The schemas that once provided optimal for navigation past situations, may not prove successful to novel situations, and the accommodation of them to include more data, more experience, more subjective experiential responses, is constantly being modified in accordance. The modification can choose to double down the assimilated schema which continues to “work” to produce the desired subjective experience, which can be reflexive of progress in the domains which we value, or the assimilated and integrated system can fail to achieve adequate progress towards those values, and in so failing, open itself up for improvement and new manners of “coping” that would better serve us to optimally embody our values or progress in the direction we desire. (Genetic Epistemology’s Implications)

New knowledge, insights, and developmental pathways to developed higher cognitive ability provides us with a broader perspective from which to conceptualize reality. As we grow cognitively we develop explanations of higher complexity in reference to details of the world around us, and in describing subjective experience. This integrated knowledge provides pragmatic utility to a vaster range of experiences, and leads us to believe that the dialectical movement of conscious orientation to our world is progressive in nature, denying the hypothesis that past modes of being would be more optimally suited to navigate existence than our presently actualized Being.      

We naturally assume that through this process we develop to greater heights of wisdom and prudence in our assimilation, and accommodation of novel experiences and information. Seeing that each new schematic reformatting includes novel situations without excluding the already ascertained, we logically deduce that this “new” schemata is more optimal for our continuing Being-in-the-world. This isn’t always the case, while certain navigational pathways are created that allows us to be oriented towards a broader range of experiences, oftentimes we sacrifice modes of being-towards-the-world, virtues, and wellbeing in the process of doing so, which we may find, in retrospect, to be personally optimal in the manner of handling things.

For example, training to remain equanimous in reaction to emotional fluctuation. This is a developed skill around emotional regulation, such as in the emergence of anger, annoyance, or disagreeableness, and we can develop a schema for handling the situations away from un pragmatically optimal emotional outbursts. The reaction to anger with violence, unwholesome speech, or selfish disregard for those we love, can be modified in accordance with mindfulness training, consciously directed inaction in response to the arising of emotional dysregulation, and conditioned through habit in these circumstances. In this manner we accommodate our emotional reaction system to a mode of being characterized by equanimity, and assimilate experiences that elicit such emotional turbulence to the developed schema. While this is a dialectical movement that appears to be progressive in nature, we may find ourselves taken advantage of, and unable to express anger in times where its pragmatic utility is optimal for the wellbeing of ourselves or those we love. In this manner, the past mode of being, and the past schema used to react in such a manner, may be found to be more desirable. We may find ourselves in a state of nostalgia longing for that mode of Being which reacted in a manner that was aggressive, assertive, and forthright in response to any emotional deviation that elicited anger. All is not lost, and the benefit that we accrued from that past mode of being is still able to be achieved through further development. The optimal solution, of course, is not recursion to remove equanimous training, but further integration of both differentiated types of response in discriminatory reactions, where it is necessary for the one mode of being to be present in reaction to emotional outbursts, such as anger or violence, we can discriminate and act accordingly. When minor stressors occur that once would elicit an inappropriate response, we can develop prudence in discerning it as such and remain equanimous. So while a past mode of being may be wanting, we still have the potentiality of manifesting underlying schematics, and using them in accordance with the developed schema, to once again dialectically transcend them both to a more optimal manner of responding and acting in the world.

The potentiality of losing a prior mode of being that is optimal to a further developed stage, such as our current one, is an idea that has frightened many of us. How do we explain the nostalgia we have for past modes of being, how can we intuit them as being better suited for us than the manner of orienting we currently embody?

This happens in comparative analysis between remembered past subjective experience, its schemas used to navigate the situations which occurred, and their relative success, in comparison to our current subjective experience and the manner in which our mode of being and it’s currently developed schemas are adequate at handling our current situation. Where we find ourselves in a state of hopelessness to recovering what was once found and now appears lost, we can also find that piece within us, as it surely is built into our currently developed schema, albeit, lying dormant. We often find fond memories of childhood, and prior experience, and despite the transcendental nature of consciousness to advance, we still can make sense of this in terms of proportionality between schematic adaptability success and its inextricable link to subjective experience. This appears to be a paradox, as we grow and develop it should be clear that our subjective experience improves as we become better equipped to deal with internal phenomena and external situations, yet we oftentimes find ourselves longing for past epochs, and nostalgia entices us to perceive the past as something “better” than we now have it.

