I picked up a copy of Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days while wandering through a bookstore. I usually buy Kindle ebooks these days, but there’s something cool about the random discovery of a physical book on a shelf.
Although I was initially leery of the “Hack” metaphor, at least the author had real hacker experience as an early computer enthusiast. The process set forth in the book breaks down into three distinct parts — analyzing the mind; imagining making the mind do things differently, and then reprogramming to break bad habits and create new, beneficial ones.
I’ve only made it into the analyzing section so far, but I was immediately struck by how the author cleverly repositioned something we already know about. He uses an analogy of film to explain how there’s your mind, and then there’s “you” — the observer of the contents of the mind.
- Your mind is like a movie. Just as in the movie theater there is “you” watching a “movie,” in your own head there is a “you” watching your “mind.” And like a great piece of cinema, you are absorbed in the movie in your mind: the thoughts, emotions, memories served up in a constant stream.
Some of you may recognize this as similar to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the inhabitants mistake the fire’s flickering shadow against the wall as “reality,” when reality is actually outside of the cave. Likewise, we mistake the movie playing inside our head as “real,” when it’s nothing of the sort.
You are not the contents of your mind, nor is your “self” anything more than a flow of intangible and fleeting thoughts and memories that have conditioned you into believing the movie is real. So when Hargrave recommends analyzing the mind, what’s he really talking about?
And while mindfulness meditation improves your general well-being, reduces depression, anxiety and stress, increases productivity, improves self control, and even changes the composition of your brain for the better, the original purpose of the practice is to observe the intangible nature of the ego in order to alleviate the suffering that comes from taking your “self” too seriously.
Once you realize that your sense of self is an illusion, you can more effectively make changes. In Hargrave’s terms, it’s time to imagine a cool new you, and start reprogramming.
Hey, if thinking is terms of “hacks” is what does it for you, you’ll get no argument from me. Go with scientific language such as “meta-cognition” and “psychological distance,” rather than traditional spiritual notions of “consciousness” and “enlightenment.”
They’re all just concepts made up by human minds anyway. 🙂
Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days
Keep going-
Brian Clark
Further
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further: sharing
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