Lightning and Bottles
Why you are not your thoughts.
The direct verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment.
The great grace of being part of the human race is that we alone can create and kill ideas fast, and unlike other species, this creating and killing of ideas fast is out-and-out decoupled from the birth and death of people. Karl Popper helped us take in that our minds are pure conjecture-and-refutation machines. The human mind creates and filters ideas, in the way variation and natural selection work on genes. The late, great Carl Sagan explained it thus:
My practice is merely to respect my unconscious mind, who often is much wiser than than the conscious part of me, and pay attention to what it says. In fact, I think this is connected with that delicate tension at the heart of the scientific method... The unconscious mind proposes a range of possibilities and the conscious mind disposes - that is, compares those ideas with the real world, checks for internal inconsistencies, and so on. I think the creative process is a partnership between a conscious and an unconscious part of our minds.
This is the stuff of creativity: one’s unconscious mind proposes, then one’s conscious mind disposes.
All this to say that a lot of ideas created in one’s mind aren’t going to be true or useful, and this is normal, and so filtering out the unhelpful ones is paramount for one to get to a better version of oneself. One of the tricky things is that many of the bad thoughts have a voice, and some are loud whereas many good thoughts can be jolly quiet. And so it’s easy to confuse one’s misleading thoughts with one’s true self. But they are not. You are not your thoughts. You are one person and create an uncountable number of ideas that clash with each other all the time. If you really were one of your thoughts, you would not have the ability to refute it, criticise it and filter it out, without killing yourself.
And this speaks to the skill of how to sharpen the filters so that one can murder one’s darling ideas. That to be the a better version of yourself, to reckon with bad ideas, to surface them, to fact-check them, and to remove them with the power of reason. I try to tell myself this all the time: don’t believe everything you think.
One exercise that I try doing every now and again makes this two-step process of proposing and disposing, conjecturing and criticising, and creating and killing ideas even clearer. The question I’ve asked of myself is what do I need to do to add my subconscious mind to my inner conversation about what my chosen quest, at this very moment of my life, is?
Following Sagan’s propose-and-dispose description, I break it into two steps, each of which uses a prompt (in the style of Ali Abdaal). The first step is to propose, conjecture, create and to let a great many ideas bloom to the surface. Prompt: What would I do if I knew if could not fail?
The second step is to dispose, refute, kill, and filter out ideas by letting my objections rise to the surface. Prompt: what would I do still with 100% effort despite knowing I would 100% fail?
These two steps of asking what if I couldn’t fail? and then asking what if I certainly did? can help one to find out what is meaningful at that moment in one’s life. If the second step rules out all the ideas from the first step, that is okay. The answer for now is that I don’t know what my chosen quest is at this moment in life. One can always repeat the exercise and in the first step make the net wide even more. If there are answers that survive the second step, then those answers will feel like one has captured lightning in a bottle.