Michael Prescott's Blog

From the files: Clear away the cobwebs

As a companion piece to my post on Richard Carlson's work, here's an old post from October 11, 2008, covering a related approach pioneered by David Burns. Incidentally, there's now an app for this — in fact, there's more than one. For iOS, the iCouch CBT app works pretty well. For Android, the Cognitive Diary CBT app looks good, though I haven't tried it. 

Carlson's method involves not taking your thoughts too seriously. Burns's method involves subjecting your thoughts to a reality check. The common denominator of both approaches is to distance yourself from your thoughts — to look at a thought from a detached perspective, rather than letting it control you. 

Neither method is a cure-all, but both can be helpful in preventing a "thought attack" — a cascade of negative thinking that often has little basis in reality.  

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In these stressful days, you may find it useful to study the ten cognitive distortions identified by Dr. David Burns. I first came across these in Burns' self-help book Feeling Good many years ago.

The basic technique is to write down a thought that's troubling you, and see which of the cognitive distortions may apply to it. Then reword the thought in more objective terms. It can also be helpful to rate your belief in the original thought and, later, in the revised thought.

For instance, suppose you are thinking, "I'll never get that promotion." Your belief in this is, say, 80% - you're almost certain of it. 

Then consider if one or more of the distorted thought processes is at work here. You might decide that #7 applies - emotional reasoning. And maybe # 5(b) - fortune telling.

Something may feel true without necessarily being true. And predicting the future is dicey business. How many times have you made a false prediction or had a feeling of doom that turned out to be unjustified?

Next, ask yourself if you can replace the thought with one that is not affected by these distortions. You might say, "It seems as if getting that promotion will be harder than I hoped." Rate your belief in this new thought - maybe you believe it 60% or so.

Now go on to the next step: why will getting the promotion be harder than you hoped? "Because the boss hates me." Write this down. You believe it 100%.

But are there distortions in this thought, too? Maybe # 5(a) - mind reading. Perhaps also # 3 - mental filter.

Have you focused only on those times when your boss has been hostile, and suppressed your memory of those times when he has been pleasant? Have you assumed he has a negative attitude toward you personally, when you actually don't know what he's thinking?

Revise your thought. Now it might be something like: "My boss can be hard to get along with sometimes." Rate your belief in this, and then ask why you feel this way. You'll come up with another thought to analyze.

Continue in this way, digging deeper into your thoughts in a step-by-step fashion, until you have arrived at a clearer perspective, one that is not clouded by distorted thinking.

This deceptively simple technique can be amazingly powerful. Give it a try.

Thoughts, and why they're overrated

One of the most useful books I've read is a little self-help manual called You Can Be Happy Matter What, by Richard Carlson. The book was written early in Carlson's career, before he became famous for a series of bestsellers beginning with Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. The later books never appealed to me all that much, but You Can Be Happy … remains one of my favorites.

Carlson's central insight is that you are not your thoughts. His teaching is both simple and profound. He suggests that most of us have the wrong relationship to our own thinking, and that this misconstrued relationship is responsible for most of our angst, depression, worry, and unhappiness in general.

What is this relationship? It is that we think our thoughts are important, when most of the time they are not. They are just thoughts. Thoughts come and go, and it is up to us whether to grant them any importance by focusing on them, examining them, and pursuing them further, or instead to simply let them go.

Suppose you are having a perfectly ordinary day when, for no obvious reason, a thought pops into your head: I really screwed up on that blind date. Maybe the blind date happened yesterday or maybe it happened ten years ago; it doesn't matter. The usual – but wrong – response to this thought is to drill down into it. Yeah, I just can't handle blind dates. Maybe that's why I'm so bad at relationships. I just turn people off. Face it, I'm going to be alone forever.

At this point, you've turned a perfectly nice day into an exercise in self-accusation leading inevitably to a bad frame of mind – probably either anger at yourself, anger at the whole world, or depression. Whatever you were doing a minute earlier seems pointless now, and whatever you had planned to do in the next hour suddenly doesn't seem worth doing anymore. You lie down on the couch, feeling low, and naturally you continue to explore the same thoughts and memories that have brought you down, thus spiraling lower and lower.

This is how most of us behave, at least a good part of the time. We grant our thoughts too much power. We think that there's something significant about them, and that when we take notice of a thought, it must require our immediate attention. We also tend to think that analyzing a problem, worrying at it the way a dog worries at a bone, circling around it to see it from every possible vantage point, will help us to find a solution. It doesn't occur to us that we've spent countless hours analyzing this or similar problems in that way, and all it's ever gotten us is frustration and misery.

So what is the right way to react to the initial thought about the blind date gone awry? Actually, the best way is not to react to it at all. Nor is it to instantly suppress the thought, as if guiltily shoving it into a mental drawer where it can't be seen. That's only another way of giving the thought power – making it so powerful that it must be hidden away like some kind of occult talisman.

