The Enlightened Path

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

─ George Santayana

   Is light a particle or a wave?

   Is the electron here or not here?

   Am I the most important thing in the universe or am I merely dust and ashes?

   Should I follow a rigid or a flexible path?

Oddly, the best answer to each of these questions is: Yes! Both of the incompatible alternatives are true at the same time. Because we do not have access to objective truth, our understanding of reality is riddled with paradox.  The enlightened path refers to the ability to cope with such paradoxes.  This path not available to the young, for it requires the maturity to accept ambiguity and the limitations of one’s influence.

The Watercourse Way

Water follows the path of least resistance, an important understanding for those involved in building and maintaining irrigation systems. Just as the flow of water is influenced by lawful principles such as gravity, the course of your biography is influenced by lawful principles such as the PIG.  Appreciating the applicable cause-and-effect relationships makes self-direction possible!

It is not the water's fault that it is influenced by gravity, nor is it yours that you are influenced by the motivational pull of an incentive.  You are, however, responsible for taking factors such as the PIG into account in order to produce the outcomes you intend.  You are not responsible for having an addictive problem; there are a range of biological, psychological, and social cause-and-effect relationships that combined to produce your current predicament.  However, now that you are an adult and find yourself handicapped by  this problem, you are responsible for overcoming it and acting in accord with your interests and principals.

You have now examined two defining strategies for managing high-risk situations. Soon you will have to design a plan to guide yourself through the crises you are bound to encounter. Should you follow a rigid path impeccably or a flexible path where errors are opportunities for growth?

The Enlightened Path is a middle way and contains elements of both. You must honor all commitments without exception, but you must only commit to what you can control, and that includes your behavior and attitudes, but does not include outcomes!  You can accept responsibility for what you do, but it would be imprudent to accept responsibility for the outcomes of what you do, because forces other than you may have an influence on how events play out. So be careful about committing to improving your life or to repairing relationships, because you have less control over such things than you may think.  Instead, make commitments only about things you do control such as your behavior and attitudes. 

This middle way is an opportunity to apply the scientific method to learning how your bio-psycho-social vehicle works so you can operate it effectively to follow the most advantageous course, according to your values and criteria.  The Enlightened Path presupposes that your understanding of reality will always be imperfect, so you must be open to disconfirming information and use it to nurture your understanding of cause-and-effect, rather than as evidence of your intrinsic worthlessness and the hopelessness of your efforts

Accepting the truth, even if it is not what you expected or wanted, is the kind of advice one might give a child. In domains of low self-efficacy, even otherwise competent adults revert to the mentality of their childhood – they are attached to outcomes, react emotionally when their efforts do not produce immediate success, and are focused on themselves and how successful or worthy they are.  This mentality of childhood produces dependence on external agency.  The enlightened path takes one from the mentality of childhood to accepting the responsibility to respond mindfully to the challenges of a mortal life.

At the abstract level the scientific method is flexible; at the speculative level, in its openness to new facts and ideas, the scientific method is flexible.  A good scientist adheres, without exception, to good scientific process ─ you can be confident that (s)he followed the procedures exactly as described in the publication’s procedure section. When engaging your challenge, you must also adhere to good process ─ for example, follow your commitments exactly as described and without exception! Consider this responsibility when you compose your plan.  Don’t look for or accept loopholes!

On the Enlightened Path, whatever happens is nature's way of teaching you the lessons of cause-and-effect. Performance errors that in the past would have triggered ruminative self-focus, are instead used in the service of personal growth by increasing your understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.  Following the Enlightened Path requires that you perform as intended without exception, except when there are exceptions, in which case you continue to maintain a forgiving, nurturing attitude toward yourself.  Rather than view unexpected or unpleasant feedback as a judgment about your self-worth, accept whatever nature has to teach you as part of the education you evidently require.  The truth wants to set you free!

