What drives men to pursue philanthropy, men like Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Viktor Frankl to expose the world’s travesties, to put human suffering on display and advise us on how to overcome it? Great men such as these were successfully able to utilize their talents and experiences to bring something meaningful into existence, each in their own way. Here we will explore their stories, and the archetypal structure which they all embodied, so we too can learn from great men, and attempt to embody the spirit of leaving humanity in a better place than we found it.
George Orwell, being of lower middle class upbringing, was employed as a young man in the British Police force, serving in colonial India in the 1920s. He saw the injustice caused by foreign dominion over people who didn’t desire their presence. Out of guilt, and repentance for the injustice he saw through becoming part of such a system, he endeavored to pursue a course of correction for the sins of his Being. He voluntarily undertook the challenge of subjugating himself to the lowest working class, emerged himself in their culture, studied their misfortune and the content of their lives. Being himself an intelligent writer, he sought to expose the many problems of the working class, to bring to the light of day their suffering, and their tragedies, the terrible working conditions, the housing crisis, the food and economic poverty. He published The Road to Wigan Pier, not only revealing to the upper classes the plight of the lower class, but offering criticism and advice to the Socialist party in how they should change their ways to better unite to face the difficulties of the suffering of the less fortunate.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian soldier during the beginning of WW2. In a letter to a friend, he criticized Russia’s disorganization at the time of German redaction of a peace agreement between the two countries, and subsequent attack on Russia. Russia’s unpreparedness was obvious, and he spoke to this point in his letter. The apprehension of this letter led to his arrest and imprisonment within the Russian prison camp system, which was unjustly imprisoning and putting to work millions of its own members for any perceived criticism or rebellion against the Russian government, which, at this point was a perverted Marxist system, stimulated with totalitarianism. During his time in the Russian camps, he documented the terrible experience he underwent, and the stories he collected along the way. He wrote to the torture, malnourishment, excessive prolongation, the freezing climate, and the altogether hellish conditions within which some 40-60 million Russians died in. Once the Americans freed him from his final camp, he exposed the camps conditions, and what the government was propagating in his novel The Gulag Archipelago. He published this work first under an alias, as the continued totalitarian nature of the government would have condemned him once again had they uncovered his identity. He exposed the hidden Russian gulag system to western Europe and the rest of the world, for what it truly was, as the rest of the world was wholly ignorant of the details of what had happened there. In addition to such acts of bravery in the face of evil, he remarked as to what enabled himself and the prisoners to strive forward in the face of such calamities, the pursuance of meaning. Individual responsibility and the strength of the human will, he offered, in short, the antidote to chaos and suffering.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist in Germany at the start of WW2, and was subsequently imprisoned at a variety of their prison labor camps, one of which was Auschwitz. He too, like Solzhenitsyn, wrote to the tragedy and cruelty of the oppressive governing state, and the affect it had on demoralizing and killing millions within its own borders. During his stay in the prison camps, Victor used his psychological knowledge to alleviate the suffering of his fellow countrymen, to help bring them through some of the worst conditions involuntarily forced upon human beings. After the war, he released Man’s Search for Meaning, a novel exposing the system in its first half, and in the second half, outlining his system of logotherapy, of a truthful pursuance of meaning to counterbalance the malevolence and misfortune found in the world. By providing a psychological system of meaning to alleviate illness, sickness, and misfortune, Viktor Frankl not only gave an anecdotal explanation to the value of such pursuit, but provided the means by which one can implement a similar strategy to one’s own life to alleviate suffering and provide wellbeing.
In all three cases, these great men encountered malevolence, and tragedy, discovered a way to overcome it, and using the powers they contained, brought back something valuable to the people. This was their way of pursuing meaning in the world, and the amount of virtue they displayed in doing so, makes them all heroes in their own right. They went through hell, discovered how to survive, made it back to Earth, and revealed the optimal pathway through the shadow of death.
Those that carry the biggest burden, who take the most responsibility, are the ones we still talk about, are the ones which have provided mankind with the greatest boon. As Jesus Christ carried the biggest responsibility (archetypally / metaphorically), that of suffering for the sins of all mankind, we thus still revel in his virtue, and his story is known by all. Regardless of the supernatural claims, the archetypal nature of his story is that which inspires the great men of history, and whether they know it or not, his story lives on in the actions of the philanthropist, in the words of the philosopher, in the lives of the great men of history. It is to him who takes the most responsibility, who carries his cross for the sake of repaying the debt he owes to the world, and by doing so, saves others, who finds the highest purpose, and to him we owe a debt of gratitude for the current state of the world we find ourselves in. We think the world we find ourselves in is free, and it is free, to a degree, more so now than it ever has been, but it was forged to be so at a high cost, the cost of error, of miscalculation, of injustice, of evil, of malevolence and inhumanity, and the rebellion against such forces, through the suffering, the deaths, the struggle and the perseverance of millions before our time. The cost was paid in effort, time, suffering, poverty, war and blood far before our time. It is the result of thousands of years of sacrifice, and to call this freedom free is to be naive to those people over millions who have laid down their lives in pursuit of a greater future. Sacrifice is a bargain with the future, it is the payment of the present, for a result in the future. This negotiation was carried out by our forefathers and generations past who fought for rights, for knowledge, for truth, for peace, for freedom, and their fight costed millions their lives, many their physical and psychological wellbeing, many endured great sufferings in the negation of injustice, so that now, we can see the fruits of their bargain.
We yield the fruit of that future, and bear the burden of honoring those sacrifices by pursuing what is meaningful in our lives. We hold the responsibility of providing a better future for our children and generations to come, we owe it to them, as we are in debt to those who come before us, to leave the world a better place than we found it. We ought to make a similar sacrifice, a similar negotiation with existence, so that we can provide the ground for a better future for those who come after us, just as we were afforded the luxury of the world we find ourselves in today (in comparison to how things were for those who came before us). It is great men like Orwell who provided the brave counter narrative that spurred the legislative aid that brought millions out of poverty. Orwell went to the slums of Wigan, and Sheffield, went to the coal mines and was able to expose the conditions of millions who lived in an altogether horrendous lower class, in an altogether different world than that of the bourgeois and upper class. It was through his elicit stories that an awareness of the profound suffering was detailed, and provisions could be made for their alleviation. It was his voluntary sacrifice of time and wellbeing, to dive to the depths of humanity, that led to him to be able to bring to civilization the stories of the underworld, so collectively, we could solve the problems which we didn’t know existed. Since the problems of the poverty of the lower class were brought into the spotlight in the early thirties, much effort has been done to alleviate the conditions of the poor and working classes, so now, their baseline, the average member of the lower class, is a king in comparison to those who lived just 70 years before. The change, the improvement, didn’t come for free, it came at the sacrifice of many people, in the face of adversity, it took courage and it took people navigating their lives towards a cause that superseded their existence, it took sacrifice of the present for the gain of the future.
