The poetic psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, asserted: “There is a lot of suffering in life. But the only suffering that can be avoided is the suffering that results from trying to avoid suffering.” We create suffering not because we want to suffer, but because our interpretation of the things that happen is at best incomplete and often distorted.

The mind is constantly working to make sense of a vast amount of data about the world with which it has to cope. As impressive as the nervous system is, it has its limitations and so must triage. When resources are limited [e.g., when you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired] or when there is a lot of competition for your mental resources, cognitive processing tends to be shallow and of poor quality.

The world is more complex and fine-grained than we can process completely. The rules of thumb we use to help make sense of all the information we receive does not provide a complete and accurate description of the objective world. The Soul Illusion results from the bogus assumption that your interpretation of the objective world is complete and valid. Our map of reality is different than the territory of reality. This is such an important understanding that it has a name, Meta-Cognitive Awareness, and is the focus of this section.

Don’t confuse loving the truth with knowing the truth.

A primary theme of this project is that those who know themselves have Meta-Cognitive Awareness—that is, they appreciate that their interpretations, no matter how certain they may feel about them, are merely how things appear at a particular moment to a particular individual. They love the truth and so refuse to be seduced by the vanity that they know the truth.

What Socrates Plato & Tolstoy Know:

Typically the beliefs that provoke self-sabotaging reactions are primitive and may have been distorting your interpretations since childhood. These cognitive distortions have become so familiar that they are tacitly accepted as valid until you examine them by researching your own emotional reactions. An important and intended byproduct of using the Thought Record Tool is that it forces you to examine your interpretations of the events that happen from the perspective of a dispassionate observer.

Trying On Different Perspectives

How you interpret the things that happen is critical because it determines how you react to them. Some interpretations elicit emotional reactions that impair subsequent performance. The beliefs on which these interpretations are based are hard to correct because perception itself is biased in favor of information consistent with the belief and against contradictory information. To counter the pathogenic bias, consider these questions:

• If a friend had this thought what would I tell him?
• If friend knew I was thinking this thought, what would she say to me? What evidence might she show me that it was not true?
• When I am not feeling this way, how do I think about this type of situation?
• What have I learned from previous exposures to this type of situation that can help me now?
• Five years from now, how will I look at this situation?
• Am I jumping to conclusions that are not justified by evidence?
• Am I blaming myself for something I have no control over?

Perhaps you can recall a time when you accepted a premise that turned out to be false, or were taken in by a magician or salesman, and were surprised when events played out differently than you expected. We are easily fooled because there is insufficient time or cognitive resources to vet every perception or belief. However, recurring patterns of bad outcomes are worthy of in depth study.

The recommended tool for this research is the Thought Record, which allows you to review a critical situation in retrospect from the perspective a dispassionate observer.