Okay, welcome back. In this section, we're going to go over the three major kinds of personal illusions. We've been talking a lot about illusions and how to disillusion ourselves get rid of those illusions. So the three major kinds are one, we think we know other people, too. We think we know ourselves. And three, we think we understand the world.

Let's go through and let's break these down one by one. So, we think we know other people know, we know what other people tell us. We used to say in treatment. If you read the entire person's chart, all their history from start to finish, you met with their families, you spent 30 days in treatment with them maybe having their for six months. They were open. They were honest, they were intelligent.

They devolves they, you know, you felt like they should All their secrets with you. If you knew anything, like one, two or 3% about that person, you had absolutely crushed it. Why? Because it's hard to know a whole person just from a little bit. And we only know what other people tell us. We try to make ourselves look good.

So we say certain things. We don't say other things, certain things we believe, but they're not true. Certain things we believe are true that we present but they're not true. We've talked a lot about that. So we don't really know other people. Hell, we don't really know ourselves at a fundamental level.

Next is we see through our biases, everything is filtered. There's a filter between me and you So there's me the filter, and then you have to look through that filter. And then everything you say back comes through that filter. Everything is warped as it goes out. And everything is warped as it comes back in. It's like it's been encoded twice.

You'll never get the right information back. The next reason we think we know other people we really don't is we often see what we want to see. We idealize people or we villainize people. Conversely, we see what we want to see. Remember confirmation bias? Isn't that seeing what you want to see?

Guess what? We don't just do that with ideas. We do it with people. It's one of the most common things we deal with. We also distort what we know about other people with our history. in what context are they in our lives?

How are they affiliated with us where they helpful, were they hurtful? What was their first impression? There's tons of ways that we start with our history, our background, who we are, colors, who they are. Remember, we see the world as we are not as it is. We just start with our own Bs, our belief systems, that's our major filter, and just the way we look at the world, but the way we explain it to ourselves, we're gonna do a section on that later on explanatory styles. we distort with our self esteem.

Sometimes we like people better because they make us feel better about ourselves. Sometimes we like people less because they don't make us feel as good about ourselves. And sometimes we completely dislike people for no other reason than they don't make us feel good about ourselves. A lot of times is because they're better than we are in some way, shape or form. We take that as a personal offense miscommunicate miscommunication. One of the strangest things to understand is Psychology is that it's virtually impossible for two humans to communicate and have good communication.

We used to do a talking feather thing in groups, and we did it largely with couples. And these couples had been together 1015 2025 3040 You know, sometimes even 50 years, they could literally complete each other sentences, but they had huge miscommunications, you know, we would do, we would do an exercise called the talking feather. I would give one of the couples say, the wife, the talking feather, and say, I want you to have a conversation with your husband just talked for like 30 seconds, give them a one idea, one concept. One thing you want to communicate, and then hand him the feather. Now he can't talk about you got the feather, you can't talk but he's got the feather. So you're going to talk uninterrupted for 30 seconds.

Then you get it when you're done, you know, practically 30 seconds, you're gonna pass it over to him, and he's going to tell you what you just said. at each point where he makes an error, I want you to correct them. And then I want you to hand them back to feather. On average, they would have to go back and say the same thing and repeat it for the person and go back and forth. 678 times on average, they'll say seven times on average, for the person to have got it right. Once.

This is with people that felt they knew everything about everybody, they totally knew each other. They've been with each other. They knew each other better than any other human being outside themselves in the whole world, in horrible communication. Here's horrible communication. I have a dog. You think you understood what I said?

Right? Pretty simple communication. I got a dog. Yeah, Mr. Paul, I understand. He said, No, you don't. What color is my dog?

How much does my dog weigh? What breed is my dog? Is my dog alive or dead? Good dog or bad dog, you know nothing about my dog. You're not even picturing the right dog. So we think we communicated, but we didn't.

We had more miscommunication and actual communication. There was about, you know, five words that I said, and we had about 37 miscommunications. So miscommunication happens over and over and over. We always layer our story upon your communication. If you tell me anything like a dog. Hey, Mr. Paul, I got a dog.

I go great. What do I immediately do? I picture my dog or my, you know, algum ation of a dog. You know, my theme of a dog. The way that I see a dog, my dog template, literally. It's a miscommunication.

