98 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
meet people who tell me that they have a friend who is „just like me,‟ and
they are probably right. As long as I rest in automatic thought, there will be
many others who are „just like me.‟
In contrast, suppose that I build an internal world of Perceiver belief
and Mercy identification. Now I can choose what goes into the structure,
and this freedom of choice allows me to become my own person. This is
how an individual can survive in a sea of billions of people. By
specializing, he develops some area in which he is unique, where he does
or knows something which others do not.A
Second, building an internal world allows me to choose my building
material. Let us suppose that I was building a real house and decided to
use the following method: Each morning a truck would pull up onto my
driveway loaded with workers and material. Each laborer would take a
handful of boards and nails from the truck and tack this wood onto my
house. He would then go back to the vehicle, get another collection of
material and add it to whichever part of my house caught his fancy. The
process would continue until bedtime. The workers would then go home
and come back the next morning for another day of work. This cycle would
repeat itself every day for as long as I lived in the house. I would hate to
think what my house would look like, or whether it would even be a house,
or how long I could stand living amidst the noise and the dust. However,
this is the method by which automatic thought is programmed. You see
now why I refer to this aspect of thought as a storage shed and not a house.
Now suppose that the same truck came to my door with the same
workers and the identical material and I told everyone to carry all of the
stuff into the storage shed out back. Suppose that I then went into the shed,
pulled out what I liked and gave it to the workers to place where they saw
fit.B Obviously, the results would be much better. The final structure would
have quality, and I would probably enjoy living in it. This is what it is like
to build an internal world. Of course, the downside is that I have to sort
through the material and I have to decide which elements are needed for
each stage of construction.
So, how does one build an internal world? What are the rules of mental
construction? How does one sort through building material and how does
one know what goes where? The reason I chose to call this volume A
Programmer’s Guide to the Mind is because these are the types of
questions which I would like to answer. Now that we understand enough
A The Contributor person is especially driven to find an area of expertise in
which he can be „the expert.‟ While specialization solves the problem of
uniqueness, I suggest that it often leads to limited knowledge and restricted
skills. Later on we will examine how one can specialize without becoming
narrow-minded.
B Yes, I mean to say it this way. See the next section.