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Meta-Cognitive Awareness

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.



— Marcus Aurelius

Neural science is the study of how your nervous system creates your experience of the world. Foreshadowing this approach to understanding phenomena, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche noted that we never receive the world as it is "in itself." Our personal perspective filters everything we know about the world.

Your cognitive faculties have enabled you to understand and work with cause-and-effect well enough to achieve your goals in many domains of your life. However, this gift of consciousness can become your curse if you assume that you have immaculate perception.  Reification is the name of the curse and refers to the fallacy of confusing your map with the territory, or confusing your interpretation of reality with reality itself.

At the moment of decision, you choose the path that looks like the best alternative according to the map you are using at that moment. Blunders are all too obvious in retrospect when a dispassionate perspective reveals paths you wish you took—if only you could have a do-over.

Fool me twice, shame on me

The $64 question: Why do you continue to use the map that you have already discovered leads you to unwanted outcomes? The priceless answer: Because you are taken in by the Soul Illusion; you don't realize that the map that is guiding your choices is a fiction that you created. Your interpretation of the events that happen is distorted by your current motivational [e.g., hunger] and emotional state [e.g., anger].

The Optical Illusions you are about to sample are not a threat because the only consequence of being taken in by them is short-term amusement. On the other hand, irreversible errors are often the outcome of being taken in by the Soul Illusion.

Reification is the lie without which you could not survive

Reacting as if your map was the same as the territory is called Reification. In order to react adaptively in a rapidly changing environment, you have to assume that you see things as they really are. But this is a bogus assumption. You never have access to all the information, and your interpretations of what you have access to may be distorted by your emotional or motivational state at the moment.

It would not make sense to have a map where one inch of the map represents one inch of the territory. A map is an abstraction designed to serve the interests of the user. The mapmaker decides what to include depending upon the map's purpose. Every map omits the vast majority of the raw data.

Summarizing and interpreting raw data is what our nervous system does, and doing so is not intrinsically harmful. It is forgetting that what we experience is our interpretation of reality, not reality itself, that causes excessive or counter-productive reactions.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness Promotes De-Reification

Meta-Cognitive Awareness [the understanding that beliefs and appraisals are simply events that occur in the mind and not part of external reality] promotes De-Reification. For example, clinical research on the effect of mindfulness meditation in cancer patients experiencing chronic physical pain, demonstrates that they were able to achieve significant reductions in subjective pain ratings by learning to observe thoughts (e.g., “It’s killing me,” “This will never end” “I can’t stand it”) as simply cognitive events with no a priori truth value.

Psychotherapy is the art of De-Reification.

Beliefs such as "I am unlovable, shame-worthy, etc." are often the products of an unfortunate history, such as an incompetent adult caretaker. But you don't need an abusive childhood to develop counter-productive ways of looking at things; none of us are free of self-sabotaging prejudices. Regardless of how they are acquired, once established, they are remarkably resistant to change.

Therapists in training are often surprised by how hard it is to get clients to de-reify beliefs that appear— to an observer at least —to be obviously false and self-sabotaging. The ability of a therapist to de-reify the premises of the client's recurring problem is a good measure of a therapist's skill.

Psychotherapy and personal research have the same goal: To de-reify the premises responsible for your recurring pattern of bad outcomes. Doing the personal research requires you to shift to the Meta-Cognitive perspective to examine the causes of your reaction. In that sense, you shift to the observer's perspective of the therapist. Each time you practice intentionally shifting from the first-person to the observer's perspective of the reaction we seek to understand, enhance your Meta-Cognitive Awareness, and De-Reifies the interpretation responsible for your unwanted reaction.

So, if you have noticed a recurring pattern of bad outcomes in your history, this is your opportunity to rise above the problem so you can deconstruct it. Researching the causes of your reactions is different than the kind of exploration done by physical or biological scientists because the object of our study is the phenomena you experience—only you have access to this data.

Researching why you react as you do requires the flexibility to shift the perspective from which you understand the meaning of an event that happened. As Nietzsche put it: "The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our 'concept' of this matter, our 'objectivity' be."

A provocative event seen through different eyes

Recall a time when you over-reacted to an event or when your emotional reaction led to a predictably counter-productive outcome. Divide a sheet of paper into 3 columns. Briefly describe:

  1. The antecedent event
  2. How your interpreted it at the time
  3. Your emotional reaction [and rate its intensity from 1 to 100].

Now, in retrospect you can reconsider the interpretation that elicited your reaction. It probably looks different from a distance than it felt at the time.

The former set of eyes is your first-person perspective, and the latter is an observer's perspective.

Observers with different biases might interpret things differently. Consider how your interpretation and emotional reaction would look to some imaginary personas: [No writing is necessary here; just think about it.]

  • A therapist or researcher who had unconditional positive regard for you and was aware of your core values and goals
  • A harshly critical observer, or an antagonistic or satanic observer
  • A heavenly perspective—examples: a departed loved one, a guardian angel, a Deity

This thought experiment is an opportunity to get familiar with our strategy to research the cause of an unwanted reaction: Shifting from the first-person perspective of every-day living to the third-person perspective of the observer. It also gave you some familiarity with the three-column analysis that will be our primary research tool.

Objectives of personal research:

  1. Know Yourself — Researching the sequence of external events and internal phenomena you experience from the observer's [third-person] perspective will reveal how cause-and-effect plays out in your subjective universe.

  2. Meta-Cognitive Awareness —Personal research gives you the opportunity to work directly with your consciousness. This is a shift from the passive role of the patient to the active role of the agent of change. This emphasis on internal locus of control will become more apparent when we move beyond observation to Intentional Trance Formation.

Optical Illusions give you access to both the first-person perspective that is taken in by the illusion and to the detached perspective of an observer who understands that your senses are being deceived by the illusion. Interestingly, a defining attribute of an illusion is that past experience of being taken in does not protect you from being fooled in the future.

 

Optical Illusions > >
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