Has anyone here heard the term perception is projection?
Let me explain a little bit about what we mean by this.
Another way to put this is a quaint saying that people don't see the world as it is;
they see the world as they are.
How do you know what you're looking at?
How do you know what's going on around you?
You don't.
This is all an illusion that's going on.
Let's just look at it in the visual sense.
To be in this room and make sense of me sitting up in this chair, all that's happening is
light waves are hitting these little tiny things in the top of your eyes that we call
an eyeball.
Actually it's not even that.
It's just that little black bit in the side of the eyeball, a tiny little hole.
It's not getting a lot of light into that, but that tiny little hole gets enough light
going into it that when the light wave bounces off the retina, it sets off a little electric
charge.
That charge goes up the optical nerve and comes into a little gap.
That little gap gets jumped over with some chemical.
Those chemicals set off another little electric charge on the other side, and that process
continues until it hits your brain.
Then inside your brain the occipital lobe is primarily responsible for it.
It's this nice little part in the back of the head that we patted earlier on.
The occipital lobe takes all these chemical/electrical signals and cooks up some magic and comes
up with some of the parietal lobe understandings of what ought to be there.
So, you don't just see a mass of color.
You see a person sitting in a chair, sitting on a blue stage, etc.
There's a whole complex set of activities that have to go on in order for vision to
work.
If you ask someone who's into optics, they'll tell you that one-way vision – in other
words if you don't know what the input source is, it's impossible to see.
Vision is impossible.
In order for your eye to see, it has to make assumptions about the light source.
That's why for example when you're in a fog where the light source is different
to the assumptions – rather than being a light source from the top down from a single
universal point, you now have a dispersed equal light source around you – it becomes
very difficult to judge distances and shapes at that point because the assumptions your
brains have to make in order to understand light have been broken and so it slowly starts
deteriorating.
Does that make sense?
It gets more complex than that.
We don't have to look at it.
I just want you to understand the main concept of this.
So, you don't really know what's going on in this room.
You have a vast amount of little things going inside your brain that give you an experience,
an illusion, a hallucination that certain things are going on in this room.
That hallucination correlates to whatever kind of reality we can experience
sufficiently for you to get a sense of I know what's going on, I can navigate through
this environment, I can succeed.
I'm not going to step in front of a bus because that will kill me, I will eat the
hamburger because it won't – unless of course it will.
You get the idea.
It's a very complex process that the brain makes in a snap.
It just creates this illusion of the ease of this.
What you're beginning to start seeing now literally in your mentalization practice is
how that illusion is constructed.
Now what does this all have to do with the ASH Practice?
Okay, this is an interesting phenomenon but unless you're a hardcore psychologist studying
perception for example, it should mean very little to you.
So, why is this of interest to us?
It's because there's more mental maps going on inside our heads than where the bathroom
is in our apartment or our house.
There are mental maps about what things mean.
Some of them are useful.
There's a bus – it can get you to places.
That's a bus and it's moving towards you quickly.
You better get out of the way.
They mean certain things that are of value and use to you.
Some of those things mean things that aren't of value to you – people don't like me,
I'm not attractive, I can't do this, it's too dangerous and so on.
When you look at a scene, you're actually not seeing the scene.
You're seeing the scene plus the sum total of your life experiences and all the conclusions
you've reasoned from those experiences – or in many cases haven't bothered reasoning
from those experiences.
That's an unconscious form of reasoning.
That's the Law of Association at work there.
So, you will interpret them one way and another person will interpret them another way.
If I dropped you in the middle of a Rave, a lot of you in the slightly older generation
would be there and say this is loud, this is noisy, I hate this, this is like washing
machines exploding everywhere, why would anyone want to be here?
If you throw a teenager into the very same environment, they'd say this is crazy.
Actually they'd probably use a different word that I don't know.
This is a word I don't know!
Yeah!
More word I don't know!
More different word that I haven't even heard about yet!
It's because they're carrying a whole world inside of them and what they see out
there is reflecting that world and therefore it is good, it is fun.
If someone who's not from that generation gets dropped in the same environment, they're
also reflecting a world and this world out here with washing machines exploding hasn't
got Mozart.
What a lonely world that is.
If only they just played Mozart and they dimmed the lights a little bit, like smoother, and
had an armchair, then this Rave would be wicked.
Of course that's an amusing example but let's take a really harsh example of that
same thing.
Two people come out of a concentration camp.
