The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part III, Ch 12: Modifications of the Mind

Most of what you call "me" was born into you, poured into you as a child, or worn into you by your own past. You did not choose most of it, and none of it is fixed. The settings menu was never locked.

In brief: In this chapter I open up the three things that turn one shared human design into a different person. They are the tendencies you were born with, the conditioning poured into you as you grew, and the weight of what you have already done, your past karma. I show how each one fills the gap between what happens to you and what you do. I also show why none of them is good or bad in itself, and why seeing them is the first step to changing them.

At the end of the last chapter I handed you a question and promised this one would answer it. I had laid the mind out piece by piece: instinct, self, memory, intellect, and the late, strange thing called consciousness. I found that the pieces are built to a single plan in all of us. And I found that no two people the plan has ever made have come out alike.

Sit on a bus and look down the aisle. Each person there is working the same few parts you are, and not one of them is you. Something turns a single shared design into a different person every time it runs. That was the thing I had pointed at over and over in this book, without once stopping to open it. It is the whole of this chapter.

Three things on the screen. I have actually held the answer up to you once already. A few chapters back I showed you a phone. It stood for the screen each of us spends our life looking at instead of the world. And I told you there were three things written on that screen. What the device came with. What got loaded onto it later. And what running for years has done to it.

The three I named there were innate tendencies, acquired conditioning, and past karma. I am not going to lay them out again as though they were new to you. You have met them. What I never did, back when I named them, was open each one up and show you what is actually inside it. That is the work here. Less a fresh discovery than a careful inventory of three things you already half-know are running you.

And it is worth doing the inventory slowly, because of what these three actually are. Think of two phones off the same line. They are the same model, with the same factory settings, and they were even handed the same few starter apps by the same shop. Give them to two different people, and let two different lives happen to them. A few years on, they are not the same device at all. Different everything. That divergence, that slow drifting apart, multiplied across every human being who has ever lived, is these three modifications doing their work.

They are also what sits in the space I spent the last chapter on, and this is the part that matters most. That space is the gap between a thing landing on you and what you do about it. Mostly they fill that gap for you, before you have a say. They are the chains on the will I described in the chapter on freedom, looked at one link at a time. This chapter is the inventory of the chains. The next one is how to loosen them.

Neither good nor bad. One thing to hold before we start. None of these three is good or bad in itself. A modification is good if, in the long run, it keeps you and the people around you alive and well. It is bad if it eats away at that. The same stubbornness that wrecks one life steadies another. So I am not handing you a list of faults to scrub off. I am handing you a map of what is steering. With it you can decide, in the few places where deciding is possible, which way to let it steer.

Here is the plainest picture of why the map is needed. A furious man stands in front of ten people and shouts. One shouts back. One goes quiet. One walks away. One starts, absurdly, to laugh. One tries to calm him, one agrees with him to make it stop, one has already stopped listening. Same man, same shouting, ten different lives coming out the other side of it.

The difference is not in the shouting. It is in the ten machines it landed on, each one modified into someone slightly different from all the rest. Learn to read the modifications, and you can begin, a little, to choose your own response instead of merely producing it. That is the entire promise of this part of the book.

The first layer: what you were born with. Start with the layer that was there before you were. The factory settings.

These are the innate tendencies: the programs you were born running, the ones no one had to teach you. A newborn breathes and pulls at the breast with nobody showing it how. The hand comes off the hot pan before any thought of heat arrives. These are not skills you acquired. They are the species talking through you. They are an inheritance reaching back past your parents and theirs, down through the animals and, if you follow it far enough, into the plants. I gave you the headline version of them earlier: the urge to eat, to mate, to guard what is yours, to fight off what threatens you, to look out for yourself first.

Here is the fuller set. I give it because the particular shapes of these programs explain a great deal about why people do what they do. They also explain the trouble the programs cause when they run unwatched.

The pull to stay alive. Underneath all of them is the one I keep returning to: the pull to stay alive. Every other inborn urge is a branch off this root. It is a magnificent engine and a dangerous one, because it does not switch off when you are safe. Long after the body has everything it needs, the program keeps whispering: more, store more, fence off more. A person with no threat anywhere near them will work themselves ragged, accumulating against dangers that exist only as a feeling. This is where greed comes from. It is survival mistaking itself for need, long after the need is met.

I know the pull from the inside. There were years when I kept piling up provision against a future that was not, on any honest look, actually under threat. And I called it being responsible. The work is to retrain the engine to answer to need and not to greed, because the engine does not police itself. The strong, running it hard, pile up so much that the weak cannot get even the little their own survival requires. So defend your future, by all means. But do not do it by stepping on someone else's.

