Psych-Out

Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains.  With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise.  Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.

In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts.  Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before.  And, the hour before that.  The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years.  Sometimes they just come on their own.  Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.

The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again.  That’s a neurological fact.  To the brain, thought is an action.  To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry.  Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation.  And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it.  Feed it.  Nourish it.  Hold onto it and watch it grow.

Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself.  It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence.  And, if that sign isn’t there?  It will make it up.  It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do.  It’s a feature, not a bug.  Why?  When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.

Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system.  These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives.  Instead, we have deadlines.  Mortgages.  Car breakdowns.  Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”.  Our  freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.

We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage.  Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it.  Watch our monkey-mind agitate.  Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!

And if we forget that we were afraid?  Oh right!  Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back.  We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses.  We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened.  It will happen.  It will…it will…it will.   Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness.  We’ll sit.  Wait.  Stew within the electro-chemical buzz.  We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.

Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.

How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.