What Your Brain Does, and What You Can Do About It

We need an Operating Manual. Life teaches us too slowly.

My Kickstarter campaign for Operating Manual for Enlightenment ends on the evening of the last Friday in April. Go there and purchase an extended version of the book. The edition you will get on Kickstarter is written more for you than the book that will ultimately be published for a less informed customer:

We’re All Creators

You navigate life like you drive a car. You sit in the driver’s seat and manipulate the controls. You don’t ask why you see the road or how your car works, you just drive.

Cars come from the factory and most of them work like they’re supposed to. They are not born, they are not the result of sexual reproduction, and they don't evolve. They work until they don’t, at which point you get someone to fix them. Then, you go back to driving.

But you evolve, and you were not born to factory specifications. You drive the mind you were born with on a road you didn’t make. You have some choices, just as you do when driving, but you don’t know how to fix the car. If you know how to fix your car, you still don’t know how to fix your mind.

I can’t fix your mind. I doubt anyone else can, either. The most capable mechanic is you, but you were not born for the job and there is no manual. That’s why I wrote the Operating Manual, but it’s just a start. In order to understand it, accept that much of what you can do is determined by the equipment you use. 

Evolve. There is No Choice

Like the car that can only travel on roads, your future is determined by what your mind can navigate. Want to do something different? Want to become something more than the options presented to you? Then you’ve got to go off-road. That’s where many people stop, or they’d like to stop.

The problem is evolution. The situational kind. Situations and circumstances evolve, and if you don’t evolve with them, then you’re yesterday’s hardware designed for yesterday’s needs. This is why people struggle. The struggle is evolutionary. Not genetic, but situational.

Consider it a test. If you are not struggling, then you have no pressure to change. And although you may embrace change, change won’t embrace you as you are.

The Operating Manual is a basic introduction to how you work, and it should come as no surprise. The trouble is that most people don’t know how to work at developing themselves. It’s not like doing your job. It’s not a secure pursuit with fair compensation. Evolution always feels chaotic and unfamiliar. There are no promises.

What we’ve been taught to do—study, follow instructions, and fit in—is not evolutionary, it is anti-evolutionary. It directs you to work with things as they are.

Artificial intelligence cannot evolve because evolution is not a deductive or data-driven process. Evolution is the making, fixing, and learning from mistakes. You have to accept mistakes because real change requires new insight. It requires making failed generalizations. 

The process of learning is adding detail to generalizations, but you must first make these generalizations. Their failure reveals something you didn’t see before. Even the lucky generalization that’s correct is bound to fail later because it will be too general.

There is a Driving Force

You cannot find meaning working toward other people’s goals since they’re not tailored for your life. Your job, relationship, house, family, and debts are only meaningful if they’re your creations. If not, they become sources of resentment that remind you that you have not found a reason to live.

You cannot find meaning by putting out one fire at a time, since most are not your fires anyway. They are conflicts that arise from not fitting in. We are asked to be a round peg in a round hole, but evolution creates angles. Angles create differences and opportunities.

The fundamental assertion in religion is that things happen for a purpose. Science was built on the substitution of “reason” for “purpose,” so that science looks for mechanism instead of meaning. This led to the mechanistic universe but left questions of change unanswered. Science strains to answer the question of why things evolve. It can not remove this question. 

You find meaning by moving in consonance with the whole. You do not follow the road; you make the road. It then becomes your road. Similarly, and amazingly, you do not drive your car; you make your car. That’s the metaphor. The reality is your mind: you make your mind. That’s how you become proactive in life, by taking control of your perception.

There is a driving force and those who think about it are sure it hides in plain sight. Like the notion of God, the driving force is everywhere. It may be a question of language and we don’t have a word for it. It may be a question of perception, and we don’t have a sense for it. Or it may be a question of engagement, and we are not engaged with it.

The driving force leads you toward feeling life is meaningful. This not only creates in you the intuition to make correct choices, it also gives you a reason to live. “Use the force, Luke,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi.

There is an expression in the Canadian bush: “House finished, man dead.” It means that when you’re no longer involved in the process of building, you’re falling apart. At a personal level, evolution is life-force. Life-force is the draw to coherence through structure.

The Operating Manual is an introduction to structure; how you’re put together. If you’ve read this far, then you’ll be interested in the book. Pledge at the lowest level and you’ll get the special Kickstarter edition. This edition is only available to you now. Sign up on the campaign page: 

What Are You Qualified to Think?

