If any of the following sound familiar, you will be delighted to know you can eliminate them all!
- Feeling like an outsider
- Never feeling like you are good enough
- Being aware of an inner emotional heaviness or depression
- Experiencing a repetitive pattern of disappointment
- The emotional heat of perpetual anger
- The inability to deeply connect with other people
- Blaming and judging yourself and others when things don’t go “your way.”
Each and every one of these is the direct result of specific beliefs, fears, or misconceptions through which you are filtering new experiences in your Reticular Activating System.
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is truly a marvel of human design. Here’s what it does:
- regulates our sleep-wake transitions
- coordinates and integrates our cardiovascular, respiratory, and motor response to external stimuli
- controls our coordination
- processes the vast majority of our incoming sensory information
Do you have any idea how much new information your brain is constantly processing? In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson quantifies the human brain’s unfathomable ability to process information as follows:
The unconscious processing abilities of the human brain are estimated at approximately 11 million pieces of information per second. Compare that to the estimate for conscious processing: about 40 pieces per second.
Without our RAS, this barrage would quite literally blow our minds! We live in a constant state of data bombardment.
The fact that the vast majority of our data processing is unconscious is a great kindness in human design. However, this unconscious filtration system runs on autopilot while determining what incoming information we value, devalue, or fear based on our accumulated past reactions.
Like the default settings on our computers, our past data processing decisions function as self-fulfilling prophecies of our present and future data filtration, unless and until we bring them to awareness for reevaluation.
Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 9th edition © 2009, Elsevier
The RAS is located in the brainstem. It consists of a network of nerve pathways. They form a link between the brain stem, which controls most of the body’s involuntary functions and reflexes, and the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness and our thinking ability. By connecting these two regions of the brain, the RAS functions as a filtering system for the mind. It controls our attention, awareness, thinking, and emotions. It quite literally causes us to construct our own internal worldview.
While we share our physical world, we each have our very own unique inner world. What we are seeing is not as it is in the physical world. We see the world as it is after being processed through our inner filters. Our sense of truth is relative to our inner filtration system.
The good news is you have the power to change the settings on your filtration system. Through increased awareness of how this system works and by paying attention to all forms of imbalance you experience, you have the power to change your inner and outer experiences.
We are biased to the status quo of how we already see things.
Believing that this internally-generated version of the truth is the empirical truth blinds us from reality.
One of the consequences of this misconception is that we believe that anyone whose perspective or way of being is different than ours is “wrong.” What we imagine to be our perception of empirical truth is merely a reflection of an aggregated inner point of view.
Within the privacy of our own consciousness – in the theater of our mind – we create our own sense of reality, which we inhabit and relate to as if it is REALITY.
It is important to remember that no one else on this planet has an identical inner world to the one you live in. The assumption that others see the world as we do is the source of an enormous amount of our misunderstanding about ourselves and each other.
The majority of our perceptions and thoughts are merely the product of our primarily unconscious sensory data filtration system. They exist only in our private inner world.
Understanding the design of the data processing function of the RAS empowers us to do some renovations to the mental and emotional scaffolding upon which we are living our lives.
We access this opportunity by paying attention to where things are not working well for us in our lives. To bring our autopilot ways of responding to our experiences into conscious awareness, we need to identify what is on our filter. So, take a good look at your underlying conditioning, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, prejudices, preferences, fears, memories, judgments, illusions, delusions, hopes, and dreams. Only then, do we have the option to challenge our default settings and change them as appropriate.
Another way of saying this is we need to clean our data processing filters. In doing so, we can update our default settings. Our freedom lies in recognizing that our RAS makes our lives a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is simply doing what we tell it to do. When we update our default settings, we are redirecting the perspective of our RAS so that it will now validate our new point of view.
Consider this simple example. While on a weight loss journey, I got to within one pound of what I viewed as a major threshold. I plateaud there for six weeks. I was doing everything “right” in terms of complying with my program. What was going on? Upon evaluation of my RAS filters, I noticed that I held a belief that crossing this particular one-pound threshold would put me into a level of success that I had not previously experienced.
Underneath that I discovered that I was fearful and did not trust myself to maintain this success. In this context, my weight loss plateau made perfect sense. Once I identified the source of resistance to further progress, I was able to bring more of this pattern into conscious awareness and to challenge myself to see my situation through new eyes.
When we get stuck, we need to look to see exactly what beliefs and fears have been preventing us from moving forward. Then, we can choose to replace them with new, affirming beliefs and assumptions.
Bringing unconscious patterns into awareness empowers us to upgrade our default settings in such a way that upgrades the quality of our inner life.
Here is the link to Part 2 of this blog to learn more keys to unlocking your inner well-being.
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