Fear and Possibility

Fear is what creates resistance to possibility. It's what gets in the way.

And yes, we give fear a bad reputation. But I'd like to reposition fear and say that fear is actually very well-intentioned!

Our brains have evolved over a huge amount of time. They've gotten humanity this far, and they've gotten us this far for a good reason, because they've looked out for us. Now remember that these incredible organs inside of our skulls are fully in the dark. These hundreds of billions of neurons and connections are completely cut off from the world, tucked away in the shadows of our skulls as we move through the world. 

And so the only access that they have is through our senses, of course, which bring in this data through all kinds of crazy mechanisms and translate that into electrical signals.

Somehow the brain distills all of this and interprets it as what we experience as reality. Not necessarily what reality actually is!

 Our brains are constantly guessing what's happening in the world out there, outside of our skull, which it cannot experience directly, only indirectly through our senses. So it's always trying to predict what is actually happening in order to protect us. 

This is a key concept that if we really get it deeply, we can understand the motivation and intention of everything that our brain is trying to do for us.

In any process that's running, the brain is in prediction mode, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When you're waking, when you're sleeping, it's always predicting, predicting, predicting to protect. It's creating scenario after scenario (in many cases, worst case scenarios) because that's what a prediction machine does.

It's not going to come up with only great scenarios. It's going to come up with a huge spectrum of scenarios. And it's going to actually weigh the bad ones more heavily because those can cause real harm to you.

It turns out that those are going to be not very likely in most cases. Now, of course, if you’re in a situation where there is a real and present physical danger (a fire nearby, a lion about to attack, etc.) yes, it's going to do a good job at getting you the heck out of there.

But most of our experiences in life are not like that! And our brains don’t know to treat the lion attacking us differently than going on a first date.

So again, we are prediction machines for the purpose of survival and protection. And this is where meditation (and what we do with the MindTravel music) becomes so powerful.

How so? Let’s continue the exploration next time.