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 will probably notice recurring patterns of bad outcomes caused by the way you reacted to the things that happen. So here is a puzzle for you: Why do you continue making the same mistake even though you promise yourself that you will not repeat the error? Examples:
- Excessive use of some incentive [food, alcohol, drugs, electronic devices, pornography, etc.] despite your sincere intentions to control your use of the incentive in the future.
- Excessive emotional reactions, despite promises to yourself or loved-ones to control your emotional reactions in the future.
Soul Traps
Mouse traps 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 reaction 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 the all-too-humans 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 the cause-and-effect principles that maintain addictive and emotional disorders is useful to those who seek to extricate themselves from a such a trap, 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.
By using these methods, you will explore your personal experience from both the observer’s, third-person, perspective and the first-person perspective of the one who actually does the experiencing. From the observer’s perspective you may conclude that your appraisals, interpretations and judgments about the things that happen are merely the subjective experiences of a particular creature at a particular time — they are not necessarily true [and not necessarily false].
It is apparent from the observer’s perspective 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 it 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.”
Choosing Your Path
This project is an invitation to collaborate with this body of material to explore subjective phenomena so you can resolve the perverse tendency to act counter to your interests and principles. Because this material is designed to be used by individuals with different attributes and puzzles to unravel, more tools and information is included than any one person will need. The downside of presenting so much information is that it can seem overwhelming.
A range of navigational options are offered for you to get to the material most relevant to you. Like many texts of this type much of the content is abstract, and you can collaborate with it by actively choosing each step of your path. What is unusual about this collaboration are the invitations to explore experiential phenomena directly, which will require you to shift to the first-person perspective. 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. Actively collaborating with the material presented here will give you the opportunity to explore subjective phenomena from several different perspectives.
A default path is presented as list of links in the left column and at the bottom of each page. 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 are the bare minimum to get to the action:
- Why souls like us are vulnerable to self-sabotaging traps: The Soul Illusion.
- How your particular trap works: The Space Between Stimulus and Response.
- How to extricate yourself: The Action Fork