202 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
image on the screen. He also feels that it is really him who is going through
the agonies and the ecstasies of the plot.
The young child has no control over identification. As I mentioned
before, any emotional experience which he encounters overwhelms his
internal Mercy world and becomes part of his identity. In contrast, we as
adults can usually choose the experiences with which we will identify.
When we watch a movie, we may either detach emotionally or else enter in
to the feelings of the moment. When we encounter emotional situations in
real life, we also generally have the choice of pulling back or identifying.
Many sales techniques attempt to bypass our mental defenses so that
we will identify with the product. Their goal is to gain entry into the
internal world of Mercy strategy from the doorman guarding the entrance.
For example, a relief agency may publish pictures of starving children in
Africa, hoping to trigger sufficient emotion within our minds to force the
image into our internal Mercy worlds. The movie may jump directly from
a scene of domestic peace to a vivid portrayal of some violent crime,
hoping to catch us with our emotional guard down.
Another common technique is to appeal to our sense of duty or guilt.
Duty means that some important person or institution already living within
my internal Mercy world, with whom I have previously identified, gives
me approval for doing an action and disapproval for not doing it. When
guilt is triggered, then I feel that I must act in order to avoid identification
with some awful Mercy result. Duty and guilt both play with
identification—it is evident, therefore, that this is a strong mental influence.
Saying it again, identification is the method by which I either choose,
or am emotionally forced to choose, what will be me. However, as I
mentioned earlier, me is also connected strongly with my physical body. I
suggest that many problems with me are caused by a mismatch between
these two methods of defining me. That is why I described me not as the
experiences with which I identify, but rather as the experiences on which I
can continue to concentrate.
It is easy for Mercy strategy to identify with experiences which are not
directly connected with my body. Suppose, for instance, that I am watching
a football game, or engrossed in a movie. As soon as I turn my eyes away
from the scene, shift in my seat, or think of the office or home, my
attention is pulled to some other topic. This is because my physical body is
actually reclining in an easy chair. It is not participating in the action. The
office or home comes to mind because that is where my body spends much
of its waking time. I have used Mercy identification to decide that me will
be part of the game or the movie, but my body tells me that me is
something totally different. As one person put it, if we focus on the
physical bodies, then a professional sports event is really twenty people in
desperate need of rest watched by twenty thousand others in desperate
need of exercise.