In this article, you will learn what mental illusions are and how to learn to see mental illusions in your head.

In this article we will talk about what illusions of the mind are. To begin with, I want to say that the mind is a wonderful tool that Genesis has endowed us with. The mind is not the brain, there is no need to confuse them. Brain, body part. But at the same time, the mind can be both our greatest friend and our greatest “enemy.” If the mind is constantly droning in your head, it is an inner voice that constantly tells you what to do and what not to do.

We can’t even sleep normally because our mind is constantly buzzing. So, everything that the mind tells you about, everything that it thinks about is all illusions, it does not exist in reality. You need to understand this. Once again, everything you think about or your mind is not there. Why? Yes, because our thoughts are either about the past or about the future, mind you, often a negative future.

There are a lot of options for the development of events, but we are used to seeing everything in a negative light most often. This is all because we are unconscious. We don't understand that the mind is not us. We don't realize that this voice is inside us, not our voice. Anyone who has at least a modicum of awareness understands what is being said here because a conscious person has the opportunity to observe in his head all these shows and illusions that our mind palms off on us. The problem is that we believe him. Our mind deceives us and not because it is “bad” or wants to harm us, it is simply what it is if we are not aware. Even in India, there is a saying “the mind is Maya,” that is, an illusion.

THESE ARE JUST THOUGHTS. You shouldn’t take them too seriously and perceive them as absolute reality. Stop believing them. Thoughts have nothing to do with yours life situation, with you, with the world.

I would like to give an example from the life of the spiritual teacher Etkhart Tolle and his incident in life, he talks about a woman who
loudly arguing with another person out loud in her head, no one was nearby, she just continued to angrily argue with a person who was no longer nearby:

What I witnessed left me somewhat disheartened. As an adult, twenty-five-year-old first-year student, I considered myself an intellectual, and was convinced that all answers could be found and all problems of human existence could be solved with the help of intellect, that is, thinking. At that time I did not yet understand that unconscious thinking and There is the fundamental problem of human existence. Professors seemed to me like sages who knew all the answers, and the university was a temple of knowledge. How could she be a part of all this?

Before entering the library, still thinking about the strange woman who was talking loudly to herself, I went into the men's room. I washed my hands and thought, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” The man standing next to me glanced in my direction, and I suddenly realized with shock that I had not only thought, but also muttered it out loud. “My God, I’m already the same as her,” flashed through my head. Wasn't my mind working as continuously as hers? There was little difference between us. The dominant emotion in her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case, anxiety prevailed. She thought out loud. I thought mostly to myself. If she's crazy, then everyone is crazy, including me. The difference is only in degree.

For a moment I was able to step back from my mind and see it as if from a deeper point. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men's room, only now alone, looking at the reflection of my face in the mirror. At the moment of separation from my mind, I laughed out loud. This may sound crazy, but my laughter came from a sane place. It was the laughter of a pot-bellied Buddha. " Life is not as serious as the mind makes it out to be " That's what the laughter seemed to communicate to me. But it was just a glimpse, and very soon it was forgotten. I spent the next three years in a state of anxiety and depression, completely identified with the mind. And before awareness returned to me, I happened to come very close to the thought of suicide, but then it was already much more than a glimpse. I freed myself from obsessive thinking and the imaginary “I” created by the mind.

We can conclude that not all problems can be solved with the mind; you also need to use your heart more often. It is important to understand that the only thing you need to pay attention to is our feelings regarding this or that aspect of our life, feelings best reflect what is, note feelings, not emotions, they need to be distinguished. Feelings are the only reality because we feel them now, and not somewhere in the past or future. I recommend watching the 2005 film “Revolver”; this film covers this topic very well, the topic of obsessive thinking.

Behind the thoughts, and then you will see their illusory nature, and not take them for reality!!!

Let's summarize:

• everything you think about is an illusion, it doesn’t exist;
• all your ideas about life, the world and yourself are illusions of the mind;
• all your thoughts about yourself, what you can or cannot do, are illusions of the mind;
• all your ideas about anything or anyone are illusions of the mind.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, it’s impossible to think about truth, as soon as you start thinking about it, truth ceases to be truth, because truth is only in the moment now, and thoughts are either in the past or in the future. The only thing that will help you get rid of illusions is the regular practice of MEDITATION.

All spiritual traditions have the idea that our perception of reality is distorted. Hinduism and Buddhism speak of a “veil of illusion,” while Christianity speaks of the fact that we “see the world darkly, as if through a glass darkly.”

Neuroscientist Wendy Hazenkamp in his article for the magazine Tricycle talks about how modern science explains the emergence of this illusion at the level of the human brain. And whether it is possible to change this.

