For many years we lived in autopilot mode; we call this unconsciousness.
I now observe that even among many conscious people, this autopilot manifests in exactly the same way.
Read about the danger of the mind’s virtuality and why it is important to return to reality.
Mind Mapping
There is a phenomenon I call mind mapping. When you find yourself in a new place, walking along an avenue, for example, looking at signs, glancing at shops, time stretches very slowly.
At that moment, a map is created in the mind, and time subjectively moves slowly. Whether it is a long trip or a walk through some new places, this feeling takes up a lot of time.
When you return along the same path, it seems that time has shrunk by about half. The road is the same, everything is the same, but the subjective feeling of time for walking or traveling has halved.
I noticed how it compresses literally into a few minutes. I decided to go to some new place and time myself by the clock, physically measuring how long it takes to go there and back, to confirm to the mind, because time compresses into a point.
Going there feels long, but coming back seems faster. This is related to this mapping; that is how the mind works. It registers something new because it needs it for safety, for survival.
The more times you walk through the same place, the less attention you pay to details, until you engage conscious movements.
Once, I didn’t leave the house for a week, then went out and saw a newly paved road in front of the house. It was impossible to have done that in a week, no matter how much I wanted it. Or it turns out that trees are growing around that you never saw before. The mind skips them. This year, I discovered blooming acacias all over the city; I had walked the same streets for 10 years, they weren’t there, and now they appeared.
And it’s not about glitches in reality, when something that wasn’t there materializes, but about the fact that you finally begin to see, to notice everything around you.
See also Mind Games. What role does the mind play in the new reality and why you shouldn’t rely on it
The task is to get off autopilot
Our task is to fully return to reality as much as possible. Something habitual becomes so fixed that it causes a state of resistance, frustration, if something changes.
When you’re used to this thing lying here, and you can act on autopilot, why would I walk with my eyes open through my own apartment if I can feel my way in the dark, I’ve lived here for so many years. And if suddenly something changes, gets moved, the first thing you do is crash into it, get bruises.
It’s the same on our websites, as soon as something new is introduced, many people immediately panic. Because they’re used to living on autopilot. They mapped out once where everything is on the mind map, and that’s it.
Therefore, walk new paths, drive in, turn into little alleys you’ve never walked down before. You need to shake up this reinforced concrete structure, mapped onto the territory in your mind, through such small physical actions.
It filters all new changes in exactly the same way, because the map is already made.
See also How to go beyond the limitations of the mind
Returning to reality from the virtuality of the mind
If earlier many people escaped into the past — when youth made the grass greener, the sky bluer, the sun brighter, and so on — now the past is essentially fixed, it no longer changes, and there is no point in diving into it or running away.
Most people will not have the opportunity to escape into the past; they will gradually be pushed out of it into the present, grounded. But the question is — are you doing something voluntarily, or are you being grounded through some serious critical situations?
So return to reality. Honestly, I thought I was fine with this, but starting in spring, I really see that I simply wasn’t paying attention to many things. Perhaps it’s the specificity of having a virtual activity, a life that is larger than the physical one.
The task of the autopilot
Many of our reflexes exist for a reason. I know for sure that if I had to consciously control my breathing, I would suffocate in my sleep.
Imagine you can lie down and wake up still breathing. But what if you had to keep it under control all the time? How does that story sound to you? And blood, the heart — you forget about it, and it stops beating.
It’s no coincidence that this autopilot is built into us; it simply occupies enormous scales. Therefore, one of the main tasks is to return to reality. And the greatest resistance arises when we refuse to acknowledge facts.
We are used to relying on interpretations: “Grandma Masha said,” a neighbor passed it on to someone. Moreover, we elevate insignificant things to the forefront.
See also Restructuring thought processes from linearity to depth and expansion. What is the basic role of the mind
Anchoring in the present through returning to basic needs
During the pandemic, we were brought back to simple basic values.
When we stood on a bridge in neutral territory (crossing the border), we got stuck for a day, and immediately basic values came to the forefront: how to eat, how to go to the toilet, just getting out of the car to walk, lie down, straighten your spine…
And for those who stand for four days and didn’t bring that much food with them, you start to realize that the joy is simply eating something plain—there’s no room for delicacies then, just having something to eat would be enough.
These are elementary basic things that we don’t value, we don’t pay attention to them.
On the other hand, this is a very good anchoring in the present. Everything else falls away—it doesn’t matter what’s happening, where events are taking place; there is only the bridge, and you are standing on it, and there is the satisfaction of your basic needs.
Through various such situations, including this one, we return to reality.
The difference between facts and our perceptions of something
There is a big difference between what exists in reality and our perceptions.
Remember your classmates, old friends you haven’t met in a long time, relatives you haven’t seen for 5-10 years. In your head, you have a certain idea of what that person was like back then and what they were like at the time you last met.
You haven’t seen them for many years; maybe you’ve heard something about them, but you don’t have a fresh understanding, a perception of what kind of person they are, what they live for now, what their values are today.
And so, for every phenomenon, we have an imprint frozen in time in our heads. But most importantly, when we communicate with living people, with whom we are side by side constantly, we also have these imprints from past years.
We once recorded them and do not allow ourselves to see anything new in other people until we open our eyes, until we step away from this mental mapping.
There he is, a scoundrel, and that’s it. Especially when grievances accumulate, we live in the past, with all these grievances. But what that person represents today, what they are experiencing, we do not see that.
Hence the channel recommendations: start each day as a new day, build interactions with people from a clean slate. This is a difficult process because much is carried over automatically.
Everyone has their own reality, but now these realities are beginning to merge. We fail to notice many things, but now it is all coming together into a single space.
See also: Filters of the mind, mental distortions, assumptions. How to see the truth behind all this
What does your mental virtuality consist of
Many are accustomed to relying on others’ opinions: some nutritionist said this, a cosmetologist said that, a shopaholic or Instagram guru said something else. And a large part of the average person’s worldview is built on someone’s statements that no one ever verifies.
For example, if I show something, immediately a huge number of people gather asking: “Where can I buy it?” You know, aside from our courses, we do not advertise or sell anything. God forbid you show something, everyone thinks they urgently need it.
How susceptible everyone is to others’ opinions in small matters, without filtering, without asking themselves: “Do I need this, and why do I need it?”
The same goes for meditations. I constantly teach: before doing any practice, read the description. Do you even need it today? That doesn’t mean the practice is bad; the question is simply: do you need it today?
Before each practice, I always explain its purpose, so you can decide, before entering, whether it resonates with you now or not.
In general, we are subject to herd instinct; we read one leader, check it, read another leader, check it, and so on. In this regard, I am a materialist, a realist who believes in the spiritual world and feels it. But materialist in this case is not about materiality, it is about reality.
It is time for all of us to return to reality, and for me too, a little bit in other matters.
This does not negate our spiritual practices or the feeling of the invisible. Our problems are not with the spiritual plane, but with the virtual one; we fail to see many things.
See also Cognitive distortions, interpretations of the mind. What they can lead to and how to train yourself to see facts
Have you noticed how much of your time you live on autopilot versus in a conscious state?
The article is based on the broadcast “11 Ask KM”
P.S. We invite you to the new course “Acceptance Workshop” to free yourself from self-flagellation, negativity, and start accepting yourself.
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