We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us
— Rabindranath Tagore
Some otherwise competent individuals repeatedly and knowingly act counter to their own interests. They are not intending to hurt themselves; they are taken in by an illusion. The illusion results from the presumed, but bogus, premise of perception, namely that we see the world as it really is. In fact, we see the world through state-dependent filters — that is, our perception is distorted by our current emotional state; different emotional states produce different distortions.
Everyone makes mistakes — they are an inevitable part of learning and growth. But if you make the same painful mistake again and again — without learning anything — you would be wise to change your perspective to see what you are missing.
The illusions responsible for self-sabotage are revealed when you shift from the perspective of the creature experiencing subjective phenomena to the perspective of the dispassionate observer who is privy to the creature’s thinking patterns. From this Meta-Cognitive perspective, it is clear that your emotional reactions result from your interpretations of the things that happen, whether or not these interpretations are valid or complete.
Now is a good time to consider the nature of our knowledge of the world around us. To begin, consider the familiar philosophical question: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound? The answer to this question has profound spiritual and practical implications: There is no sound!
When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea – the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. Sound is an experience that is created by, and exists only in, the mind of the perceiver.
Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. These top 10 reviews are eliminated when you rent a water cooler from some company. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of Urologists Texas Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” Sounds, colors, and patterns appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by, and only exist, within an individual’s nervous system. All of our experience is our nervous system’s interpretation of the input it receives.
The Confabulation of Subjective Reality
Subjective reality is not the same as objective reality, although to function effectively in the real world we must assume it is. The Soul Illusion is the consequence of failing to appreciate the difference between objective reality and subjective experience. In
eastern philosophy, we are viewed as trapped in “Maya.” The entrapment results from the tacit premise of perception: We perceive the world as it really is, and so we will always perceive it as we do now. In fact, the question is, “Is Brain Food Important” to a creative construction that the brain makes in interpreting sensory data?
The understanding that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are mental processes that are biased by our personal perspective and current motivational state rather than accurate and complete depictions of objective reality is called Meta-Cognitive Awareness.
The specific distortions that occur as you go through an emotionally provocative event are always invisible to you at the time, because all subjective experience, including perception, is state-dependent. However, the distortions are often obvious to others and may be painfully obvious to you in retrospect.
Dr. Jekyll is a college professor who sees me for anger management — although I have never seen him when he is not calm and rational. During his descriptions of hateful fights with his wife the only emotion he shows is contrition. He can describe the provocations that triggered his anger so calmly, because in my office he is experiencing these events from the dissociative perspective of the narrator, rather than from the associative perspective of the actor being provoked. For example, when describing a recent argument, Jekyll reports: “I felt hot and angry and thought, ‘she is always putting me down.’ She is such a bitch, but I know that I’m an ass hole when I’m drunk. I’m probably more to blame than she is. . .”
Taking one’s perceptions seriously, as if the were the same as objective reality is called reification — for example, “she is a bitch” as opposed to “at the moment she seemed like a bitch to me.” My goal as therapist is to help my clients de-reify provocative situations.
Note that in order to describe the events that happened Jekyll takes on the dissociative perspective of the narrator, including his evaluations of his own psychological state and culpability. This is a different perspective then he had when the events were unfolding in real-time. However, it is still not quite the perspective that I’d like him to take.
The dispassionate narrator in my office has cognitive resources — including the ability to think rationally and the awareness of the harmful effects his emotional reactions were to have on his family. During the angry episode, he was an emotionally reactive creature living in the here-and-now. The Rational Processing System capable of thinking through the ramifications of his beliefs and emotional reactions was not available to him then, but is available to him during those times when we collaborate.
To do the job of husband and father his primary responsibility is to act in ways that make his wife and children strong. To a dispassionate observer, it is obvious that my client’s default reactions are counter to his primary responsibility. The mission of my collaboration with Dr. Jekyll is to de-reify his beliefs about his wife and about finding relief in alcohol that appear causally related to his counter-productive reactions.
The therapist’s puzzle
In my office, I’m consulting with Dr. Jekyll, who has excellent cognitive abilities and sincerely wants to protect his wife and family. However, his reaction to the next provocation will be determined by how Mr. Hyde — who has neither excellent cognitive abilities nor an awareness of Jekyll’s motivation to be a good husband and father — interprets the things that happen. How can we protect the Jekyll family from the destructive Mr. Hyde?
To cast this story In Epstein’s terms : In my office I am collaborating with Jekyll’s Rational Processing System — who is aware of his core values and motives. The goal of our collaboration is to help Jekyll train the creature he inhabits to act in accord with Jekyll’s interests and principles — even when provoked.
To achieve a good outcome it is essential that it is Jekyll, not Hyde, in the driver’s seat during future confrontations with his wife. Interpreting events from the reified perspective that “she really is a bitch who is always putting me down” puts Hyde in the driver’s seat. Jekyll’s heroic challenge is to de-reify his thinking so he remain relatively cool during high-risk situations and thereby enable himself to act non-automatically during such crises.
To follow his path of greatest advantage, Jekyll will have to change how he reacts to the events that happen. The key to this change is de-reifying his motivation to react in ways that causes himself and other unnecessary pain.
Uses and abuses of reification
Reification helps one make sense of the complex and fine-grained environment with which we have to cope. Throughout this course I use the metaphor of traps to to summarize and characterize the important cause-and-effect principles that pertain to Mood and Addictive Disorders. The traps are used as simplifications that show how specific mechanisms work by isolating them from other effects, and how particular causes produce their harmful effects. But the traps are only metaphors; they do not exist as real entities. They are merely abstractions — stories — that help make sense of things, rather than complete representations of the complex and fine-grained reality. [Likewise, the client examples presented throughout this course are used as fables that omit the complexity of the actual case, but still, hopefully, provide useful lessons for the reader].
The Soul Illusion is a consequence of taking our current perspective and the stories we tell ourselves too seriously. The critical mechanism of the recursive traps that cause so much unnecessary suffering is reification of pathogenic beliefs and perspectives.
Reification Fork
At this point you may choose to explore paths of moving along the dimension of reification — de-reification. To stop the self-sabotage, this course offers three paths to promote movement in the direction of de-reification:
As suggested above, reification is not intrinsically bad; it is only reification of pathogenic abstractions that causes pathology. Reification of beneficial abstractions can do good. Suggestion is a hypnotherapeutic method that strengthens your ability to use reification in the service of your will.