One for the rest of their life will be fearful, terrified, hate the world and think it's
full of mean, ugly, bad people that are out to hurt you.
They will be terrified.
At every point, they will double check and verify and distrust.
That's a very unpleasant life that person has to lead isn't it?
Another person comes out and is determined to make the most out of life.
They have a second lease on life.
They don't do a job that is soul destroyer.
Why?
Life's too short.
They could end up in this place all over again.
Let's make it count what I have left.
The exact same experience – one comes out in Hell and the other one comes out in Heaven.
The experience is not the important thing.
It's what you carry inside that's important.
Those mental maps decide your life.
If your life in any way, shape or form sucks right now, if it's unpleasant, frustrating,
annoying, boring or whatever you want to call it, it's because you're carrying inside
of your world where that portion of the world something unhealthy is going on there, and
therefore you're suffering.
If your life is marvelous, fun, fantastic, filled with delights and gifts, that is also
nothing to do with the world out there.
It's all to do with the world in here.
You are projecting it.
You're adding that stuff onto the sensory stimulation that your senses are getting because
your senses have no mind.
They will process data like a machine almost.
It's what happens in here that matters.
It's the way you make sense of things that matters.
By the way, who here feels themselves stuck in Bucket Land to one extent or another?
A couple of people are putting two hands up.
I understand.
Hallelujah, I'm getting out of Bucket Land.
It's not very helpful to tell you it's your fault.
You have the wrong maps.
You live in the wrong world.
It's not very helpful to you.
It may be true but that's just more blame, unless of course your world goes yes I need
someone who's forthright and tells me the truth no matter how hard it is.
Once again, am I harming you or am I helping you by telling you this?
I don't know.
I can make predictions about what most people's inner worlds look like, which will let me
communicate with a large amount of people, but I'll always get it wrong with some because
I'll never understand the nuances in everyone's internal world.
What we're doing now is we're working up to it slowly, incrementally, safely.
How do we build the world inside ourselves that we actually want to live in?
If you build it in here, you'll start perceiving it out there.
If you start perceiving it out there, you might even be able to change enough things
to make it more permanent.
Do you see where we're going with this?
Do you see how just a few relatively simple exercises are only there to give you a skill
and to start letting you see the mental mechanisms in action, the metacognition, so that you
stop confusing what you think is going on – there's that word again; think is going
on, that's an extra step – with what would be useful for you to see.
Of course there are some boundaries we need to come to grips with, which we'll get into
over the course of the next few days, so you don't fall down the path of self-delusion.
There are self-fulfilling prophecies and there are self-delusions.
What's the difference?
If you think about it, there's a very small difference between one and the other.
This is a question that has vexed me for years.
Am I just being self-delusional?
I'm having all these wonderful things happening, but then again in other ways I am being self-delusional
and there's a very, very narrow boundary where you can go from self-fulfilling prophecy
and just go down the path of self-delusion where nothing happens.
The difference between one and the other has to do with intent and expectation.
A self-fulfilling prophecy happens.
It occurs.
Life changes around you.
In a self-delusion nothing happening outside will ever change because you're disconnected
from it.
So, you don't change the world anymore.
You kind of change yourself to stop the world from intruding on your delusion.
Do you understand the difference?
We all do it by the way.
I do it as much as the next person, but the trick starts becoming how do you spot when
something is a self-delusion and how do you convert it into a self-fulfilling prophecy,
one where the things you want to occur start occurring.
The answer lies in here.
We haven't come close to exploring that yet, but the experience you're starting
to have starts pulling back the curtain so that you can see the Wizard of Oz working
his little machine, so when it comes to the point where you can do something with practically,
you can start changing your internal landscape and that's going to start filtering out
and your external landscape will change, which means your behavior will change.
As soon as your behavior changes, the reactions the world gives you will change, and then
you've changed from a possible delusion to a self-fulfilling prophecy because things
are no longer the same for you.
In self-delusion your behavior doesn't change, which means you don't get different responses
from the world, which means things stay the same but you think they're not.
Again it's a subtle nuance.
Are you beginning to understand?
Isn't it interesting how a small thing, walking down the street and there's kind
of an area I'm hazy about, but I'm just going to let it be hazy for now.
It creates the illusion of a reality for you, so you're not afraid to walk from one end
of the street to the other even though you have no idea what's going on in between.
That's just part of the way your mind does that.
