Understanding why our mind often makes us misunderstand things

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
longer manifest at that time. So, why does the mind misunderstand anything at all? That’s because the mind chooses the path of least resistance.
In every situation, whatever is the easiest way out, the mind wants to take that. So, if I want pleasure, it will look for the quickest pleasure. What is available? If it wants to understand something, what is the easiest explanation? Take that.
If you have a problem, okay, what is the fastest solution? Go towards that. So, the mind wants to solve, deal with things quickly. And when there is resistance in a particular path, then going along that path will require more time, more energy, and that’s how the mind resists going along that path.
Whichever path, quickly. I’m hungry, okay, whatever food is readily available, just let me eat it. If that is healthy food, I’ll eat healthy food.
If it is unhealthy food, I’ll eat unhealthy food. So, when we understand that this mind chooses the path of least resistance, then if we can either create resistance on this path of least resistance, or we can decrease the resistance on the other path, then in both ways, things can be slowed down. I just came from America about 15 days ago.
So, I gave a talk in Google there, in Silicon Valley. So, there, in Google itself, I was quoting an experiment that was done in Google. So, or rather a psychological study.
They found that most of the people have sedentary jobs, and they tend to eat a lot, and they get obesity, and medical insurance of the company itself goes up a lot. So, they, on the advice of some experts, decided that in their cafeteria in the company, which they had, they had chocolate, sugar candies, various sweet items, which would be there in transparent containers. And people would come to the cafeteria to eat something, and they would order these candies, chocolates, and eat it.
So, they decided to just cover those sugar candies, all sweet items, put them in opaque containers. Not containers which have advertising promoting water in it. No, just make them opaque.
So, if somebody wants a sweet, yes, give it, then they’ll go to that box, take it out. And they found just by doing this, almost 35% of the consumption of sweets decreased. And of course, correspondingly, the obesity issues also went down, the health issues also got less complicated.
So, it’s something as simple as this. When we see an object, it’s readily available for enjoyment, let me go and enjoy it. But if it is not visible, then, okay, I get a desire, where is it available? I’ll go and take it.
If the desire is very strong, anyway we’ll go and indulge it. But, this I’m giving as an example, that if even a little resistance is created on a path which we don’t want to go, that can check the person from going in that direction. So, the mind chooses the path of least resistance.
Your pleasure is available easily, the mind will go towards it. Later we’ll talk about how, when the mind is often ready to go through great difficulties to get a pleasure also. I’ll come to that later.
But, right now, this is the principle we’ll focus on. And the mind goes towards the quickest pleasures. So, what does this mean practically for us? Why does it happen like this? Why does the mind go for quick fixes? I want this right now.
This is the easiest pleasure, let me go for it. So, actually, we are souls who are evolving through many species. And we have all been in the lower species, the animal species.
And when we go from one species to another, this body is left behind, but the mind remains the same. And the mind which is carried from one species to another, has the same tendencies from the previous life. Now, in animal forms, most often, there is a matter of survival of the fittest.
It is, might is right. At any moment, death can strike. At one level, it’s true for human beings also.
But in animal life, it’s much more vivid. So, survival in the animal world often depends on speed. If a deer is eating some food, and a deer just smells, oh, there’s a tiger over here.
Even before the deer looks back, it has to run. It just takes the time to look. In that much time, the tiger will spring and catch it to eat.
So, in the animal world, we need to have very fast responses to survive. Life and death can depend on one moment’s hesitation or one moment’s prompt action. Animals, in general, function in two broad modes.
Before I go to this, psychologists have also observed some similarities between default human behaviors and animal behaviors. Psychologists have a different explanation for this. Not all psychologists.
But psychologists say that actually, we have come from the animal species. And they are referring to physical evolution of the body. Our past ancestors were ape-men and this and that.
And because of that, our brains have evolved in a particular way. Now, if you look at the brain structure itself, there is a significant or a dramatic difference between simian brains and human brains. So, it’s not that the brain has evolved.
It’s more that actually, the mind is the same. So, yes, there are similarities between the way humans and animals function. But that’s not so much because the body has gone through physical evolution.
But rather, while the soul has gone from one world to another, the mind has remained the same. And in the human body, we carry over tendencies from the animal species. And when the mind is the same, it has those same tendencies.