As we become better equipped to deal with a larger range of environments, problems, and internal states, the complexity of information grows, the amount of information needed to be integrated into the coherent framework grows, and tangentially, the amount of potential solutions and pathways to navigation grows. This increase in complexity can cause a disparity between subjective experience, it’s currently assimilated schemas, and the “perceived” complex environments we find ourselves in. In contemplated memory we find past epochs characterized by a retrospectively perceived improvement of wellbeing in relation to our current state, and this can be characterized by the reduction of complexity and our past schemas success relative to those simpler situations we found ourselves in. The relative success, given a less complex world, less encumbered by further potentiality to confront unknown problems at the time we were wholly ignorant of, can account for the difference in subjective wellbeing, and entice us to recall once embodying a mode of Being that appears to be marked by more wellbeing than our current state, and rightfully so.

In infancy and childhood, the amount of problems, information, knowledge of the world, and ability to navigate life, all is a lot less taxing on conscious life than is found in adult experience, as most of it is delegated to unconscious assimilation and accommodation. The schemas are optimized to work through assimilation in reference to a small range of experiences, and given the tendency for parental responsibility the infants success in these domains is usually sufficient enough to comfortably sustain life. As we develop cognitively our knowledge of the complexity of situations, ideas, and their potential solutions, all grows, as does the ever improving vastness of coverage by developed schemas. What we may perceive to be lost in wellbeing within subjective experience, is made up for in competency and clarity in regards to more optimally navigating a larger set of problems, and an improvement in capability to articulate a bigger set of knowledge about reality. But this perceived loss is merely that, a perceived loss, it is not lost forever, in fact, if we wisely analyze any area of our Being that appears to be lacking in such a way, there always lies the potential for bringing forth from the depths what was lost and accommodating the newer system in accordance with it, to a novel, integrated, schema that holds the best of both worlds, itself being the best possible formulation that we can articulate or embody. Any schema can develop in this manner, and many times develops unconsciously, but the consciously directed recognition, and following training, can actualize the potentiality to dialectically move in this manner.

We become better equipped to integrate new information, better able to describe the world in higher resolution, and create schemas that are relevant to the multitude of added experiences. When the complexity of our environment and situational encounters was relatively lower, and we had a schema that could easily assimilate us to those problems, we found success, but that success was easier won than the relative success of our current schema given the added data we have to wrestle with, the added situations, responsibility, knowledge, and capabilities. As our potential actualizes itself and opens us up to novel potentialities, the schematic underpinnings for decision making and acting in the world must accommodate itself to uncovering optimal solutions, as time and experience grows, the relative success is what is remembered, not the relative competency, knowledge, and potential.

The old structure is always retained within the new, and although it is transcended and modified to be more inclusive, we still have recursive ability to enact those earlier developmental modes of Being. The characteristics that are attached to outdated modes of Being, patterns of behavior, and methodologies all remain inherent in the manifest system, and often recursion to utilize those underlying characteristics can be prudently utilized towards novel situations. The reemergence of transcended knowledge and schemata to novel situations at that point becomes itself an emergent datum to which we are not currently assimilated to in our current schema, and the schema therefore undergoes a successive accommodation of the emergent phenomena with the current understanding towards a novel strategy.

The infallible mode of being certain promotes doubling down on assimilation despite inadequacy with optimally handling novel experiences and situations. This manner of top down deficiency causes stagnation against the biological desire to dialectically improve consciousness to manage the transient nature of existence by accommodation. Maintaining a fallible conscious interpretation of experience, consciously being open to having inadequate articulations of reality, in doubting the optimality of our manner of Being-in-the-world, we can exert a top down influence that promotes the accommodating effect of novel experience to better orient ourselves in accordance with it. Consciously directing our being in such a way can come at a cost to subjective wellbeing in the short term, in facing our own inferiority through admonition of being currently incapable of optimally managing situations, but it opens us up to transcending our prior mode of being and the schemas utilized by it to greater heights found in the resultant dialectical improvement that accommodation to novel experiences affords us. This top down directionality and mode of being which maintains its own fallibility simultaneously promotes the natural dialectical movement of transcendence, where the mode of being certain hinders it.