#5 What Influence Do You Have Over Your Experience In Each Moment?

See if you can pinpoint what is and isn't influenceable

One direct answer to this question is you have total influence over your moment-to-moment experience.

The supporting logic goes something like this...

…You, and you alone are responsible for what you 1) think, 2) feel and 3) do. If what you’re thinking, feeling and doing about, say, someone else, or a past event, or a future set of circumstances, or a tricky decision, or whatever else you happen to be aware of, isn’t helping you, all you need do is change one of these three, and Bob’s your uncle, your experience will change.

It’s a very simple formula.

In various guises thousands of self-help books have been based on it. Each promising you a new beginning, relief from psychological and physical pain, and often all the riches you want that the world has to offer, if you just follow the formula (or key steps, or XYZ technique, or the ABC rules, or this or that set of tools etc.)

Now, I feel it’s important to say at this point, that if you are following a formulaic method of managing your experience, and it’s working for you, fantastic! Stay with it. There’s likely to be a strong correlation between your belief in what you’re doing and the outcomes you accomplish.

That said, though, I know for some, me included some years ago, I found the use of various positive thinking techniques only partially beneficial. Therefore, I gave up using them after a while. For me, there were two primary reasons for this:

1. Forgetfulness: when in a rage say, or a rant in my head was underway because someone had fallen short on their promises, or, for whatever reason, I’m hijacked by sadness, anger, frustration, embarrassment or other strong emotions, remembering a particular tool, technique, method, formula etc., tended not to happen. I forgot about them. Why? I was too immersed in the emotional hijack. That, and only that, looked real to me.

2. Inauthenticity - when I did remember, using a formula to counteract guilt, jealousy, shame, fear, regret etc., felt futile. I saw it as a weird form of self-deception. Whatever I said or did felt inauthentic because I was in denial of the actual feeling that is “upon me”, as they’d express it in the Irish language of Gaelic I learned recently. (“Tá bron orm”, for instance, means “sadness is upon me” and differs from “I am sad” insofar as it implies the emotion is transient, which, as we’ll see later, could be crucial.)

Formulaic solutions that are intended to help us change unhelpful experiences, share one thing in common. They come into play once an experience has formed. After the fact, so to speak. They tend to steer us away from the mysteriousness inherent in experience that we explored in Post #4. “The Hard Problem” of how thoughts, feelings etc., arise in consciousness in the first place, is outside their remit typically.

So, if like me, you’re someone who’s curious about how experience forms, as it’s happening, you’re likely to enjoy taking a closer look at what’s in your conscious awareness in each moment first, before we go on to consider just how much of that you can influence.

What is it we’re conscious of precisely?

When I first encountered this question I thought it was a dumb one. To me the answer was obvious - wherever I was, whoever was there, whatever they were doing, what I could see, what I was hearing and the way all that made me think and feel, it seemed to me, was what I was consciously aware of and made up my experience.

If you’ve ever had to deal with screaming kids, or been in a large crowd cheering on your team, or remember lying on a sandy beach with the sun on your back, you’ll no doubt get my meaning here. What’s going on around you seems like it’s shaping your experience. As I say, it’s kinda obvious right?

And yet, if we track back to Post #4 and our inquiry into the mysteriousness inherent in moment-to-moment experience, as well as Annaka Harris’ conversations with David Eagleman and other neuroscientists, who discovered our brains react to stimuli and make decisions before we consciously perceive them, which Eagleman summed up with the phrase “The Brain Knows Before You Do", my initial answer above began to look incomplete. Something was missing.

In his book The Missing Link, Syd Banks, who was a Scottish-born philosopher and author known for his teachings on what underpinned all human experience, invited us to wonder how true the fundamental principles of Consciousness, and Thought seemed to each of us. (He wrote about a third principle called Mind or what’s sometimes referred to as ‘The God Principle’ too, but I will return to this in a subsequent post about the different ways folk experience God.)

Consciousness, he suggested, is the medium through which we experience life. He likened it to a large screen upon which the movie of our sensations, thoughts and feelings just appear. This struck a deep chord with me. Mainly because it’s unlike my answer above, where it seemed to me that consciousness acts more like a camera, taking in information from what’s happening around so it can be processed, quick as a flash, to create experience. My intrigue was well and truly piqued.

Banks further invited us to see that the sensations, thoughts and feelings that appear on our internal screens can be viewed through different lenses. A microscopic one, for instance, where we zoom in on one particular thought or feeling. And we might zoom out and take a panoramic view too, or look at what’s on our metaphorical screen from many different angles. He suggested that whatever lens we do use shapes the subjective experiences we have in our inner life of whatever is grabbing our attention ‘out there’.

“Whoa, there’s a lot to digest there” I said to myself when I first read this. I nearly left it at that, filing all this consciousness stuff away in the ‘too difficult box.’ Stuff just appears on some imaginary screen, can be seen through many lenses but whatever lens I use constitutes my experience of what I’m paying attention to? Mmm...I’ll need to ponder on that a lot more, I thought.

As I did, the projector metaphor stayed with me. It wouldn’t go away. It was profound, somehow, but I didn’t quite know why.

As time passed I began wondering whether it explained why not everyone recollects the same facts when giving witness statements to police at a crime scene, for instance. Is that connected to what’s on their personals screens, which is different in each case, and what they’re projecting onto their statements about what happened?

Similarly, when two people watch an actual movie, their experience of it, on their inner, personal screens can be quite different, even though they watched the same pixels on the big screen in the cinema.