An Exquisite Irony

The next two sections describe hypnotic and cognitive-behavioral tactics that will help you escape the addictive trap in which you find yourself.  You will have to develop and modify these methods so they fit your particular circumstance, and this requires that you evaluate your performance and the usefulness of the different methods and approaches, and therein lies one of the classic traps found in the paradoxical domain of coping with a disorder of appetite.  The seeds of suffering are already present in the plan to escape it!

Planning itself involves attachment: The very attempt to achieve a goal implies that reaching this goal is desirable. When I feel bad, I am motivated to figure out what to do so I feel better. Often efforts to feel better produce unintended consequences that produce negative emotional states and ruminative self-focus.

The very attempt to change your behavior sets up a trap because it requires that you check whether or not your tactics are working.  When people get negative feedback they tend to confuse the messenger with the message.  One of the primary challenges of this kit is to discourage judgmental reactions that would trigger neurotic rumination and the impaired performance it brings about. Preventing ruminative self-focus from hijacking your cognitive resources is an important challenge. To use this kit you will have to be awake and open to the truth, no matter how ugly or cruel. Discovering the truth, rather than fearing or denying it, is what enables you intentionally to influence the course of events.

Doing Mode & Being Mode

Doing Mode refers to solving problems and achieving goals.  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, when you are simply experiencing the here and now without trying to accomplish anything or make sense of anything you are in Being Mode. 

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, a seductive trigger for ruminative self-focus. Deciding not to fall into this trap may produce a self-critical reaction when you catch yourself ruminating, “I’m doing it again, after I told myself not to, Why do I keep doing this? I don’t have what it takes. . .”

If the self-talk were broadcast, it would sound childish, but through the state-dependent filters produced by ruminative self-focus, the self-talk is accepted, typically without question.  This recursive process can be evoked by almost anything, and overcoming it is not trivial.  Pulling yourself out of an autonomous sequence such as ruminative self-focus requires that you recognize and disengage from the autonomous sequence as soon as it arises.  The Soul Illusion makes recognition difficult, because the distortion filters will be invisible to you. (See Chapter 5.4 for methods to help you recognize the warning signals that you are asleep at the wheel).  Moreover, pulling out of a pathogenic state of mind, even if you recognize that doing so would be a good idea, is complicated by the recursive traps of self-evaluation.

Any attempt to change things for the better implies Doing Mode, and goals regarding the self require frequent self-evaluation. The automatic reaction to recognizing that one has fallen into ruminative self-focus is to evaluate yourself as less effective than you intended, because the intention was to not fall into that primitive thinking pattern.  To the extent that you are attached to achieving the goal, the self-evaluation triggers an emotional reaction and, thereby, changes state-dependent filters.  Emotional reactions to self-evaluation are often the first link of an autonomous chain of events that leads to relapse.

One solution to this perverse trap is to switch from Doing Mode to Being Mode. The switch requires the meta-cognitive ability to wake yourself out of autonomous problem-solving mode, turn off all the state-dependent filters, and experience the here now without interpretation.

Meta-cognitive awareness permits intentional state change

Meta-cognitive awareness involves switching from an attached to a detached perspective; for example, when Dr. Jekyll recognizes that he is in one of his Mr. Hyde trances, he has learned to say to himself: “I observe that I am thinking angry thoughts about my wife and these thoughts make me want to give her pain, but I will engage in actions that will get me out of this angry state so I can respond in accord with my interests and principals.” Saying this to himself requires the ability to detach from the perspective of Mr. Hyde and observe his thoughts and sensations from a dispassionate perspective.  If he is able to use his cognitive gifts to detach from the emotional state, he will revert back to the kindly Dr. Jekyll trance.

Unless you enjoy the pain, it is likely that self-destructive behavior occurs when you are asleep at the wheel.  Awakening yourself requires the meta-cognitive perspective to recognize that you have fallen into a recursive trap, and now is the time to take back control of your actions. Your first task is to wake up so you can operate the vehicle intentionally. 

