The Emotion Machine

Every little detail in our environment can have an influence over our choices and behavior. Often we aren’t even aware of these details and how they influence us – it happens below the surface of our conscious minds.

Just as you can only see the tip of an iceberg floating in the ocean, we only see a snippet of what is actually going on inside our minds when we make a decision.

Becoming more aware of these unconscious influences can give us a deeper understanding of our own minds and some of the situational factors that can change the way we think and act.

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I remember as a young teen when I first heard the words, “Think for yourself and question authority.” It was a soundbite of Timothy Leary being sampled in the Tool song Third Eye – I was probably 13 or 14 at the time.

The swirling guitars and synthesized chaos of the song along with the inspiring words created an atmosphere that was probably as close to an “insightful” or “psychedelic” experience as anything else I had experienced up until that age. It felt meaningful and liberating.

And even today these words carry a lot of meaning to me. The mantra “think for yourself and question authority” speaks to a simple truth, which is: society isn’t always right, and you have to trust your own heart and mind at the end of the day, no matter what anyone else thinks.

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It takes years of conscious practice to undo all the negative conditioning we’ve been exposed to through our teachers, parents, family, friends, peers, and society as a whole. Of course, this doesn’t mean we never learn anything positive from these figures - we do - but we also learn a lot of unhelpful things that we need to unlearn.