Mind over Matter

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It matters in everything we do as a human species, the action and the reaction of the physical upon the mental and of the mental upon the physical, has been demonstrated since observation became a part of medicine. It is called, "Imagination," and it manifests through our ability to visualize and create. No more so than in violence issues because it becomes critical to visualize, create and act to survive.

The ability to imagine and visualize is much like the medical world's placebo effect that is also described as mind over matter. To really achieve results consider the power of drama and rituals and embed them into your training and practice. 

Listen, you already know from daily affairs that one's imagination and a bit of self-deception heighten your experiences like watching a movie. When the movie says ten years pass you go along with it because you understand that this belief makes the "story" work - and we all want that story to work. It is exactly the same in any discipline you endeavor to master. Rituals, visualization and imagination are key. 

These psychological factors behind these concepts are around us all the time. They shape nearly every decision we make. This is seen in the consumer industry, when we click to buy on Amazon, or seize upon a great deal at a local store. Modern economies rely heavily on a secret ingredient: storytelling. 

These stories are subliminal in nature, we go about daily living as actors imagining the things we can do, buy and sell but the reality is it is all about the story underlying everything. 

You have already heard the term, "heuristic," which is a mental shortcut. Heuristics are useful, if you don't have enough information, facts, about some things you will make an assumption. The assumptions like the more something costs means it is superior to what costs less. Marketers, using influence principles such as this, exploit our mental shortcuts to sell us stuff. 

Herein lies the benefit for us in the self-defense martial arts arena, we use those shortcuts of the mental to create like movies in our minds things that are, can be, effective. This is critical because there is no way in hell we can actually train and practice "live fire" violence to learn because it is so subject to damage, grave harm and death.

In short, your visualized imagined expectations and beliefs along with past experiences when trained and practiced can turn into "reality!" Baba Shiv, Stanford University Behavior Economist stated, "If one expects a ninety-dollar bottle of wine to taste better, the area of the brain that shows pleasure in real time shows greater activation." 

In short, when you need it most, the visualized imagined practice and training, as long as it is realistic, will kick in and be there for you in the clench. 

You see, research shows, that evolution gave us a mind that is alert to stories and suggestions, to imagination and self-deception, because, through many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, minds that can attend to stories because of their success at passing on their owner's genes. 

To support this consider the following, when animals square off against one another in conflict they rarely plunge into battle from the get-go. First, they try to signal all kinds of ways what the outcome of a battle would be. They puff up their chests, they roar, they bare their fangs and so on. Animals evolved to attend to stores and signals because these turn out to be efficient ways to navigate the world.

If you and I were lions of the Serengeti, and we were trying to settle who is the biggest, baddest of them all, it would be counter productive for both of us to plunge straight into a violent conflict that could damage, cause grave harm or kill either of us. It would better server both of us to make a show, posturing if you will, of strength, ability and willingness as to how things will turn out if we go for it. If my story is more convincing than yours, we both might be able to agree on the outcome without having to actually fight. 

Lets go with another example, the ancient Greeks used to describe two ways of thinking, "logos and mythos." Logos some what means a world of logic, empirical, and scientific while mythos refers to dreams, story telling and symbols. 

Logic and reason in modern society makes us modern; story telling and myth making are felt as primitive. The issues, as you imagine, is the reality that evolution and our species live under a yin/yang way of living, i.e., in short we need both logos and mythos to create stories, that science relies on, to build metaphors to use to understand the world. It shapes the scientific discovering we make; they even shape what we see and when our framing and metaphors change, the world itself is transformed. 

Let’s consider our brains in this, our brains are governed by two sides that are intertwined and interdependent. The rules of the game of life are inextricably woven into the tactics of how we play the game. In order for logic, the human mind, and rationality, for logos, to achieve its vision of a better world, it needs to work with mythos, the world of stories, symbols and myths. Doesn't that make what you already know a bit more clear as to why we have stories, symbols and myths? 

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