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Perceptions of Your Soul

You need to know things the others don't know.
It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

- Don DeLillo


As remarkable and complex a structure as a neuron is, it does not possess consciousness. Consciousness requires a complex nervous system comprised of many neurons and sense organs. The nervous system you were born with is among the most complex structures in the universe, but consciousness did not emerge until you populated that nervous system with experience as you matured through childhood.

Self-awareness and the ability to think abstractly, which are not available to primitive creatures, enable smart folks like us to influence the course of events. Whether these higher mental faculties enhance or diminish the quality of your life depends upon how well you understand yourself and your limitations.

Govern Yourself!

Without knowing yourself, you cannot govern yourself. Your actions will be determined by your passions and conditioning. This is why in all ancient teachings the first demand at the beginning of the way to liberation was: ‘Know thyself!’ [These words, which are generally ascribed to Socrates, actually lie at the basis of many systems and schools far more ancient than the Socratic.]

Psychologists study subjective experience from the outside [from the observer's perspective]. In contrast, Phenomenologists study experience from the inside [first-person perspective]. Each perspective has access to information not available to the other. Psychotherapy is helpful to the extent that the therapist and the client collaborate to take advantage of each other's perspectives.

Phenomena — such as seeing a candy bar, tasting it, regretting the empty calories — have a property that distinguishes them from anything else that we can study: We experience them directly. The knowledge that comes from direct, first-person experience is qualitatively different than the abstract knowledge that results from studying topics such as chemistry, history, or automotive repair.

A subject is the observer, and an object is the thing observed. The personal research we will be doing involves intentionally shifting between the perspective of the researcher and the perspective of the phenomena being studied.

To know yourself you have to research phenomena from the outside and the inside—that is, from both the first-person perspective and from the observer's perspective. The Optical Illusions gave you the chance to explore how your soul interprets ambiguous visual perception. This was the first of several invitations to compare two different approaches to understanding your subjective experience: The psychological approach, which studies your experience from the observer's perspective, and the phenomenological approach, which studies your experience from your perspective.

As you become familiar with shifting between these ways of exploring your subjective experience, it will become easier to switch from one to the other during real-time crises when there is a lot riding on your interpretations. This flexibility is important because there is no best perspective; each has its benefits and costs. The first-person perspective makes rapid and graceful performance possible but is easily taken in by the Soul Illusion.

So, abandon all your premises and pre-judgments; let the revelations of your personal research answer the question:

 

 

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