Buddha taught that our minds create illusions that obscure the truth. Plato warned that we mistake shadows for reality. Rumi spoke of the barriers we have built within ourselves. Many other thinkers have described the same phenomenon, and it still shapes our world today.
Human beings, by their very nature, live inside invisible "mental prisons". These are mental constructs that not only prevent us from perceiving reality as it is, but also limit what we can think, distort who we believe ourselves to be, and ultimately lead us to places where we don't want to be. We often use terms like filters, biases, or delusions for this phenomenon, but calling them prisons seems a lot more appropriate given how profound and insidious their effects are.
Below you will find an interactive guide to these mental prisons, drawn from philosophy and science. More importantly, it describes tried and true methods for escaping them.
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