We do this 1000 times with everything. Somebody says, Oh, my girlfriend just broke up with me. And I said, Oh, I know just what that's like. I've had several girlfriends and they left me and it was just awful. No, I have Paul's experience of a girl leaving me. You tell me about it.

And I try to figure out where it's just like what I went through. And when you say something that triggers something in me, I say, You felt just like me. Now, it might have even been close, but it was not the same. You can even take two people and you can prick them both with a pin in the exact same spot and they don't feel the same pain. This is how hard it is to communicate in any way shape or form and have it be identical between two people. So lots of miscommunications.

I think I've said enough about that and they drive on false associations. We associate certain things with people that aren't really true. We might think somebody is really nice because we saw them hold the door for a person. Well, maybe that was his boss and that's why he was being nice. Maybe normally doesn't do that. Maybe slams doors in people's faces.

We don't know. So, people do various behaviors, and then we kind of grade it. And then we assume they're right. And we make false associations over and over and over again. So we don't really know other people. We think we know ourselves.

Not really, we have a lot of illusions Why? Remember, we talked about the imprint period, during then and be on that. We believed a lot of what other people told us whether it was true or false, whether it was right or wrong, whether it was a good source or bad source. Next, we see through our biases, we've talked about this over and over again. So I hope that you're beginning to understand what a filter is, and how many different ways that it works. All these personal illusions that we're talking about right now are various forms of filters.

We often see what we want to see which is what it's a bias. It's a filter. Let in what I want. And I don't let in what I don't want. This is a defect of your brain, which gives you the wrong information, because it's trying to protect you and make you feel better. Remember, we move towards pleasure and away from pain.

Your brain does that. So when you have painful memories, it tries to move away from them. When you have pleasant memories, it tries to move towards them. When people say nice things about you, you try to absorb it. When people say negative things about you try to move away from it, you're rejected. This helps your body your brain to boost your self esteem, which isn't a bad thing.

But in doing so, it's giving you a massive amount of false information, and you don't even realize you're doing it. Next, we distort with our history. I remember one comedian, he said I've had a pretty good life. Well, it's not entirely true. I have an editing process in my brain. And whenever there's something negative, I like to snippet out, and I leave it on the cutting room floor.

So I don't know if I had a great life. But I did some amazing things with editing. That is so funny. And that is so true. That's your positive use of your brains editing tool. You literally do do this.

The comedian was saying it is if it were something funny, but it's something that's true. Matter of fact, it's so true. That's why everybody laughs It's so true. It's what it's funny. We start with our belief system. I think that one's fairly obvious because most of that is a distortion in and of itself.

So that's the ultimate filter. We just start with our self esteem. Remember, we're always going to protect our self esteem. We do it as if we were protecting ourselves because we are we are our self esteem. So we'll distort things to make our self esteem healthier and to protect it. We think it's part of us.

It's actually a defect. We'll talk about that later. We can't see ourselves. So we think we know ourselves. But go ahead and do a presentation on stage. See if you know yourself.

See yourself on tape. even listen to yourself on an audio recording. You know, the first time somebody hears themselves on audio, they're usually horrified. Unless they just had the most beautiful voice ever. They're horrified by the sound of their own voice. And they're like, No, you know, the tone.

The cadence is the same. But that's not me. That's not my voice. That doesn't sound anything like I sound in my head and it sounds horrible. I hope to Hell, I don't sound like that. And you do.

And it's not horrible. It's only horrible to you. You're the only one that cares. That's the ego again, that's the self esteem. So we can't see ourselves. We can't see how we look.

You know, I just had people come up to me. They said, Paul, you okay? You know, you look really depressed. And I'm like, I don't know, I can't see my face. What do you see? I thought I was relaxed.

Was the one time it wasn't feeling bad all day. It wasn't nervous. I wasn't uptight, I was feeling relaxed. And you took that as horribly depressed because you know, your face kind of sag in your head was down your shoulders down. That's also known as complete relaxation. So, we can't literally see ourselves, we don't know how we look to other people.

We don't know how much facial expression we give off or fail to give off. We're just all guessing we don't practice our facial expressions in the mirror. We can't see ourselves. And finally, and I think everyone will agree this is true. We both hide and distort our pain. We deflect it.

Why do you think muscular tension is that you distorting your pain? physical, mental pain becomes locked in the muscle and that becomes what? physical pain. It's one of the ways you distract yourself. That's how somatic disorders start. Soma is a Greek word just means body, Soma, somatic disorders, the pain of the brain.