It is in the pursuit of meaning, of doing something that has implications beyond ourselves, that we prove to be worthy of the lives we should be grateful for having, and it is in this pursuit that united men such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Frankl. They all saw the potential they contained to do more than they had to, to do something good, and right, and it was never easy. It is in this adoption of responsibility and in the creation of something valuable that we repay the debt with which we are charged. We all have different abilities, different potential, different manifestations of the divine, yet the objective potential for pursuing a higher value, is something inherent in all of us. As Jesus is the archetypal son, God is the father, the Holy Spirit is in each of us, the potential to align ourselves with the greater good, a higher ideal, lies within every man and woman’s very Being. Jesus was the greatest articulation of what the manifestation of God himself should embody at the time, and in being the greatest manifestation of the highest good he was charged the highest responsibility, and the highest suffering, that of taking up his cross, taking the suffering of the world upon his shoulders, and paying the ultimate price for the sin of mankind. As God is the highest representational symbol of “the highest ideal”, Jesus the highest manifestation of that ideal, and us, being intricately interwoven with the potential of alignment with that ideal through the holy spirit, we too hold the potentiality of manifesting it, each in a different form, in a way conducive to our situation and competencies.
Here we wish to delineate the emergence of conscious direction in its initiating role of preceding action, for the purpose of automatic unconscious habit formations which reinforce the internal disposition towards further development. We start with the initial disposition of the individual, in whatever mode of being he has so acquired as constituting his present moment. Regardless of what the content of his consciousness may be, and regardless of his current psychological makeup, it is possible that a thought arises which leads to a bodily action, or to further thoughts, towards the emergence of emotion, or to a shift in his mode of being. This we define as conscious direction – that conscious forethought that appears to be causally related to our subsequent orientation in the world. This conscious direction appears as intuition, conscious will, a thought in which its intentionality is movement.
The movement which is intentioned by conscious direction is towards any aspect of the totality of our consciously experienced content. Sensory inputs of the visual, tactile, or auditory faculties can be directed to proceed the conscious direction, in such a manner that the proceeding perception is in alignment with the content of conscious direction. The thought may arise in conscious experience of “I will to feel the tactile sensation of my right foot”, this may come in the subjective experience of the conceptual linguistic form of thinking using language, as described, or may be a natural inclination within conscious experience, the mere thought that is pre-conceptual. We know it to be conscious direction by the will to movement, the movement is within the gaze of consciousness. The experiential subjective gaze moves from conscious awareness of the conscious directive, towards the apperception of the tactile sensation in the right foot, the integration of the awareness as conditioned by the perceptible faculty which factors out content of stimuli through the structure of our embodied being, becomes represented in the consciously experienced sensation. In this manner we experience the accomplishment of the conscious direction in its actualization.
In addition to mere consciously directed sensory awareness, and the movement which can manifest in our gaze from mere awareness of present mental content, towards the awareness of mental content which is manifesting in relation to a consciously directive command, there are other movements which can be directed by the conscious will. Like the movement of the gaze of conscious awareness, which, in order to be apprehended mindfully, necessarily requires the implementation of mindfulness during the successive moments proceeding the conscious formulation or realization of the directive, we also can direct movement in any other area that is able to be perceived consciously. This movement that proceeds conscious direction, and the content of the conscious direction, both are necessarily apprehended individually by conscious awareness. Without being consciously aware of the conscious direction, we necessarily are not performing conscious direction, the latter requires the former, yet the former does not require the latter, in order to be manifested in conscious experience or actualized in its application.
While there is a multitude of consciously perceived phenomena which can precede the emergence of further action occurring, here we are only interested in that content which can be acquired by an individual. Meaning – an emotion, or a perception, a memory, can all arise in consciousness in a fashion which directs his mode of being to shift, or which act as causal agents towards the production of additional events in the individual’s life. We are not here interested in external stimulus, only internal stimulus. External stimulus is here wholly out of our “control” in the sense that we cannot direct it within the present moment. What we can direct is the action which proceeds an event occurring which then acts as a stimulus which changes our mode of being or conscious experience. We must here strictly separate that which is internally produced, the act proceeding conscious “will” to instantiate the noema, from the external stimulus, or that which is perceived in embodied form and intuited bodily. We are interested in the experience of that intentioned content produced within the realm of our conscious awareness that subsequently produces action.
The content of conscious direction thus can be anything which we are able to be consciously aware of. Here, conscious awareness is defined as the subjective experience of the content of the present moment, what we are able to experience. While we are always experiencing the present, often the presents relationship to us – us being defined as that transient conscious awareness itself – is that of an unknown known, or something with which we have inherent knowledge of but in the present is unknown, or out of our gaze. Only when the gaze of consciousness is reflexively directed upon itself, when we become aware of our awareness and the content herein of the present moment, does the term I here am calling conscious awareness spring into play. Once we can become aware of our awareness, the ability to recognize conscious content in its relation to being a causal agent in the production of an effectively “produced” content becomes available to us. The use of the word free will here must be eradicated from thought if it so appears to be in relation to the description I am describing. The production of conscious awareness, and of conscious direction, is wholly the product itself of determinate conditions leading to its arising, the ability to do so, like any other mental phenomena, can be improved in its ability to manifest through habitualization, expressed experientially by repeated manifestation into conscious awareness.
As phenomenologically discovered, the intentionality of all consciousness must be recalled. All content of our experience is directed towards something, and the mode of being which we here are referencing as conscious direction is actually the noematic correlate to the underlying noetic content of intentionality. The conscious direction which interests us therefore isn’t the unconscious intentionality behind all human action, it is only the appearing content in experience which occurs before the next moment, it is the conscious causal link to the effect in the moment. While deterministic rules apply to the emergence of conscious direction, this conscious direction is unalterable by the many factors of existence, and being that it is the experience which precedes the next moment, and is all “we” truly have as experiential proof of our ability to choose and alter the world, it would be optimal for us to forge this directional capability to be in line with our values, goals, beliefs, in a way which is psychologically and physically beneficial for us in the next moment, reiterated over time, for us and those we care about. This realm of influence and intention behind the potential theorizing of a beneficial mode of being from which conscious direction can pervade, can be expanded to include as many factors as one wishes. One can look to optimize and alter the content of this conscious direction towards an intention of single-minded consent, toward a singular goal, towards personal psychological wellbeing, towards family relational growth, in effect, anything which stems from the will as worthy of pursuing.
