Originally posted on 07-10-07:
I’ve been busy—doing what is a long story—and the reason I haven’t been posting is that, once again, it had become a process that took at least two hours out of the day—hardly the short version. So another attempt, briefly…
If someone said you didn’t have to do anything to make your heart beat, or your liver or kidneys—any of your internal organs—perform their functions, you wouldn’t be surprised. You would wonder why anyone even bothered to mention it. But if someone said you don’t have to do anything to make your brain think, you might pause to give that statement some thought.
In fact, you don’t control your brain’s thinking, it thinks you, and it thinks you in the particular way that it does as the result of thousands of years of mistakes. It is operating on false assumptions, coming to wrong conclusions.
Example: About 60 years ago, when I was three or four, we lived in the country, after having previously lived in town, and there were all sorts of critters in the country that I wasn’t used to—snakes, among other things. A neighbor showed us a Coral snake he had killed, something I had never seen or heard of before, and sometime after that, as I was going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I saw a snake on the floor in the moonlight, and started screaming. My dad came running in and switched on the light to reveal my sister’s jump rope, suggestively coiled on the floor. My brain had taken that limited information and mistakenly turned it into a living threat to my existence.
In a similar though much more complicated process, this same brain, acting on misinformation, has created the mistaken idea of me controlling it, with innumerable unpleasant consequences. It is a very difficult mistake to unravel and set right—even to talk about coherently—but this brain is working on it.
Blossoms Controlling Caterpiller
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