The Drunken Monkey lives inside your head just beneath your conscious awareness whispering painful, paranoid, enraged, vengeful, confused, conflicted and often catastrophic guidance through an unconscious flow of myths, symbols, images, voices, feelings, and thoughts, flowing day and night through your body and mind—a suicidal back seat driver, clamoring for control of the steering wheel of your life. When the drunken monkey speaks, no matter how insane the thought, your brain has no choice but to listen. Up until now, you have been the drunken monkey’s prisoner, and you are living on a planet of prisoners whose minds are plagued and paralyzed by the drunken monkey’s distorted, terrorized thinking.
The operating system of the drunken monkey is based on myths. Myths structure the deep, unconscious brain, and thereby inadvertently structure the conscious, self-aware mind, and what we call our conscience. We are rendered helpless by these deep and powerful myths, the cute little fairy stories with teeth, that the drunken monkey seamlessly weaves into an unconscious nightmare of fear, anxiety, shame, blame, and guilt that makes life for billions of people nearly unbearable.
What we call the conscious mind, the new brain, is a relatively recent development in human evolution. As the prefrontal cortex and cortex evolved, they gave us the ability to build large social structures for mutual benefit, safety, and support. With our self-aware mind, we recognize and bond with people in our immediate group. We know when we hurt another’s feelings or break moral codes—seeing the consequences of our actions through the eyes of others; we feel their emotional pain. We can also scan the world around us for potential threats to the group’s well being. By having a self-aware mind and conscience, we can contemplate our own life, lessons, and destiny of death.
The new brain focuses on relationships, imagination, thinking, problem solving, possibility, potential, resource sharing, etc. The conscious mind interacts with stored memories and feelings, allowing us to learn, grow, adjust, adapt, and change our behaviors so that we fit in and thrive within our society. We have a biological drive to be part of a whole. However, an unintended consequence of the conscious mind is that it is weak when compared to the ancient brain. The old brain has highly developed neural pathways fighting for access to the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. The old brain dominates the new brain; the drunken monkey runs the show. The new brain is helpless to defend itself against the constant onslaught of the ancient symbolic language running rampant behind the scenes.
The language of the drunken monkey is myth and symbols, and our modern mind has been drugged, trapped, and programmed by myths and symbols thousands of years old that developed around the same time as the newer parts of the brain were firmly coming on-line. We have become slaves to our brains, and more accurately, the operating system developed by the drunken monkey to help us survive and not be annihilated by life.
Myths swim just beneath the surface of conscious awareness and are nearly impossible to catch. Even when we do see our myths, it is only for fleeting moments. They seamlessly slip in and out of our inner minds, constantly influencing our moment-to-moment experience whether we are awake or asleep. We don’t consciously perceive the myth’s symbols working on our psyche; therefore, releasing ourselves from the myth’s clutches is nearly impossible.
From the womb until our final gasp for breath, myths are cleverly implanted into the unconscious via cute little stories that mommy and daddy tell us about life. These stories comfort us, giving us the rules and laws that we need to survive and thrive in our culture. Myths compose the operating system of this human life and determine almost every decision that we make. We attribute the creation of this operating system, and the feelings within our conscience to God, but we have no idea that these feelings are actually composed of the energies from powerful myths, created by our ancestors, and passed down through the ages as absolute truth.
You must remember to ask the simple question, “Is this myth, this cute little story that mommy and daddy told me about life, actually serving me? For that matter, is it even correct?” Mommy and daddy can’t question because they have been commanded not to question by God’s law.
The power of myth came to me through meditations, insights, client sessions, and personal experiences. I asked myself the simple questions, “Why is it that some things change and other things don’t? What within holds on tightly to certain beliefs? Who is really running the show in my life?”
Surprisingly, the answer I stumbled upon radically changed my life forever. I recognized it was not God running the show, but rather, my brain. God, it seemed, had little if any influence over the brain. I discovered that the deepest parts of my brain, brain stem, and limbic system were aware and communicative, but beyond my conscious perception. These parts of the brain behaved like a drunken monkey wrestling for control of my daily perception and experience, often winning out over my conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is a huge insight because the ancient brain does not use verbal language, but rather uses symbols that are not recognized by conscious awareness
I suddenly saw everything in life as a symbol of something else—a secret code of the ancient reptile brain. I began discerning and understanding this simplistic yet powerful language with my conscious new brain. I was shocked by the discovery that, though I thought I was in control of my life, there was an alternate life running a majority of my experience, and it didn’t want to change. That part wanted chaos, pain, suffering, guilt, and shame. That’s all it knew. After two weeks of communication with these parts of my brain, fear disappeared from my life, replaced by creativity, peace, joy, and ease.
My basic guideline is this: people need their myths. So, use the myth if it serves you. When the myth traps you in a prison, limits your freedom, your finances, your ability to love, or your experience of pleasure and joy, when the myth affects your health, then drop the myth. Choose new myths that serve you. You can learn to wrestle back control of your life’s steering wheel from the desperate, chaotic grasping of the drunken monkey in your head.
All myths are stories, and all stories are incorrect—all of them. Myths, stories are guesses about the way things are from a very limited perspective of inherited or perceived truth. Expand your vision to encompass the possibility that you don’t have a clue, and neither does anybody else—especially the drunken monkey in your head.
If you are interested in
Lawrence
, he will present his meditation on an online conference space in July. At this free opportunity, you will virtually experience his work, as if you were participating in his workshop. Please contact Masaru, at info@atmanwellbeing.com for the details.
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