The Mindsphere

I think of human experience as an interface between mind and the world outside the mind. Which side of that interface - the external world of events and stimuli or the internal world of beliefs and memories - has the greater influence on human experience? The answer is key to raising your level of consciousness and improving the quality of the experiences that you have.Your experience of reality is almost entirely (over 90%) dependent on your mindset, on the context through which any of us sees the world around us. Context is the lens or filter through which we interpret everything. That lens is different for everyone, because it's based on the experiences you have had in life.

We aren't born with our filters in place (although we've already been influenced in the womb). What we are born with is an extreme level of helplessness, because we are born with far more potential than skill. The human infant’s ability to learn is unbelievable, practically infinite. That learning potential begins to shrink the moment the brain begins to get what it so eagerly wants. And what the brain eagerly wants is to find out everything about how the world works. For the human brain, “how the world works” is “how the people and objects around me work.”

The human animal’s uniqueness is in the prefrontal cortex of the cerebrum of the brain, the place where all the processing between sensory input and conscious action takes place.

This area processes information and makes decisions by comparing the incoming information with a set of rules about reality and how things are supposed to go. That means this area of the brain is the seat of our entire belief system or mental model of the world. It is the location of our context.

Within the processing plant of our brain is a zone which neither takes in sensory information nor directs motor output, and yet this zone is very busy. Out of this area arises imagination, generative thought, realization, recognition, and intent. This is the seat of the soul in the brain, the “psychic zone.” This is the part of your physical self where the Witness sits and where experience is had. It is the area in which you know. It is where your mind is situated in the mind-body instrument.

In just one year, the deaf, blind, insensate little human has become a whirlwind of activity, talking, walking, and dominating his mother’s life. And his personality is there, too. He already has a mind of his own. As soon as the mind begins to form, brain growth and learning decelerate. Already the human being’s mind has obtained enough data about the physical, biological and social world around it that it has formed a solid opinion about any new sensory information that gets provided.

This is why very young children (or neurologically-young older children) are so “open-minded.” They are still in the enlightened state of willingness to suspend judgement. They have not yet forgotten the face of God.

Soon there comes a time in our life when we're no longer open to learning all things. Now we’ve got our personality in place, our mind is made up, and everything else we learn from now on will be compared against this knowledge. Around age four, we begin to use our minds to read other people's minds. By age six or seven (on average), we are turning our attention more and more toward our peers. With closed minds, we now find our place in our tribe, and the community mind or tribe-mind takes precedence.

The next stage of development is about perfecting our place in the community outside the mindsphere. The next stage of development is about your monkeysphere. And most of us get stuck here for the rest of our lives, focusing on what's going on outside of us and trying to control our experience by controlling what's outside ourselves.

It's where most of our suffering comes from.