You arrive home from a friend’s house around 11 pm. The entire drive home you were thinking
about one thing: letting your dog out. But as you pull into the driveway and get out of the car,
a thought pops into your mind and completely takes over: Somebody is behind you. You feel
like you are just being silly, but you add a little pep to your step and scurry towards the
front door for good measures. What you find in doing so is not what you’d anticipated.
You realize that the faster you walk, the more you believe someone is behind you. At this point,
you give into the thoughts and take off in a full sprint towards the porch, screaming your dog’s
name. You clear all 3 stairs in one leap, slam the front door behind you, and turn the porch
light on. After a quick sigh of relief, you laugh hysterically as your dog relentlessly barks out
the window at the invisible monster. “I knew there was nobody behind me”, you say. (brief pause)
The mind plays tricks us far more than we recognize. Whether it’s to protect our life
or to protect our self-image, the mind constantly alters our perception of the objective world
and morphs it into a unique story that we tell ourselves. The unique story that we tell ourselves
is known as our subjective experience, and it is the narrative of the mind. But the thing is:
the mind doesn’t perceive things how they are, it perceives them as they relate to us. So,
the narrative or story it feeds us is often disconnected from the objective world or
what is actually there. It is through the mind’s translation of objective reality
into your subjective experience of that reality that all the trickery takes place.
In this video, we’ll look at 3 ways the mind plays tricks on us.
1. Survival The most common reason our
mind tricks us is to ensure our survival. When the thought that someone was behind
you popped into your mind, you had a very strong feeling that no one was there. You had a feeling
that you were safe in the objective moment you were in. But even still, your mind had you
thinking Freddy and Jason were right behind you by the time you made it inside. This is because the
story the mind tells you about your predicament stems from hundreds of thousands of years of
evolution through the mind’s survival instinct. Even though you felt safe in the moment, and
you actually were safe in the moment, your mind identified that as a further point of weakness.
For the benefit of your survival, your mind told you the story it needed to get you inside and to
safety. To avoid even the slightest possibility of a horrific experience, your mind tricked you into
anticipating that experience so that you would defend against the possibility of it happening.
In this case, the mind tricked you in the name of protecting your survival. (brief pause)
2. Self-Image Another common reason the mind tricks us
is to protect our self-image, or the ego. The mind will alter the story of the objective world
to make us feel or look better about ourselves. Remember, there is an objective world that exist
a certain way before we perceive it. That is not the world we see. The world we see is the story
our mind tells us about that objective world, or the story of how that world relates to us.
The story we tell ourselves is our subjective perception of an objective
reality, or our subjective experience. Well, when we are in a vulnerable place,
our mind blocks out parts of the story that might further harm our self-image,
and it enhances the part of the story that will feed it. For example, do you know anyone
who always thinks they are in the right? Like they take credit for every-single-thing that is
good in their life, but blame everyone else for all that is bad? If you know someone like this,
they likely struggle with their own self-image. And what you are seeing is the mind try to protect
them from their own perspective of themselves. Ironically, they don’t puff themselves up because
they believe they are better than everyone, they do it because they believe they are
less than everyone. And what you are seeing is their mind trick them into believing otherwise.
Let’s see how our mind could trick us into becoming a habitual liar, for example.
If you are not a habitual liar but you go around lying all day, you will suffer to some extent.
Whether you hold yourself accountable and feel bad about it, or you try to ignore it and it
manifests into an argument with your partner the following day. But imagine if you began to do this
every day…to walk around lying your face off to everybody you see. And then you carry on with this
for 3 years straight. At some point, the amount suffering you must face for your lies exceeds your
moral obligation to tell the truth. Now, you know that if you continue to see the act of lying as
morally wrong, you’ve got 3 years of it to suffer from. So, in the name of not seeing yourself as
degenerate liar, the mind tricks you into thinking that lying isn’t such a bad thing. And in the name
of reinforcing that belief, you continue to lie. The mind has altered your perception of yourself
in a way that so long as you continue to lie, you can continue to see yourself as a good person.
A simpler example of how the mind tricks us to protect our self-image is when it convinces us
that we deserve the trip to the bakery. When we collapse under the pressure of the mind’s desires
– as we often do when thinking about donuts – it can cause us to feel weak and at the mercy
of our inner roommate. To avoid these feelings of vulnerability, the mind seeks out any reason we
might deserve a donut and makes that our reason for getting one. Now, instead of getting the
donuts because we’ve collapsed under the pressure of desire, we get the donut because of the amazing
work we put in last week. The mind alters our perception of the donut to make it stand for a
positive attribute, so that we can feel good about ourselves for eating it. (brief pause)
3. Projection Projection is the
most interesting of the mind’s tricks in my opinion because at the end of the day,
it tells us a lot about who we are. But first: If you think this video could help someone,
consider giving it a thumbs up so YouTube will share it with others. You have more
to do with spreading the message than me at this point, so I would really appreciate it!
Imagine that Karen will present in front of a large group of people tomorrow,
and she’s extremely nervous about it. When she gets upfront and begins, she looks at all the
faces and knows she’s being heavily judged. She feels as if everyone is smiling at each other,
wondering what she is even talking about. While presenting, she sweats, stumbles over her words,
and forgets half of the material she came with. “I can’t stand it! I hate presentations”,
she thinks to herself as she walks out of class.
Little did Karen know, not a single person in the audience was judging her. She was free to
be as Karen-like as she wanted to be, and nobody would have cared a bit. Karen, on the other hand,
had judged every presentation leading up to her own. She had been sending snapchats and
making fun of people that forgot material or presented poorly. Because of this, Karen’s mind
tricked her into thinking everyone else was doing this to her when she was presenting.
Karen wasn’t nervous because the audience was showing signs of judgement, Karen was nervous
because she is an overly judgmental person. And she projects that onto the audience to assume
they are the same way. Karen had no external reason to assume she was being heavily judged.
Her assumptions are a projection of her internal perspective. In other words, her mind doesn’t
protect her from the audience that’s in front of her, her mind protects her from herself