ci­pal part­ner. It’s all about hav­ing a part­ner with a will­ing pair of ears, and lis­ten­ing to their feedback.

That being said, what is not help­ful is for one or the oth­er of cou­ple to act as ‘ther­a­pist’ for the oth­er. This degen­er­ates into “I’m here to smarten up and fix my part­ner” — a game that only leads to misery.

Help­ful:

• Dis­cus­sions regard­ing the direc­tion of the rela­tion­ship, about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and about “cou­ple relat­ed issues” are fair game for dialog. 
• Self rev­e­la­tion is always accept­able, and high­ly encouraged. 
• We also estab­lish “word pat­terns” to remind their part­ner of “blind spots.” 

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Discovering Blind Spots

To recap, most peo­ple believe that the movies in their heads are true. Thus, when one of these “head movies” runs, they get sucked right in. 

It’s anal­o­gous to the expe­ri­ence you’ve had in real­ly excel­lent Hol­ly­wood movies. Your “dis­be­lief is sus­pend­ed” and you are immersed in the action. Time flies by, and you feel emo­tions arise, and it all seems very real. Then, the movie ends, you give your­self a shake, and reori­ent your­self to “the real world.”

Now, if a 2‑dimensional cel­lu­loid movie can do that to you, imag­ine what your inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tions can do!

“Tun­ing in” (being present) to our movies requires notic­ing our phys­i­cal reac­tions. We’re often so wrapped up in the men­tal movie that we are unable to step back from it. We sug­gest body aware­ness — notic­ing where tight­ness occurs, where queasi­ness is felt, where anger aris­es, etc.

The way out of the mental movie is to notice what your body is doing.

Once you iden­ti­fy where and how you react in your body, you can choose to mon­i­tor those parts of your body, and “catch your­self” before you swal­low the whole movie.

The goal is to “wake up,” much as you do when a real movie ends… to come back into the the­atre, notice the screen, and see the actu­al peo­ple around you (as opposed to the actors you were just “relat­ing to.”)

Then you give your­self a shake, get up, and exit the theatre. 

“Wak­ing up” is notic­ing the phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions, and using them to become con­scious of the dys­func­tion­al movie that is play­ing between your ears. Once you notice, you can choose to shift your atten­tion back to the actu­al expe­ri­ence you are having.

Ultimately, our goal here is to get you to the place of informed observation, and choiceful response.

Informed obser­va­tion: our head movies are guides. They are meant to be  help­ful and retriev­able” — “Don’t touch the hot stove!” kinds of things. “When I yell and berate and blame my part­ner, things dete­ri­o­rate” is a neu­tral data chunk. Using it to trig­ger the, “All men are morons, and I’ll show him!” movie is an invi­ta­tion to disaster.

Choice­ful response: we have to notice our addic­tion to our movies, or we are doomed to con­tin­ue to react in non-help­ful ways. After we notice, we cre­ate a choice. This choice is open, flex­i­ble and aimed at the result you actu­al­ly want.

A choiceful response, arising from an informed observation.

It takes both prac­tice and deter­mi­na­tion to deal with what is going on in the moment, and not to get side­tracked into gath­er­ing more evi­dence of how hard done by you are. 

Full and authen­tic liv­ing is liv­ing in this moment, with­out ref­er­ence to the movies that live in our heads.

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Series Nav­i­ga­tion

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