And note the strange thing the same engine can do. A person can override even this, the deepest program in the building, and spend their life to save another's. I showed you in the last chapter where that override comes from, so I will only remind you of the shape of it. It is a self drawn wide enough that another life now sits inside the line. Protecting that other person has simply become protecting yourself. The woman who gives a kidney to a stranger is not fighting her survival instinct. She is running it on a self that has grown large. Those people are not malfunctioning. They are the program at its best.

Pleasure and pain. Sitting close to survival is the engine that drives almost everything we do day to day: we reach for pleasure and we flinch from pain. Pleasure is roughly what it feels like when survival is going well. Pain is roughly the alarm that it is not. The wiring obliges us to chase the one and dodge the other by whatever means are nearest. And we obey it our whole lives, mostly without noticing we are obeying.

There is a deep fairness built into it. The more pain a thing costs you, the sweeter its resolution, the moment when the pain is over. So without some pain there would be no real pleasure and, in the end, no growth at all. The two are a single instrument with two ends.

The thing worth learning is that you can take this half into your own hands. You can choose a pain now because you have seen the pleasure it pays out later: the hard study, the early morning, the difficult conversation. I have had to teach myself this more than once, badly at first. And there is no sin in the simple pleasures, taken in moderation. Chase them freely, as long as you are harming neither anyone else nor yourself.

The pull to stay asleep. The most dangerous of all the inborn programs is the quietest. It is the pull towards not-changing. It pulls towards keeping things as they are, not opening to a new idea, not spending the energy that growing costs. Everything alive tends to slide towards its lowest, cheapest state. In us, that slide shows up as the comfortable conviction that we already know everything worth knowing.

It is the program that keeps a person from ever taking a real risk. And it has an ugly chain of consequences. It feeds self-importance and ego, and a person sealed inside their own certainty stops being able to feel for anyone outside it. Call it ignorance, and understand that nearly every other failure in this book traces back to it.

There is only one cure, and it is the cure this whole book is, really, about. That cure is knowledge, patiently let in until the comfortable certainty cracks and you have to stand in front of the world as it actually is. The pull to stay asleep is strong precisely because staying asleep is free. Waking up costs energy. Pay it anyway.

Not born equal. Now the inborn program that the modern world handles worst of all. It is also the one I have to be careful not to soften, and I will not. We are not born equal. Most of the trouble starts with the soothing belief that we are: that every baby arrives carrying the same intelligence, the same gifts, the same everything. From that belief grows the idea of equality, which has cost millions of people a great deal.

A socialist, holding that all people are truly equal, ends up treating each one as replaceable. Each person becomes a unit, a thing you can swap for another thing. But no one is replaceable. Each person is genuinely unlike every other, born answering to the pleasure-and-pain machine in their own particular way. And so each one is fitted, whether they ever find it or not, to a role no one else can fill in quite the same manner.

Press hard on this and you find something most people would rather not hear: equality and freedom cannot both be had at once. Enforce sameness and you crush freedom. Protect freedom and people promptly become unequal again, because free people, being different, go in different directions and arrive in different places. The difference is not a defect to be corrected. It is the thing that keeps the species alive. It is the spread of types that lets some of us survive when the conditions turn, where a single type would all go under together.

So I would have you do the opposite of what you have probably been taught. Do not be ashamed of how unlike everyone else you are. Embrace it, treasure it, feed it. Every time we force people to think alike and speak alike, we steal the one advantage nature gave us. And we put the whole human project at risk to buy a feeling of fairness.

The rest of the factory set. Those four are the ones worth sitting with: survival, the pleasure-and-pain engine, the pull to stay asleep, and the fact of our deep unlikeness. But the factory shipped with more. You should know they are there, because each of them is steering somewhere under the surface.

You came into the world already wanting to pass yourself on. Your genes reach for a kind of borrowed immortality through a child. It is a clean enough urge, as long as we do not crowd the planet past what it can carry and starve out the other lives we share it with.

You came in already trusting, before you had any proof to trust on. Nearly every bond between people, and a surprising amount of business, runs on trust rather than evidence. A mother knows her child for certain. A father takes it on faith. But the same open hand is why we so easily swallow whatever the loudest screen tells us. That is why you must check a thing against several sources before you believe it. And it is why trust is better given to people who have earned it by what they do than to anyone who merely says the right words.