Translation by Anastasia Gosteva

People seem to always want to change something: buy the latest gadget, find new job, improve your relationships. Things that are simply “the way they are” do not bring them complete satisfaction. Buddhists describe this situation with the term dukkha, meaning “suffering,” and believe that dukkha is an integral part of existence (although the term is indeed often translated as “suffering,” in fact dukkha means “restless impatience” in Pali).

We often believe that we can achieve happiness by changing some external circumstances in our lives and in our environment. We ignore the fact that much of our suffering is maintained and “perpetuated” by our own minds. It is the habitual patterns of our minds that determine our perception of events, our emotional reactions to other people, as well as how we see the world as a whole: as “good” or as “initially flawed.”

These same patterns influence the simplest, most basic manifestations of our everyday life. Our mental and behavioral habits underlie the diversity of our life experiences, and we are simply unaware of most of these habits. They control our lives, and as a result we live it on autopilot.

In Buddhism, these habits of our mind have a lot to do with the concept of karma. At each moment of time, our consciousness is not free, but is rigidly determined by the state it was in at previous moments, and the entire totality of our past experience determines the entire totality of our current experience. Our actions (which include not only our behavior, but also our thoughts) leave traces in our minds, and the likelihood that we will act or think the same in the future increases.

Korean Zen teacher Daehaeng Kun Sumin describes it this way: “People are often careless about the thoughts that they allow to appear in their minds. They think that as soon as they forget this thought, it will cease to exist. This is wrong. Once manifested in your mind, the thought continues to function, and one day its consequences return to you.”

But what’s amazing is that these ancient ideas about karma (at least as they describe the relationship of cause and effect over the course of one life) reflect with amazing accuracy the neuroscientists’ understanding of how our brains work. One of the most fundamental principles of modern neuroscience was formulated in 1949 by Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb and is known as “Hebb’s law” or “cell ensemble theory.” In his book “The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory,” he postulated a principle of neuronal interaction that is often described in one phrase—“neurons that fire together, wire together.”

In this seminal work, Hebb proposed that “any two cells or systems of cells that are repetitively active at the same time will tend to connect, and activity in one cell or system of cells will promote the activation of the other cell or system of cells.” . This is the basic premise of neuroplasticity—the ability of our brains to change in response to new experiences.

The mechanism of neuroplasticity has been identified as a result of numerous careful studies. scientific research, who studied how the neural networks in our brains physically arise and are updated at the micro level. Imagine two neurons connected to each other in such a way that the activity of the first neuron makes the second neuron more likely to fire. If we start stimulating two neurons at the same time over and over again, after a few hours, stimulating the first neuron exactly the same as before will lead to a stronger electrical response from the second neuron.

This is because the first cell will begin to release more chemical neurotransmitters, and the second cell will form more receptors that can sense these neurotransmitters. These molecular changes will result in stronger connections between the two neurons. If this co-activation is repeated over a long period of time, the neurons physically change their shape - growing new dendrites to further strengthen the connection.

This is the simplest example of two cells interacting with each other, and in a living brain millions of similar interactions occur every second. Each neuron communicates with thousands of other neurons, creating an incredibly complex network of connections. As a result of the continuous process of the emergence of new stable neural connections, new neural networks are gradually formed in our brain, associated with the experiences that are repeated most often in our lives. These neural networks reflect our personal knowledge about each specific object, person or situation, which manifests itself in our experience as sensations, memories, emotions, thoughts and behavioral responses.

And as we live our lives, those neural circuits that we use most often become rigid and incredibly resilient. In practice, this means that they turn on almost automatically, and they are much easier to activate compared to new, previously unused circuits. The initial activation of these old circuits requires less energy than the activation of new ones, and then indulgence becomes literally the “path of least resistance.”

The brain can be compared to an energy conservation mechanism: from 20 to 25% of the cellular energy of our body is used by our brain (while its weight is approximately 2% of the body weight), so as a result of powerful evolutionary pressure the brain has learned to be as efficient and economical as possible .

Like a river that prefers to flow along its own bed instead of making its own new way to the shore, when the brain has a choice between two actions, it chooses the one that is familiar to it and has been repeated many times, because energetically it is more profitable.

Greg Dunn, Purkinje Neurons, 2008. Ink on paper digitally processed.

It is not difficult to see the connection between these studies and the concept of karma. Any of our subjective experiences - ideas and thoughts, emotions and sensations, behavior - are reflected at the cellular level. Millions of neurons come alive in the complex networks of interactions that underlie every experience we experience. The more often certain specific patterns of activity of our mind are reproduced, the deeper a certain mental track becomes. As a result, when we engage in a thought or action, we are more likely to repeat it again and again in the future, since each of our thoughts and each of our actions activates certain neural connections.

On the one hand, this can be looked at simply as an energy conservation mechanism or a relationship between biological cause and effect. On the other hand, this is the law of karma, which manifests itself daily in our ordinary lives. Our brain literally becomes what we think.

