During this life, you have a fantastic ability to lie to yourself about what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. Delusion is persistence in an incorrect belief after being shown sufficient evidence to disbelieve it. It is far too easy and far too common to live a life of self-delusion, especially in modern times which offer no shortage of substances, experiences, digital personas, and unmerited prosperity to paper over anything we’d prefer to ignore in ourselves, others, or the world.
Your brain is more powerful than you know, and it will engage in the most elaborate and irrational gymnastics to avoid selfincrimination. Self-incrimination is good, when accurate, because it identifies opportunity for improvement, and improvement always leads to greater joy. In order to consider things that might grant you greater joy, you have to navigate a maze of automatic subconscious reactions, any one of which is sufficient to completely shut down any chance for improvement. Your subconscious will generate reasons why you should ignore or turn away from invitations toward improvement with potential obstacles like these:
- “If this is true, what massive actions would I need to take to respond with proportional intensity?”
- “If this is true, I am a far worse person than I thought.”
- “What would this mean about all those sacrifices I made under a false pretense?”
- “How much good did I leave undone?”
- “How much harm have I caused to others?”
- “If this is true, then those bad things I’ve gone through (or done) are my fault.”
It is astonishing to realize how often humans intentionally delude themselves rather than improve themselves. Perhaps one reason delusion is favored over recognizing and addressing fault is because the dire consequences of delusion are rarely acknowledged. When we engage in self-deception we willfully blind ourselves to the only guidance system we have to direct us toward the most abundant life.
12 Be careful, brothers, that none of you ever remove yourself from God’s continuous interactions with you by indulging desires of distrust toward him.
13 That none of you become insensible to improvement through the blindness brought by willful sin. (Hebrews 3, Author’s Interpretation)
Once you have willfully blinded yourself to some aspect of your thoughts, feelings, or actions, you will usually persist in your inability to notice it anew until and unless you either experience some new or more intense consequence of your willful blindness, or you happen to have the fortune of meeting someone wise and benevolent enough to attempt to show you.