Interview with Daniel Ferris Braun
– © 2004 Andy Mickel

Q: You have consciously and passionately taken a path in your own life devoting an enormous amount of time to writing and teaching -- all aimed at directly helping to improve people's lives. In the last 4 years you've reached out to men in the local men's work communities (New Warriors, monthly Men's Brunch, etc.) and have built connections which are both supportive and challenging to you.

During this time, you've pointed out to many people in classes and your personal life-coaching that there's an important thematic analogy coming out of the film "The Matrix." What is the significance of this analogy that serves to teach us about our own ways of thinking, or, as you put it, about our own management -- or mismanagement -- of our own mental maps?

Daniel: In one of the early scenes of The Matrix, the heroine, Trinity, says the following words to the hero, Neo, after he asks "What truth": "... that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch... a prison for your mind."

The special effects of "The Matrix" were superb, but the underlying philosophy is what made this movie "great". Not surprisingly, the philosophy is quite old. In the West, it goes back at least to Plato and was rehearsed by the likes of Immanuel Kant, a progenitor of the phenomenological philosophers; one of which was Jean-Paul Sartre (the Existentialist). The underlying philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism also support the same precepts that underlie "The Matrix."

In "The Matrix," a collective of computers had evolved into having its own collective consciousness with its own drive for survival. Needing a constant fix of electrical power, the computers saw the human, just another form of that inferior stuff called "life", as a good source of energy. Humans would make great "batteries". So instead of removing the vermin from the planet, the computers devised a way to harness the electrical energy they put out. Good recycling!

The only problem was these batteries had to have a mental life in order to function well. Not any mental life would do. They would have to have a mental life that would permit them to maintain good voltage. Most importantly, they'd have to have a mental life that would allow them to stay in one spot... a spot from which the computers could sap the energy they needed.

No problem! The computers could just hook the humans up to a digital grid and would, thereby, provide them with "experience" from a virtual world, a matrix, that would satisfy their need for a stimulating mental life.

Q: How does that relate to our lives?

Daniel: Well, it just turns out that we humans also suffer from strong tendencies towards living in "virtual realities", outlooks that are accepted as the way-things-are, as "real". In "The Matrix" the computers imposed a virtual world unto the humans by a direct hookup to the neurological systems of the humans. The imposition for us is more subtle. We build our own matrices by not being aware of the purely representational aspect of our thinking. In other words, when we believe the structures, the thoughts, of our minds to be about reality, we are then controlled and dominated by that belief -- by those "believed" thoughts. We become "slaves" of our own thoughts -- our own believed maps of mind.

In "The Matrix" the moment of liberation is symbolized by when Neo stops the bullets in midair. When he finally sees his own thoughts as the virtual things they are, they then have no power over him. Fixed thinking causes fixed reactions.

By analogy, the moment that a regular human being stops "knowing" his thoughts as being equivalent to reality -- the moment that he or she starts to see thoughts as no more than representative or symbolic structures (like maps are no more than symbolic structures) -- that is the moment when the individual starts to become liberated, free of his or her own matrix. To address this liberation with a modern term we can call it "self-actualization".

Q: So you are saying that the movie "The Matrix" is an analogy for self-actualization.

Daniel: Yes, in other words, as we humans become aware of the mind's ability to only map existence we become flexible enough to become good thinkers, good map-makers -- so good as to even eventually free the SELF (in us) from being controlled by the more rigid uses of mind -- those uses that are so bogged down by the belief that the mind's maps are more than maps -- that they are themselves equivalent to reality. Perhaps, someday we social beings will come to understand that thinking is always subjective, symbolic, or hypothetical.

Q: So, you are saying that we humans mess up in life because we treat our thoughts too rigidly -- like they are more than just hypothetical or representative things?

Daniel: Yes, that's essentially it. By the way, the reason the scientific method, itself, works so incredibly well stems from the fact that the true scientist sees each thought as being hypothetical, as being based in "hypothesis". Now, if we could just start to apply this uncommon sense to our psychological and sociological behaviors, we would find that we would see a saner and more peaceful world. I have little doubt that were humans to start using the mind appropriately with respect to its ability to generate symbolic or hypothetical structures -- in other words, to its ability to make personal maps of the unique events of our lives -- people would be more inquisitive about their own thinking and that would lead us to a saner, more communicative, and happier world.

Q: With respect to that, tell us how you deal with anger, frustration, resentments using this model or understanding?

Daniel: Well, when one knows in one's heart or gut that one's thoughts -- that is, that one's opinions, suspicions, accusations, etc. -- stem from mind-made maps, one is much more likely to treat such thoughts with more curiosity, with a kind of healthy indifference. In this way or "mode", one is more likely to engage in delayed reaction, questioning, research, and communication before one simply reacts. The non-symbolic thinker, the typical "reactive" human, is the one who suffers from those symptoms of chronic frustration, resentment, and anger.

Q: In the last year, in your new career as "Counselor at Life", you have helped several men understand their feelings of depression by helping them to identify that their states of depression are related to their taking various mental maps as equivalent to reality. What are the important ideas behind this approach?

Daniel: The mind is like a hit-or-miss recorder of mind-made experiences. Experience is a mind-made thing. When the mind records an event as a memory it does so with all the illusions and biases that it brings to the event. In other words, those memories that cause our chronic conditions of so-called "depression" are to a large part nothing more than continual reactions to old and poorly recorded old memories? (to use the allusion of the mind's maps) to old and dysfunctional (believed) old maps. The process of freeing one's SELF from such belief, from such maps, is synonymous with "getting over depression". In fact, it is also synonymous with getting over other problems like chronic frustration, resentment, and anger.

Daniel Ferris Braun is an artist, writer, new-age philosopher, and life counselor. He may be reached at selfearth@hotmail.com for enquires, consultation, coaching.