. . . to choose the path of greatest advantage
rather than yield in the direction of least resistance– George Bernard Shaw
Addictions [excessive appetites] and relationship problems that result from excessive emotional reactivity are traps for the soul. Look back on your own history to see if there are recurring patterns of acting counter to your own interests that persist despite your intentions to follow a more advantageous path. Examples:
- Repeatedly failing to control your use of some incentive [food, drug, pornography, etc.] despite the best of intentions.
- Repeatedly failing to control the counter-productive emotional reactions that diminish the quality of your most important relationships, despite sincere promises to yourself or loved-ones to do so.
Traps for the Soul
Mouse traps are mechanical devices that you can watch in action to see how they work. Neurotic and addictive traps operate in the realm of subjective experience. To understand how they work you have to observe the sequence of external events and internal states from the perspective of the dispassionate, rational observer (the same way that you—not the mouse— would observe the operation of a mousetrap).
You have a better opportunity to appreciate the entrapment mechanisms than those who have come before, because you not only stand on the shoulders of the great thinkers of the past, but you have access to the tools of modern cognitive and neural science that were not available until recently.
Meta-Cognitive Awareness
Knowing yourself and understanding what causes you to react as you do will not to make you happy or fearless, but it does give you the key to escape recurring patterns of self-sabotage.
Meta-Cognitive Awareness is the technical label for the appreciation that all you see, think and feel is a creation of your nervous system and not the same as objective reality. Put another way, it is the awareness that your interpretations and judgments are merely the subjective experiences of a particular creature at a particular time — they are not necessarily true [and not necessarily false]. The feeling of certainty that a particular belief is valid does not make it so — even if you are really certain. Your beliefs are creations of your nervous system, so naturally your nervous system appraises them as valid. As comedian, Emo Phillips, observed: "I used to believe that my brain was my most important organ, until I realized who was telling me that."
Meta-Cognitive Awareness is a perspective that enables you to work with and mitigate the potency of the primary mechanisms of traps for the soul. These mechanisms include:
- Perspectives and automatic response patterns that result from early conditioning
- Compelling yet bogus beliefs
- Psychological principles that promote self-sabotage, for example:
- The Imp of the Perverse – The motivation to resist to restrictions (try not to let you nose itch)
- The Problem of Immediate Gratification (The PIG) – A small but immediate payoff has a greater influence on your psyche than a much larger but delayed payoff.
Learning about subjective experience and how to intentionally influence it is different than the study of any other topic. A psychologist studies the psyche from the rational, detached perspective of a scientist. The psychologist’s abstract understanding of the cause-and-effect principles that maintain addictive and neurotic disorders [such as those described in the links above] is extremely useful knowledge to those who seek to extract themselves from a such a trap, but intellectual knowledge alone is not sufficient.
To mindfully react to the things that happen—that is, to intentionally alter your path of least resistance— you have to learn how to work directly with subjective experience. In contrast to psychology, phenomenology is the study of experience from the first-person perspective. The thought experiments and experiential invitations presented on the pages ahead provide opportunities to try out and practice using some ancient and modern methods to explore and work with subjective phenomena.
Navigational Notes
Because this material is designed to be used by individuals with different attributes and challenges, more tools and information is included than any one person will need. The downside of presenting so much information is that it can seem overwhelming. To get to the material most relevant to you, please take advantage of the navigational options.
A default path is presented as list of links in the left column and at the bottom of each page. To allow you to skip around and navigate directly to those sections most relevant to you I have included links and definitions throughout so that each page is relatively free-standing.
The next page on the default path describes the first, and probably most important, decision a person seeking to change course must make: Selecting the change strategy.