The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [28]
Negative perceptions: Reality is perception, and the suffering person gets trapped by negative perceptions of his own creation. Perception keeps the pain under control, not by reducing it but by sealing out even greater pain. This twist is the one most people find hard to understand. The body discharges pain automatically, yet the mind can override that instinct by turning the pain into something “good,” in the sense that it’s better than other, even worse possibilities. Inner confusion and conflict are why the mind has such a hard time healing itself, despite all the power it holds. The power has been turned against itself, and thus perception, which could end suffering in an instant, locks the door instead.
Reinforcing a perception: Perceptions are fluid unless we seal them in place. The self is like a constantly shifting system that incorporates the new into the old at every moment. If you constantly obsess over old perceptions, however, they become reinforced with each repetition. Let’s consider a specific example. Anorexia nervosa is the medical term given to a condition in which a person, usually a girl under the age of twenty, adopts starvation as a way of life. If you interview an anorexic teenager who weighs under 90 pounds and show her four pictures of body images, ranging from the thinnest to the fattest, she will say that her body matches the fat one despite the fact that in reality her frame is skeletal. If you go so far as to superimpose her own face on the four pictures, an anorexic will still choose the fattest photo as being herself. This distorted body image totally baffles other people. It seems bizarre to look in the mirror at a skeleton and see a fat person instead (just as it is bizarre for identical twins to feel that one is extremely ugly and the other beautiful).
In these cases, perception has become distorted for hidden reasons connected to emotion and personality. An anorexic, if shown photos of four cats, can easily pick out which one is the fattest. The distortion comes at a deeper level where “I” decides what is real about oneself. The whole thing is a feedback loop. Once “I” decides something about oneself, everything in the outside world must conform to that decision. In the anorexic’s mind, shame is essential to who she is, and the world has no choice but to throw her shameful image back at her. Starving herself becomes the only way she can figure out to make that fat girl in the mirror go away. Which leads to a general rule: Reality is whatever you identify with.
Anywhere that life hurts we have locked ourselves into some kind of false identification, telling ourselves private, unchallenged stories about who we are. The cure for anorexia is to somehow pry a wedge between “I” and this powerful, secret identification. The same applies to all suffering because each person arbitrarily identifies with one thing after another that tells an inaccurate story of who he or she is. Even if you were able to surround yourself with pleasure every minute of the day, the wrong story of who you are will wind up bringing deep suffering.
Getting lost in the pain: People have remarkably different thresh-olds of pain. Researchers have hooked subjects up to equal stimuli, such as electric shocks to the back of the hand, and asked them to rate the discomfort they feel on a scale from 1 to 10. It was long thought that since pain is registered along identical neural pathways, people would register a pain signal more or less the same (as for instance, almost everyone would be able to feel the difference between bright headlights in their eyes and low beams). Yet the pain that registered as a 10 for some patients felt like a 1 to others. This indicates not just that pain has a subjective component but also that the way we assess pain is completely individual. There is no universal path between stimulus and response. One person can feel deeply traumatized by an experience that hardly registers for someone else.
What’s so strange about this result