An Exquisite Irony

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved,
and it makes free those who love it.

–George Santayana

As you follow the Enlightened Path, you will discover the truth about how you react to the events that happen, and how these responses contribute to the unfolding of objective reality. Looking at the truth of what has happened to you and how you acted is a cruel assignment. However, the truth will set you free if you can look at it and accept the lessons it has to teach.

We are biological creatures that experience pain. It is understandable that we want to avoid suffering, and when we fail to avoid it we seek relief. Fear, desire, anger, and other emotions are among the creature's reactions to the things that happen. Powerful versions of these emotions distort perception and motivation and drain cognitive resources. So during crises, when good performance is critical, powerful emotional states interfere with mindful performance.

The Irony of trying hard: Any intention evokes Doing Mode — that is, every goal carries with it the motivation to achieve that goal, and implies an ongoing evaluation of success and failure so you can make adjustments. Ironically, the greater is your desire to achieve a certain goal the greater will be your emotional reactions to successes and failures and hence the greater the state-dependent distortions of perception, appriasal and other state-dependent faculties. To the extent that successful performance depends upon access to your best cognitive resources, strong emotional states promote failure. But how can you free yourself from reacting emotionally to the things that happen when the stakes are high?

Emotional reactivity and self-evaluation are attributes of the mentality of childhood. The desire to free yourself of childish passions sets up an excellent opportunity to explore the Irony of Trying Too Hard. You want to change your ways for all the right reasons. You appreciate that this is a difficult task and will have to invest some energy into it and evaluate what works and what does not.. So far so good. The fatal problem emerges if you confuse the failure of a method with the failure of the puppy. .

The Enlightened Path requires that you be awake and open to the truth, no matter how ugly or cruel. Discovering the truth about cause-and-effect, rather than seeking relief from it or avoiding looking at it, is what enables you to benefit from the lessons that nature is trying to teach you. The challenge you face demands that you be open to the truth, yet able to avoid the judgmental reactions that would trigger the Failure Trap. The Serenity Prayer offers excellent guidance on how to prevent ruminative self-focus from hijacking your cognitive resources..

The Serenity Prayer

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” is an eloquent statement of the Enlightened Path. The key to it is the wisdom of Epictetus [see Attachment]: The things you can change are your thoughts and actions. You should always do your best, but you do not control outcomes so you will have to accept the things that happen.

Events (including the responses of other people) that unfold in ways you do not like evoke negative emotional states. This is an adaptive reaction when the discomfort motivates problem-solving, but maladaptive to the extent that the emotional state biases perception, appraisals, and behavior. The greater the desire for the goal, the stronger the emotion if you don't get it (and even if you do), and, the greater the state-dependent bias.

Remember, our goal is to maximize your ability to get the good stuff in life (as you define it) and minimize the bad. Naturally, you will encounter your share of bad luck, frustrations, and failure along the path ahead. Your challenge is to train the creature you inhabit to cope with the raw experience of living a life so that you can perform well at times when doing so is particularly important..

Doing Mode & Being Mode

Doing Mode refers to interacting with the world in a goal directed way.  The OPEN Path exemplifies Doing Mode. You notice a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want them to be so you develop a plan to achieve your goal, execute it, and observe how it worked so you can modify your actions accordingly. In contrast, Being Mode refers to experiencing the here and now without trying to accomplish anything.

Suffering naturally evokes Doing Mode to solve the problem and end the suffering. When you attempt to solve a personal problem, your attention will often focus on the difference between the way you are and the way you want to be.  If you are not careful, this perspective can be a seductive trigger for ruminative self-focus. Ironically, intending not to fall into this trap can set up a self-critical reaction when you catch yourself ruminating, “I’m ruminating again, after I told myself not to.” 

Pathogenic rumination can be evoked by almost anything, and overcoming it requires that you recognize that you are doing it, so that you can disengage from it. But rather than disengage, the most likely subsequent cognitive event is self-focused rumination, and eventually, perhaps, the recognition that you have fallen back into it again.

This is an extraordinarily destructive trap, but it is so compelling.  One approach to escaping it is to develop the meta-cognitive ability to intentionally switch from Doing Mode to Being Mode, and thereby awaken yourself from autonomous problem-solving and the state-dependent phenomena it engenders, and instead experience the here and now without interpretation.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a mental discipline that promotes awakening and may be defined as: Sensitivity to present experience with non-judgmental acceptance.

Much of our behavior occurs autonomously in the service of one goal or another.  As we go about our daily lives, we are typically preoccupied with the past or future while our actions in the present are generally mindless sequences of behavior in the service of some local goal, such as driving to the store. In contrast, mindfulness involves keeping attention in the present moment without judging it as good or bad—calmly and consciously observing and accepting whatever is happening in the here and now.

Thought Experiment: Mindfulness Meditation - Focus your attention on the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don’t analyze it or judge it, and return your attention to the breathing. Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape through this exercise). As you follow your breath you will notice that a range of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness and elicit reactions. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and instead to experience the here and now directly without filtering it in any way.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness—the appreciation that subjective reality is the state-dependent creation of a biological creature at a particular moment (not necessarily an accurate reflection of the objective truth) can free you from the Soul Illusion. The understanding that thoughts and emotions are not necessarily valid and may be distorted in perverse ways when local conditions elicit pathogenic trances, makes it possible for you to exercise your will.

For the rider to control the horse's passions and get the horse to go in the intended direction, the rider must be separate from the horse. A Meta-Cognitive Shift occurs when you shift from the perspective of the horse [Experiential Processing System] to the perspective of the rider [Rational Processing System]. For example, when you recognize that you are in a high-risk state, initiating a Meta-Cognitive Shift will enable you to re-capture your attention so that you can guide the creature to act in accord with your core motivation.  

Awakening

The exercise of will usually begins with a meta-cognitive shift from the perspective of the creature to the perspective of the operator of the creature.  For example, when Bernie recognizes that he is in one of his angry "Mr. Hyde" trances, he has learned to consult the reminder card [described in the next section] that says: “I am probably reading this because I want to act out my anger, but that would be a mistake.  Instead I will remember my core motivation and mindfully act in accord with my interests and principles.”

Developing the ability to awaken from the Mr. Hyde trance and act according to his core motivation—stay out of jail and re-establish a rewarding lifetime partnership—is a non-trivial challenge. This same challenge of awakening from a pathogenic trance faces the individual with an incentive use disorder.  In both cases, good outcome requires a meta-cognitive shift from the state-dependent perspective that would motivate destructive behavior to the dispassionate perspective of the Rational Processing System, singularly dedicated to your core motivation.

Thought Experiment: Meta-cognitive perspective of a conflict.
During a high-risk situation see if you can shift from the creature's perspective of Doing Mode to the detached perspective of Being Mode so that you can observe your sensations and thoughts without the distortions caused by temporary emotional states. The goal of this thought experiment is to describe, the experience of the conflict. Many people can separate the two parts of the conflict. Using the english language, what can you say about how you experience the forces that pull you toward the incentive and the forces that repel you from it? Describe the sensations, images and thoughts associated with these motivations as best as you can —your experience of them, their priority now, their priority then, and any conclusions you may have about your core motivation.

These topics will be discussed in much greater detail in the next, and possibly most important, section of this course.

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