We're going to harness those effects in our favor but not just now.
Enough talking from me for a little while.
Over to you guys.
Do you have any questions or comments on the stuff we've been discussing?
When I was listening to you, I couldn't stop thinking about – I'm an engineer,
so I'm used to deconstructing everything.
It seems to me – I'll give you an example.
For example, this was years ago.
I just started learning skiing and was in Austria and we were there – I don't know,
eight or 10 people and all of them were experienced skiers and I was the only one.
So, the first half day they had patience with me, but then they wanted to go their way.
They wanted to use their time and I fell behind and those damn skis and my body hurts.
Well, two days later I was much better, to cut the long story short.
Is it more prevalent because you said we have a lot of maps, not just one but then there's
one behind.
I think we have lots of different worlds inside of us – at least in my case – they get
triggered by emotions, so they are already there.
Yes.
And I understood you probably not correctly that we've got to construct new worlds,
which to me is much more difficult.
I'm sorry…
Allow me to address the thought I think you're having and then you can correct me if I've
mistaken it.
First of all, I disagree with you.
I think you did understand me correctly.
I agree, we have worlds within worlds within us and they tell us how to react and respond
how to make sense and meaning of things.
Many of the things are great and very useful.
The fact that you're an engineer is only possible because you have an engineering world
inside where things work, and as soon as you put something together that doesn't work,
your inner world looks at it and says it's nothing like any machine we have in here,
that can't work.
Sometimes it's to your disadvantage of course because that's how new machines get built
on different principles.
Then you have to expand that world to make it work.
I agree with you also.
Our task will be to create new worlds – brave new worlds if you like but without those connotations
– that will allow us to have a more satisfying experience of whatever reality we happen to
have around us; hence be more useful and so on.
I also take your point that currently it appears that that may be very difficult.
That's only because we haven't got to that yet.
Okay, what I wanted to say is since there are already a lot of worlds inside of us,
to me it seems like emotions are like light switches.
If you have one emotion, you have access to one world.
If you have another emotion, you have access to a totally different world, totally different
possibilities, chances, dangers and everything.
I agree.
So, now you're talking about state-dependent learning.
You know the earlier rooms inside your mind.
Your happy room will have one world.
Your sad room will have another world.
If you're habitually in the sad room, you can do sad very well and have lots and lots
of wonderful worlds within that.
It's just they're all really sad – and vice versa.
Emotion is not the only way to navigate those worlds, and you can take parts of one world
and put them in another world, but we haven't got even close to doing that stuff yet.
There's no point going there because you'd be saying what's he talking about right
now?
We need to build up those experiences and that's what we're doing right now.
You absolutely guessed correctly.
This is where we're going.
We won't be doing it the way you expect it.
It won't be as direct as you think it is.
It will be a lot easier than you can think of right now, but let's reserve judgment
until we actually get to that portion.
Right now we're still learning the tools that will help us build worlds.
We haven't even got to building worlds yet.
Arthur: I'd just like to clarify in my own mind, I found that when I was describing my
neighborhood, which essentially is my backyard, that I could only do it in very brief detail
because there's a lot to see.
I remember a few years ago at a meeting we had an exercise where we learned to tell a
story, and I remember telling a whole story about opening up a drawer and putting on a
pair of socks in the morning, and that was a detailed story for two or three minutes.
So, I'm trying to understand the difference between those two.
First of all, it comes back to your original question from earlier, which is how much detail
do you give?
You have so much detail in your internal reality that it would take you an hour or two to describe
even the most significant parts of it, and that's just one room for example.
Again, we don't need that.
This is kind of training us for other things.
The fact that you are aware of them is enough.
Just do this for a second.
Close your eyes for a moment and think of a room that you're very familiar with, and
then mentally just notice all the details as quickly as possible and then come back.
Very good.
How long did that take?
A couple of seconds, right?
His eyes are open now, just so you know.
Now do the same thing and describe those same details.
How long would it take you to describe all those details?
At least 20 minutes, a half an hour or something like that.
Maybe even more once you got into the flow of it.
So, this tells you something very important.
Your mind works much more quickly than your capacity to describe it.
Arthur: Especially if told you about what's in each of the books on the shelf.
Exactly, because each of those books becomes a reference point to a new world, which is
another set of information and so on.
This is very important, folks.
Within the context of what we're doing here, I don't care about the descriptions.
The descriptions are totally and utterly irrelevant.