The best way is to say yourself, I don't know why I thought about that. It's not worth thinking about now. Or some words to that effect. Then just dismiss the thought and go on about your business.

Though it may be hard to believe, this really works. The subconscious is extremely suggestible, and if you tell it that a certain idea is not important or interesting and certainly not worth bringing up, then the subconscious is much less likely to bring it up again. And the more you reinforce this policy, the less likely it is that the thought will even occur to you. Your subconscious can be trained to stop bringing you things you don't want, much like dog that can be trained to stop bringing you scraps from the garbage can.

Now you might say, What if I would actually benefit from taking a good hard look at my mistakes on the blind date? How else am I going to learn? And that's a valid point. But you're not going to learn anything by an exercise in recrimination and self-abasement. You'd be better off approaching the subject neutrally, when you're in the mood to tackle it without being too hard on yourself. And you're unlikely to get much benefit out of repeating this exercise countless times. Learn what you can from your mistakes, and then close the book on that subject and move on. If your subconscious keeps nudging you to return to this topic after you've gotten what you can out of it, then simply ignore the nudges.

Carlson tells us that nearly all of our emotional and interpersonal difficulties come from granting our thoughts a power they don't deserve. He calls the spiraling nosedive of negative thinking a "thought attack," and observes that these attacks are best handled by nipping them in the bud. Take note of the first negative thought, acknowledge it (don't try to hide it or suppress it), and then simply decide not to take it seriously right now. You can even schedule a time later in the day when you might be willing to take it seriously. Most likely, when that time arrives, you won't even remember it. If you do remember it, you'll probably be sufficiently detached to be able to look at it more objectively and usefully.

From my own experience, I can say that this is a highly effective technique. It's also easy to forget. You can quickly lapse back into old habits. The imagined power of your own thoughts can exert a seductive hold on your ego, a hold difficult to break. But it can be done. It takes a kind of mindfulness, a willingness to step back and look at the thought before committing to it – I mean before committing to even taking it seriously or thinking about it further. Most of the time, once you've taken a step back, you'll find the thought is not worth your time, and you'll dismiss it as effortlessly as you would brush a mosquito off your arm.

Incidentally, this is one of the objections I have to the New Age mantra "thoughts are things." I think this gives thoughts entirely too much reality and importance. It also encourages us to suppress (or repress) our thoughts, by investing them with a fearful power that makes them dangerous to look upon. The opposite is closer to the truth: "thoughts are nothing."

There are limitations to Carlson's method. Though he insists that our happiness is entirely a matter of our own interpretation and that outside circumstances have nothing to do with it, I think some outside circumstances are so dire that no amount of mindfulness, short of the otherworldly detachment of a Zen master, could make them bearable. If you're a prisoner in a concentration camp or the captive of a serial killer, your happiness is really not in your own control. But most of us, thankfully, are not likely to find ourselves in those circumstances. For the ordinary ups and downs of everyday life, the frictions and frustrations, the arguments and disappointments, Carlson's approach works extraordinarily well.

It also has a certain relevance to the whole question of the nature of consciousness. If we are not our thoughts, then what are we? Evidently we are the mind that looks at our thoughts and either investigates them or shoos them away. Which means we are something like "the witness" who habitually stands back from our thoughts and actions, observing and sometimes judging in an impersonal way.

Perhaps it is the witness who is fully real and accounts for the continuity of consciousness that persists across many changes of mind – changes of opinion, changes of knowledge, changes of mood, changes of psychological maturity, etc. When we regard ourselves as essentially the same person we were at the age of six, maybe what we are acknowledging is the persistence of the witness, the observer who is outside the ego with its changeable nature, its endless conflicts, its Sturm und Drang. We are the eye of the storm, and the I in the storm.

And when we get caught up in petty quarrels, ego-based rivalries, and counterproductive obsessions, we're forgetting our essential nature as the witness and becoming ensnared in a briar patch of thoughts that ultimately have no reality at all. We're like a spider that gets stuck in its own web.

At this point we've gotten a little bit away from Richard Carlson's book, so let me circle back to it by saying that my summary of his views is necessarily incomplete and, in itself, probably not very helpful. If it interests you, I suggest reading the whole thing. It's not a long or difficult read, and you just may find it helpful. I know I have.

The part and the whole

I recently came across an article by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, proponents of the "biocentric" theory presented in their book Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death.

The article, "There is no death, only a series of eternal ‘nows’,"  argues that

biocentrism, in which life and consciousness create the reality around them, has no space for death ... [E]verything we see and experience is a whirl of information occurring in our head ...

Of course, as you’re reading this, you’re experiencing a ‘now’. But consider: from your great-grandmother’s perspective, your nows exist in her future and her great-grandmother’s nows exist in her past. The words ‘past’ and ‘future’ are just ideas relative to each individual observer.

