Explaining our brains autopilot function, perspective and why feelings of gratitude make us feel deeply happy...

By Tamar Groeneveld

Autopilot Function

People are mainly asleep, in a dream like state, trapped in a program set on autopilot function. 

Let me explain. Everything you have ever learned, by rote, instinct or osmosis gets recorded in your mind for ease of future use. Over time this becomes an integrated software program, an operating system, if you like, similar to Windows. It organises all your learned behaviour and automatically brings up the correct program for you to use in any given situation, similar to you starting up Word when you need to write a document or letter.

This operating system works in the background, constantly, on autopilot. You don’t ever have to think about it.

Because of this operating system, you function well, you can walk, talk, write, work, and remember where your car is parked… most of the time… on autopilot. This makes our day to day life functional. If we had to re-learn how to walk, talk, write, add, drive, every morning, our lives would be very impractical. With this operating system managing and bringing up all our past learnings when needed, we become functional in our day to day living without having to consciously think.

However…. This operating system doesn’t only work functionally; it has also recorded all our past emotional, intellectual, learnings resulting in our beliefs, truths and understandings about life. So our operating system has organised our beliefs based on past learnings and has an automatic in-built perspective on all things. This means we don’t even need to think about our perspective… This also functions on autopilot.

That’s where we start to run into problems. The perspective we live our lives from is very much based on our experiences and learnings from our younger years. These learnings came from the environment we were brought up in. We learned things through osmosis (1st two years of our life) observation, being told, growing up, being let down, time with our siblings, parents, teachers, peers, watching telly, going to church etc. Therefore if we were brought up in Scotland, in a strict religious family, as the only child of a Scottish Laird, we will have a very different perspective, different rules, different ideas, different truths than if we were born in the middle of the Sahara desert, with the Bedouin. 

Our perspective is not a carefully planned perspective, where we are able to pick and choose as children, deciding carefully what we wanted to incorporate in our autopilot perspective. Our perspective is really made up of a jumbled mass of learnings that have been integrated, ordered and assessed for purpose and use by our operating system, so that we are functional in society. Our perspective on life, the perspective we think is right, our truth if you like, has been built automatically out of the learnings that our environment afforded us as we grew up. Therefore our autopilot perspective is based on learned behaviour given to us by our environment and the teachings of others. 

Now this operating system is there to protect us and enable us to be functional, it is fully integrated into our physiology, especially our fight flight mechanism. What does this mean? It means that we don’t often think about our perspective as wrong, we don’t often question it. We just understand it to be true. Sometimes we can’t even understand why others would think differently. 

It is like this because at this stage in our evolution the main concern is functionality and survival. 

We need to be able to operate quickly in day to day situations and we need to be able to survive for the human race to continue to thrive.

With this in mind, an autopilot function that operates and manages all our past learnings and is able to use those learnings automatically to keep us safe and productive is an extraordinarily good mechanism to have.

Perspective

This is such a vital thing to examine because perspective is not real, it isn’t the truth.

Our perspective feels real to us. It feels like our truth, but is it? If our perspective was mainly given to us, absorbed by us, when we were young, than it is mainly made up of other people’s ideas, we’ve just absorbed those ideas as if they were the truth, it happens through osmosis really. We soak up the environment of our childhood and this becomes the perspective from which we see the world as a good, friendly place or a dangerous place, or a magical place etc. There are as many perspectives in the world as there are grains of sand on a beach.

The problem with our perspective being so engrained and set on our autopilot function is that we view the world from only this perspective, without even thinking about it. We can discuss other perspectives… But… in our day to day…we are mainly blind to any other perspective being active. We get lost in our perspective and this perspective dictates our reactions and actions, commands our emotions in situations, and conjures up the thoughts we have in our head about life in general. 

Quantum Mechanics tells us about there being infinite possibilities ‘all and every’ possible outcome is available to every possible situation. It is described as a wave of potentiality. A wave of infinite potential outcomes. It is the observer’s perspective that collapses the unlimited wave of potential outcomes into the outcome we experience. So… although every possible outcome is available, our autopilot perspective, built up of our beliefs and past learnings, dictates the outcome that we experience. Our perspective collapses the infinite possibility into the outcome that we experience. Therefore it is our ruling perspective, made up of all our beliefs and learnings, that forms the life that we live. This is happening constantly, every second of every day. 

The autopilot function that we have is extraordinarily helpful as it enables us to function with ease in normal day to day tasks, in fact we often function without even realising it, totally on autopilot. 

However, we are very much restricted by what our environment programmed into our autopilot function, during our younger years. We had no say about our environment when we were children. Therefore, it’s a bit of pot luck as to whether your autopilot function is mainly supportive or disruptive to you in adult life. You see there was no function, no barrier to entry that commanded you to absorb only positive and supportive memories, situation or learnings… So you formed your autopilot perspective from everything that was experienced.

