In his TED talk, Anil Seth describes consciousness as a predictive mechanism that creates a made-up picture of the world based on incomplete information. He illustrates how consciousness does not show us objective reality but rather creates “controlled hallucinations” more akin to writing realistic fiction.
We use our best guess at what has happened before to predict ourselves into existence.
Thanks to the generosity of others, I have come to understand my own depression and anxiety as that mechanism run amok. My experience is that stress is what happens to me when the writer of this realistic fiction gets into the dark plots in its storytelling and I believe them to be true and helpful stories.
My anxiety leaves me when I wake up to the fact that my perception, my memory and my ideas of the future are not objective reality but are being written.
...that, though I have a list of terrifying and horrible, traumatic stories catalogued in my memory, here I am, alive and breathing, sheltered, clothed, fed, supported and loved.
…and that when I get still and really look, I can’t find an OBJECTIVE problem. Only subjective ones. lots of painful subjective ones that I find do me no good to hold onto.
I have set about releasing myself from belief in my memory, my perception and my ability to predict the future and to do my best to put all my energy into the present moment, which is all I can ever affect.
How am I now, in this exact moment, without these fictions? Perfectly fine. What options are available to me to respond to this moment? Literally all imaginable options. I can do anything. I can serve any cause. Because all I have is now. And the cause I choose to serve now is peace.
The result is blissful awareness of the gift of life.
I find that I am always okay, except in what I’m thinking and believing. And I’m thinking fewer and fewer stressful thoughts and believing them less and less.
I do great with it until I’m poked where the dark writer in me lives - where someone responds to me disapprovingly or I get a speeding ticket or my wife gets mad at me or someone says or does something that scares me - and I’m jarred back into the story.
A story that pops up, not because it’s real but, because I’m used to writing it.
A story I can’t believe anymore.
So when it happens, I get to just go ahead and work through it all again. And find that - again - without my painful STORY, I am perfectly fine.
That’s reality.