The Brain is a Story-teller

The unfortunate tendency of the brain is to attempt to explain everything. This is its function, of course, but unfortunately it tries to explain its own existence and behaviour in the same way. “I exist because…” or “I am this way because…” are usually followed by a story, and so we can say that the brain is a bag of stories. We love stories because they make us feel comfortable, in that we can account for any kind of phenomena with them.
Psychedelic journeys, alien encounters, conspiracy theories, religions, occult practices, creation myths, the theory of evolution, classism, racism, political left versus right, patriotism, economics, psychological problems… etc.

It’s always story-time for the brain. Stories explain away our experience of life, and explanations are like teddy-bears: they make us feel comfortable by giving us something to cling to when the darkness of uncertainty looms. We tend to give a causal structure to our experience, but that causal structure will almost certainly employ what Edward De Bono refers to as “Porridge Words”, which are vague and apparently meaningless words which play a very important part in thinking. Some examples would be words like “alien”, “spirit”, “mechanism”, “they”, “something”, “device”, “god”, “energy”, “UFO”, “it”, “the big-bang”…etc.

The problem with these stories, is that they form pre-conceived notions in our brains, which we begin to define ourselves with, and just like when we watch a movie, and we can’t help favouring either the hero or villain, we have a tendency to choose the stories which make us feel the best, and form opinions, which will have a big influence on the company we keep.

This problem can be addressed by rewiring our brain to believe that it can believe in “this AND that”.
“I believe in God” seems to be opposed to “I’m an atheist”, but since both of these statements revolve around a porridge word, we can adjust the way we define the word “God” to suit two beliefs by saying something like “God is freedom”. Or when it comes to things like alien encounters or conspiracies, we can simply say “I believe in the possibility”. After-all, once we’ve realised that we can’t trust the stories that our brain forms, then we can really only believe in what we experience, and try not to demean our experience by confining it to a single interpretation.

Positive Skepticism

‎”We are in a war within our own mind. It is a war between our truth and all the opinions and judgements that have been thrown at us or that we have thrown at ourselves. Become a warrior and fight against the parasite in your own mind. Stop being the scorpion that stings itself with it’s own tail and be skeptical of what you are telling yourself. Listen carefully, filter through the negative, allowing only the positive to rule and reign bringing heaven into your existence.” ~don Jose Ruiz