Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

We all want to be happier, healthier, better people. But only a few grasp that all of our highest aims can be reached by placing our focus directly on our minds.

In the past, we humans have learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us.

Kaizen is a Japanese term often used in business, meaning continuous change for the better - an ongoing endeavor for incremental optimization.

When you have cultivated mindfulness, life becomes richer, more vivid, more satisfying, and you don’t take everything that happens so personally. Attention plays a more appropriate role within the greater context of a broad and powerful awareness. You’re fully present, happier, and at ease, because you’re not so easily caught up in the stories and melodramas the mind likes to concoct. Your powers of attention are used more appropriately and effectively to examine the world. You become more objective and clear-headed, and develop an enhanced awareness of the whole.

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.

Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; Then you can move toward health.

The strength of a person’s spirit [can be] measured by how much truth he could tolerate… to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened.

When you insist on finding the real truth first and learning to love it second, you can become the master of your own cognition.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with yourself. And like any relationship, it will degrade if you don’t ever dedicate quality time to it.

The unexamined life is not worth living

The key to finding out which of your values are truly yours is the process of taking a philosophical wrecking ball to them and seeing what refuses to fall.

If you aren’t finding uncomfortable truths about your values, you haven’t gone far enough. If you or your groups consider an issue to be obvious, ethically simple, and taboo to question, questioning it is exactly what you must do.

Dopamine is the craving and the compulsion which causes us to take another hit or try our luck on the slots one more time. It has no obligation to deliver on its promise, and very often, it doesn’t.

In order to attain genuine fulfillment, we have to learn to quit trusting our wants as valid indicators of what will genuinely satisfy us. If we could learn to ignore our desires, or better yet, use them, and understand the real mechanics of satisfaction, we could take our well-being out of the hands of chance and maximize it.

Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly. It is impossible to put the pieces together if you do not have in your head the idea of the whole… The bowman must first know what he is aiming at: then he has to prepare hand, bow, bowstring, arrow and his drill to that end. Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target. No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbour.

Value intuitions and desires can be easily confused. Both could be described as preferences of an affective nature, but they are different in meaningful ways. When you reflect on your values, you don't feel a sense of craving, a motivational force pulling you toward them. They are always there, but unlike desires, they allow you to neglect them if you choose. Desires are the screams you can't ignore, but values are the whispers it is often hard to notice.

Wisdom allows you to understand that investing in your education is probably a better means to becoming a billionaire than investing in lottery tickets. But even more crucially, wisdom allows you to question whether becoming a billionaire is a worthy end in the first place. The heart of the pursuit of wisdom is that you can be easily deceived about your own well-being.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and in a word, everything which is not our own doing. Things in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammeled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hindrance, dependent on others.

Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

The sage desires to have few desires.

[I] try always to master myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world.

Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.

We often long for other things which are out of our reach even though they are not, at least at the present moment, within our control. These misplaced longings often result from confusion over how much control we have.6 No adult suffers over the fact that he cannot simply spread his arms and fly, as this is unambiguously out of reach.

The faculty of desire purports to aim at securing what you want…If you fail in your desire, you are unfortunate, if you experience what you would rather avoid you are unhappy…For desire, suspend it completely for now. Because if you desire something outside your control, you are bound to be disappointed; and even things we do control, which under other circumstances would be deserving of our desire, are not yet within our power to attain. Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, within discipline and detachment.

Often the greatest barrier to serenity is too many desires for what we don’t possess and too few for what we do.

Much of the pain we experience is caused not by events we wish to avoid, but by the identity we wish to have. The desires which cause us to suffer when we are hit with a painful insult are the desires to be a competent, lovable, and valued individual. But by contemplating nonself, we can down-regulate all identity-based desires by reminding ourselves of the flaws with the entire self-construct when circumstances clash with these desires to be liked or respected.

The Stoics thought the primary reason we suffer is because we are unable to comprehend and love nature in its entirety. When we understand that everything that happens is causally determined, we free ourselves from the blame and resentment of ourselves and others and from the anxiety of trying to control fate. When we come to see that what we naturally view as bad is derived from our limited perspective, we can put a limit to our sadness. And when we understand that the permanence of our possessions, relationships, and souls for which we long is unattainable, we can learn to love what is permanent.

Frequent practice of moderate asceticism is a way of embedding into your mind the fact that your desires are not good indicators of worthwhile choices. When you act against those desires, your mind will learn from your behaviors and conclude that these things are not so desirable after all. Would anyone who thought pleasure was the ultimate good deliberately put herself in an uncomfortable position? Would anyone who thought social status was the highest good neglect his social media accounts? Would anyone who thought money was the highest good turn down, or even give away, a large sum of money? You teach yourself what is important to you through your behaviors, so behave wisely.

If you lack the ability to stabilize your emotions and feel at peace in the face of difficult circumstances, those emotions will hijack your plans to achieve bigger things.

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

If you force yourself to confront the bitter truths of this world and then go through life full of pain and pessimism, have the courage to call it what it really is: strength in one area and weakness in another. We must strive to cultivate intellectual maturity and emotional maturity simultaneously.

Though we only have one word for them, there are two very different meanings of “optimism.” Cognitive optimism is a distortion of the truth. The willingness to believe a desired outcome or belief is more likely than the evidence suggests. But emotional optimism has nothing to do with specific truths or outcomes in our lives. It is the highly adaptive attitude that all will be well regardless of the outcome. We must all aim to be cognitive realists and emotional optimists.

Desire for the present to be different from the present incites pain, but desire for the future to be different from the present incites action.

As you learn to exercise a high degree of control over your emotions, the arguments for unhappiness, pessimism, and emotional helplessness will become increasingly baffling to you.

Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.

The greatest remedy for anger is delay: beg anger to grant you this at the first, not in order that it may pardon the offense, but that it may form a right judgment about it - if it delays, it will come to an end. Do not attempt to quell it all at once, for its first impulses are fierce; by plucking away its parts we shall remove the whole.

Learn to view every frustration you encounter as a test of mental strength, and you will get better and better at maintaining your patience, levity, and control.

If you are willing to look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all.

Schadenfreude is the German word for delight in the misfortune of others. Many people relish the losses of other people and feel averse to their gains - sometimes even those they care about.

A good friend, and an adaptive individual, should genuinely delight in the successes of his friends. When your own values are the benchmark of your well-being, the only person you should be envious of is one which is more you than you are. And in this event, you will know what needs to be done.

Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.

If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.

The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.

When we fully understand that all things must end, we can learn to appreciate the finite amount of time we have with others and celebrate the end rather than repeatedly mourning the tragedy of impermanence.