Here a coherent system of values is optimal, so as to not enable our potential for conscious direction in the course of something we value to by hijacked by unconscious and immediate spontaneous pursuits which escape our mindfulness. By entering into a reactionary mode of being which is no longer mindful of the content of consciousness, we let loose the reigns of the psyche to operate in a natural, unmediated, subconsciously directed way. This isn’t negative or positive, as the state of our psyche and the totality of the being which we are, can, prior to the moment described, already be fine-tuned to our values, to a greater or lesser degree. The more time and effort and conscious formulation of rational goals, and habitualizing oneself to the pursuit of such goals, are some of the factors which will enable the spontaneous act of the will in an unmindful state to continue the pursual absent of conscious direction and the mindfulness which is aware of it. The contrary case is what we need to be wary of, in the not fine-tuned, unintegrated, un philosophically formulated valueless mind, the individual is prey to the whims of the will, rather than an orienting north star, and if they have meaningful pursuits which they would rather pursue, the necessary work in the realm of conscious habitualization and conceptualization, and practice, will temper the ability to pursue them.
Wellbeing requires pursuit of what’s meaningful. Pursuit of what’s meaningful requires a value structure. A rational value structure requires philosophical work. Philosophical work requires philosophical knowledge, rational capacity, intellect, effort, time, and experience. The experience of the individual, and his conscious recollection of it, limits the range of content which is available to be philosophically analyzed, thus limited the range of philosophical datum the individual has to work with in the optimization of the value structure (Value Structure Instantiation). Additional knowledge, both logical and experiential, will naturally expand the range of content from which the individual has to work with. The discovery of what is meaningful to one, thus must be uncovered, or created. Uncovered in the sense of an unknown known, as something which provides meaning to the individual’s life but goes unconsciously conceptualized in its relation to the individual, thus is inherent in his being but lacking applied mindfulness to it. Created in the sense of the application of conscious direction towards some pursuit, which creates the conscious conceptualization and attachment of the word “meaning” to that content. We naturally will find that anything our will is directed to has meaning to us, as we are always putting objects, rather physical or mental (idea, thought, experience), in relation to ourselves, and conceptualizing them in ways which makes sense to us. Thus every content of experience has a value and a meaning to us before we become conscious of it containing that meaning.
The very perceptional structure of our embodied being is fine tuned to a value system which has developed over the course of the development of the human genome, and has been modified since birth. This perceptible system necessarily runs in the present moment in its pre-conscious, pre-sentient, pre-directed, form which mediates the content perceived through a type of value structure, the content of which, and the characteristics of which, can be modified and altered by experience, including that which proceeds conscious direction. This perceptible system, I n its current state, is that which limits the range of conscious experience as it is directed to receiving a proceeding mental content in conscious experience, or in the actualization of embodied movement, including physical action, mode of being change, mental content change, and any movement which we are consciously able to be mindful of, or direct our being to be in accordance with. While the very content of conscious experience is mediated by this system, the intuitions, ideas, thoughts, or linguistic commands which arise in conscious awareness under the guise of conscious direction, are themselves the product the same embodied totality of our Being which gives rise to the instantiation not only of the mood, personality, mode of being, which courses through our conscious experience, but also is the manifestation of the content within the framework as well.
We are always acting with intention, out of desire, and the intentional object always holds a place of representation once it is conceptualized in the mental stream of conscious thought. The revelation, uncovering, or discovery of those contents, activity, systems, concepts, which hold the most meaning in relation to each other, in their total relation to us, is what we should seek to describe for our formulation of a value structure. The necessary interconnection between values, their place of priority, the discarding of lesser and the superseding of greater values must be carried out on an individual level, not only would it be useful to find what currently represents one’s values (based on time spent in pursual), but it is necessary for the optimization of conscious direction, our conscious experience, and thus our wellbeing, that we formulate what we would like for our value structure to be. What is an “ideal” value structure we wish to body.
With this “ideal” in mind we can further seek to optimize our time in proportion to this value structure. Thus the famous Jocko Willink maxim; discipline equals freedom. By disciplining our time and effort into those things which we most value, we are effectively exercising the freedom of the will to “choose” what its content is. A well-structured life which reflects the consciously formulated value system is far from being constraining, on the contrary, it constrains the pursuit of values which one doesn’t value, while providing the framework for a life which accurately reflects one’s values, providing the optimal structure which can be recalibrated with experience and further philosophical work towards improvement of the value system. By disciplining oneself to follow the consciously formulated values, we create the possibility of deeper pursual of what is meaningful to us.
With the value structure as our guiding star, conscious direction can be applied toward the content which is in alignment with what is meaningful to us. How are we to be confident in our pursual of such ventures? It is based on the work with which we have put in towards the description of values. If at any point we question our confidence in the path we are following, in the experience directed towards values, if it ever occurs to us that the path isn’t optimal, all we have to work with is the experiential knowledge and the philosophical application towards our conceptualization of values, and their relationship to each other in formulating a meaningful life. If this occurs, more work is to be done.
Here I wish to make some remarks on the correct interpretation and usage of psychological classification methodologies, as the general application of them seems widely misused in their accepted revelations. The main examples which I have in mind to use for the purpose of interpretation are those of psychological personality tests, such as; the Meyers Briggs; the Big 5 personality tests as used by modern psychology; the archetypal constructions as proposed by Jung; the tripartite separate of personality as divided to their corresponding physical disposition as proposed by William Sheldon; and in general the medical diagnoses of someone’s “mental illness” or abnormal psychic state. While these I specifically have in mind, any classification system that seeks to delineate areas of emotional or experiential phenomena, or even modes of being, are all under scrutiny to be used in their respective proper formats, and here criticism and explanation of the method we should use to interpret them is discussed.
