If you say you can’t, you can’t. If you say you can, you can.
–Zen Master Seung Sahn
The stories we tell ourselves about the world shape our experience of the world. If you let go of the limiting stories you tell yourself about how you can fix your life and help the world, amazing things will follow. The below is from my new book How to Be Alive: A Guide to The Kind of Happiness That Helps The World (you can get a free sample chapter here and order it here):
First, our brains collect stories:
What I mean when I talk about “stories” is what cognitive psychologists call mental models. A mental model is a simplified representation of reality, stored in the brain, that helps us predict the consequences of our actions. Cognitive psychologists widely agree that people develop and use these representations as one of the bases of their decision-making.
Our mental models—our stories—can be built from our own experiences, from other people’s experiences, from our understanding of the world, from our opinions of how things should be, from what we believe other people expect from us, or from many other things.
Some mental models are not grounded in our experiences at all but are handed to us by our culture (through people, media, and even—God help us—advertising). Mental models handed to us by the culture form the basis of what I have been calling standard life approaches.
Then, as we go through life, we compare our experiences to our stories:
When we encounter a real situation, the brain flips through its story (or mental model) file until it finds a match. Mental models help us transfer learning from one situation to the next—through what psychologists call analogical thinking—so we can get faster and better at dealing with things.
So, say you’re a kid and you see a barking dog. Your brain searches for a barking dog story le. Maybe your mom told you a story about how she got bitten by a barking dog when she was little, so you react accordingly.
Finally, our brains react to the stories (rather than reality):
A barking dog? Run!
In some ways, mental models are like bits of software that get loaded into our brain’s hardware and executed when triggering events occur. Of course, those events can be much more complicated than a barking dog. Our stories affect how we react when we encounter Republicans or Democrats or Muslims or Christians or when world crises impinge on the happiness of our own lives.
If we aren’t careful, we can end up living more in our stories than in reality:
Each person’s brain collects thousands and thousands of mental models—stories. Taken together, the web of stories forms not just a single piece of software but a whole virtual game world in which we live, our own personal Matrix.
As beneficial as mental models can be in predicting outcomes and helping us choose our behavior, we can forget to check our stories against what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. We don’t ask ourselves if our stories match the Truth. We can cling to the map and forget to watch the landscape.
Through the process psychologists call denial, we accept into experience only those aspects of reality that accord with our stories. We literally can’t see the parts of the world that don’t t our stories. We don’t see that the barking dog is also wagging its tail—a puppy who just wants to play. We can see only the barking dog that threatens to hurt us.
Then our real world begins to conform to our story world:
We don’t choose our stories based on whether they are true or false. We choose them for the effect they have on us. Perhaps they make us feel safe (I know I’ll be ne with enough money) or happy (everything turns out all right in the end) or justified (people aren’t nice, so why should I be?).
Sometimes, we prefer the effect of the story to the reality of life. We like our little answers more than the big questions. But then, we are no longer free to act from our True Selves because we follow the dictates of the story. The story uses us to fulfill itself instead of our using the story to fulfill ourselves.
Because of our denial, we can’t see and don’t pet the barking dog who also wags its tail and wants to play, so the playful dogs ignore us and move on to someone else. Playful barking dogs stop appearing, not only in our story world but in our real world. We are left with only the barking dogs who mean to hurt us.
That is how our stories, when we are too attached to them, create the world we live in. The big question: Is the world your stories are creating the one you actually want to live in? If not, it is time to become aware of the old stories that don’t serve and start consciously telling yourself new stories that do serve.
If you say you can’t, you can’t. If you say you can, you can. Say you can. Making a start at changing your stories and creating a life that is better for you and a world that is better for others is as simple as that.
This passage came from my book How to Be Alive: A Guide To The Kind of Happiness That Helps The World. You can get a free sample chapter here and order it here.
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