Episode 080 - It Cuts Both Ways

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

In the last episode we spent some time looking into our innate human genius as well as some of the remarkable attributes we have within our vast intelligence. We also touched on the fact that many of us are troubled by self-sabotage and other forms of negativity that limit our ability to truly enjoy our lives.

And we ended the episode with two questions - if we began life in a genius state of consciousness and it is still within us right now: What happened to us? And more importantly, what can happen for us?”

We’re going to look at these critical questions in this episode today. But let’s start out with an extremely condensed overview of the answer: What happened to us is that we began suffering from a subtle case of mistaken identity, which is hampering us from fulfilling our ability to achieve highest human potential. And what can happen for us is that we can re-connect once again with the larger part of our intelligence and enjoy all the inborn gifts that are built into it. This will create a more fulfilling life for ourselves, having a positive effect on everyone in our sphere of influence.

Okay, that’s only two sentences, but there’s a lot to unpack in them.

Our case of mistaken identity brings on the condition of self-sabotage, which seems to affect almost everybody. I’m always impressed by how many people tell me how much they are bothered by it, and some of them are incredibly successful. Many are suffering from the dreaded imposter syndrome, which is one form of it where they believe that despite their accomplishments in life, on the deepest level, they are really a fraud. There are dozens of psychological syndromes like these that prey on our minds and can plague our lives in hundreds of ways.

It kind of reminds me of a west wind at the Jersey shore, near Philadelphia. On those beaches, if there is a west wind, which is also called a land breeze, it blows tons of mosquitoes and green head flies onto the beach and you really can’t go on it. Everything else can be perfect – great sunshine creating a beautiful, warm day, bright clear ocean giving off that fresh saltwater smell. But if you go onto that beach, a swarm of insects will make a meal out of you so fast that you won’t be able to last longer than five minutes. Believe me, I am speaking from painfully direct experience on this.

It can be just like that in life. It makes no difference how great things may be going in your outer world, if your mind is making a meal out of you on the inside, you’ve got real problems.

So, as we approach the information, I’d like to suggest that you try to maintain what is called the “beginner’s mind,” which simply means you continue to suspend your assumptions and previous understandings as you consider the ideas presented. Also, even though you may have heard some of these ideas before, there is a decent chance that you have never heard them in this exact context before.

As I mentioned in the last episode, I am always reminding myself of Thomas Edison’s view of our so-called understandings in his quote: “We don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.” That’s a truly helpful perspective because if you can stay opened and give the understandings a fair chance, a lot of pleasant inner surprises may surface within you.

Now, as has been mentioned a few times, as a species, we humans are on the very low end of the food chain and would never have made it through the grueling selection process of survival of the fittest were it not for our incredible brain. Indeed, not only is it the single greatest biological evolution in the history of life on earth, it is the only factor that has allowed us to prevail over the almost insurmountable odds that were stacked against us.

Incredibly, we have about 86 billion neurons that fire together constantly and after enough repetition of firing between specific neurons, a neural pathway is established. Once the pathway is established and used continually, it becomes fortified and the neural firing mechanism becomes greatly enhanced. And when this has happened to a sufficient degree, we feel that we have learned something.

This is the way you learned your name. This is the way you learned the language that you speak and in fact this is the way you’ve learned everything that you’ve learned throughout your entire life. Learning is basically just the repeated firing of neurons which create the advanced formations of your neural pathways.

After a while, all your pathways develop an internal brain structure that we call your neural grid, which is the massive, interconnected electronic highway which holds all of your individuated knowledge. And we know from the study of people who have suffered from severe stroke or traumatic brain injury, these pathways can be completely wiped out, with nothing remaining. But, after what can be a grueling process of reprogramming, the grid can be rewired and a lot can be regained. So, it is the content of this neural grid that creates who we seem to be.

But as critical as our neural grid is on a countless number of levels, including the shaping of our identity in the world, it is only one small part of our massive overall intelligence. Another term for this grid is the ordinary mind, and it is a very powerful tool that we have created to navigate our way through life.

And now, as touched on in the last episode, here comes the root of the problem for us. Instead of understanding that this is just a tool that we have created, due to a myriad of external factors, we have come to believe that this is who we really are. We have become so overidentified with the makeup of this inner matrix that we have lost sight of our real nature, which is a key element of our much larger intelligence.

And here’s where the pain of it comes in. Within this small part of our intelligence is an even smaller part which has been called our inner critic. And as small as it may be, it has a critically big mouth. The reason it’s called the inner critic is because it is always criticizing us. It’s merciless and once you start believing that your inner critic is who you really are, and you listen to its constant negative rambling like it’s the gospel truth, you’re in for one nasty day at the beach. Followed by many, many more.

