The Findings - #8 The mind needs to know.

We have an obsession with knowing. Vision boards, goals, five year plans, day planners, time management, to-do lists, all so that you know what you’re doing, where you’re going, and how you’ll get there. This obsession with knowing places a high value on the mind, so much so that I can now see that sometimes when I thought I was using my mind, my mind was really using me!

In addition, the mind doesn’t like the way the heart works. The mind wants to determine a new moment based on what’s already familiar, using the past as its reference point to how it ought to be... except a new moment has no past.  The heart replaces facts and evidence with feelings and uses its own set of qualifiers called intuition and instinct. These two inherent qualities have very little value in our society's formula for success and that is particularly true when you experience change. So when you take a leap of faith, you don’t necessarily have all the information. That’s intentional. Life loves to play!

But because the mind needs to know everything before it leaps - past attempts, failures and risks, likelihood of success - it rarely gives the green light. This is why we often feel so stuck and unable to move forward or make a decision. Meanwhile, the heart uses feelings as a preview. Now I can appreciate the importance of the question, “How do you feel?”  This is the tug of war between the heart and the mind that was so keenly represented in the “left side/right side of the page” exercise discussed in the book.

In addition, because the mind works with what it knows, it has specific filters about how things should look and, if it doesn’t look like that, then it must mean “nothing is happening.” I suffered from this time and time again and was able to see that it was a cause of not just stress but depression as I got stuck in the belief that nothing was happening while so much was happening. Another major breakthrough.

The mind can take neutral data and create a conclusion that isn’t true. This is why it’s critical to challenge what your mind presents to you. In doing that myself, I realized I was trying to build my future from the past.

 

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."