You came in an optimist, too, wired to believe it will work out. That is a gift, right up until it walks you into the casino or the credit card or the loan you cannot really repay. There you are, betting against odds you know are against you, because some hopeful program insists you will come good in the end. Be a hopeful person, but a careful one. And remember that the bad days have always passed before, and the better ones have always come.

You came in a creature of habit. You lay down a worn road in yourself through sheer repetition, until an action stops being a choice and becomes almost an instinct. It is the same trick that let our hungry ancestors hoard food against winter. And now, running unchecked, it has us stripping the earth bare past any need, threatening the very lives our own lives depend on.

And you came in wanting, above almost everything, to be free: to live and speak and feel and think as you please. That want is usually overruled by the older, deeper pull to band together. This is because surviving alongside other people simply works better than going it alone. You trade your weaknesses for their strengths, in the give-and-take I have called mutualism all through this book.

Sometimes that banding curdles into the strong lording it over the weak, with some people seemingly built to push and others to give way. In that case too, the even exchange is still the better way. The one exception is where two people have knowingly chosen to arrange the power between them otherwise, for their own reasons, which harms no one. The hunger for freedom only really surfaces once survival has been made easy and the band is no longer needed.

One more, and I will return to it near the end of the book. You came in needing a purpose. The only purpose nature ever actually issued you was to survive and make more of yourself. A modern life accomplishes that almost without your noticing. It leaves a strange, empty-afternoon feeling that something is missing, a hole where the purpose used to sit. That hole has to be filled now with a meaning you choose, rather than one you were handed.

Look back at the furious shouting man, and you can read him now. His aggression is just these programs running him, with nobody home to hold them. And here is the catch that sets up everything still to come. Every one of these tendencies is in every one of us, and yet we are still not equal, still not the same. That is because the programs do not arrive at the same strength in any two people. And life turns some of them up and lets others go quiet, depending on what each of us is exposed to. The factory settings are universal. What life does with them is not.

The second layer: what got loaded. Which brings me to the second thing on the screen: everything that got loaded onto the device after it left the factory.

A newborn, I said in the earlier chapter, is close to an empty phone. The default programs are running, enough to keep it breathing and feeding, and almost nothing else. Then the loading begins, and it never really stops. Parents, teachers, friends, the books, the films, the customs, the faith or the absence of one, the particular corner of the world you happened to open your eyes in: all of it installs itself in you. It shapes what you value and how you carry yourself, mostly while you are too young to have any say in the matter.

This is acquired conditioning. I told you before the two true things about it that matter most. A great deal of it went in without your consent, and is therefore not your fault. And all of it is, now, yours to fix. What I want to show you here is how it actually behaves once it is in.

How conditioning behaves. It behaves, more than anything, like an addiction. Take the way people bind themselves to a brand. A person buys into one company's world: its phone, its software, the whole walled garden. Before long they cannot imagine leaving. They keep buying only that, not from any fresh decision but because the wanting has worn itself into a groove. That is conditioning in miniature. It stops feeling like a thing you do and starts feeling like a thing you are. And prising yourself loose from it takes more will than you would believe for something so small. We pick up the deep ones the same way, only younger and without the receipt.

And the loading changes us by two different doors. Sometimes we walk in the front door on purpose. We try something new. If it pays out in pleasure the first time, we go back for more. If it does not, we usually leave it alone. That is why a first experience can decide the shape of years. And sometimes it comes in the back, with no decision at all. You simply marinate long enough in a set of values, a feed, a crowd, and you are quietly remade by them, without ever catching the moment it happened.

Either way, the lever is the same old pleasure-and-pain engine. And this is the hopeful part: it means that what was programmed can be reprogrammed, by the same mechanism, if you are willing to do it on purpose.

The shape of that work is not complicated, even when the doing of it is slow. First you have to catch the conditioning in the act and admit it is running you. Then you have to let in the new knowledge that shows you why it should go. Then you practise the better habit, patiently, until it has worn a groove of its own. And last, you hold the whole of it up against other ways of seeing, so it cannot quietly close over you again. The full practice is the next chapter's business. Here I only want you to see that the door is not locked.

Men, women and lovers. Some of what gets loaded is where our sense of ourselves as men and women, and as lovers, actually comes from. I want to walk through this carefully. It is the part people most often mistake for factory wiring, when it is in fact installed. The urge to reproduce, yes, is inborn. But how you go about it, and with whom, is not issued at the factory. It is shaped. For most of life's history the whole point of mating was the next generation. But a conscious creature discovers something the program never intended: the act is a pleasure in its own right, more often about the pleasure than about any child.

