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Hacking Mind, Part 1 - The Three Basic Laws

We associate experiences and actions with pain or pleasure, and from these associations come the self-created, secondary rules that govern our daily lives. I call them secondary not because of their importance, but because they are derived from factors such as culture, individual heritage, physical condition, social status, and environmental factors (including astrological factors, according to traditional medicine), whereas the primary rules are the same for the human species as a whole.

The children, for example, of parents who drown their inner and outer conflicts in alcohol, will develop rules that they hope will insure the recognition of their individual significance. For instance, "if you care about me, you will always give me your full attention". Sometimes a rule like this will get a young person in deep trouble because the person giving their full attention to them may not have their best interest in mind when doing so - they may recognize the appreciation and are fully prepared to take advantage of it.

All of these internal rules can be explored by the individual for their own betterment, but more often than not, people are hypnotized by conditioning into believing that self examination needs to be left to the "experts" who basically make you explore these things yourself while they watch and charge money. At the same time, these unspoken rules are damaging relationships and success in the counselors' lives as well.

So what happens when pain and pleasure go beyond their basic meanings and are expanded to encompass such ideas as social status, peer pressure and personal possessions?

We have situations in which the glamour of a situation is mistaken for pleasure. In drug addiction, the addict thinks that the circumstances and situations in which they are involved are pleasurable: the acts of dodging the authorities, giving parents the finger and telling their religious and social upbringings to shove it - all these things are pleasurable, but only because they have fallen for the idea that this sort of activity is something that gives their lives depth of meaning. Where does this come from? Well, it might come from the metaphoric idea that defiance is freedom, and freedom is pleasure. I don't think I need to go into the more fundamental metaphors that build this thought pattern, but it is one of the basic concepts that have motivated political movements throughout the centuries, all over the world. So where does the pattern of drug dependence go? Form an act of defiance accompanied by euphoria, the body becomes dependent on the drug in order to feel normal, because when the body begins to detoxify from the drug, it is a painful experience, and the number one rule is to AVOID PAIN. So rather than accept the short term pain of detoxification, all sorts of excuses (new rules) are created to continue the addiction; the only pleasure has become a simple matter of obeying the first rule.

How about the person who is in love with love, but has developed a rule that "if you love me, you must always believe me"? What happens the first time they blurt out the story of the weirdest thing they have heard about or have experienced personally? Their partner of the moment may have a sudden look of incredulity on their face, as is common in these situations, and the rule starts sending off the signal "he does not trust me" or "she does not love me". Now the mind begins to develop an association with that person and lack of trust, therefore, the minute an excuse arises, this mistrust is ready to create a non-existent situation that not only damages the relationship with others but the relationship with the self, because the statement "I am not trusted" or "I am not loved" simplifies itself into a rule like "I am not worthy of trust" or even more simply "I am no good".

So here we have the progression from pain and pleasure to the internal rules of behavior, or the "transaction layer" program. Now what we need to do is figure out how to intercept those associations with pain and pleasure before a rule can form, or if a damaging rule has been discovered, how to break the association with that rule and re-associate it with something that is actually beneficial to the self and to others.