Meta-Cognitive Awareness

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

- Steve Wright

We learned how to think when we were children, and most of the time we still think that way. Some schools of thought distinguish between the primitive mentality of childhood and more advanced cognitive strategies. Mood Disorders [anger, anxiety, and depression] and addictive disorders [substance use, overeating, compulsive use of sex, games, or money] are maintained by the mentality of childhood.

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for an incentive of little value is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children, and for them provoking a relapse is as easy as bribing a child with candy.

A predisposing cause of relapse is the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. They label their appraisals in ways that crystallize these experiential phenomena into “things” that have an independent reality. For example: “Mommy is bad,” carries with it the tacit premise that “she really is bad and it’s not just that I’m cranky.” The dispassionate observer understands that the child’s cranky state influences his current appraisals, and mommy won’t always seem bad. Later, when the child is in a different emotional state, his appraisal will be distorted through a different state-dependent filter.  Naturally, the child is always unaware of the Soul Illusion and in each situation believes that he sees things as they really are. 

When a child experiences fear—say in the doctor’s office just before the inoculation—her emotional arousal comes with the tacit premise that the fear is based on a real threat and its intensity is related to the awfulness of the situation.  Some children experience such strong emotional states that they must be restrained by adults, even though they are told, “It will just sting for a moment.”  Likewise, children often believe that the intensity of their desire for a certain incentive correlates with the degree of pleasure they will actually receive from it.

Many grown-ups continue to think that their perceptions, expectancies, and appraisals are undistorted reflections of a permanent objective reality [see The Soul Illusion]. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective reality—which includes cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings—is merely a temporary, state-dependent phenomenon that exists only in the mind of the beholder. The objective world is populated with events; it is only within your subjective reality that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical term for this realization is, Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

The Exercise of Will Begins with a Meta-Cognitive Shift

Directing the creature you inhabit so that it follows the path of greatest advantage, despite the pull of local stressors and temptations, requires the ability to shift from the perspective of the creature, whose actions are determined by cause-and-effect principles, to the perspective of the master of the creature, who is aware of your core motivation.

In the process of doing things, we have to continually evaluate whether we are on the right track so we can make adjustments as needed. Doing things puts us in the role of the performer who is constantly receiving positive and negative feedback about how effective the performance is. An unintended consequence of the self-evaluative demands of Doing Mode is that it cognitive resources required to successfully cope with the challenge are easily consumed by the Ruminative Self-Focus evoked by negative self-evaluations, which is common when doing in domains of low self-efficacy.

When observing an athlete or musician perform, we are not aware of the internal dialogue going on in the mind of the performer. As spectators we might hope that the performer is paying attention to the performance rather than to speculations about self-worth. Making a Meta-Cognitive Shift involves shifting from the associative perspective of the performer to the dissociative perspective the observer in order to awaken from autonomous doing, and observe the bigger picture.

In my office, Hasselbring is already in this dissociative perspective. To tell me his story he takes the observer's perspective to describe the external events and internal experiences, for example when describing a fight with his ex-wife he observed, "I felt hot and angry and thought, 'she is always putting me down, I felt like killing her." Note that the Hasselbring in my office describing the fight experiences it differently than he did when it was happening. He remembers what the feelings were like, but now can look at it dispassionately, his perception, motivation and response tendencies less distorted by the angry emotional state.

Thought Experiment: Meta-Cognitive Shift

How long does desire last?  It seems to last forever.  Intellectually, you understand that desires and cravings, like all subjective phenomena, have finite, typically brief, life spans.  The rational mind may understand this, but to the creature you inhabit, experience is absolute and seemingly permanent.  An interesting thought experiment is to shift from your normal associative perspective of the situation you are in to the dissociative perspective.

The objective of this thought experiment is train the creature you inhabit that its perceptions, motivations, and appraisals are subjective and temporary rather than objectively valid and permanent. With some practice you will be able recognize warning signals such as. "I want that" or "one won't hurt" and make the meta-cognitive shift to "Ah yes, there's desire again.

Being rational and competent in my office is cheap. The ability to be rational and competent during an emotional crises is more valuable. Awakening from Doing Mode to Being Mode is one path to the Meta-Cognitive Shift that can free you from the Soul Illusion.

Awakening > >

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