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An Ancient Recommendation

Know Thyself!

— Socrates

Subjective experience is a strange subject. Studying your own experience is a different kind of challenge than is researching subjects such as chemistry or physics. When doing conventional research, we can safely assume that the cause-and-effect principles are the same in different laboratories. The results obtained by one scientist can be replicated and used by other laboratories. Knowledge once acquired can be passed down from generation to generation.

In contrast, subjective phenomena exist within the experience of each individual. Each of us is unique and has idiosyncratic reaction tendencies. There is no one exactly like you; your puzzle is different than anyone else's. You cannot rely on a particular therapeutic method that worked for someone else because the cause-and-effect principles that operate in your subjective universe are likely to play out differently. Knowledge about the self does not generalize as well as knowledge about chemistry. Each individual has a single lifetime to learn how to work with the cause and effect principles that operate in their unique subjective universe.

Psychology is the scientific discipline that researches the soul from the observer's perspectiven. Phenomenology studies the soul from the first-person perspective, and so is a different kind of discipline than objective science. To really know yourself, you have to research subjective experience from both perspectives.

The Personal Research Tool provides an opportunity to research your reaction to a high-risk situation from both the first-person and the observer's perspective. The by-product of shifting back and forth between these perspectives is the emergence of Meta-Cognitive Awareness. When you step outside yourself and watch what goes on between stimulus and response, you can see that the interpretations that elicit your reactions are creations of your mind. They are not necessarily true and not necessarily false; they are just how things look to you at that moment. Later you may see the same event from a very different perspective and regret your response. Meta-Cognitive Awareness, the happy byproduct of doing personal research, is one of the critical milestones along the passage from the mentality of childhood to more advanced cognitive strategies.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness

The first-person perspective is the default and is likely the only perspective available to young children and animals. But if you can shift out of this perspective and observe the sequence of external events and internal states from the perspective of a dispassionate observer, for example when describing the sequence of external events and your emotional reaction to them to a therapist, you may become aware of cause-and-effect relationships that were invisible to you while you were in the midst of the crisis

The awareness that subjective reality is not the same as objective reality emerges during the developmental sequence and is not availble to young children nor probably to most animals. In practice, we act as if maps and interpretations are valid so we can use them to make decisions. But those lacking in Meta-Cognitive Awareness are easily taken in by the illusion that they know the truth. Because they confuse their map with the territory they feel certain that they see things as they really are. Ironically, this feeling of certainty, which is also created by their nervous system, is taken as confirmation of the validity of their interpretations and judgments. The realizatin that all experience is a fiction created by the nervous system was cleverly noted by comedian, Emo Phillips: "I used to believe that my brain was my most important organ, until I realized who was telling me that."

The folly that results from acting as if our interpretations were valid and complete is often obvious to others, and sometimes to ourselves when we look back on a self-sabotaging episode in retrospect. But in real-time the distortions are invisible to us; we react to the things that happen as if the lenses through which we perceived the world do not distort.

The ability to shift from the first-person to the Meta-Cognitive perspective is the key that opens the door to mindfully influencing your life's course. As a bonus, you may discover that shifting back and forth between the first-person and the observer's perspective enlightens and delights.

 

 

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