Another View of Habits and Letting Go
I recently read the book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman. It provided a new way, and perhaps a clearer one, for me to point to features of both habits and the inherent difficulty in mastering “letting go” practices, both of which I have addressed before.
I have postulated that we each are “a focused point of attention” of Being resulting from 13.8 billion years of choices, beginning at the Big Bang with a choice whose intent was something akin to “Let there be light”. This nearly infinite number of choices is represented as instinctual preferences written in our DNA and by the directional nudging we have accepted from family, friends and environments through infancy, childhood and beyond. These all provide a vast multitude of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, preferences which direct our behavior. Add on to this all of our own current and former conscious choices during this lifetime.
Here are some quotes from the book to initiate another look at habits and “letting go”. (The quotes listed here are not always in the same sequence as in the book; the underlines and bolding are mine).
“Consciousness is the long term planner…” “…it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.” “When the brain [has] a task that it needs to solve, it rewrites its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency.” …