They're merely training wheels to help you stabilize it.
Let me just pick a room.
I'll go to the house I grew up in.
I'm going to pick the front garden.
I'm done.
Why?
Because my attempt to describe it to all of you has stabilized so much that I can see
it vividly.
I can see the tree right there.
I can see the wall covering around there going straight over here, the gate over here.
I don't even have to tell you about the rose bushes.
They're all probably dead because in the wintertime it's cold and they're not there.
There are flower bushes there.
Oh, I can look into the living room.
It's all inside my mind already and I only need to describe it to you enough to make
it vivid for me.
Now there is a point to description at some point to create linguistic talent at bringing
what's inside out.
There is a point to that, so describing is actually a useful skill anyways.
It improves your linguistic talent.
If you're interested in writing for example, like screenwriting and so on – actually
screenwriting will be different.
You don't have to be able to say it out loud for screenwriting but you have to be
able to type it.
Typing and speaking are different skills.
They're related but they're different.
So, if you want to be a writer, then you write out these descriptions.
If you want to be a storyteller, then you have to speak out these descriptions because
neurologically different things are going on at those points.
For our purposes here, we don't care about those things.
Those are specialist uses that we don't care about.
As soon as your internal reality is stable and vivid, you're done, which means I fully
expect some of you as these exercises go along to say something like all right I'm in Paraguay.
I'm there.
Good and then I'll go down… good and then open… yes… good.
So then there's the… yes… good I go outside and.
Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?
It's vivid in my mind.
If you're interested I'll give you the tour now in a slightly longer version.
So, I'm in Paraguay in my apartment.
I'm in the guest bedroom.
There are three beds against the wall.
There are kind of green things there.
The blinds are currently down.
So, I'm going to turn around and there's a mirror there and a little commode.
There are some steps going down – that was my going down part, by the way.
So, in front of me is a little kitchenette area.
I'm going to open the fridge.
These actions start making sense to you now but they've been making sense to me way,
way before that.
This is not a hypnosis training.
It's not a coaching training.
This is not a communication training.
I do not care if the person sitting next to you has any idea what is going on as you're
describing these things.
You're describing it for you, not for them.
As soon as it's vivid inside your mind, if you want you can move on.
If you enjoy it, by all means describe some things, but then you're doing it just for
the amusement value or for the linguistic value to connect descriptions of your internal
experience, which will be very important for those of you who want to be able to then describe
metacognition to others.
That way you can link language to experiences but don't be surprised if they have no idea
what you're talking about or completely misunderstand you because they don't share
the experiences.
Does this make sense to you?
Incidentally if you do this exercise again, I recommend you use the other door – the
one that goes to the outside world, the front door in other words – and walk about your
neighborhood rather than your garden because there will just be more experiences there,
specifically because you less time in them.
Would it be safe to say that a self-fulfilling prophecy versus self-delusion is that a self-fulfilling
prophecy gets validated by the outside world?
Yes and no.
See, I know it now.
Now the challenge is turning this into an actual description, right?
Let's put it this way.
A self-delusion can't handle a world disagreeing with it and so it will do everything possible
to avoid being aware of the disagreement, either because you remove yourself from those
environments because they're too challenging, or because a self-defense mechanism kicks
in and you change external reality to suit what you think it should be doing because
it will keep your illusion protected.
YouTube is a wonderful place to discover this.
If you want to see self-delusion in action, YouTube is a winner.
There is an amount of people on YouTube who will tell you what their reality is – bless
them – and in the same breath will demonstrate how it's not true for them and they don't
even realize it.
Let's take anyone who is a fundamentalist, not just in a religious sense but at anything,
someone who thinks this is the only way it can be and everyone else is wrong.
I saw a wonderful video of a woman who was kind of a fundamentalist like this, who is
possibly the most hate-filled person I've ever witnessed in my entire life.
I mean she's got the twisty eye thing going on.
She's got the rhetoric and the condemnation of everyone around her, and she can find fault
in every single thing and it's bitter.
You can feel the emotions coming out of the TV screen and it's hurtful and the person
isn't even there.
This is the bit that gets me.
At the end of this whole rant, she comes up with a comment to the effect of 'but thankfully
I'm the most relaxed, easy-going person there is.'
That is a wonderful example of a self-delusion because she has no awareness of how un-easy-going
she really is and if anyone ever held a mirror up to her and said look, what's going on
here, that's not being easy here – one of two responses will occur.