Because this autopilot function is there to enable us to function effectively and to help us to survive, feeling happy, fulfilled or relaxed was not on the agenda. Therefore we can often end up feeling unfulfilled, shallow and lacking in some way. We can get feelings of ‘is this all there is to my life’, ‘there must be more’. This makes us strive more from that survival mechanism. I must need more… success, money, a bigger house, a fancy car, an amazing holiday to make me happy...

Taking it all for granted

Because of the nature of our autopilot perspective, we mainly take our lives for granted.

Why? Because, without realising it we get stuck in our autopilot functioning. 

Because we don’t need to, we rarely think outside of our ingrained thinking. We rarely try and see things from an opposing point of view. It almost hurts us to stray too far from our autopilot, why? Because it is designed to do all our thinking for us so that we can save a huge amount of time and energy. Reactions can be quick. And this is necessary for survival. This is the essential point of all this. We work most efficiently on autopilot because that is how we, as the human race, has survived. 

Because we are living within our own little autopilot world, we miss out on how magical our lives are. We take almost everything for granted as it’s already been engrained in the autopilot function. We only see what needs improvement because that is what is important for our survival. That which we already have achieved is done, it’s been integrated as learning, we can move on, that part is already in place. Our physiology, is geared towards survival, it is not geared towards seeing what is already sorted, what is already achieved. It only sees what we need to do next to continually secure our survival.

I think you get the point.

Happiness and feelings of joy don’t get a look in. To our instinct, happiness is a pointless time wasting expression. Striving for greater security, seeing what still needs to be achieved, is so ingrained in us that we take other things for granted. We don’t count our blessings naturally, instead we strive towards the next task, ignoring what is.

When you take things for granted, you are quite literally erasing, rubbing out your true wealth your true depth – your substance if you like.

It’s like walking around Venice with a blind fold on. You are in one of the most beautiful places in the world, a living museum of culture, art and architecture but you can’t see or appreciate any of it. You don’t recognise any of the beauty around you. You miss the glistering sun off the canals, the delicious aromas of Italian food, the stunning architecture, the vibrant colours and singsong beauty of the Italian language. 

It’s like never seeing the inheritance we have been given. Never acknowledging the effort others have put into the life we are currently living. If you are not recognising any of the beauty around you, if you are not experiencing all the good things in your life, it does not mean it’s not there, it just means you have been blinded by your own operating system. 

The problem is this…If you are blind to seeing, feeling, hearing what you have got in your life that is really good, then everyday happiness and enjoyment may well elude you. 

Just because it’s there, present in your life, if you do not recognise it is there, if you do not appreciate it, you only get a superficial benefit from it. A material benefit if you like. There is no depth. If you are not noticing, not recognising, not accrediting the simplest of things, which give your life depth, you tend to feel a sense of loss, a lack of purpose, perhaps a mild depression, your life is missing something. When you feel that your life is missing something you start searching for what it is missing. You have this sense that you are lacking in some way. All this can come from that lack of depth of meaning. Now the lack drives you, it must mean you need a new car, a new body shape, a new house, a new partner, a new business, more money, more acknowledgement, bigger better holidays…More… More… More… Yet, when you get the more, you realise that more wasn’t the answer…

Feelings of Gratitude can change everything

None of these things are bad in themselves, they can all be amazing and wanting them isn’t bad either, however, the why you want them is really important. Wanting the more because you presently feel lacking will mean the more won’t fill the gap… Because the gap is the superficial part. You still feel lacking. You still feel a little lost. Still no one understands you. You look for the depth you are lacking, that is all you see and it manifests its self in negative ways. No one understands me, why have I got so little and others have so much etc. 

You can heal that gap today. Then the more you achieve, the more you get, the More will have a different affect. You will actually see it and feel extraordinarily grateful; you will be filled with happiness and wellbeing. 

The underlying feeling of lack is generally created from a ‘take it for granted’ attitude. 

If you are ignoring what you’ve already got, what you’ve already achieved, what others do for you, what society has done for you in the past and in the present and will do in the future, what nature does for you every single day. If you take all the good stuff for granted… You are blind to everything that is helping you every single day… You are literally erasing from your mind the miracles that surround you. You are literally robbing yourself of the blissful feelings of happiness and fulfilment that you could be experiencing on a day to day basis. By alerting yourself to things that are really working well in your life… Things that you might take for granted but if they were not their your life would really be difficult…By becoming conscious in your thinking about your life… You can take yourself out of your autopilot function and see consciously everything that is hugely wonderful…You start to notice the true wealth that surrounds you… The huge wealth that you presently wield… You become conscious of everything that is good in your life… right now…this very second… without changing a thing… And when you do this you suddenly become extraordinarily grateful and have a deep sense of inner joy and outer happiness…

When you are genuinely grateful, you uncover one of life’s biggest secrets…

Feelings of gratitude are the compound interest happiness uses to thrive and grow.