And once survival is more or less guaranteed, as it is for many people now, pleasure starts doing the steering. The range of ways people arrange their loving widens accordingly. Those arrangements, the ones outside the old default, are the work of acquired conditioning, not of inborn tendency. This is how I see it. I know most of the scientists who study sexual orientation see it differently. They have found no good evidence that who a person is drawn to is learned from the way they were raised. Most of them think biology, from genes to hormones before birth, plays a real part alongside life.

To see how it sorts, separate out two clusters of traits we can call the masculine and the feminine. They are loosely tied, by way of hormones, the first to men and the second to women. But the tie is only loose, because whatever the mix you were born with, life pushes it around as you grow. A person ends up some particular blend of the two. And the match that settles best is the one that balances the blend. A man who is, say, seventy parts the one and thirty the other fits most easily with someone weighted roughly the opposite way. The two of them together come out even.

Sometimes two people do not balance each other. Then the family that actually steadies may need more than two people in it. That is where households of three or more, in their various shapes, come from. They are the natural outcome of a balance that two could not strike. And once in a while a person is whole enough on their own that they need no one else to even them out at all.

This is also why I would ask you never to judge a human being by the body they are standing in. What we loosely call gender is not a fact of the flesh. It is a thing of the mind: a shifting blend of the masculine and the feminine within a person, together with everything life has conditioned into them. And it does not hold still. We are, at bottom, mental beings, and the body is not always an honest report of the mind inside it.

The plain biology is simple enough. There are two sexes, male and female, written in the chromosomes, with a handful of people carrying an unusual mix of them. My counsel is to accept the body you were given and not go meddling with the biology underneath. But where a person changes the outside of the body so that it tells the truth about the mind within, that I have no quarrel with at all. The point throughout is the same. The body is the device. Who is running it is a separate question.

Inherited poison. And some of what gets loaded is simply poison. I mean the prejudices, the contempts, the inherited hatreds that pass from one generation into the next. They do nothing but deepen the divisions between people and spread misery. These have to go, and the sooner the better, before they do more damage than they already have.

But they have to go the way all conditioning has to go: by a person choosing, from the inside, to be rid of them. You cannot beat them out of anyone from the outside. Force someone to drop a belief and you have not changed them. You have only buried it deeper and made an enemy. The change is real only when it is freely made.

The third layer: what you have done. The third thing on the screen is the one that explains the rest. It is the accumulated weight of everything you have already done.

Think again of those two identical phones. Suppose they were not merely the same model but truly twins. Suppose they were born with the same factory settings and handed the same early apps by the same hands. They would be identical twins, in other words, matched on the first two modifications. They will still, in time, become different people. And it is this third thing that makes the difference. It is the one I called dark mode in the earlier chapter: the setting that quietly recolours everything else on the screen. Your past actions are that kind of setting.

Every thought you have thought, every word you have spoken, every thing you have done has left its mark and set something running. This is what the old word karma actually means. (The word is Sanskrit, and at its root it simply means action.) And it answers, like everything else in this book, to the law of cause and effect I laid out earlier. There is no escaping that law and no special exemption from it. What you put into the world comes back around to meet you.

I want you to see what karma is in the plain terms I have been using all along. Remember the threads of cause and effect I described. A single cause runs forward into its effects, and a whole life is the place where countless such threads cross. Your past karma is simply the threads you yourself set running, seen now from the inside, pressing on this present moment. The actions are done. The threads are out there in the world, branching and rejoining, and they arrive back as the conditions of your today. Which is why we have so little real command over the present: the present is mostly the bill for a past we can no longer reach.

That is the precise sense in which the three modifications together hold the will captive. There are the tendencies you were born with, the conditioning poured into you, and now the long sentence of your own past actions. All of them decide more of you than you would care to admit. Freeing the will, which I spent a whole chapter on, just means loosening, one by one, the grip of these three.

My own version. This is the place to be honest about my own version of it. For a long time I thought of my worst habits as failures of will. They were choices I kept making wrongly, I told myself, and I was a man who simply needed to try harder. I would brace myself, swear off the thing, and lose. Then I would brace myself again, and lose again, and read my repeated losing as weakness of character.

It was not, mostly. It was a road worn so deep into me by years of repetition that the will arriving fresh each morning was no match for it. I had mistaken a piece of accumulated karma, a groove cut by my own past actions, for a free choice I was failing to make.

The day I understood the difference was the day the thing actually started to give. That was because I finally stopped fighting it as a moral failing. I started treating it as what it was: a setting that could, with patience, be changed.

