"Everything that is real was imagined first"
Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
Are thoughts real? To those who have them, they can be as real as they are. Indeed, PTSD is the result of being stuck in a thought from the past, where a memory becomes an iron maiden, and the pain it causes is as real as any physical pain. In fact, some studies show that psychological pain can be even more painful, and therefore more real, than physical pain. Even Descartes linked thoughts to reality when he had the thought, "I think therefore I am." But if the thought Descartes had put into words wasn't real, than he was no more real than his thought. And this is because, according to psychologist Richard Carlson, thoughts aren't real. And since "God" is an immaterial intelligence, isn't God therefore just an idea? And therefore no more real than a thought about what the word "God" means?
What are thoughts, anyway? Like soda bubbles floating up from the chaos of our subconscious mind, they piece together our perception of reality. Like thoughts, so isolated
material particles are also abstractions, wrote Niels Bohr in 1934, "their properties being definable
and observable only through their interaction with other systems." From this, Bohr concluded that "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." And if what we call material reality cannot be considered "as real," what then can we make of our thoughts and ideas?
"Your thoughts aren't real," writes Carlson in his book "You Can Feel Good Again." Rather, he continues, "when we think, we are using our imagination to create an image or picture in our mind of an event rather than the real thing." This is like watching a made-for-television movie about an event, like the American Revolution or you high school glory days, rather than living through such events. But our imagination is colored by our particular perception, and our perceptions, which are subjective to each individual, are effected as much by our physiology as by our experiences. Physiologically, lack of sleep or water or food, stress, or too much sugar, the ingestion of drugs or an allergic reaction, and numerous other things, can all effect our senses, warping our perceptions. And "beliefs," trauma, and other experiences likewise effect our emotional state, which in turn effects how we see the world and ourselves within it.
In the same way light is both a particle and a wave, so Carlson may be only half right. Thoughts have a symbiotic relationship with our perceptions. And our perceptions are real, even if what we perceive is mostly a dream. Like the duality of light, so our thoughts are therefore both real to us and also imagined; both our reality and a dream. They are real because they have real world effects, from our health to our emotional states to shaping the world we live in. But they are also imagined, for they are merely ideas, regardless of how effective they are in animating and shaping our existence.In this sense, thoughts, especially about the past and the future, are like ghosts from the sub-cellar of our subconscious mind that haunts our conscious thoughts.
Thoughts are colored by experience. For those who grow up in more secure environments, both emotionally and financially, an adverse event can serve as a learning experience. Falling off of a bicycle is merely information for how to better ride the bicycle. For those who grow up in less secure environments, for lack of safety or resources, the same event can lead a person to feel like a failure, which may then teach them to avoid taking chances. For such people, falling off of a bicycle teaches them to stay away from bicycles altogether. And if such a fear or anxiety is cultivated into a virtue that bestows status on a person for practicing it, it may even becomes a dislike of those who build them and like to ride them.
While both perspectives are attempts to analyze the same event, mining it for information, the former feels encouraged and supported to use their rational brain to learn how to do better, while the latter may feel judged and condemned and uses their rational brain to defend themself from the harm of feeling judged and condemned again. In this sense, the rational brain is simply the tail being wagged by our emotional brain.
To use Brene Brown's ideas about the difference between guilt and shame, the former feels like they are only guilty of failing to ride the bike, while the latter feels ashamed because they, personally, are a failure. The guilty rider can learn to improve their ability to ride a bike, but no amount of trying to learn how to ride a bike will help the person ashamed of being a failure. And because no amount of efforts can change the fact they are a failure, they are forced to wait for a savior to rid the worlds of bicycles and those who make and ride them. In both cases, the thoughts are the shadow of the experience one gleams from their environment, through which they project those influences onto the walls of the reality around them.
Unique to each of us, our experiences are what lead us to form our thought systems, and whether we relate to such systems in a healthy or unhealthy way. "Your thought system is concerned only with the details of your life, how you compare with others, your worldly pursuits, your intellect, your ego gratification, and your endless supply of wants and needs." While wants and needs are simple and satiable for a soul, it should be noted, they are infinite and insatiable for an ego. The soul wants merely to live, bathed in the gratitude of each and every breath. The ego wants to live forever, free of the worry that, like even the universe as a whole, it will one day perish. The former recognizes it is connected and merely a part of the whole, while the latter wishes to see itself as greater than the whole. Yet our thoughts, which emanate from the one, become the dreams we wish to come true of the other.
