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Then You Can Govern Yourself

If you want the present to be different than the past, study the past

 —  Spinosa

Once you know why you act as you do, you can use this knowledge in the service of your interests and principles.  The middle column of the Personal Research Tool reveals what went on in the space between the triggering event and your unwanted emotional reaction.  

With the aid of this tool, you can examine what caused you to interpret the event that happened in a way that evoked the reaction you experienced. 

Two representative examples:

  1. Mimi reacted with anger to her partner’s statement: “I’m sorry; I love you,” because she interpreted it as a sign that he would abandon her.  What caused this perverse and counter-productive interpretation?  As a result of an unfortunate history, Mimi’s expectation that people who claim they love her will eventually abandon her has caused her to interpret the actions of intimate partners from a suspicious perspective.  Appreciating that she has the bias is the first step of getting out from under it.

  2. Ernest, the problem drinker, who has been sober since his last problem drinking episode.  He is now in a situation in which he is at high-risk of relapse.   He wants to break his vow of abstinence because he expects the outcome of the lapse to be positive.   Considering his extensive history of painful relapses, what causes this perverse and counter-productive interpretation?   The Ernest who appraises the lapse before it happens is not the same guy as the Ernest who appraises it after it happens.  Before the lapse, his perspective is distorted by desire; after the lapse it is distorted by regret. 

You are vulnerable to these kinds of traps not because you have a disease or are defective in some way, but because you are all too human. Paradoxically, the intellectual gifts that enable you to solve problems that no other creature can are also responsible for your tendency to act counter to your own interests.

The Soul Illusion—confusing your interpretation of reality with the reality itself—is the curse that comes with the gift of consciousness. The personal research you are about to undertake will reveal the details of your particular curse.   The process of researching the sequence of external events and the internal reactions they elicit opens the door to understanding what goes on between the stimulus and the response. The key to accessing this knowledge is to observe the sequence from the inside [first-person perspective] and from the outside [the perspective of a dispassionate observer]. 

Knowledge is Power

Knowing the effective causes of your reactions gives you the power to steer.

Your future will certainly include crises of stress and temptation. How you react will be determined by what is going on in the space between stimulus and response at these critical moments. Your personal research reveals the effective causes of those reactions that you would like to avoid repeating in the future. Specifically, the middle column contains the perspective or premise that caused you to interpret the event that happen in a way that led to the unwanted outcome.

Understanding how your interpretation of the things that happen influences your emotional reactions gives you the opportunity— indeed the responsibility— to work with your perspective in the same way that photographers work with their camera positioning in order to achieve their intended outcomes.

There are several schools of thought about how to change what goes on in the space between stimulus and response. The concepts of Reification and De-Reification lie at the heart of each of them.

 

 

 

Reification & De-Reification > >

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