chapters

The Soul Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

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 driven by a coherent cognitive structure — the same is true for the Amway distributor.  The same is also true for anyone caught in a trap that perpetuates itself, including: 

  • Addictive Trap
  • Excessive Emotional Reactions
  • Recurring Relationship Problems [usually caused by one or both of above]  

Like the suicide bomber, and the Amway distributor, Barry believes he knows the truth. These folds are deluding themselves. No human, not even Socrates knows the truth. Everything you know, think, and believe was created by your remarkable, that receives information about the outside world though its sense organs. A bloodhound has access to information that I do not; the same is true for bats, dolphins. In many ways, their knowledge of the world is greater than mine.

However, you and I have a faculty that is not available to any of them. Abstract reasoning gives us access to a new way to represent the world that supplements the experiential processing that is available to the other animals. The downside of adding an extra processing system is that it opens the door to conflict.

The Puppy and the Puppy Trainer

Freud's model described the conflict between the conscious mind, driven by rational concerns and the unconscious mind, driven by lust and fear. The model I will be using 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 tries to bring about desirable outcomes. This puppy-trainer is most prominent when the puppy's motivations and emotional reactions predictably result in bad outcomes.

This text is designed to be read by the puppy-trainer, but includes experiential invitations for the puppy. As you navigate your way through this material, you will be training the puppy to follow a path that the puppy-trainer judges to be most advantageous.

The biggest threat to good outcome is prematurely abandoning the challenge. I am using the corny metaphor of "the puppy" to emphasize the need to be patient and gentle with yourself. You are bound to encounter difficulties and frustrations that will try to motivate you to defect. Perhaps the most important responsibility of the puppy trainer is to keep the puppy engaged in and entertained by this process so that you persist through the discouraging times. 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.

 

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