I am going to share with you a story of a Mathematician named John Nash. Perhaps some of you may have heard of him, but if you haven’t, by the time you finish reading this unusual story, you will have tremendous respect for the man for what he achieved despite his severe problems.

John Nash was always intelligent as a child. In fact, he was so brilliant, he managed to get into the prestigious Princeton University in the 1950’s.

Over there he shared a room with a person called Charles Herman. Charles Herman didn’t interact with other students but was fun to be around. Soon Nash also met Charles’ niece Marcee.

Unfortunately, Nash wasn’t able to find a topic for his doctorate at the university because he was looking for an original idea that never seemed to come to him.

His professor met and told him that his record was unimpressive and the university wouldn’t place him anywhere. Nash was disappointed. It was then that the professor took him to an event that was happening at the university.

There was an elderly gentlemen seated at a group meeting and then all the professors in the university came to him and put their pens on the table, where he was seated. It was a mark of respect in the academic community given to someone who had the achievement of a lifetime.

The professor then asked Nash what he saw. Nash said he saw recognition. The professor said, he should see ACCOMPLISHMENT not recognition.

Nash then got completely focused on doing something worthwhile.  Charles Herman and his niece Marcee were there with him during that time. It was then that he developed a mathematical concept useful in economics that would change his life.

The classical economic theory said that the best result would be derived if every person did what was best for himself. Nash, upon observance of an incident concluded that the chances of getting best results for everyone would be when everyone did what was best for the group.

His goal was to actually derive a mathematical formula to ensure nobody lost even in competitive situations. This formula would be extremely useful in negotiations and high conflict situations. He actually managed to derive it! It was called Nash Equilibrium and he wrote a paper on the same.

He showed the paper to his professor and immediately the professor exclaimed that it was a true breakthrough! With a remarkable discovery of this magnitude, he could get admission anywhere!

He was promptly given a prestigious placement. His research was so revolutionary that he even got covered in Fortune magazine as one of the brightest mathematicians of the day.

Around the time, he met a person called William Parcher, who said he was representing the CIA, intelligence agency of the USA. Parcher asked Nash to help him decode secret mathematical messages from Russians.

He started spending all his time decoding things, to the point that he even began ignoring his main job and his family. Soon he became extremely suspicious that Russian spies would assassinate him for decoding the secret messages they were transmitting.

One day a group of people followed him. He felt they were Russian spies. He attacked the leader and then tried to run away. It was then that the group caught him and gave him an injection to sedate him.

When he woke up, he yelled at them to free him. But turns out, they weren’t Russian spies. They were psychiatrists.

They told him that he was suffering from Schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder. They told him that he was having false imaginations of decoding messages on behalf of the government.

He then saw that William Parcher, Charles Herman and Marcee were sitting there and tried talking to them. The head psychiatrist asked him who he was talking to. He said he was talking to the three people sitting on the chairs.

But the Psychiatrist said, there was no one on those chairs! William Parcher, Charles Herman and Marcee were hallucinations (life-like imaginations created by the mind) and not real people!

Nash’s entire world turned upside down!

At the time mental illness was so poorly understood and treated that they simply did not know what to do with the patients. He was thrown into a psychiatric hospital and suffered for years. He was given electric shocks and what not, but he did not improve.

Finally, after an agreement with his family, he was released but his condition had worsened tremendously. He continued interacting with the hallucinations and believing what they said. His relationship with his wife had worsened and he left his job.

Part of the problem was that his disease made him continue to believe that the hallucinations were real and he was not convinced by his wife and friends who told him they couldn’t see them.

But somewhere, his logical mind was still intact because eventually he deduced that Marcee couldn’t be real – she never got older or taller!

With the proper realization that the three people he was interacting with were hallucinations and not real, he decided that he was not going to let them control his life.

He decided that no matter what happened he would not interact with the hallucinations he encountered. At first the hallucinations pleaded, then they taunted him and tried to scare him. But no matter what happened, no matter how real it felt, he kept telling himself they weren’t real.

It was an intensely painful process. He pushed himself to get back to work and teaching. Students mocked him for his erratic behavior when he was trying not to react to the hallucinations. But he decided he would not entertain the hallucinations and would not let them interfere in his work.

Slowly the disease’s control over his life lessened. This was a process that took years.  The hallucinations were still there but slowly their grip loosened, because he learned to ignore them as far as possible, and he was able to come back to working regularly in the real world.

Unknown to him, his methods were similar to what is now a medically recognized therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and is used to treat mental illnesses. But at the time, nobody even knew of it!

As he got better, he continued to teach and work on his theories that he had worked on for several years in the past.

Eventually, Nash’s work was recognized to be so significant in a real-world scenario, that he was visited by a gentleman from the Nobel foundation who informed him that he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics!

After this announcement, as John Nash was sitting in the coffee house with that gentleman, all other professors stood up from their chairs and one by one, laid their pens in front of him as a mark of respect for an achievement of a lifetime, just like Nash’s professor had shown several decades ago!

Life had come a full circle. John Nash ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 and became an inspiration to millions.

A movie on his life – A Beautiful Mind was released in 2001 and it ended up winning 4 Oscars!

You see, our lives are actually not that different from the experiences John Nash went through. What he experienced was an individual delusion, and what we all experience every day in our daily lives, is a COLLECTIVE DELUSION.

This delusion is called MAYA. It’s a phenomenon described in ancient Indian philosophy where we are unable to distinguish the illusory natures of the world from its underlying reality.

The closest synonym for Maya, for Western Readers would be the “The Matrix”, similar to the 1999 Hollywood movie of the same name.

But just like Nash, amongst all the noise, distractions, delusions and difficulties, once someone helps us become aware of the Maya, when we ourselves put two and two together, just like John Nash did when he realized Marcee did not age.

Also, just like Nash, if we can focus on what’s important and ignore all the illusions looking to keep in an endless, worthless and pointless cycle, we too can end up having a pretty good life, without even needing to escape the Matrix, but just being MORE AWARE of it.

Now, some things are real and some things ae a part of a collective delusion like countries and money. We believe in them because everybody believes in them. To not follow that means you can’t feed yourself or will end up in prison. So, to live practically you need to follow those delusions. But why are we still buying into other delusions we absolutely can reject?

We are all schizophrenics in a way, and while we can’t turn off the delusions/hallucinations, we can be more aware of them and choose to live consciously. Let’s explore how we can protect ourselves against these widely believed “hallucinations” or “Psychological Traps” (in the following chapters)