Personal Experiment: Meta-cognitive perspective of a conflict - During a high-risk situation see if you can detach from Doing Mode so that you can observe your sensations and thoughts from the meta-cognitive perspective. See if you can use language to describe, the two conflicting forces: Cravings or urges that pull you toward the incentive, and your will, which pulls you in a different direction. When you get the chance, write about these experiences, describing as best as you can the details of these motivations – your experience of them, their priority now, their priority then, and any conclusions you may have about your true motivation and how to cope with the motivational influence of local conditions. 

Mindfulness and awakening

The Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  This eloquent description of the middle way between the Impeccable and the OPEN path comes with the caveat that outcomes are in the category of things I cannot change. 

Consider how the Serenity Prayer applies to ruminative self-focus. “The things I cannot change” include outcomes, the past, what people think of me, etc.  I must have the serenity to accept the way things are, not to try to fix such things.  “The serenity to accept” is another way of phrasing Being Mode.

Given your awareness of situations or personal characteristics that diminish the quality of your life, it is natural to apply your problem-solving skills to improve things. The goal is clear enough: Maximize pleasure and desirable outcomes and minimize pain and miserable outcomes. Unfortunately, as discussed above, problem-solving methods applied to the self tend to trigger self-evaluation that leads to pain and bad outcomes.  Ironically, it is the very attempt to escape or avoid unhappiness, or to achieve happiness that drives the recursive mechanism.

Ironically, it is a mindless form of problem solving that, when successful, maintains neurotic and addictive disorders.  Individuals with social phobia, for example, figure out ways to minimize social contact, but the successful avoidance prevents the exposure that is required to resolve the social phobia.  Individuals whose access to the incentive is complicated by family or a treatment program can figure out ingenious methods to access the incentive.  Later the successful recovery of the incentive will be viewed, in retrospect, through the state-dependent lenses of having lapsed (failed) and may thereby evoke demoralization.

The first step out of these autonomous traps is to awaken from the mindless problem-solving mode to a different way of relating to problems: Mindfulness, which may be defined as paying attention to the present moment with acceptance, is not the default mode of experience.  Like any other non-automatic response it requires training to override the  default judgmental orientation of Doing Mode.  Students of mindfulness are taught that whatever their chosen focus of attention is at any moment, to allow, as best they can, thoughts, feelings, and sensations to come and go in the mind.  The intention is to notice how the mind tends to become attracted to experiences judged to be positive and to avoid or escape experiences judged to be negative.  The skill we are seeking is to purposely let go of problem solving and instead to simply observe the data dispassionately.  From this meta-cognitive perspective, one may be more able to discern the true nature of the problem and respond to it in a more skillful way.

Mindfulness exercises the skill of disengaging from bad trances along with their state-dependent filters and response tendencies, and awakening to the unfiltered experience of the present moment. Ironically, by intending to experience the present moment with acceptance you cannot help but become aware of the continual shifting of attention from moment to moment and the tendency for some of these shifts to produce emotional reactions. 

A good model for developing this skill is the sparring practice a boxer uses to develop his skill.  Everyday life will give you many opportunities to recognize and disengage from the ruminations elicited by Doing Mode and simply experience in an unfiltered way the present moment, even if it is less pleasant than you desire.

Personal Experiment: Following the breath - Focus on the movement of the breath in and out of the nostrils.  If your mind wanders away briefly note what took it away, then gently bring attention back to the breathing, without judging the wandering of attention. The goal of this exercise is not really to prevent the mind from wandering, but to cultivate habits of wakeful self-awareness that can prevent us from living our lives asleep at the wheel, and hence can prevent autonomous slides into relapse.  This goal requires that you observe your experience in a friendly way, rather than reacting against it or believing your experience is a reflection of objective truth.

When dealing with the world in real time, your attention naturally and automatically parses the stimulation it receives, categorizing it so it can be used in the service of problem solving.  Perceiving sensation in a way unfiltered by automatic problem solving perspectives allows you to awaken from the recursive traps that emerge from attachment and self-evaluation.