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The mind is like a parrot – it repeats what it hears.
Repetition is how we learn. It is how we build the neuropathways of skills and habits.
Our mind is also very loopy. Think about your day. We follow a lot of routines. Our thought patterns are extremely similar day to day, thinking the same thoughts over and over, repeating the same words and phrases over and over.
“What needs to be done today?” - This is a phrase we say to ourselves daily.
“I like this, I don’t like that. This is nice/great/cool. This is OK/terrible/boring.”
And on and on. Same words, same phrases, all day.
When you hear a word out of the ordinary, like “heliotrope” or “permutation” or “ambrosia”, it jumps out because it is not part of your everyday speech. Those 'new' words we tend to notice, and … guess what else… repeat, of course. “Heliotrope… heliotrope… I like it … I don’t like.” And on and on. That’s how we put those interesting words into the loop.
The mind is “a parrot in a loop.”
This basically means two main things:
- The mind can be subtly conditioned or trained, enticed by “interesting words”, and thereby duped. This in turn means that we should not take our mind’s chatter seriously. It’s a parrot after all.
- It’s not original. Originality is a rare quality for the mind. In fact, original ideas usually arise when we get our minds to stop – when we get out of the loop.
And, all this talk about duping the mind reminds me of one of Mark Twain's famous phrases:
"It is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he's been fooled."
Ain't that true in today's world?
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