Mental Events are Real Events
The basis of all of my research into the mind and life stems from a very simple and basic idea. This is the idea which underlies all of the humanities and provides the very rationale for all commonsense societal change.
That idea is “the mind is a mechanism of repetition”. A simple phrase to describe an earth-shattering discovery. A discovery upon which the fate of the human race rests. A discovery which can change the world, if it is correctly understood by enough people in time.
The gist of it is that the mind functions essentially as a machine which accepts data input from the environment and then regurgitates it in the form of actions, thoughts and emotions on the part of the user. In other words — monkey see, monkey do. Duplication.
The core of the idea is explained, in very simple and practical terms, here:
This datum is so stable and so obviously demonstrable that I wondered if I could use it to develop a sort of therapy. After all, when you know what changes the mind, then you should be able to apply that and change the mind yourself. Even the smallest shifts in mental well-being could be hugely beneficial, if they were found to be long lasting.
It was found that a therapy could in fact be developed based around this simple datum, so long as a few more facts were realized:
- The past exists only in the mind. The past does not have physical existence. It may have at one time — it doesn’t now.
2. The only reason the past matters is because of its effects on the present.
3. Changing the past in one’s mind changes the effects of the past, as the mind has trouble differentiating between what “actually” happened and what happened in the mind only. Therefore, mental events are real events with real effects.
Therefore, creating “mental events” influences the mind in a similar way to how “actual” events influence the mind. After all, the most influential part of any real world event is what your own reaction and opinion of it is — so it would make sense that isolating that from the physical event would allow it to remain effective.
A mental event could be a reconstruction of an actual event, but with details changed. Or it could be an entirely new event created from imagination.
Mental events will of course not have the influence power of actual events, as they will not be felt and experienced as clearly as a real event would be. You can imagine yourself driving around in your dream car, but that wouldn’t be as real to your subconscious mind as actually driving around in your dream car. A happy medium would be driving around in any old car while imagining that it was your dream car. That way the event is at least half real.
But either way, when the subconscious mind experiences an event, it will absorb it and then seek to duplicate it.