As humans, we have certain obvious skills we’re expected to refine, and certain not obvious mechanisms that we’re supposed to use as they’re provided to us. These non-obvious mechanisms are the workings of our neurology and the mechanisms of our subconscious.

It is also our apparently unique ability to intrude on these mechanisms that sets humans apart from other animals. I say “apparently” because I suspect it’s untrue. Other animals also evolve themselves, we’re just so minimally capable in this regard that we don’t know how to communicate with them. 

This is similar to the search for extraterrestrial life or artificial intelligence. Until we know what makes up our intelligence, we won’t be able to recognize its presence outside of us. For example, we consider structures in noise to show intelligence. 

We look for rhythm and melody in the noises in outer space. We look for meaningful language in the vocalizations of animals. The fact that we’ve never found or deciphered either, in spite of obvious intelligence in other animals, should indicate that we don’t really know what we’re looking for.

This is important when it comes to recognizing intelligence in yourself. If you can’t see it, you can’t improve it. You may not even be able to respond to forces you can’t perceive. Although this begs the question of how perceptive you need to be. You don’t need to be all that perceptive, and most of us are not. Sooner or later, no matter how thick you are, you’ll be the message.

Under the Hood of Your Mind

We’re pretty good at thinking. Even the most inept human is more capable at deduction than an animal that responds reflexively. That doesn’t mean we’re better at what we do, it means we’re better at understanding novelty.

The two sources of insight we overlook reside in our subconscious and in our neurology. These are the two areas where we’re built not to interfere, the more hidden mechanisms of our minds. We’re excluded from tinkering with both because they’re too important to mess with. 

The key here is the word “mess.” We tend to mess with things by breaking them, and that’s not always a good approach. A better approach is to use inference and intuition, but those are hard to teach, hard to learn, and most of us are unskilled in these departments. Lacking these delicate skills, our minds have been designed to keep our bullish thinking out of the china shop of our neurology.

Most of psychology and psychotherapy deal with the conscious mind because this is where we can most easily communicate and find agreement. Psychology, like science, is based on money. Unlike science, it lacks a methodology. It shares the worst and lacks the best of science. Sad as this is, it seems necessary given the social environment in which it operates.

Neurology

These are big terms and some definitions are helpful. In this context, neurology means how your mind works at a high level. We’re not concerned with physiology, we’re concerned with the ingredients of thinking. We don’t know what these are exactly, but we’re nevertheless able to engage and improve them. 

I spend a good amount of energy trying to explain this, and to convince my clients that they could improve their neurology. The direct tool is neurofeedback, which is your direct interaction with your brain. But even without a direct connection, I can succeed with words to some degree. 

In the realm of neurons, interacting with your brainwaves enables you to improve the function of your nervous system. You are actually interacting with, not just observing your brain. This is hard to understand or explain, but the opportunities are tremendous. I may not be able to communicate it to you in words, but you’ll feel it when it happens.

The Subconscious

Your subconscious is hidden in a different way, and connecting to it requires a different sort of effort. Your subconscious contains patterns that it assembles into predictions and suggestions. The predictions enter your consciousness as inclinations, and the suggestions appear as emotions. 

Both are speculative, neither are deductive, and both deceive you into following them by making you think the ideas they put into your head are subject to your free will. You have about as much free will in following the indications of your subconscious as you do in driving the car of your life, to use the metaphor I described before. 

You can become a participant in your subconscious processes, but you cannot participate using deduction. Deduction is offensive to your subconscious. It is an embarrassment, much like a child who insists on scribbling over your careful drawing. 

You participate in your subconscious creations by becoming humble in the extreme. Humble even to the extent that you do not react to things that would otherwise frighten you. This is how you learn to lucid dream, and it’s a good skill to have if you’re a psychotherapist. It’s a form of non-interfering participation. It also requires a degree of detachment in experience. Subconscious involvement is illusional but real. Even when it’s delusional it can be valuable. 

You need both engagement with and protection from fears and inclinations. It is what Achilles experienced when he was only able to listen to the sirens when he was tied to the mast of his ship. To engage with your subconscious requires skills beyond what most people have learned, so it requires new learning. 

Working with your subconscious requires a greater degree of patience, discernment, and awareness than is required in the conscious world. It is a higher form of intelligence that has yet to be recognized or measured.

Learning to engage and refine your neurology and your subconscious are aims of the Operating Manual. If you’re interested in living a more meaningful life, then pre-order the special edition here: