Zen

Who are you? Your first impulse may be to say I am John or Jane Doe, and I‘d say are you or is that the name your parents gave you? And you’d respond oh OK hmm I am a male/female, who likes listening to music, dancing, go to the movies, etc. I’d then respond is that who you are or what you’d like. Most people can not even say who they are. The correct answer I AM WHATEVER I SAY I AM. What you like is only based on what you remember and you remember is the first time you experienced it you were receptive to it. Had the first encounter or impression had been a pleasurable one the outcome may have been different. Though it is not always that we make or decisions on first experiences we do make every decision today based on a yesterday. People continually state that you can not go into the future nor back into the past, today is all you have the opposite is reality. Most people make every decision today based on an experience or memory from the past (e.g. If I give too much he/she will take advantage of me) and these decisions affect our future, few people live in the today. Why? Well where do memories come from: The brain. Everything you have stored in that magnificent PC is stored in the form of memory, including emotions. In fact the purpose of emotions is to help your brain transform short term memory into long term memory. Where did you think Love comes from, your heart? Nope it comes from the brain. People will stand in front of a jet and awe in its beauty and wonder how it works, but seldomly do people awe in the glory of the greatest anomaly, nor wonder how it works: You. Since before birth your brain is processing information and labeling, good, bad, nice, naughty, right, and wrong. The brain is creating tiny nerve cells called "neurons.’ Imagine they look like little star fish with little branch like arms. These tiny branches reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. When thought is transferred from neuron connection to neuron connection it’s similar to an electrical impulse. The brain looks like a thunderstorm when it is presenting a coherent thought. So no one is ever seeing the thought. What they do see in neurophysics is a storm raging around different quadrants of the brain. Those are areas that are mapped in the body and what a person must be responding to is a holographic image rage, murder, hate compassion, love etc. These images or experiences are then translated with memory into what the person should be feeling. The brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment and what it remembers because the same specific neural nets are then firing. Each place where they connect is incubated into a thought or a memory. Scientific experiments have shown that if we take a person and, hook their brains up to certain PET scans or computer technology and ask them to look at a certain object and they watch, certain areas of the brain light up. And then they've asked them to close their eyes and now imagine that same object. And when they imagine that same object it produced the same areas of the brain to light up as if they were actually visually looking at it. The truth is that the brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment and what it remembers because the same specific neural nets are then firing. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory. For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed and interconnected in this neural net and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept and the feeling of love, for instance is stored in this vast neural net. But we build the concept of love from many other different ideas. Some people have love connected to disappointment. When they think about love, they experience the memory of pain sorrow, anger and even rage. Rage may be linked to hurt, which may be linked to a person which then is connected back to love. We build up models of how we see the world outside of us. And the more information that we have, the more we refine our model one way or another. And what we ultimately do is tell ourselves a story about what the outside world is. Any information that we process, any information that we take in from the environment is always colored by the experiences that we've had and an emotional response that we're having to what we're bringing in. We are the builders of these models we are the GODS of our own little individual worlds. In closing I am whatever I say I am. What you perceive to be true, you believe to be true, and what you believe to be true, you conceive to be true.