The human brain is one of the best storytellers. It makes the best stories in the world. It sees people dying every day and yet makes meaning of life assuming that we will stay alive forever. In every relationship tussle, each party believes the fault lies in the other person. Responsibility for each failure lies with either the circumstances or some other person, while the credit for each success goes to ourselves. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The human brain creates so many stories and we keep believing in all these stories and live life accordingly.
For example, many psychological tests challenge our brains. For example, can we read the following sentence:
Most of us would be able to read the sentence easily because our brain has developed an ability to economize resources. In the process, it has to learn to make intelligent guesses and make meaning. That is why even if the spelling of almost all the words in the sentence is wrong, our brain makes meaning of the same with certain guesswork. Our brain keeps making such intelligent guesses almost the whole of our lives because we never have the complete information so as to enable us to make decisions. That is why, the brain needs to make this intelligent guesswork in order to survive. That is the reason why we can see two triangles in the following figure, while there is actually no triangle in this:
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On the one hand, this feature of the brain saves our lives in many situations, but on the other hand, we are always in a hurry to make meaning. It is good to use this capacity of the brain in certain situations, but somehow we lose the wisdom to use it selectively and start using this feature of the brain for making stories about almost everything around us. But why don't we observe reality as it is and why do we make "intelligent" guesses, and effectively end up making quite stupid and unrealistic mental stories about the people and things around us? Probably because we are either lazy or in a hurry to achieve the target.
There are three kinds of people in this world. The first type of people has a "fixed mindset". They somehow get stuck on what they know or what they have and do not want to grow. That is the reason why they resist any and every change. They want to stick to a mountain like the glacier. Even if such people are quite active physically, they get fixated on different concepts, ideas, and beliefs mentally. That is the reason why they resist every new learning and their minds become very powerful story-making machines. They make stories in their minds about each and every person and phenomenon around them. Since they have resistance to change, they do not want to test their mental stories and hypotheses and live with them. They feel extreme pain as and when these stories are challenged.
The second type of people are like rivers. They want to change and flow, but in the direction that choose. They keep learning new things, but their learning is limited to the things they find value in. They discard the rest of the learning. That is the reason why these people seem to grow over their lifetime because they learn so many new things in their respective field and keep challenging their mental stories. However, in the process, they make a lot of mental stories around the tings that they are not interested in.
The third type of people are like the clouds. They explore freely almost everything in this world. Such people like to examine everything including their own ideas, beliefs, and mental stories. That is the reason why they are less likely to be fixated to their mental stories. We can see many such people in almost all the streams including science, arts, writing, philosophy, etc. in fact, an explorer wants to explore everything around.
Probably, why certain people become fixed, some goal-oriented, and some explorers has a lot to do with our understanding of lives. The people who lose awareness of reality, get fixated on either what they have or what they want to have. It is a matter of habit. If we don’t remain aware, laziness sets in. If water does not flow, it starts rotting and smelling. If we are aware, we can’t be fixated on anything because we are in the present moment and can experience that everything is changing so fast. If we stay aware, we just flow with the reality, rather than being fixated on our past or future. That makes us flow and we develop ability to see through the things including our own mental stories.
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