These karmic aspects of neuroplasticity have important applications. According to Buddhist views, the cause of suffering and impermanence is illusion and ignorance—our inability to see the true nature of reality. Instead of realizing the impermanence and emptiness of all worldly manifestations, we tend to regard things as actually existing and unchanging, having an independent existence. We treat the people and objects around us as separate, made up of disparate parts, and attribute to them some kind of innate personality. And not only that, but on top of everything else, we treat ourselves the same way.

This erroneous perception of reality is the cause of dukkha, as a result of which we are plunged into an endless stream of desires and disappointments, the sole purpose of which is to protect and maintain our sense of “I”.

And the ability of our brain to be plastic leads to the fact that this illusion is maintained thanks to the neural mechanism responsible for the process of concept formation. Let's look at an example of how a new concept emerges in response to a new visual stimulus. (This example is taken from the book A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon.)

Imagine a little girl who has just started learning her letters. For the first time in her life, she sees the capital letter A, and this letter is written in an ornamental font. The moment A sees her, a certain group of neurons in her brain's visual system is activated.

In another primer, she sees another A - this time there is a watermelon at its base. A slightly different set of neurons will be activated - it will contain many of the same neurons that were activated the first time (since the letter A in both cases has common elements that stimulate the same neurons), but new ones will be added, and some will not be from the first set.

The third time the girl sees A written in some other font, the main group of neurons associated with the unchanged elements of the letter and some additional neurons are activated again.

Every time a child sees the same letter written slightly differently, neurons associated with the perception of elements of the letter that looked the same in all previous cases are activated, and according to Hebb's law, they become increasingly connected to each other. In the case of the letter A, these identical-looking elements are two lines located at an angle to each other and a horizontal line between them. When the brain begins to find and highlight these identical elements in each new simulation, the child develops the concept of the letter “A”. Later, the sound and understanding of the place of this letter in the word will be added here.

As a result, every time a girl sees two connected slanted lines and a horizontal line between them, the neural circuit associated with the perception of the letter A will immediately turn on in her brain, and thanks to this, she will easily recognize this letter and understand what she is seeing.

Conceptual processing of reality is incredibly convenient and useful when it comes to relationships with the world and other people. It is through the ability to create new concepts that we can learn and remember. Without it, the simplest tasks would baffle us, because we would again and again, as if for the first time in our lives, study a spoon or a ballpoint pen, trying to guess their purpose.

But there is a downside to conceptual thinking: by their very nature, established concepts disrupt the immediacy of our perception. And in Buddhism this has been known for a long time. American scientist John Dunn cites the example of the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, who lived in the 7th century. Dharmakirti reasoned that when we encounter some unique element of an object several times in a row, we generate “false awareness.”

It results from our mind creating “sameness” (which is a concept) by separating all objects with that element into a separate class - because it is most relevant to our immediate needs. Due to the habit of operating with stable concepts, we do not realize that in reality this element of the object is unique. On the contrary, we are sure that the concept in our head reflects some fundamental essence of this object.

Modern cognitive science also confirms the fact that conceptual thinking distracts us from direct perception. In the example with the letter A, the groups of neurons associated with differences in spelling do not form stable connections because this visual stimulus is not repeated - this is the inverse of Hebb's law. Due to the fact that connections only between neurons associated with the perception of identical elements are strengthened, the emphasis in the girl’s consciousness shifts from unique and inimitable details to already familiar ones. She doesn't perceive uniqueness! The purity of her perception is in some way violated. The conceptual filters in our brains create a veil of illusion that hides true reality from us.

Greg Dunn, Hippocampus II, 2010. Lacquer on an alloy of gold and aluminum.

We are oblivious to the interdependence and impermanence of the world around us because we crystallize our experiences into pre-formed, composite patterns that seem constant to us over time. We do not see the emptiness of things because we believe that our concepts reflect the essence of things. It seems to us that a certain connection of lines really is the letter A and will always be so.

When it comes to the letter this does not seem to be a serious problem. But the problem arises when we perceive people and more complex phenomena in an equally narrow way, putting simplifying labels on them. And, as a result, we do not see other people (and even ourselves) in all the uniqueness of the current moment. It seems that illusion—our flawed perception of reality—is a natural consequence of a fundamental biological process that is beautiful in its practicality and elegance, but also threatens us with great delusions.

What should we do? Are we doomed to play out our lives at the mercy of routine neural patterns? Both Buddhism and modern neuroscience are sure not. The same neuroplastic properties of our brain that allow us to acquire our karmic limitations can help us free ourselves from the captivity of illusion.

For centuries, people have turned to contemplative practices to achieve this, and their experience suggests that transformation is possible. And recently, neuroscience—partly thanks to its tandem with Buddhism—discovered a previously unknown fact that our brain can change throughout our lives. This is good news: if you practice meditation regularly, you can change your brain in significant ways.