What frequently occurs after an individual receives a classification of their character is that they become identified with it and develop a belief structure that is modified and in alignment with said classification, at the exclusion of other diagnoses, and at the exclusion of being identified as lying upon a mutable spectrum in every regard of character trait. The individual receives, discovers, or intuits themselves as fitting into different categories, and through the identification, both consciously and unconsciously, doubles down on the path prescribed. The unconscious search for content in alignment with the description given to them promotes confirmation bias in the individual, strengthening the resolve upon a limiting description of their character. This methodology is reinforced by the intellectual belief that the defining of such a diagnosis is directly relatable and descriptive of their character. Due to the belief in such a self-grouping, the individual spreads the meme of the classification, in thought and speech, further reinforcing their belief and modifying their behavior in alignment with the diagnosis. People tend to not want to contradict themselves, and to remain consistent in their interactions with others, and through the statement of their description to other people, they seek to confirm their words through the manifestation of their actions, further solidifying the modified belief structure. I believe this to be a perversion of the data presented, and altogether promotes an suboptimal mode of self-description, that is, if the goal is towards not only a comprehensive understanding of one’s self, the “truth”, but additionally towards the individuals personal character growth, or “Ultimate Wisdom” (as described in previous content).
This acceptance of a diagnosis and further memetic reinforcement necessarily implies the transition from the always beneficial fallibilistic mode of being towards that “mode of Certainty” which is characterized by dogmatism and stagnation. Obviously this is an impediment we wish to remove, while on the other hand, we must accurately understand the usefulness of such classifications, and the way to interpret the findings in a way which we can use to foster a proper psychological development.
The mode of being fallible, and of the fact of irreducibility of our character to simplistic terms, is of paramount importance for the individual to integrate the totality of their psyche. While there is beauty and wit in the simple, the human psyche is merely too vast to be cut down by Occam’s Razor in a way which does justice to the variability and extensive complexity which makes it up. While words themselves cannot ever do infallible justice toward an accurate representation of the actuality of the psychological whole, they can more or less be used to conceptualize the reality in a way which is beneficial. The dogmatic adherence to a single diagnosis, mode of being, or applied psychological classification, must be henceforth disregarded.
To start from the fundamentals, the range of human experience, of human psychological makeup , and its displayed character traits, lies upon a spectrum of potentiality for every individual. Every individual lies upon a spectrum of anxiety manifestation, strength of will, sociability, intellect, virtue, extraversion, introversion, agreeableness, as well as in the proportion of the psyche which is dominated or affected by archetypal structures in the unconscious (to greater or less degree). Every metric which is regarded as being all-encompassing towards an individual’s character, as described by psychologists, is inherent in every individual to a varying degree. While this is more or less intellectually grasped when pointed out, it is rarely expounded as being universally valid, and is only referenced when it suits the individual to so do. Those who are towards the “extreme ends” of a certain psychological trait, in relation to the totality of individuals, are slapped with a diagnosis which is generally accepted, and in reference to areas of which little or no description is given, the actual trait goes unrealized and if consciously considered is disregarded as not applicable to the individual’s psychic makeup. A patient who is categorized as being low in trait openness may seek to respond to such a description through overcorrecting or by doubling down in the self-identification, but may simultaneously unconsciously ignore other areas of their character which may have a greater bearing on their psychological wellbeing, such as disagreeableness or self-conceit. We must be on guard against isolating the psyche to a unitary description lest we fail to optimize the totality.
Upon every area of human analysis, we lie upon a spectrum, in every regard. This complexity of intertwined variability across every psychological classification, and our potential for change within it, and our response to the current state we find ourselves in, is paramount to the optimization of the individuals wellbeing. The application of wisdom derived from experiential as well as acquired knowledge are the mitigating factors towards the management and optimization of one’s psychological state in response to the manifestation of underlying psychological traits. How well one receives the results, and under what individual belief structure and interpretation method one uses to analyze the results, will determine the individual’s response. This is obviously a more complex topic, but the gist of it can be deduced from what follows.
The usage of psychological classifications should be interpreted in the manner of disclosing information solely in relation to the framework one is analyzing, as being applicable only within that structure and not without or in an all-encompassing nature towards the totality of ones Being. For example, the classic introverted and extroverted distinction made by Jung seeks to delimit individuals into two clearly opposing groups. The problem is, every individual lies upon a spectrum of their past, current, and future relation to the description of the two terms, and can bounce between them as well as inhabit both on a regular basis. The classification of oneself as being an extrovert doesn’t mean one doesn’t have any inclination towards introversion, it merely means that the description of the word extrovert, as decided by the conductors of the psychological examination, and as the individual responds to what he believes to be an accurate representation of himself in the questionnaire, is what the test produces to be a good explanation in light of its collected datum, in relation to the average test participant. In addition, we must take into account that the system used to discern psychological traits are based on samples, so, we must take the information it gives in its correct context. If we are confronted with the result of being high in trait extroversion, it is referring to the fact that we are more extroverted than the average person who was included in the sample. Everyone has a degree of extroversion, and to state that we are “high in trait extroversion” necessarily entails that what we believe to be true responses about ourselves (answered in the questionnaire) points to the fact that we have higher than the average person’s trait extroversion, as it is defined by the psychological system, in relation to the sample size of people tested for the trait, based on the questions and their answers.
The necessary correlation of this to the truth of the matter is tempered in relation to the individuals understanding of the description, as well as his understanding of himself, which we know is unconsciously modified by inherent biases and preconceived notions, stemming from socio-cultural, environmental, and genetic pre determinations. The accurate analysis of oneself is an impossibly tricky thing to differentiate from what one would like to be an accurate description of themselves. This is the first logical issue one gets into in psychological examination and classification. Secondly, the subject is limited by the spectrums associated by the two terms, and in their overarching applications and general descriptions. The truth is we all could be extroverts in certain situations in life, introverts in others, dependent upon the situation we find ourselves in. We must recognize that the classification is only to be used in the sense of, for example: “I currently am operating under Jung’s conceptualization of introversion in his division between introversion and extroversion right now, because I believe my current situation is describable by his description of the term” (maybe you are abstractly thinking in the absence of social interaction, and enjoying it, and don’t want the company of others). Because you find yourself frequently in such a situation, doesn’t mean that the classification can be blanketed across your character, or that it is exhaustive in defining you, it strictly means exactly what it means – meaning – within the moment you see a likeliness to your own character in the description of whatever the questionnaire is asking (holds across all self-narratives), and the result is more or less pointing to high or low in the trait in relation to the average person tested. This holds true for any classification one may become interested in or be diagnosed by, whether it be a personality test or other divisions of the psyche into conceptual groups.