For it can be changed. That is the whole reason for telling you any of this. Whether your life becomes a kind of heaven or a kind of hell is built, here, out of what you accumulate. Good actions compound into a life that mostly works. Harmful ones compound into one that mostly does not. The world quietly blesses the first and quietly charges for the second.

You do not get free of this by killing off your wants and desires. You are a creature in a material world, and you will go on wanting things, and that is fine. You get free of it by watching. That means bringing awareness to the thought and the word and the act as they happen, since the world outside you is mostly a mirror of the one inside.

Some of what you have set running lies dormant for years and ripens only later. Becoming aware of it all takes time, and undoing its pull takes longer. But it is not impossible. With steady practice a person really can stop being run by a past they cannot change, and start living in the present instead.

When someone harms you. A few hard cases follow from this, and I am not going to flinch from them. When someone harms you, defend yourself. Do it in the least harmful way the situation allows, but defend yourself. What you do not need to do is take revenge. Forgive them instead. And understand that the forgiveness is a favour you are doing yourself, not them. It is how the wound moves from the front of the mind, where it keeps cutting, down into the deeper places where it can finally begin to heal. Forgive, but do not forget. Keep the lesson.

Most people who hurt others are simply asleep, acting and reacting with nobody awake at the controls, the way I described the sleepwalking machine before. Now and then one of them hurts you badly enough that you start to plot a way to hurt them back. Do not. It only drowns you in the same depths they are drowning in.

People who do real evil are already building their own downfall, one action at a time. Leave them to the bill that is quietly accumulating in their name. What I called cosmic intelligence, the lawfulness running underneath all of it, settles those accounts more reliably than your vengeance ever could. So ignore what it costs you in the short run, and do the right thing for the plain reason that it is right.

And because the settings can be changed, you are never finished, never fixed in place. A person can recondition their own brain on purpose, as their life comes to require it. If you have spent your years as a scientist and find your real hunger is to make art, you can become the artist through steady practice. And you do not thereby throw the scientist away. You only shift where the weight falls. It is less like stripping a car down to nothing and rebuilding it from new parts. It is more like taking the same car and changing what it is for, from the daily commute to the racetrack: the same machine, carrying a new spirit.

The mind is vast enough to be remade this way more than once in a life. Only remember that it behaves, here, exactly as the memory did a chapter ago. It keeps in good working order only what you actually make it use, and quietly lets the rest go slack. So whatever you mean to hold onto, you have to go on using.

The whole inventory. So that is the inventory: the programs you were born running, the ones loaded into you by everyone who reached you first, and the long weight of everything you have done since. Three things, braided together so tightly that most people spend a whole life mistaking their combination for a fixed and chosen self. They are not fixed, and they were mostly not chosen. The screen is yours. The settings menu has always been open. The very thing that makes you unlike every other person is those three modifications, mixed in a blend nobody else carries. It is also the thing you are allowed to reach in and change.

But knowing which settings are running you is not the same as knowing how to change them. The changing is a practice all its own. How to tame these three. How to quiet the storm they make, so that a person stops being ruled by what was poured into them and starts, at last, to live awake. That was the next thing I had to learn.

Words to Keep

• modification: one of the three forces, inborn, loaded in or self-made, that turn one shared human design into one particular person.

• innate tendencies: the factory settings, the programs you were born running, inherited from the species, such as the pull to stay alive.

• acquired conditioning: everything loaded into you after birth by parents, teachers, books, customs and place, mostly before you could have any say.

• karma: the threads of cause and effect set running by your own past thoughts, words and actions, now pressing on your present.

• greed: the survival engine mistaking itself for need, long after the need has been met.

• ignorance: the inborn pull towards not-changing, felt as the comfortable certainty that you already know everything worth knowing.

• mutualism: the give-and-take in which both sides gain, each trading their weaknesses for the other's strengths.

• masculine and feminine: two loose clusters of traits, partly tied to hormones, that every person carries in a blend life keeps shifting.

• gender: in this book, a thing of the mind: a person's shifting blend of masculine and feminine, plus what life has conditioned in.

• forgiveness: a favour you do yourself, letting a wound move from the front of the mind down to where it can heal.

• reconditioning: reshaping your own mind on purpose through steady practice, shifting where the weight falls rather than starting again from nothing.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes from my own observation and practice, not from any one book.

• The Indian teaching of karma: the old idea that every action sets consequences running that come back to the one who acted. I read it here in plain terms of cause and effect.

• Mutualism, the biologists' word for a partnership in which both sides gain. I use it all through this book for any give-and-take that works for both parties.

• Socialism, the political tradition this chapter argues with over equality and freedom.