Understanding Your Algorithm: What's Your Story?
Posted on October 29, 2022 by Harry Turner, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.
Confirmation biases, death anxieties, chronic procrastination, and impatience are all maladaptive if-then programs embedded in the matrix of your mind
Our minds are amazingly efficient and adaptable. Like software to a computer, it was designed to be updated. We are born with the ability to take in information from our environment, and organize it into a framework of understanding with the main objective of keeping us safe. We can think of this as our Life Story, or our “Algorithm”.
The Algorithm develops from childhood and is influenced by our experiences, feedback, parents and caretakers, and later the media, the educational system and our friends. We develop beliefs about how the world works. And these beliefs then form our identity, who we think we are. This all impacts the psychological software that makes up or individual Algorithms. Understanding your Algorithm is not a choice.
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it become destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over. – Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Our experience of life is then filtered through our unique #perception of #reality. It is this filter through which we process the situations of our life, rather than the actual situations themselves, that determine the meaning we give to them.
Our “bad” habits are the result of “if-then” programs that are triggered by what we experience for the external world. Our perception of a situation becomes the trigger to our responses. The issue this presents is a human life is a long one that is constantly evolving as we grow. In #adolescence, we are vulnerable to whatever #biases, #prejudices, and preferences of our original family unit, which has also been conditioned to accept certain biases, prejudices, and preferences from their original families.
By early adulthood we’ve been preprogrammed to perceive life a certain way. Our mind then develops a story, a narrative script, we tell ourselves and others about what happened in our past, how the world works, and who we are. Our mind uses this story like a blueprint to make sense of the world, to predict, evaluate, react to and control our lives.
We refer to the blueprint for guidance, when we encounter challenges, to determine what it means and how we should respond. Our Algorithm determines whether we are resilient or rigid, and whether we thrive or fail. Our minds are constantly trying to find a way to make what happens fit within our blueprint, it has to confirm that our view of reality is “right”. It has to keep us safe from uncertainty or danger.
Our minds are wired to find, notice, and focus on what we already believe, so we tend to find ourselves in situations that confirm our biases, ergo confirmation biases are formed. We end up with expectations about how the world should be. We look for it in the world. We then find what we look for as we dismiss and disregard things contrary to what we’ve accepted as truth. We choose the same people, energetically, situations, and end up feeling those same familiar feelings. The world around us proves us “right”, and our belief is reinforced. And so the saga continues…
Confirmation biases, death anxieties, chronic procrastination, and impatience are all maladaptive if-then programs embedded in the psychological software of our default programming.
Until you intercept the story and change your beliefs. You have to compassionately guide your mind into following a new blueprint, and re-writing the story. When you do this, you will begin to look at life differently. Your expectations will change. And your mind will do what it does best – find evidence that you’re right. This is you telling your mind what to do as opposed to being told what to do by it.
You have a #choice: re-write the story, or stay locked into the unconscious #belief system, or Algorithm, that has determined your life so far. It is important to understand that you already have everything you need, and you can be, do, or have anything you desire that is aligned with your specific life path. The truth is that your unique abilities and circumstances have unfolded perfectly to prepare you to live your own life and fulfill your own desires. When we don’t see this, we choose the life path of our default programming, which has little to do with us and everything to do with how we are conditioned.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rewrite your life story to reflect the truth of who you authentically are. Choose the red pill “Alice” and lets see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I’ll be your Guide as you traverse the territory of who you “think” you are.
Stay L.I.T.
Harry “The Nocturnal Therapist” Turner