An honest examination of every descriptive conceptualization can be applied to any individual at some point in his life, or at least be recognized as a potentiality for him who is analyzing, if he is to be sincere and work towards the connection. One can spin any description to fit one’s conduct, and can see any human conceptualization in a way that is in alignment with one’s character, if one has the intellectual relational reasoning necessary to do so. Even if one can’t clearly see every personality description as being contained in their character, and claims boldly that this description truly represents them and these don’t, I believe upon further investigation he will discover that certain descriptions within the framework are merely more or less applicable to his character in the manifestations of his thought, speech and actions (which truly represent what we believe), and that this “more or less” implies that they all are descriptive of human nature which he himself contains, just certain ones become manifest to his conscious awareness more than others. Statistical probability and percentage of conscious occurrence play a role in the acceptance of descriptions, as that which more consciously enters into awareness becomes a more viable description than the altogether more accurate claim of ignorance.
This is the use of such classifications, the phenomenological examination of conceptualizations which are used as representations describing different modes of ones being, and using such concepts to denote specific changes and attributes of one’s mode of being. The optimal use is to not generalize a specific description as being applicable across all moments of time, but using them to comprehend and describe his present state as it so appears to him, within the framework of whatever system he is using. The description is only applicable within the system he is using to analyze his psyche. If one seeks to couple multiple systems, one creates a metasystem and that becomes the arena within which he is playing.
Groupings done by William Sheldon pose a serious problem to a truthful understanding of one’s physical state and its connection to stated “correlative” personality. His differentiation of three body types, endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph must be used under the interpretative framework I have described above, or the data would be misconstrued. There are no strict restrictions which define these terms in their actuality, but if we are to analyze ourselves using his method, it is possible for us to state that one description fits us currently more than the others, while simultaneously holding the view that it is a classification which isn’t stable and clear cut, it is merely a conceptual defining of our current state as being in alignment with one classification more so than another, in comparison to others, as he defines it, within that system. It doesn’t point to a truly scientific description in a way that is meaningful in an objective sense, it is merely useful in the game played within the rules he describes, not truthful other than in idealized form. The same holds for his corresponding psychological compositions which he says is in alignment with different body types. His description, in a nutshell, is between the skinny, large, and muscular, body types and their corresponding traits of cerebrotonia (predominance of intellectual over social and physical factors), viscerotonia (predominance of social), somatotonia (predominance of physical). The naturally skinny person is defined as being more intrinsically introverted and inclined towards intellectual dominance, abstract reasoning, social distancing and isolation, and have a high interest in privacy. The naturally larger person being defined by being desirous of sensual pleasures, love of people and sociability, enjoyment of family life, craving for affection and need of people when in trouble. The naturally muscular person is defined as having a more aggressive nature and desire for power over others, indifference towards pain, high desire for youth and a need for activity. Of course his descriptions are more exhaustive, but generally we can see how the underlying traits which may lead to the development of each body shape or of each personality traits, themselves, can be causally related to its correlate term. In other words, an underlying desire for power may make an individual to become more likely to become muscular, the underlying desire for sensual pleasure may lead the individual to eat more and become larger, in relation to others who lack the similar desire, the underlying desire for intellectual comprehension of the world may predispose the individual to be more likely than others to neglect of physicality and thus skinniness. Also, vice versa in conversant cases. Thus we can see the causal connection in underlying traits of the classifications, but in all cases every single correlation can be applied to any individual regardless of their current body shape or of their most domineering mental pattern. We cannot tell whether the correlation between interest and body type will manifest itself in an individual, here it is implied as merely a probable effect, but in all reality, it is entirely possible for such interests to produce the opposite corresponding manifestations in actions than he described. The desire for power can produce introversion, and all other combinations are possible. The ability to change or to be defined by any of these drives / physical appearances is necessarily contained in every individual, albeit to differing degrees and likelihood of present manifestation. While these descriptions one may automatically intuit as applying to them, in their desire to mentally connect the two descriptions to their own disposition, it is absolutely a hindrance, and impediment, and an illusion or trick of the mind to exclude oneself from the ulterior psychological descriptions and personalities. It is useful to see how the groove created by a psychological state can be a beneficial pathway towards the higher probability of development of a body type, and the exploration of the causal effectiveness in psychological states and their relation to the ability to manifest actions in accordance with those states is surely something interesting, but as far as denoting the essential characteristics of our psyche, every one of these different modes of being lies within every one of us as potentialities. The degree to which the groove produces the correlated action is merely predicated upon intuitional and potentially statistical variance, it is not universally valid or immutable, it is actually quite limiting and can be easily memetically reiterated as a thought pattern which melds the psyche to its description. This is the error we must be on guard against proliferating, we must be careful which content we choose to believe, spread, and act in accordance with, lest unconscious deceptive forces become prevalent.
In the same way we should view the psyche as a whole. It isn’t beneficial to be defined by one description within one form of classification, when we can bracket our personality and psychic makeup in a million different ways. It is beneficial to see the causal relation between modes of being and their effects upon our lives, and what is more probable to produce certain content, so that we can direct our beings into the grooves which we consciously believe would be beneficial to us. In receiving information about our psychological makeup, as compared to the average person, we can utilize the information to better understand ourselves, but we must be framing the results and our place in relation to them in the proper brackets. Certain occupations, relationships, ways of spending time, and interests, can be gleamed through the results of psychological testing, proving applicable to many areas of our lives, but the necessary caveats must be conceded. What presupposes any test, and the data from which it draws, is the belief of a general understanding of ourselves in the first place. Thus, through understanding ourselves, in accurately representing ourselves when being tested, we learn how our psychological makeup compares to others, thus enabling us to better understand our self in relation to the society from which the data is taken. This context, and the accuracy of our representation, will determine the accuracy of the results. So in a way, how we understand ourselves, in the first place, is the crucial factor towards how we understand the results, and thus how we understand ourselves. This seems paradoxical, and potential deceptive, but, if we are to authentically represent ourselves, the results can be utilized in the aforementioned ways.