And, why is it when someone drives badly it can cause rage in me on one day, and concern for the errant driver and other road users’ safety on another day?

So many questions. I soon found myself reading more.

On the principle of Thought, Banks wrote this:

“I am not talking about your thought or my thought. I am talking about the universal power called Thought. There are no components to Thought. It is an element that can never be broken down into smaller segments. Thought itself is completely neutral. It is not until you put your ideas into a Thought that that thought gets its power. Whatever you put into that thought, whether it be negative or positive or whatever, it will manifest itself in actual experience.”

Okay, so, if we’re looking into the principles underpinning experience, I took this to mean that we humans’ capacity to think is a fundamental component. Take Thought away, or Consciousness come to that, and experience of any kind cannot form. That made sense to me.

Further, our capacity to have thoughts arise in consciousness is different to our personal thinking. Banks is not prescribing what experiences we should have, he’s describing the principles underpinning all experience, of whatever kind. I was being invited to consider whether both the good and bad experiences I had, stemmed from the meaning I fused into “neutral” thoughts.

Needless to say, by now, I was voraciously inquiring much further.

I wondered if “the universal power of Thought”, that’s somewhat mysterious, and Sydney Banks describes in The Missing Link, could be why David Eagleman and co coined the term “The Brain Knows Before You Do”.

Perhaps, Thought, like gravity, is indeed neutral, and always there, whether we realise it or not. It puts neutral thoughts on our screen for our personal thinking to make sense of and project onto events, circumstances, people etc. out there. Unknowingly, a lot of the time, along with Consciousness, it creates what we call “reality”.

Delving deeper into my own sense making, I listed all the sensations I could think of. I’ve prettied them up below. This isn’t an exhaustive list but it gives you the gist.

Then examples of the different forms thoughts take.

Finally, some of the positive, neutral and negative feelings we’ve all probably had at some point.

And so, to the question of how much influence we have

Look at the list of sensations, do you have any influence over, say, goosebumps, sweaty palms or a knot in your stomach? Don’t these just appear in response to what your senses are picking up in the situation you’re in?

Similarly with the different forms thoughts take. Isn’t there an automaticity to these? Of all the memories you’ve stored away based on past experiences, some just come flooding back to you without you summoning or choosing them.

Think how quickly we ascribe meaning to words but never question why. Take ‘control’ or ‘leadership’ or ‘reputation’ for instance - how often do we wonder what good, bad and indifferent effects our meaning making and subsequent behaviour has with respect to each?

Intuitions too, on first glance we immediately intuit what we need to do or say to reach a particular goal, without us consciously choosing these. They just seem, well, ‘obvious’.

Strong emotions like love and awe, or at the other end of scale, fear and hate, also come upon you without you having any influence over them. They visit your consciousness in a flash and can be all consuming, to the exclusion of everything else. Only when you settle down again and return to feelings of calm, equilibrium, acceptance, curiosity does reflection on the beliefs, convictions, ideas etc. that are underpinning those feelings, become apparent. Until we settle again - which can be a short as well as a long process - these emotions hijack the contents of consciousness.

(Note - I’ll explore our experience of difficult others in future posts. For now though, this tip, borne of a hurtful experience for me, may help you. It’s no use talking to someone about the beliefs making them angry when they’re in the throes of anger! Wait until the emotion subsides first, if you don’t want any scars!)

What looks true to you?

There’s a paradox in play here - by which I mean something that appears contradictory, logically inconsistent, and challenges our widespread understanding of how experience is created in each moment.

To cycle back to the screaming kids, cheering crowd and having the sun on your back while lying on a beach, it seems logical that your conscious experience of each is governed by the behaviour of the kids, the crowd or the location of the beach. It’s ‘outside-in’ we could say; what’s happening ‘out there’ is taken in for processing ‘in here’.

The invitation this paradox makes, however, is to explore the extent to which that seems true, or whether your conscious experience is made of the sensations, thoughts and feelings on your internal screen, which you project onto those kids, that crowd and beach. The suggestion being, what’s on your screen in each scenario could vary from one moment to the next - screaming kids drive us mad on some days and not on others, the crowd or the beach could be joyful, but may not be, depending on the contents of consciousness - what’s on your screen - and whether you notice the lens you’re using to view them.

In other words we might describe our moment-to-moment conscious experience as an ‘inside-out’ phenomenon. Albeit one that’s mysterious somewhat. Even baffling at times too. Yet also one that, if it seems true, and we observe the combinations of sensations, thoughts and feelings on our internal screen, from a metaphorical distance, it has life-changing implications for how we experience events, other people, and the circumstances we find ourselves in moving forward.

In the video below I explore the implications of conscious experience being both an outside-in and an inside-out phenomenon. Including what we can influence, and observing the transient nature of sensations, thoughts and feelings, but for our innocent capacity to ruminate, overthink and to hold on to those that don’t help us.

You’re very welcome to join me there if you’d find that helpful.

Kindest,

Roger

To help you plan your time, this video last 22 minutes.

I encourage you to see it as time invested in you, which is best spent in a quiet space, with few distractions - having what I call “me time” all to yourself. I do so because it’s wise not to rush what I cover in this video. We learn much faster when, as I explored in Post#3, we’re right here, right now, we have few mental distractions to…well…distract us.

Enjoy watching and look out for the thought experiment at the end. It just may take you to some really helpful places in your inner emotional life.