"You can't satisfy your thought system, because its job is to think, compare, contrast, and analyze. It is concerned with what happens in your life. The set of guidelines within which it operates is totally inconsistent with enjoyment. When you align yourself exclusively with your thought systems, as so many people do, you are doomed to a life of frustration and unhappiness. When Woody Allan said " i would never join a club that would have me as a member," he is actually articulating how a thought system can lead to frustration and unhappiness.
According to Carlson, a thought system (TS) is different from healthy functioning (HF). The TS is the result of conditional experiences, through which we perceive events. HF is concerned with how we relate to what happens in our life. The TS is the thinker that thinks, strategizing moves as if life were a game of chess. HF, however, observes the TS to determine if it is strategizing from a perspective of fear and insecurity or a place of love, acceptance, and support. In the former, cold logic is relied on to defend against threats real or imagined. This leaves a person in a constant state of hyper-vigilance, as if they are living in a war zone. Such a state is itself a kind of hellish realm in which a person is trapped.
It is important here to understand the difference between "healthy functioning" and unhealthy functioning (UF). HF is our ability to consciously detach from a thought system in order to observe it, learn about it, and thereby strive to better understand what it is and why we have it. UF, on the other hand, is an inability to consciously engage in HF. As a result, a person is either unable or unwilling to see their thought system as being merely a learned system of thinking that does not necessarily perceive reality in an accurate light, and mostly because their are too dependent upon that thought system to be able to separate from it, or they unconsciously dissociate from the parts of themselves that do not conform to the rules imposed by such a thought system. Put another way, HF is the ability to consciously dissociate our true self from out thought systems, while UF is either the inability to dissociate from a thought system, which is often due to unconscious reasons, or an unconscious dissociation from a thought system caused by how incompatible such a system is to a person's authentic self.
The Divided Self
The unconscious inability to dissociate from a thought system, or the unconscious involuntary dissociation from such a system, is reflected in the Bible verse quoted by Abraham Lincoln that “a divided house cannot stand.” And nothing divides the house of our own mind more than starving a child of unconditional love and providing love based on judgement and approval instead. Such a divide and conquer strategy that convinces a child to prioritize attachment to a thought system over authenticity - and the Christian is convinced that their "authentic self" is a born sinner that needs saving, and anyone who dares to believe otherwise deserves to be tortured for all eternity - was explained by Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing, in his book The Divided Self. In it, Laing explains his theory about the origins of such psychotic symptoms, and how they can result from a person’s mind undergoing a form of mitosis by splitting in two.
The basic split that forms in the person’s personality, according to Laing, occurs “along the line of cleavage between his outward compliance and his inner withholding of compliance.” This happens when insecurity about one's existence prompts a defensive reaction in which the “self” splits into separate components, the “real self” and the “false self,” generating the psychotic symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia. “In conformity,” he explains, “what one perceives or fancies to be the thing one should be in the eyes of others becomes “the false-self,” a concept that Stephen King refers to in The Shining as a “false face.” This thing “may be a phoney sinner as well as a phoney saint,” Laing continues. “In the schizoid person, however, the whole of his being does not conform and comply in this way.”
Shame is key. In Religion, we are taught to feel ashamed for being merely human or having human desires. Because of beliefs in the stain of original sin, religious shame is not simply about what sins we commit, but about the fact we are born sinners. In recovering from trauma, a child first has to unlearn beliefs about themself as being unworthy or inherently flawed, so they can see that their feelings of shame over being born broken are, in fact, a lie, and therefore are nothing to feel ashamed of.
Guilt is different. We feel guilt for something we've done wrong that we can improve on or avoid doing wrong again. We learn how to add and subtract, for example, or not to play baseball near the neighbor’s house after we break their window with our baseball. Shame is something we can't stop doing, however, because it is the result of something being wrong with us. We either can't do simple arithmetic or we can't seem to care if we break a window or two with a baseball, and perhaps because we like to do so.
Shame is a form of blame of who and what we are, while guilt is about what we did. Guilt is something we can save ourselves from by learning to do better, but we need a “savior” to overcome our shame, because we are powerless to change being born with sin-stained soul. One says we are ugly ducklings that must be given angels wings by a God for us to ever become a swan, which we are rewarded with after we die but only if we spent enough of our life trying to sell our Christian brand. The other starts with the premise that we are swans that have been traumatized into believing, and therefore manipulated into accepting, that we are born with souls that are the spiritual equivalent of ugly ducklings.
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