You are not the passenger.
You are the ride.
At some point in the evolution of biological creatures, conscious awareness emerged. Abstract processing, which opens the door to self-consciousness, comes with opportunities as well as dangers:
- The opportunity: The higher mental faculties that come with consciousness—including imagination and abstract reasoning— give you the power to intentionally influence the course of events.
- The danger: The ability to think abstractly makes you vulnerable to thinking errors and their perverse influence on your life’s course. Certain thinking errors are special because they have a self-confirmatory influence on outcomes. These special thinking errors show up as recurring patterns of unwanted outcomes.
Subjective Versus Objective Reality
Suicide bombers and Amway distributors live in the same physical world, but experience different subjective realities. Given that you buy into the crazy beliefs that maintain it, the suicide bomber is influenced by a coherent cognitive structure — the same is true for the Amway distributor. The same is also true for people whose lives are qualitatively diminished by:
- Addictive Disorders
- Neurotic Disorders
- Recurring Relationship Problems
Barry, the suicide bomber, and probably the Amway distributor believe they know the truth. They do not! No human does. Everything you know, think, and believe was created by you remarkable nervous system— with access to an array of sense organs— that help you navigate through the complex world in which you live. A bloodhound, using its sense of smell to detect who walked along a trail several hours ago, has access to information that is not available to you. The same is true for bats, dolphins, and a slew of other earthly creatures.
However, you have a faculty that, as far as we know, is not available to any of them. Abstract reasoning gives you access to a new way to represent the world that supplements the experiential, nonverbal, processing that is available to the other animals. The downside of adding a new way of processing information is that it sometimes conflicts with the old way.
The puppy and the puppy trainer
Freud used the horse and rider as a metaphor for his model in which a conscious mind, driven by rational concerns, was often in conflict with an unconscious mind, driven by lust and fear. Our model also involves two minds:
- A biological creature driven by hungers and fears [the puppy].
- An intellectual entity capable of abstract problem solving, who tries to exercise a rational influence on the puppy’s motivations and emotional reactions to the things that happen [the puppy trainer].
Puppy Training
This text is written for the puppy-trainer, but includes experiential invitations for the puppy. As you navigate your course through this material your rational mind will be training the puppy to follow a path the puppy-trainer judges to be most advantageous.
The biggest threat to good outcome is defecting — prematurely abandoning the challenge. I am using the corny metaphor of "the puppy" to emphasize the need to be patient and gentle with yourself. It is easy to become discouraged, so perhaps the most important responsibility of the puppy trainer is to keep the puppy engaged in and entertained by this process. Have some respect for the difficulty of this task and don’t be harsh or critical. Give yourself the unconditional positive regard you would give to a puppy or a child doing its best to master a difficult but critically important task.