The fact is that the mechanism of neuroplasticity is constantly active, the brain is constantly updating its neural networks in response to current experience. If we begin to consciously choose our current experiences, we can activate the parts of the brain that we need.

Through regular meditation practice, we can become aware of our mental habits. And having noticed them, we can make a choice - follow them or try to change them, try to react not automatically, but consciously. And then we can form new stable neural circuits. Over time, we can direct our river in a new direction.

But it's not easy. We begin to change deeply ingrained mental habits that have been formed through thousands, if not millions of repetitions. On top of that, this reprogramming process requires a lot of energy—both the effort we put into stopping our minds from wandering, for example, and the cellular energy it takes to create new, stable synaptic connections between neurons.

These processes at the biological level reflect what is called in Buddhism “purification of karma”, and are the first step towards realizing that in addition to our personal karma, there is also collective karma, manifested in equally deeply rooted social patterns of behavior and thinking and encompassing not just our individual lives.

We need to take heart because this work can be extremely grueling at times, both mentally and physically. As new neural pathways begin to emerge in our brains, old ones gradually weaken due to infrequent use. And this is a very inspiring understanding: change is possible, and difficulties along the way are natural. Understanding that to create new, stable neural circuits we need to do and think differently over and over again helps us gain patience in our meditation practice. If we have enough devotion, we can create new healthy mental tendencies - towards wisdom and compassion, awareness and kindness. This is why meditation practice is needed.

The question of how much we can actually move beyond this illusion and change the situation in which abstract concepts “reify” our current experience remains an open question in neuroscience. As we know, Buddhism claims that a person can begin to perceive the world directly and discover the emptiness that is beyond all concepts.

From a biological point of view, we will probably never be able to completely eliminate the physical manifestations of those structures in our brain that are responsible for conceptual thinking. After all, we need it to function meaningfully in the world.

But through the practice of meditation we can change our attitude towards our concepts, we can see their basis. And then gradually we will be able to lift the veil of maya and see the true nature of reality.

APPEARANCE AND ILLUSION

He who sees meaning in the meaningful and the absence of meaning in the meaningless is capable of true understanding.

Dhammapada

But the mind is like an illusionist. He can make us see things that aren't really there. Most of us are caught up in the illusions our minds create, and we essentially encourage ourselves to create more and more out-of-control fantasies. The imagined drama becomes addictive, creating what some of my students call an “adrenaline rush” or “high” that makes us or our problems seem larger than life itself—even if the situation giving rise to them is dire.

With the same delight with which we applaud the trick of a magician pulling a hare out of a hat, we watch horror films, read adventure novels, get involved in complex interpersonal relationships and we fight with our bosses and colleagues. In this strange way - perhaps related to the most ancient, reptilian layer of the brain - we actually enjoy the tension that such experiences cause. By enhancing our sense of "me" as opposed to "them," this experience strengthens our sense of individuality - which, as we saw in the previous chapter, is itself only an appearance devoid of inherent reality.

Some cognitive psychologists I spoke with compared the human mind to a movie projector. Just as a movie projector projects pictures onto a screen, our mind projects perceived phenomena onto a kind of cognitive screen—a context we consider the “outer world.” At the same time, the mind projects thoughts, feelings and sensations onto another screen, or context, which we consider to be ours. inner world, or "yourself".

This is closer to the Buddhist view of absolute and relative reality. Ultimate reality is emptiness, a state in which perceptions are intuitively recognized as an endless and transitory stream of possible experience. When you become aware of perceptions as just fleeting events depending on circumstances, they cease to be so meaningful to you and the whole dual structure of “self” and “others” begins to lose its former strength. Relative reality is the mistaken idea that everything you perceive is real in itself.

However, it is not so easy to give up the habit of thinking that things exist somewhere “out there” in the outside world or “inside.” To do this, we need to give up all the illusions that we cherish and realize that all our projections, everything that we consider “other”, is in fact a spontaneous expression of our own mind. This means leaving behind ideas about reality and instead experiencing the flow of reality as it is. At the same time, you do not need to completely free yourself from your perception. You don't have to hide away in a cave or on a mountain retreat. You can enjoy your experiences without being actively involved in them, by looking at them the same way you would look at objects appearing in a dream. In fact, you may begin to marvel at the variety of experiences that become available to your perception.

By recognizing the difference between appearance and illusion, you may be admitting to yourself that some of your perceptions may have been incorrect or biased, that your ideas about how things should be may have become so ossified that you are no longer able to see no point of view other than your own. As I began to realize the emptiness and clarity of my mind, my life became richer and more vibrant in ways I could never have imagined. Once I let go of my ideas about how things should be, I was free to perceive my experience exactly as it is, and exactly as I am, right here and now.