204 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
Maybe this is why we do most of our identifying while sitting quietly
in a chair: We go to a concert and sit; we attend a church and sit; we turn
on the television and sit; we watch the baseball game seated in a chair; and
we play a computer
game—sitting. Any
movement we do is limited
to polite applause, pressing
of buttons, waving of arms,
and occasional standing up
and sitting down again.
Only our voices are
permitted free
expression—sometimes. By keeping our physical bodies passive, we stop
the me of our body, for a time, from disturbing the me of Mercy
identification. It is as if we set aside our physical containers for a while and
become disembodied emotional sponges—couch potatoes with feelings.
So why do we insist on banging our mental shins against the furniture?
Why do we find identification so tempting? I suggest it is because we are
lazy. We want to get immediately to some destination without making the
journey; we want to eat our cake without baking it first; above all, we want
to have fun, immediately, without effort, and without end. Dragging our
bodies along is literally a drag. It takes time to move the physical container
from here to there, to teach it skills, and to whip it into shape. It is much
easier simply to jump directly to the goal with Mercy identification, or to
escape immediately from the problem by suppressing unpleasant memories.
Guilt, ME and Identification
We begin to see now why guilt is such a problem. Let me explain it
more clearly. Remember that conscience is programmed when Perceiver
thought knows that some good Mercy experience will lead to a painful
Mercy result; guilt in contrast occurs when the first Mercy experience
becomes part of me: If the first Mercy experience is part of me, then
Perceiver strategy predicts that the unpleasant result will also become part
of me.
The problem with guilt is that it usually involves my physical body:
Either a certain action was done by my body, or my physical body
occupied a certain location, or someone else saw my physical body at a
certain place or with a specific person. In all these various ways, the me
that is associated with my physical body declares that I am guilty, that me
really did commit the crime.
But why is guilt intensified by the presence of a physical body?
Because the body acts like mental glue. First, it „sticks‟ to my mind. The
human mind lives within the body; it requires the body as a container.
Second, the body „sticks‟ to the situation. Whenever I do an action, many