We want to get the clearest view of ourselves, and to do so we must remain in a state of fallibility and openness to variability in our self-narrating, as the trickle-down effect is vast and its implications will affect our wellbeing and further development. If we are to make a simple approximation of classifications than we should maintain the defining of ourselves as a complex system of overlapping and intertwined modes of being and character traits, without further specification, which would only muddy the clear waters from which we ought to remain content in. Others can deduce what they will in their judgment of us in our speech and actions, and we may choose the narration for which to follow, but we must maintain a diligent striving for such descriptions to be in accordance with the objective truth. We must be honest towards our potentialities, and we must be wise in the discerning of beneficial modes of being in which to inhabit, as they truly define our conscious experience of life and thus our wellbeing.
On a side note – there’s room for extrapolation into overlying modes of being in reference to merging layers of classifications and how they manifest cooperatively. For example, an extroverted or introverted Hero archetype dominating the psyche, or a high in trait openness individual with a dominating trickster archetype. There’s much room for psychological extrapolation upon the emergence of novel classifications between each other and between older groupings. This would be beneficial to the whole psychological community in denoting how to navigate or aide a patient that can be characterized in these ways, as well as individually if you find yourself manifesting actions which are in line with a specific formulation, and also in describing the optimal integration of the psyche from these very different starting points which we may find ourselves in. While certain actions, patterns, habits, predispose us to certain modes of being, and certain classifications, certain combinations within different systems of analysis, in conjuncture with each other, if carried out authentically, can provide novel insights into the phenomenology of our Beings. Are these tests more accurate than psychotherapy? From introspective analysis? From a phenomenological analysis of our own Being? From the description of our personality from a close friend or loved one? The answer doesn’t necessary matter. But all this content, all these pathways of inquiry, can provide a more holistic view of ourselves, and what we need to work on to become who we wish to be, in relation to who we are, and also, to provide into formation to be utilized in the pursuit of best navigating our experience on the road to that highest ideal potentiality which we are striving for.
In order to utilize exposure therapy for psychological growth, it is necessary to first establish the psychological preconditions for such an endeavor. The conscious awareness of a present fear is a necessary first condition. In retrospective analysis of a trigger which springs into effect a period or momentary heightened emotional sensitivity, we can recognize the content of that which our psyche has unintegrated. This content can be of something which is purely mental, such as a memory, thought, emotion, perception, or it can be of a sensual, external stimulus. In regards to the content which illicit the extreme emotional response, it is crucial to use judgment that improves with practical wisdom in how to psychologically condition the mind towards an appropriate response.
Our value system proves to be entwined with the decisions we make in regards to the furthering of our psychological wellbeing. If we find the content to be producing a negative, fearful, “unable to deal with” or “aversive” type of conditioned response, further exposure, and in all honesty, direct apprehension and knowledge of such content, will condition our minds to be accustomed to it. It is frequently observed that that which strikes the most fear into a man’s heart is that which he doesn’t understand, the unknown, or the misunderstood. It is through understanding, through knowing, and seeing himself overcome it, that he conditions his automatic system to no longer have the same extreme response to the stimuli. Once you have come to know what you’re afraid of, and “stood up to it” in deliberate confrontation, whether it be physical or mental, in looking where you least want to look, and going where you least want to go, psychological resilience to the stressors and in turn total psychological integration ensues.
As to contents which produce an extremely positive, hopeful, or altogether unmitigated source of pleasure, such as in addictive substances, or habitual tendencies striving after pleasure, which afterward produce a craving, a longing, or a discontent psychological state in the absence of such content, an opposite reaction to exposure therapy would be optimal to the psychological development of the individual. This doesn’t mean abstinence in regards to pleasure, but rather the ability to be content in its absence, the self-independence that is necessary for personal growth, through the knowledge and conditioned response of being content with nothing. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for things, or that we shouldn’t desire or wish for things to be otherwise. It does require a great deal of wisdom and experiential understanding to distinguish which type of content would fall into this category, but psychologically lacking wellbeing after the absence of an emotional stimulating content could be an early indicator. In such cases a measured and consciously deliberate restraining of indulgence is necessary to come into the most beneficial relationship between yourself and that content. Once little separation is made, a less biased analysis of the content which produced such a reaction can be made, as the dopamine reward system becomes less inclined towards its pursual. The disciplining of the heart, mind, and body, towards the end of ultimate psychological integration in regards to both ends of the spectrum, is necessary for individual growth in competency and overall “Wisdom”. Being in the correct relationship to the things which overstimulated the psyche in producing an emotional reaction allows us to ground our decisions and how we spend our time, and what we avoid, based on a clear, rational – tempered through experience – mode of being.
There is room for a phenomenological examination into the presence of enantiodromia, in reference to the Jungian and Neumann’s determination of the concept, and their theories upon it having a natural psychological function occurring as a real phenomena in our lives. There have been many expositions and uses of the terms in both of their works, but as to a centralized focus on the topic none exists that I’m aware of in outside philosophical treatises or in the phenomenological domain. Neither psychologist has expounded the basis for which it arises, that being upon the inherent essence of our psyche (producing both the conscious and the unconscious) to manifest the effects of enantiodromia, an analysis which undoubtedly must be carried out using a phenomenological method.
As we are beings who find ourselves “thrown” (Hiedeggerian) into a world unasked for, we necessarily encounter chaos within our experience as that which is counteractive to our ideal state of things. We find situations with limitless factors necessarily out of our control, experiences, emotions, thoughts, constantly arising and enabling us to have a potential range of options from which to decide upon manifesting in response to the present moments variants, this is the chaotic world of our subjective experience. As biological entities, the world does not present itself to us in a way which aligns with our natural goals, not to mention the more obvious examples within our experience such as our culturally informed societal goals, and developed desires. We find our consciousness constituted by a sense of consistent “directedness” (Husserl) towards objects and activities which follow from another aspect of our being, that of “desire; craving” (Buddhism), “will” (Schopenhauer), “will to power” (Nietzsche), and in general, “wanting”. This directedness of our essential Being in the pursuit of desire found within a transient world which is in its nature impermanent, conditioned, and chaotic, produces states of Being which are unique to that which we find in Dasein (humans for which their own being can become an issue for it-Heidegger). In this struggle to satisfy the directed nature of Being towards its specific desirous goals both unconsciously and consciously, we see an ever persistent attempt to wrestle with anxiety towards death and towards attainment of desire through managing the essential state of the world we find ourselves in, through imposing order upon chaos. This order manifests itself in the way we structure our being in opposition with the world in a way which optimizes our psychological experience within the present moment, according to the acquired knowledge (wisdom) which determines the degree of manageability we are able navigate situational content with.
