Buddha is supposed to have described our minds as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind—whether or not drunk, whether or not bee-stung—is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, shifts from thought to thought, is easily distracted, undisciplined, and most importantly confused. Sounds a lot like ADD or ADHD, but really this pretty much describes all of us to one extent or another. It’s just that many of us are in denial about it. We think we—not some passel of drunken monkeys—are in charge.
There’s not much evidence to support that belief, however. What neuroscience increasingly reports is that our brains are doing far, far more than we ever imagined they were doing. Not only are they keeping us physically alive, they’re directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The majority of our “choices” take place at the unconscious level. We only think we’re in the director’s chair because we’re so darn good at spinning yarns to explain why we just did what we did, thought what we thought, or felt what we felt. We are, as one author has called humans, the storytelling animal.
Each of us undertakes the same major creative project, which is the story of ourselves. It’s a constantly evolving work-in-progress into which we weave everything we do, no matter how seemingly inexplicable those things may be. It’s our nature to create this story, so we’re very good at it. So good, in fact, that our audience isn’t even aware of the fiction. Those are the best kinds of stories, right? The problem is that our audience is us.
[T]he intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. —Steven Pinker
Our stories help us maintain the fiction that we’re in charge. So instead of recognizing and accounting for the vast expanses over which we are not in charge, we continue merrily along, spinning our tall tales.
It isn’t that we’re never authentic, never conscious, always asleep at the switch. From time to time, we are conscious, maybe some more than others. But the irony is that because we think we’re already always in charge—already always making conscious choices—most of us never learn how to become more awake and aware, never discover how to increase our ability to set our own course and make it so. Why bother learning how to do something when we’ve already mastered it?