Going into the body, that mind body connection. we distort our pain. We start our pain we tell ourselves It's worse than it is. Oh my god is the most horrible thing that's ever happened in the history of man. This only happens to me. Poor me.

We hide pain. We talked about that we, we hide it, we suppress it, we cut it out, we put it on the editing room floor. So we don't even truly know ourselves. Plus, most people can't remember back to what the imprint period. You don't even know why you are the way you are. Because you weren't there.

Cognizant, watching and remembering during the imprint period. Even if you have memories of that time. You don't remember accepting or rejecting anything you don't remember when you learned every little thing you know, there's only 100 people with a What do they call it? eidetic memory like that. There's 101 in the entire world. So that is new.

Matter of fact, I know you don't know my about yourself. Because a you're human in be you're taking this course if you already thought you knew everything, you wouldn't be taking the course those people missed the course. And those that people probably know, far less about themselves than you, you are at least self aware enough. This is the first understanding of a truly intelligent person, then I don't know what I don't know. So maybe I should go find out. That's about as intelligent as a human being ever gets that to you.

Congratulations. Three, we think we understand the world. Again, because we believe what other people tell us, we get our information about the world through two sources, and they're horrible. One, other people and outside sources giving us information about the world. They all have agendas. They lie, they have their own distortions.

They don't completely understand reality and then they're repeating it to us. They're wildly biased And then they give to us. This is before people even, you know, trying to be negative or like they just they can't help themselves. Second, we believe what we see what we tell ourselves what we internally tell ourselves, we don't realize we're a sample of one. I would tell this to my psychology students all the time I said, Don't trust your own experience. Why?

Because your sample of one in a sample of one is no damn good. Statistically. You can't say anything in general, based on one sample, and that's all you have. You have one life, you know an awful lot about that life. You're the leading expert on that life. But it does.

It tells you nothing statistically, about the rest of the world. You just assume that that's a massive assumption. Think of this way statistically. If my Experience is real, and therefore matches everybody else's. Everybody else is an adult, married, white 54 year old male with no kids. And three pooches.

Okay, well, that's not right. That's instinctively wrong. But but that's my experience. It can't be wrong because my experience, we think because it's our experience that it can't be wrong. We saw all these things. We heard all these things.

We put all this logic together. Therefore it has to be right and it has to be true. Otherwise, we're What? We're insane. Well, that's the other first realization of intelligent person, you are a little crazy. What's a crazy person?

Somebody holds illusions and believes them to be true. That's the definition of a crazy person. They don't get the true reality. Isn't that a crazy person? Yes. Who's that?

That's all of us. So we have horrible sources of information. Next, we often see what we want to see we've talked about that We just start with our history, we layer our story. History literally means Michael Jackson had a album by this title. He called it history, or his story. That was the name of the album, his story.

That's what history is, you put your story on top of what happened. And you call that what history. They say history's already always written by the victor. Why? Because they're going to have a different version. They're going to give you their version because they won because they get to tell the story.

They don't tell the truth. They tell the story. And again, I want to let you know this. This doesn't mean that you're lying to yourself, even though you are, it doesn't mean that you're lying to yourself. You have a story that you believe to be true, based on what you've seen and heard, with all these limitations that every human has, and that becomes your story. But I want you to know, it's just a story.

We're going to talk more about this later. Okay. We of course, to start with their own belief systems the false Association This is why we can't understand the outside world for the same reason we can't understand the inside world. We make serious logic errors. Remember, only like one person in the hundreds ever had a single course on critical thinking, nevermind multiple courses. And everybody actually makes probably more logic errors than logic corrects, you know, correct logic assumptions.

Because we don't know enough about logic. We're not really trained in this area. Strangely, in America, we do not teach people to think. And finally, and I talked about this, I guess I got ahead of myself. We're a sample of one and a sample of one is no good. Okay, folks, that's it for this section on personal illusions.

I want you to kind of go over this you know, you own this course of go through Pick back through, see how these are true. And I want you to carefully examine the the areas where I said something, or you see him on the slides and you say, I don't think that's true. That's the one you need to work on. Because I can guarantee you, this has been like researched. Every single one of these is true. If you're not seeing it as true, somehow you're blocking yourself somehow you can make a new distinction.

This might be where you write in and you say, hey, Professor Paul, can you help me out with this one? Okay, that's it for this section. And I'll see you in the next training.