In the learning process (wisdom acquisition) of the sentient Being, one finds oneself over correcting for the faults of inefficient ordering, this over-correcting, both in our attempts to order the chaos, as well as to avoid stagnation through manifesting change in our structure to combat rigidity (instigating chaos), is what has been described as enantiodromia in the psychological literature of Jung and Neumman.
Through our individual challenge of psychological management, we find ourselves on either side of a perfect harmony between a chaotic state of Being and an Orderly state of Being, or balance, which, if discovered, could end the pendulum swinging in any drastic fashion. Thus we unconsciously are coordinating our behaviors in response to our psychic state, which is determined through environmental and experiential stimuli to produce the current state of things as we experience them in the present. That being said, when our psyches are predominantly characterized by the presence of a dominant archetype, we tend to seek psychological resolve through the antithetical archetype. This process of dominant archetypes in an unstable psyche is eventually resolved through Jung’s conceptualization of individualization, which does not suppress the archetypes or have a dominant characteristic, but rather seeks to integrate them into a wholesome individual who recognizes their influence yet is able to be in control of the management of them so as to not be off balanced in regards to their effect over the individuals wellbeing. Thus we establishes ourselves as an individualized being, through the “discovery” and ordering of the subconscious’ contents into the awareness of consciousness, and integration of the two fields of the psyche into the totality of our Being. When our lives are characterized by a dominance of unconscious activity, we seek to impose our “will” upon our own structure, (a top-down control upon bottom-up dominance – neurologically speaking) the rectifying of such instability can be accomplished through what Neumann referred to as centroversion.
By consciously recognizing the unconscious’ power over our psyche, and recognizing the place and limits of both systems as being mere aspects of our integral whole, we begin to view the system which is our Being more holistically. A holistic view of our nature gives us the necessary knowledge to delve into the phenomenological analysis of the structure of this Being as it enables the manifestation of these multiple modes of Being. When able to retrospectively analyze “important” (more valuable/ memorable/ defining) areas of our past experience into certain generally definable temporal periods, we find them able to be classified as epochs in the development of our current Being. These psychical epochs are found as significant time spans which we are able to discover to contain indubitably essential information towards determining the next epochs essentially defining characteristics. When we analyze the general scheme of transference from one epoch in our lives development to the next, we can find the pendulum of enantiodromia present in its swing from the chaotic to the orderly, from the conscientiously depicted “good” to the “bad”, as we morally conceive of the terms conscientiously within each epoch, and vice versa, transforming our Being from one epoch to the next. It becomes present that patterns of psychological shifting have been taking place, as systems of knowledge and action are consistently being transcended by a new replacement ideology which contains within it the experiences of the past, yet purports to offer a new solution as a framework or mode of Being to oppose the state of thrownness which we then find ourselves in. As the defining of strata of conscience corrects for its misgivings in the “good” and the “bad”, progression is made towards a new system which is created through a dialectical progression as each epoch ends and contains new information as to its failures and changes it judges to be conducive to a better future state. In this process we find the development of wisdom through experience, as well as the gravitating of the pendulum towards a balanced neutral position. Thus the ancient adages such as “everything in moderation” as you get older you tend to “settle down”, settle down where? Settle down from jumping to extremities in the pursuit of a form of being which is well equipped to handle the slings and arrows of misfortune in existence.
How is a phenomenological realization of the enantiodromia which is a part of the structure we find to be the essence of our Being, useful to us who are able to conceptualize and realize the validity of it within our own lives? We can, containing as we do, detectable and contemplative modes of consciousness (available consciously to us, yet through deterministic means), contemplate our current position in reference to the optimal balancing place (being in reference to the pendulums center), which would mean an optimal life situated in the future which we would naturally fall past the in the swing of the pendulum, and work to unnaturally strive for its attainment. Whereas the process is necessarily unconsciously regulated through the advance of a subconscious or even consciously directed corrections made within our past modes of being, or in past epochs (great changes), we can take a more informed stab upon the greatest possible directedness of consciousness when we are able to view the picture holistically, consciously, after a phenomenological analysis. We can recognize our position and where we need to go, and direct our consciousness in an informed way towards the attainment of such a position. In regards to the totality of our Being and whether we seek to attain this as a short term remedy to our current psychological state, depends on our current disposition. If the desire so arises experientially to pursue centroversion consciously through diligent discipline consciously directed in its pursuits, which takes time and development (experience and knowledge), the choice is available to a broader and more precise extent to the phenomenologist who is able to determine his own position in reference to his own Beings location on the chaos/order spectrum, as well as the ability to consciously desire the pursuit of wisdom, and have the love of wisdom, which is philosophy, on his side.
While great persistent striving within a disciplined structure is often crucial to the attaining of goals, we must be wary lest we fall into psychological distress. We can consciously correct for this, without over-correcting, if we have the required wisdom to abstractly theorize about where the optimal psychological place lies, and subsequently to actively pursue these conscious goals in a practical way. In seeking to inhabit that space, we give attention to the Being which gives rise to both goal attainment and pursuit, as well as internal conscious wellbeing and psychological stability. I’m in no way saying that all-in pursuit of what is meaningful won’t produce psychological distress, but in the case in which our psychological wellbeing is hindered through our desires in our ordering of life too rigidly, we must enact wisdom to be able to navigate both aspects of the coin, the pursuit of our goals and what is meaningful, as well as what is psychologically beneficial to us. In no case should we over-correct to complacency, but with time and experience we can gain the insight and wisdom into how to circumvent these problems psychologically, as well as how to better direct ourselves to the optimal path that includes both important factors of our life (psychological state of Being and meaning-pursuing) which necessarily go hand in hand.
While I am aware this is nothing more than a basic structure into the practical outcome of phenomenologically analysis of enantiodromia, I hope it provides the necessary starting point and content that enables further inquiry.
How is one to escape from the suffering and consummation of one’s character inflicted by the memory and assimilation of one’s own historical malevolence and shortcomings? This question is not to be posed to those of perfect character, but being that such a thing doesn’t exist, except in the minds of the mentally diminished, we must admit of having been cursed with periods of retrospectively found evil volition, and later discovered inner peace. It need not be discussed as to the causality and manifestation of such periods, as the factors present in any individual’s life range from ignorance to misfortune, what must be addressed is how to deal with our consciousness once it is consumed by the memory of one’s own moral ineptitude, and character traits resulting from historical events which one desires to escape from.
