chapters

An Invitation. . .

to choose the path of greatest advantage
rather than yield in the direction of least resistance

- George Bernard Shaw

If you look back on your personal history, you may notice a recurring pattern of bad outcomes that you can trace back to a bad choice. The puzzle I have for you is not why you chose a path that took you to a bad outcome, but why you chose it a second time, and to this day continue to choose the path that you can predict will take you to a bad outcome. Examples:

• Excessive consumption of food, alcohol, drugs, or excessive use of electronic devices, pornography, gambling, etc.  Consider this an Incentive Use Disorder if you repeatedly fail to control your use of the incentive despite sincere intentions to do so.
  


• Excessive emotional reaction to something that happened. Consider this an Emotional/Behavioral Regulation Disorder if there is a continuing pattern of hurting a loved-one despite sincere intentions or promises to control yourself in the future.

Why do you continue to follow the path that you have already discovered takes you to bad outcomes?  The mystery is greater still if you not only recognized your mistake but you've resolved not to make it again. If that is the case, the puzzle becomes: Why do you to act contrary to your own intentions? Why don't you learn the lesson that the painful consequences of your actions are trying to teach you?

Simplistic answers such as being compelled by Satan, a disease, or unconscious motives do not provide the practical information you could use to escape the recurring, unwanted pattern or help you follow a more advantageous path. 

The Personal Research we are about to do will:

1. Reveal the solution to your puzzle: Why you react to the things that happen as you do.   This is the knowledge you need to govern yourself so that you are able to follow your path of greatest advantage rather than drift in the direction of least resistance.
2. Promote Meta-Cognitive Awareness: The by-product of performing personal research is a shift in how you look at your beliefs, judgments, and appraisals. Getting outside of your immediate experience so you can understand what causes your emotional reactions may be as life-changing as the specific knowledge revealed by your research. [More about this topic later.]

Traps for Your Soul

Mousetraps are mechanical devices that you can watch in action to see how they work. The self-sabotaging traps listed above operate in the realm of subjective experience. To understand how they work you have to observe the sequence of external events and your reactions 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 understand and successfully cope with the mechanisms of entrapment than those who have come before you 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.

Know Yourself

Knowing yourself and understanding what causes you to react as you do will not make you happy or fearless, but it does give you the key to escape recurring patterns of self-sabotage.

To mindfully react to the things that happen, you have to learn how to work directly with subjective experience. Personal research is different than the study of any other topic. A psychologist studies the psyche from the rational, detached perspective of a scientist. But the psyche's experience of itself is qualitatively different than what the psychologist can observe.

The psychologist's abstract understanding of cause-and-effect is useful to those who seek to solve their puzzle, but intellectual knowledge alone is not sufficient. 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 from both perspectives.

By using these methods, you will explore your personal experience from the observer's perspective of the psychologist and from the first-person perspective of the Phenomenologist— the one who actually does the experiencing.

From the psychologist's perspective, you may conclude that your appraisals, interpretations, and judgments about the things that happen are merely the subjective experiences of one particular creature at a certain moment. From this perspective, it is apparent that the feeling of certainty that a particular belief is valid means nothing about how valid it really is. 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."

Our Collaboration: Your Part

To change how you react to the things that happen, you will have to learn to work with subjective phenomena such as emotions, beliefs, and judgments. To participate in this collaboration you are invited to shift from the third-person perspective of the reader of text to the first-person perspective of a soul exploring its private experience directly. Actively participating in the thought experiments and trance formational experiences will give you the opportunity to explore subjective phenomena directly so you can understand what causes you to act as you do.

Because this material is designed to be used by individuals with different puzzles to solve, more tools and information is included than any one person will need. A default path through all this material is presented as list of links in the left column and at the bottom of each page. These contents are so voluminous that you may be reluctant to begin what seems like such a long and difficult journey. For this reason [and for another I'll describe in An Ancient Recommendation], I request that you collaborate actively in this project by choosing the path you take.

A range of navigational options is offered to get you quickly to the material that will have the greatest payoff for you. 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 default path contains almost all the pages. At the other extreme, the three pages below provide the fastest path to the action:

1. Why a soul like you is so vulnerable to self-sabotage: The Soul Illusion.
2. How your particular trap works: The Space Between Stimulus and Response.
3. How to extricate yourself: Ancient & Modern Paths to Freedom

 

 

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