One is she'll get angry with you, which is a defense mechanism to kick out the information,
or the other one is she just won't see it – what are you talking about?
Look how nice I'm being to them.
I'm telling them what their faults are so they can fix them.
That is the way self-delusion maintains itself.
Now let's turn this into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A self-fulfilling prophecy maintains itself despite contradictions in reality.
So, let's take the same kind of hateful person who wants to be an easy-going person,
and at the end of it let's just change a slight nuance in her mindset.
Instead of saying I'm the most easy-going person she might say 'just watch me, in
time I'll be so easy-going that none of this will matter.'
That's accepting reality and being willing to change it, interact with it differently,
and that's when you start getting different responses from the world.
Just by putting that little frame at the end there – that little admission that I'm
not there yet – who here felt different about that woman as I just described her?
Hands up.
That's how the self-fulfilling prophecy works.
The first person is so hateful and can't even see it.
What will you likely do?
Avoid them or fight with them depending on your mindset.
Are you as likely to fight with the second person?
Are you more likely to give them a second chance and hang out with them just in case
it helps them out?
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy in action right there.
They're willing to engage with the reality that is other than the one that they know
will ultimately happen.
So, in a mixture – a symbiosis – there's a feedback loop between themselves and the
outside world.
If they change their behavior, the outside world responds with a different reaction,
which changes their behavior further, their reaction goes further and bit by bit, increment
by increment depending on how far they have to go, they will start changing the course
of their ship to a new position and then they'll travel there.
Let's imagine we have a flat world theory, you know the one where you fall off the edge
of the world if your ship travels too far.
The self-delusional person will say no, the world is round by definition.
I shall keep on sailing and when they get to the edge of the world they fall off.
When the sailors say look there's nothing there, we're going to fall off, they'll
say don't be silly, when we get to it you'll see I'm right, and they go right off the
edge.
The self-fulfilling prophecy on the other hand says all right we're now going to circumnavigate
the globe.
We're getting closer to the edge, so let's stay right a bit more and right a bit more.
Oh look, I found a whole new country.
I told you we'd do it.
Do you understand the subtle distinction there?
We've spent a lot of time on this now and technically it's not really part of what
we're doing here, but hopefully the experiences you've had so far today kind of feed into
what you're doing here.
You're beginning to start seeing your mental mechanisms in action.
The next step will be to start creating safe environments to explore whatever delusions
are keeping you the way you are right now.
I have them, you have them, we all have them but the problem is we're fish in water.
We can't see what's going on and that's precisely because we can't change it.
It's a feedback loop.
I don't know it's happening, so I can't see it, so I can't do anything about it.
So, it happens again.
I can feel the experience of it.
I can only infer it and that's a very difficult thing to do.
Luckily, I have an unconscious mind that knows a little bit more about this stuff than I
do, that sees things plainly without as many things added on top of it that I've added
on top of that, and that's the loophole that will give me freedom.
Have you heard the phrase a psychotic insight?
I'll just explain that very briefly.
Psychosis of course for many people is a very terrible thing.
Incidentally if you look at Shamanic practices, the best Shamans tend to be psychotic.
They've merely mastered their psychosis sufficiently to become great healers, which
is an interesting point, which I think our model of medicine might learn from somewhat,
but that's neither here nor there for now.
When someone is having a psychotic break, one of the things that tends to happen is
their meaning-making mechanisms alter, they change.
They'll see reality almost without the filters that put meaning onto things, which is why
things can seem really bizarre.
So, on occasion they'll see something that no one else can notice because we've all
filtered it out.
We've all deluded ourselves it's not going on and they'll go right to the point and
say this is going on, and people will say how the hell does he know that?
It's because we're all so polite, we've deluded ourselves that we can't see it,
we're not supposed to see it.
Does that make senses?
In some respects, you'll be able to develop a kind of psychotic insight into yourself,
into places where you are stuck and suddenly you'll see it and say huh, wow, I never
thought that was possible but clearly that's why it was.
Is this helpful to you?
We've kind of fallen down the philosophy track a little bit.
I'd like to be able to prove more of that to you in terms of your experiences, but that
really is not going to happen until day four or five.
We're setting up reference experiences so that you'll be able to do that kind of work.
We're not even close to that yet.
Thank you for that.
That was kind of an interesting discussion so far.
Are there any other comments or questions on what we covered there?
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