Post by Reefs on Jan 2, 2019 11:10:16 GMT -5
I recently mentioned a chapter in Derren Brown's book 'Happy' where he talks about how beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves limit our perception and understanding. And I think what he has to say is actually quite relevant to both the unenlightened and enlightened (hehe) readership here. The chapter in question is about 20 pages long, so I'm going to post a heavily edited version in order to keep it on point.
Here's the first part:
Here's the first part:
When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with people’s capacity to fool themselves with stories […] We are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale. We turn the memory of a holiday or a meal into something entirely wonderful or completely appalling, depending on the story we have decided for ourselves of a successful or failed event. We adjust details and selectively remember what fits into our preferred narrative. […] These stories shift and change.
We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves. These are neat narratives that allow us to arrange complicated reality into a satisfying and tidy parcel, and move on with our lives. Without them in place, we would see only a mess of details. If we were unable to form meaningful patterns, our lives would become overwhelmed.
Other stories […] become deeply ingrained and in many ways define who we are. We tell ourselves stories about the future […] Other stories are about the past […] Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now [..]
Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young […] With these overarching stories or templates in the mind, we repeatedly arrange our lives in such a way as to let events and others reinforce the same familiar message, like a child’s fable. Again and again, many people play out the same story […]
Epictetus [said]: ‘What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things’ In other words, it is not events out there that cause our problems but rather our reactions to them: the stories we tell ourselves […]
When we grasp that we do not need to react unhappily to events in the way to which we are accustomed, and thus begin to question our relationship with those aspects of the outer world, we can apply the same understanding more deeply to our inner world and the story we tell ourselves every day about who we are. That can change too. It is, after all, a fiction.
Derren Brown, Happy, pp. 4-9
We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves. These are neat narratives that allow us to arrange complicated reality into a satisfying and tidy parcel, and move on with our lives. Without them in place, we would see only a mess of details. If we were unable to form meaningful patterns, our lives would become overwhelmed.
Other stories […] become deeply ingrained and in many ways define who we are. We tell ourselves stories about the future […] Other stories are about the past […] Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now [..]
Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young […] With these overarching stories or templates in the mind, we repeatedly arrange our lives in such a way as to let events and others reinforce the same familiar message, like a child’s fable. Again and again, many people play out the same story […]
Epictetus [said]: ‘What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things’ In other words, it is not events out there that cause our problems but rather our reactions to them: the stories we tell ourselves […]
When we grasp that we do not need to react unhappily to events in the way to which we are accustomed, and thus begin to question our relationship with those aspects of the outer world, we can apply the same understanding more deeply to our inner world and the story we tell ourselves every day about who we are. That can change too. It is, after all, a fiction.
Derren Brown, Happy, pp. 4-9
