Self-Created Reality
Out of the millions of bits of information our brains process each second, 45 bits give or take are devoted to conscious thought. We can give our total conscious attention to around of one-millionth or 0.000001 of the sensory input available to our brain. We are programmed for virtually total inattention. And we live in a self-created reality world.
Instead of the reality out there, you see, hear, feel, and think what you expect to see, and your expectations are based on your experiences and memories. A surprising proportion of your perceptions are fundamentally illusions.
“We never see the world exactly as it is — our entire experience of it is filtered through the screen of our longings and our fears, onto which project the interpretation we call reality.” Maria Popova, Brain Pickings blog
Self-Created Reality
In a very real sense you don’t “see” anything. A layer of retinal cells at the back of your eyeballs that are sensitive to light trigger impulses that tunnel up through a bundle of fibers (optic nerve) to the brain. Of course, your brain can’t see at all. The image does not get past the retina. The brain receives pulses, not images.
It turns out that these pulses can come from tactile input that can come from other parts of the body than the eyes. In the 1960s Bach-Y-Rita wanted to see if you can “see” through your back. So he built a device that routed visual images via a huge TV size camera to electrodes taped on the skin of a blind person’s back.He chose the skin as a sensory modality in place of the eyes because the skin is the largest sensory organ in the body. And he felt the brain will figure out how to utilize this sensory input.
Crazy Idea!
He had the blind subjects sit in an old dentist’s chair with electrodes taped all over the skin on their back. The subjects rotated a camera in the direction they wanted to “see” and the images flowed as light pulses to blunted needles covering their back. Light pulses flowed from the camera through blunt needles against their back stimulating their back with electrical patterns.
It worked. By moving the camera, the blind person was able to identify the objects captured by the camera. They were able to “see” whatever images the camera recorded. They could “see” through their back. No eyes needed.
“We don’t see with the eyes,” Bach-y-Rita said. “We don’t hear with the ears. All of that goes on in the brain. Remember, if I’m looking at you, the image of you doesn’t get beyond my retina; just to the back of my eye. From there it pulses to the brain through a bundle of nerves. Those pulses aren’t any different that the pulses from the big toe.”
We are not seeing the world. In the brain the thalamus receives the pulses and routes only about five percent of this electrical information is to our conscious mind in the form of images. We live in a world of self-created illusions. We call this illusion reality.
Sense of Self
Our sense of self is encapsulated in a thought-generating module, aka Narrator, in the left hemisphere of our brain. This is the focal point of billions of parallel-processing, networked neurons, communicating within 45 to 50 bits what the brain decides we need to know to keep our story intact. Without the Narrator we would be lost in the brain’s enormous chaotic processing. The Narrator puts it together into stories we accept as reality; stories that blind and bind us.
When we narrowly focus our attention we limit our beliefs. These beliefs at the center of our attention become expressed by our inner speech. This inner speech (a.k.a. Narrator) strengthens our narrow beliefs. Our beliefs limit our perception. Round and round.
Wisdom comes when you discover you are not what you believed yourself to be and you move to a deeper reality. This new depth becomes another surface, and all that appears on this new surface vanishes and discloses a depth beneath. This happens again and again throughout your life as long as you go on exploring deeper and deeper layers of your being.
This does not mean probing into deeper and deeper layers of problems, but with accepting and living with paradox. Paradox is with us along with death and taxes. Much of it comes from the division of right and left brain and the corpus coliseum highway between that ironically serves to block as well as enhance communication between the hemispheres. Over the centuries, it seems the left hemisphere has become dominant over the right.
The Narrator
We are convinced of the veracity of the left brain hemisphere’s specious arguments over a right hemisphere with no voice at all. We have given up freedom and are trapped in a maze of words, concepts, and the mental and emotional states that reflect back the only world we know. Mental illness is remaining trapped in the Narrator’s left brain hemisphere hall of mirrors. Freedom is learning to move freely from one hemisphere to the other, leaving the prison of left-brain concepts and states.
We “know” who we are from the Narrator and the Narrator makes up whatever it needs to come up with . No one is behind the curtain pulling levers. No center of consciousness that we know of. The Narrator takes all of the input, meaningful and things with no intrinsic meaning, spinning it all into a narrative that makes a lot of sense and becomes a unified story line; our concept of self, of “me-ness.” It is this concept of self based on unconscious, implicit beliefs that causes many of us a tremendous amount of suffering.
We accept and believe in the cohesive and fictional self and world created by the Narrator. We give irrational, harmful thoughts authority because they are intimately connected with this fictional self. Ironically, when these thoughts are most judgmental is when we are convinced they must be true. And when a desire is there, we think the desire is there to be fulfilled, instead of corps of brain modules firing away.
It is the interpretive power of the left brain that gives us the illusion of self. The left-hemisphere Narrator takes myriad neural modules firing throughout the brain and creates an on-the-fly conscious experience and sense of self. This interpretive power of the left brain offers an illusion of unity and control and accounts for much of our feelings and behavior while denying and rationalizing at the same time. Without this left-brain Narrator, we would be lost in the fierce, firefly chaos of billions of neural modules and their unfathomable interconnected pathways firing throughout the brain.
David Bohm, one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century summed up this interplay between our perception and our belief:
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based on our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”
Cognitive Attention Therapies
You need to cope with the perpetual chatter of the Narrator. You can’t shut it up, so you learn to direct our attention so that we react to the Narrator’s chatter as we might react to passing clouds. We let thoughts come and go without clinging to them.
We have significant input as to how our conscious mind questions and sorts out our observations, perceptions, and beliefs. Cognitive psychology offers a method of questioning our beliefs. Attention Therapies offer control over what we take in.
You might read or listen to mp3s. With novels, you take on the reality of others at the same time you distract from the Narrator. With nonfiction or self-help, you expand your knowledge of the world.
A huge catalog of Vipassana Dharma mp3s can be downloaded for free at Insight Meditation Center. Most of these are recordings of live Vipassana Insight Meditation sessions, some all day meditation workshops. These can serve as therapy sessions.
While you are listening to mp3s, at work, at home, or driving, you can work with Attention Therapies. Breathing is the core of Attention Therapies. Breath Awareness is mindfulness. Return to focus on the breath whatever transpires. Observe the breath and all that happens to interrupt it, without clinging to the interrupter – thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, pain.
Active Breathing means being an active participant in the process of breathing. You regulate the way you breathe. You can control the length of time you breathe in and breathe out. You can control whether you breathe in from high up in your chest or down low in your abdomen.
Expand Attention
We can focus our attention anywhere we like, on sound, space, posture, breathing, Insight Meditation, or we can focus on unresolvable issues.
The flow of what goes through our consciousness is limited only by the scope of our imagination. The limit is the volume – 45 bits at any given moment, even though the next moment something quite different may be passing through.
You can suffer intensely or you can grow and become with 45 bits of attention. But it is just 45 bits and you must learn to use it consciously. The alternative is to remain in the perception, belief, belief perception loop for a lifetime of suffering. You really do have the choice.
Electric Brain
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