So what happened to your great-grandmother after she died? To start with – since time doesn’t exist – there is no ‘after death’, except the death of her physical body in your now. Since everything is just nows, there is no absolute space/time matrix for her energy to dissipate – it’s simply impossible for her to have ‘gone’ anywhere.

Think of it like one of those old phonographs. The information on the record is turned into a three-dimensional reality that we can experience a moment at a time. All the other information on the record exists as potential. Any causal history leading up to the ‘now’ being experienced can be thought of as the ‘past’ (ie, the songs that played before wherever the needle is), and any events that follow occur in the ‘future’; these parallel nows are said to be in superposition. Likewise, the before-death state, including your current life with its memories, goes back into superposition, into the part of the record that represents just information.

In short, death does not actually exist ... And if death and time are illusions, so too is the continuity in the connection of nows. 

The model is interesting, but I think at a certain point it fails. If we assume that the needle of the phonograph corresponds to consciousness, then presumably death corresponds to the moment when the needle is lifted off the record. But at that point the needle no longer can play any tracks on the record. Yes, the information encoded in the grooves remains, but it is inaccessible to consciousness. It might be seen as a store of information akin to the Akashic Records, but it would not be part of a dynamic, living personality.

At least, this is how I read it. It's possible, however, that I've misunderstood what the authors are saying. as best I can tell, if your life "goes back into superposition, into the part of the record that represents just information," then "you" are not actualized and, as such, "you" do not exist.

A more complicated but perhaps slightly more satisfactory model occurs to me. It involves holography. (Somewhere, Art is cheering.)

Image from Phys.org. 

A holographic plate consists of wave-interference patterns that encode the information necessary to generate a three-dimensional image. Such a plate can be either reflective or transparent. A beam of focused light reflects off the plate or passes through it, creating, in either case, a three-dimensional projection. For our purposes, let's imagine that the plate is transparent.

The projection is fully three-dimensional, a fact that a spectator can appreciate only by circling around the image. From any given vantage point, only part of the image – one narrow slice of it, so to speak – can be seen. To take in the entire image, one must move around it, seeing first one side, then the front, then the other side.

Now let's say that this three-dimensional image corresponds to the entire content of the spacetime universe. And let's say that the spectator slowly making his way around the image and taking it in bit by bit in sequential fashion is egoic consciousness. What, then, is the beam of focused light? I suggest it can be analogized to the higher self, the larger consciousness of which the ego is only a small fragment or offshoot.

The higher self converts raw information into rendered images (using the word image in the broad sense to include objects that can be felt, smelled, tasted, etc.). The higher self sees the entire panoply of images as a single whole; the focused light of its consciousness pervades the entire spectrum of information, illuminating all of it. The egoic self, in contrast, perceives the hologram from one particular angle at any given moment; its movement along the axis of time creates the impression of change, as each new slice of (rendered) information comes into view and previously observed information moves out of view. The ego's point of view is narrow and limited, while the point of view of the higher self is omniscient, at least as far as the spacetime cosmos is concerned.

This is how things usually work, but occasionally the ego gets a glimpse of the bigger picture. In bursts of inspiration known as "cosmic consciousness," or in certain kinds of drug-induced visions, or in near-death experiences, or in death itself, the ego is – temporarily and partially – merged with the higher self. From this vantage point, the ego perceives the whole spectrum of rendered information all at once. The experience is overwhelming. It can be described as seeing the world from God's point of view, seeing and knowing everything there is, bursting free from the limitations of time and space, leaving Flatland to enter a higher-dimensional realm, etc. It can also be described as a "life review," in which all the events of one's life are reexperienced either simultaneously or nearly so.

In all cases other than actual death, the ego soon detaches from the higher self and is left once more with its familiar narrow perspective. But the memory of the transcendent experience never completely fades. It can provide the impetus for personal growth, religious or spiritual innovations, and even the development of psychic powers.

In death, the aftermath is less clear. Some would say that the ego simply dissolves into the higher self, while others would say that the ego detaches and continues its progress in an illusory replica of the spacetime world. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, among other sources, seems to suggest that the newly dead person can, with an effort of will, maintain the ego's merger with the higher self, but in the absence of this will (and the highly cultivated self-awareness it entails), the ego will inevitably retrogress. This opinion seems to be seconded by many channeled communications stating that the earthlike realms of the afterlife are ultimately illusions that must be transcended, and that the ego is progressively sloughed off as spiritual evolution proceeds. It is also borne out by the many postmortem communications strongly suggesting the persistence of the individual personality.

The end result, in either case, would be the (immediate or eventual) immersion of the ego in the higher self, which, standing outside time and space, is indestructible and self-contained. This would seem to be the ultimate destiny toward which we are all striving.

That's not to say that the higher self known to us is all that exists. It may well be the case – in fact, I suspect it is – that there are many higher selves, and that they ultimately comprise all of the consciousness there is; the sum total would be akin to what we call God, and the awareness of all these higher selves together would encompass many planes of reality, not just our physical plane.