George Monbiot makes an interesting statement in this morning’s Guardian. He points out that there is a myth: that the people at the top of corporations are financial geniuses who got their wealth by merit of their brilliant minds and hard work. This myth is false, he says. It is a self-attribution fallacy, a myth of election. Not only do these people not have superhuman talents but:
they have preyed on the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.
I agree with Monbiot’s politics and I too believe that the unbridled greed of unregulated capitalism has put psychopathy in the driving seat of our culture with disastrous results.
It’s debunking the myth that our thinking self is the central axis of our being in the world
But as I was running around Shoreditch park trying to shake of a turn-of-the-season cold, I was also reflecting on another myth-busting shift that is happening. It’s more subtle and slow-moving than the dynamic Occupy movements that are springing up all over the globe, but it is I believe complementary and phenomenally powerful. It’s debunking the myth that our thinking self is the central axis of our being in the world.
More and more of the neuroscientific evidence and research in contemporary therapy point to a fallacy that is right at the heart of our psychic version of the Eurozone crisis.
Our thoughts believe they are geniuses. They too suffer from a self-attribution fantasy. Although most thinkers acknowledge the existence of a body below the neck and are buffeted about by their emotions, the strident voice of our thoughts are like Charlie Chaplin’s great dictator shouting and shouting and shouting.
Yet our ‘being’ goes on quite happily when our thoughts blank out during sleep. While we are thinking furiously about a house we want to buy or an argument we need to win, our body goes on breathing and digesting and blooding quite unconcerned with the strutting voice of the thinking mind.
What made me think about this was that halfway around Shoreditch park I found myself stuck in an angry little groove, thinking about a troublesome friend of mine and my anger at him. Round and round: a jumping needle on a record. So then I practised a trick I teach people on meditation courses: flushing. Simply bring all your attention to your senses: to what you can see, smell, feel, hear. Let the images and details and colours and tastes flush through your system and ‘dislodge’ the stuck needle.
Our emotions, body and energy are all enacting our lives long before we think about acting
A little voice in my head said: ah, but you’re just repressing the thought. And then it struck me: but why is thought more real than the sound of people playing five-aside-football or the colour of those leaves under the sodium street lights? It’s a brainwash to think that thoughts are at the centre of things.
They really aren’t.
Neuroscience shows that most decisions are made and acted upon seconds before the thought “I’m deciding this” shows up. Our emotions, body and energy are all enacting our lives long before we think about acting.
Just as the Arab Spring showed that one illusory system can fall overnight and something new can arise, sustained mindfulness practise can undermine the phoney dictatorship of the thinking mind to such a point that it collapses and, in the aftermath, we realise we were being duped and we’re better off without it.
I’m talking about a Copernican revolution.
Our thoughts are satellites
We have been gulled to believe that our Being revolves around our conscious thoughts. But this is like Ptolemy’s model of the sun revolving around the Earth. It seemed commonsensical but it causes major, irreconcilable problems because it is not true. If however, we start to entertain the notion that our being radiates out from around our body and that our thoughts are (important but peripheral) satellites then things make a lot more sense. Throw in the energy that radiates out from the Body-Sun and you have a solar system of Being that suddenly functions properly.
Thoughts can be terrible wealth-destroyers when we believe they are the centre of our Being. Allow them their place in the orbit around the energetic Sun of the body and the enormous solar wealth of Being can be fairly distributed again.
I’d love to know your thoughts on the myth of wealth. Drop me a message with any thoughts, comments, questions, queries or insights that pop up while reading the blog. I’d love to hear from you!
Click here to sign up for Alistair’s newsletter. Find out more about The Mindsprings School. A series of courses created by Alistair to help you live a happier life.