Tonight I’m teaching an Automatic Influence seminar where we’ll all watch this video of Andrew Parrish filming his cat watching the movie, Psycho.
The movie isn’t reality. They’re all actors. The blood. The screams. It’s all fake.
But the cat doesn’t know the difference between image and real life. It reacts to the pictures as if they’re real.
We’re all a bit like this cat, which is why we react almost the same way when watching scary movies. Our hearts pound. Our palms sweat. We’re tense. We cover our eyes. We scream.
We know it isn’t real, but it’s easy to confuse fact and fiction.
Why? Because our mind interprets vivid imagination and reality almost equally. We have the power to imagine experiences so vividly, so powerfully, that we react as if they’re real.
Think about the VR craze. “Gaming and film are the first and most obvious applications for [virtual reality] experiences,” writes screenwriter and Forbes contributor Mark Hughes, “but once you experience a wide array of applications of the technology, it quickly becomes obvious we’re facing a fundamental shift in how we consume not just entertainment, but also information in general, from education and instruction to design and city planning, from vacation travel and pay-per-view sporting/concert events to space travel and warfare.”
Why the entertainment revolution? Why are so many anticipating it and investing in it? Because virtual reality feels so real.
Again, our mind interprets vivid imagination and reality almost equally.
Given this idea, and all the time we’ve spent showing how happiness comes from mindset, I have to ask, “What experiences are we creating in the theater of our minds?” Whatever they are, they’re almost as powerful as actual experiences.
- We create a hundred “virtual reality” arguments with our bosses, our spouses, our enemies on any particular day. Is it any wonder we’re stressed? Imagine having a hundred actual arguments in a day. No question we’d be worn out.
- We imagine failure and embarrassment as we prepare for a presentation. In the theater of the mind we’ve shamed ourselves at least fifty times leading up to the actual event. Is it any wonder we’re terrified?
People often blame their unhappiness on circumstances. But I wonder, How many of their bad experiences are real and how many are virtual?
Say someone says, “You’ll never be good enough to get that job.” That’s a discouraging experience. But we don’t stop there. We replay the memory, letting them insult us again and again and again as the movie loops in our minds. There’s one actual experience, followed by a hundred virtual experiences.
Say we’re worried that our teenager will get into a car accident. We imagine the gory scene, the funeral, the weeping, the agony. It scares us. Then we imagine it again and again. How many experiences here are virtual and how many are actual? Worry is usually dozens of virtual experiences with no actual experiences, because the bad thing we worry about almost never happens.
We have the power to stop the movies and play better ones, but we often stick with the horror stories. We let our mind go all Stephen King on everything, creating a hundred virtual experiences for one actual experience.
The virtual experiences start to define us. We’re constantly discouraged and worried, because we keep playing the insults and horror stories over and over.
Here’s how we can boot Stephen King from the theater of the mind.
- Start by distinguishing between actual circumstances and virtual ones.
- Work to ditch the destructive virtual experiences. Call destructive VR what it is, and take off the headset.
- Embrace constructive VR. We have the power to make any head-movies we please. Why not go all Scorsese instead of King and make a lot of good ones? You know, Oscar-winning sort of stuff?