THE MOVIE: A BEAUTIFUL MIND
AND THE GREAT LESSON FROM THIS TRUE STORY
See the movie first, before reading this. It is a marvelous movie with marvelous lessons but reading this first will spoil the surprise and the gradualism of the lesson.
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WHAT'S REAL?
At the risk of ruining your experience of watching A Beautiful Mind, I give you my assessment of the significance of it - and I hope you learn to, forever, see that you are separate and that you need not believe all that occurs in a simplistic mechanistic mind.
Basically, he at first totally believes that he is living this other life and that his friend is real. He thinks he is on a mission, where he leaves in a secret location decoding results of secret messages about a conspiracy that will hurt all the people in this nation.
Then he discovers (in the process of "therapy") that those things are not real, that they are imaginary and that he need not continue doing those things that are harming his life and his relationship with his wife.
The imaginary images and sounds from his brain, however, do not stop. He still sees them, but he simply acknowledges that his mind is making them up and that they are not real - and that he need not obey or react to them. They simply move to the background, to be largely ignored, which leaves him to be more present (and not feeling the agony of his old false beliefs) - and much more happy.
Of course, we think of him as nuts, illusionary. Yes, he is a bit further out, but if we imagine that our minds rule us, that we are our minds, that we must react to thoughts as if they are real, aren't we the same at the core?
THE ANALOGY FOR US
Once a person knows that the images and patterns coughed up from the primitive mind are strictly that - only images, patterns, recordings in the brain - he can cease to believe that they are real and represent reality and/or the truth. They, in many cases, do not represent reality or what works at all! They are stupid and primitive and many are, to a large degree, false - imaginary, not accurate, not correct, not real, fictional, etc. (As a part of this process of developing healthy thinking, we must learn how things actually work - we must learn the truth. Read and understand fully Your Mechanical Brain/Body - Summary.)
We were brought up, most likely, to believe that our thoughts were correct and that we were victims of our thinking and that we couldn't do anything about them. (Some of us actually believed that there were "entities" with voices within our mind, entities that had power over us. Totally wrong! See The Believing Brain.) So, we suffered much - but for no purpose at all!
Like Nash in the movie, we can simply see the stuff the images and patterns that pop up from our brain, but we can choose to realize that they are not real nor the truth. (That was also the breakthrough for Byron Katie, when she began to ask the question about her thoughts "Is this the absolute, provable truth?" She immediately ceased her years of depression and is now a teacher/guru of sorts. See The Truth Test - If It Doesn't Pass This Test, Stop Believing It!)
And, certainly, we will not lend credence to such fairy tales, such stories and beliefs that we made up. How could we believe that what we made up is actually real, in the real world? But that is what most of us do, in a lack of understanding and a lack of thinking that is ultimately very, very harmful to us, as believing in untrue things can only lead us into clashing with reality and experiencing the suffering that results!
Surely, you CAN stop believing in what is so readily seeable as being untrue?!!?