Our mind moves almost at light speed and the current estimation is that it is giving us about 30,000 negative messages every day and fifty percent of those are repetitive. Which means we are programming the same negative messages into our mind at least 15,000 times each day, or about fifteen times a minute. This is a truly incredible amount of negativity, which can make you feel like you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.

Now it’s important to remember that our ordinary mind is a truly extraordinary tool and we could never survive without it. And we can never grasp how much intelligence we each have within us at this very moment. Indeed, it is estimated that it would take the most advanced computer in the world about 45 hours to do what our brain does in just one second.

But this mind of ours can be a real double-edged sword, which means it cuts both ways. And when our inner critic wields the sword, we usually find ourselves cut and bleeding within seconds.

To further clarify the situation, let’s briefly examine three basic aspects of our ordinary mind that can have an enormous impact on us.

The first element to grasp about our Ordinary Mind is that it is responsible for making improvements in every part of our lives, which is a truly tremendous benefit for us. But to utilize this talent, a key part of its nature is that it is always dissatisfied. No matter what’s going on, it will always be looking for something better, something more. Its innate dissatisfaction is what makes it so effective and productive. Without it, we’d still be living in caves and every advancement in our world, from the wheel to the computer and beyond, is a direct result of it.

But the when the dissatisfaction becomes unbridled and gets out of control, it can become brutal because living in a state of constant dissatisfaction can truly darken your life. Thinking that your dissatisfied mind is who you really are, you become dissatisfied with everything. Nothing is ever good enough, including your spouse, your family, and your profession, among many other things. And ultimately, you become dissatisfied with yourself, which can become deeply destructive, turning your world into a prison of endless frustration.

A second key characteristic of the Ordinary Mind is that it is deeply connected to our limbic system, which is responsible for our safety and security. In this area, it’s in a state of constant surveillance, always on the lookout for threat, and we couldn’t survive without it, especially during the early days in the cave.

This survival mechanism is a critical function for us and we can’t do without it. But the other side of the coin is that its default signal is fear, and its general tendency is to catastrophize problems, making a mountain out of every molehill on every issue. Ultimately, fear can become the root of our awareness, completely dominating our minds and bringing devastating results to our health and well-being. Ironically, if unchecked, the very part of our mind that is responsible for protecting our life can end up ruining it.

The last aspect of our Ordinary Mind to understand is that by nature, it cannot operate in present time. It’s always remembering the past or hypothesizing about the future. Or it may go into weaving random fantasies. But it can never be in the here and now. When we’re in present time, we’re in an entirely different state of consciousness than our thought world.

This may not seem so bad at first, but if we don’t understand it, it can become deeply problematic. We can often find ourselves wondering why we’re not fully present, why are we day dreaming our way through our lives and not really paying attention. The next thing you know, the inner critic has more ammunition to torture us with. But that’s only if you believe that you are your mind. When you know that you’re not and you understand how it works, you can take advantage of an entirely different approach which yields vastly different results.

Now here’s one last thing to consider about the make-up of this neural grid of ours. It wasn’t exactly created by us. We actually had very little to do with assembling the deepest structures of it. That was done by an amalgam of all of the influences that we were exposed to throughout our younger years. And we really don’t have access to its actual formation.

Of course, we know that our parents or primary care givers had an enormous amount to do with it, but we don’t know much about what they were truly like as adults. We just saw them through the eyes of a child. And there were many other architects of it as well that we can barely remember, specifically our teachers from kindergarten through second grade, who also were among its primary programmers.

And that’s not to mention the world of television, radio and the internet, generating the constant barrage of commercial messaging that we have lived with for our entire lives. In the 1970s we saw between 500 to 1600 ads per day. Now we are exposed to between 4,000 to 10,000 of them each day. So, who really shaped this grid of ours anyway?

We’re coming to the end of this episode and we have only taken a 40,000-foot overview of the lay of the land. Suffice it to say, that if you have come to believe that your ordinary mind is who you actually are, with its neural contents of all your likes and dislikes, opinions and concepts, memories and future dreams, and you don’t understand that in reality, it’s just an incredibly innovative tool that was largely created by a random hodge-podge of constant impressions, you’re in for a pretty rocky internal ride as you proceed down the highway of life. Whether we understand it or not, our neural grid is not who we are. It’s not even close. Fortunately, our overall intelligence is something far greater.

Now, this has been a lot of information to absorb. We’ve exposed the pathway that leads to the trap of our inner prison. In the next episode, we’ll start looking into finding the doorway out.

As always, keep your eyes mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.