There is an absurd feeling which emerges when one compares who one is today, with the person one was in the past, growing more absurd the bigger the gap in time. New knowledge and wisdom has taken us to this place, recognizing the suffering produced in the present moment, the flaws in our current condition, and through understanding the conditionality of such a state, we choose to rebel against the state of affairs inflicted upon our experience of the present. We wish to escape the historical antecedents causing unrest within our conscious experience. But to escape the web of causality is a logical fallacy, and attempting to do so necessarily creates cognitive dissonance at the expense of the individual’s sanity. To escape the suffering caused as a result of moral shortcomings implies a purging of moral shame and moral dread from one’s experience. This means no longer feeling remorse for one’s malevolence, and no longer fearing the result of repeating or taking part in a future unholy endeavor. This attempt to escape ones suffering from historical causes appears to be an escape from conscience, which is far from the answer to our original question, being how to cope with the inevitable suffering of falling short of one’s present ideals.
It’s clear that any advancement in one’s personal morality, both practically and abstractly, can be seen as being a result of what in Buddhism is regarded as the twin foundation stones of morality, moral shame and dread. Feeling the pangs of one’s past transgressions, recognizing the current repercussions in one’s experience and the conscious experience of suffering due to such actions, forces one into the biologically necessary position of dreading such an experience in one’s future, aiding the development of a character aiming at avoiding said moral infringements to one’s system. Being that we are discussing a system of beliefs in the ethical sphere, it’s worth noting that such a conscience is in no way universal to all, but can be judged according to universal principles. This means we may not share the current conscience, view of good and evil, which doesn’t mean that the validity of such developed systems lies in the relativity of one’s society and culture, ultimately, only apparently does.
Sam Harris’s conceptualization of universal principles which encapsulates all of mankind moving in a positive direction towards a better humanity, and away from universal suffering, gives us a good description on the structure we should be using to judge the state of one’s conscience, or in comparing multiple individuals to one another and their relation to higher shades of meaning and moral recognition. But here I digress only to state that what we are concerned with is the individual, and not the validity of his conscience, which should be analyzed and constructed through the accumulation of experience and wisdom requisite to be a man wishing to rectify his current experience with past malevolence. Thus one is necessarily in the correct state of mind to answer and proceed such inquires if he reaches the point in life where he poses the question, and sees finding its solution necessary, for the good of one’s own experience foremost, with a thought towards its influence on humanity at large.
What the courageous man wishes to embark on, is a rebellion against the constraint on one’s character and psyche imposed by a literally different person, oneself, in one’s past. The difference in the two people need not be noted, separated by time, one creates and destroys, changes, and evolves, in directions only recognized as positive or negative due to comparison in phenomenological data and subjective judgment, and this process of transfiguring is proceeding to be carried out from moment to moment. Thus one rebels against the human condition, against that absurd contradiction not between the outside world and the inside world, but between ones perceived past and ones perceived present, between what was, what is, and what could be, between the contradiction herein, and the immediately illusory belief that the same person is inhabiting all three positions.
The unrelenting drive of the psyche to push one’s consciousness to accept the validity of one’s own ability to volitionally act outside of the bounds of causality, free will, as well as believe in the permanence of a central Being (a self), serves to undermine reality, necessarily creating an absurd view of the state of our being as we perceive it. Those who have struggled to emerge from such illusions here should consider themselves blessed, as one obstacle in our pursuit is no longer an issue. The proof of such phenomena being falsehoods, is expanded upon in “The Causal Tethers Which Bind Us”. Seeing ones past as a series of acts done by another person (a previous version of the current “self”) doesn’t aide the individual upon first glance as we perceive ourselves as constant through time (albeit – an illusory view), but one should rebel against the nature of the mind to see oneself in this way to attempt to cut through the illusion, if not experientially at least abstractly. While it is necessary to experience the moral shame and dread proceeding an unjust act, as it is a necessary place in psychic growth and wisdom in producing a mind better able to act in accordance with itself, we must not allow ourselves to act from the habits formed by someone who lives in a distinctly different time in place. Rather, we should rebel against the strings which move us, and attempt to cut our ties to the character traits we consciously wish to separate ourselves from. Our suffering acts as an indicator of where to approach, where to learn, where to grow, and we should follow it, and when based on misfortune, accept it stoically, when based on our own acts, rebel.
Fight against the tendency to continue in darkness, fight against the stagnation of unrelenting conscious stability, fight for a better experience, a better life, a better humanity. We must accept that we deserve our punishment which we created for ourselves, and in rebelling against the idea that we still are the person we used to be, we become the person we have the potentiality of being. Rebel against any tendency towards a rigid conception of eternal permanence. Whether we find ourselves suffering for the misfortune of a past, or of an act of immortality sparked by the cursed nature which we inherited, whether through ignorance or awareness of rage, the suffering which we currently experience must be fought off with the aim of creating the space for the new to replace the old. The mind is consciously attempting to manifest order to combat the chaos of past experience, we must not hinder it by further pursuing dissonant thoughts, or acting in accordance with our outdated philosophy. We should strive to build upon the biological framework, the universal scaffolding, which we encounter within the present moment. To tear down the edifice, to cause a revolution of the spirit, to attempt to escape the causes which fabricates the present, is a dissociative endeavor, causing only future confusion and voluntary ignorance. Through denial of past events we serve only to fool ourselves into insanity, to accept the occurrence of the past, and work to overcome its negative effect on the present, is the task of the brave.
We must bridge the gap between the unchanging past and the changing present, and see that it is possible to accept the validity of both, while transcending them both to a higher level of conceptualization, and from there incorporate the truths we have thus far encountered. To escape one’s history is never the goal, to overcome misfortune and the evil discovered in one’s own heart is the task at hand. The emergence of the realization of one’s own malevolence is unearthed only through conscious retrospection, and is only conquered through conscious pursuit of a character in accordance with ones developed conscience. Effects of one’s own evil manifestations, such as those upon our character, and those which are experiential, such as memories, are overcome psychologically through rebelling against the principles one once stood upon, through fighting against our nature to habitually indulge in bad intentions, through pursuing a morality based on the lessons one has acquired, which is constituted by a factual interpretation of reality. Historical rebellion is combated by rebelling against the restraints, the universe which holds us attached to it.
We should fight against our biological drive to see ourselves as being the same as our experiences, and rather frame the situation realistically, in us constituting the current production of history. One should strive to extract the gold in the lessons we’ve learned while simultaneously avoiding over encumbrance by the content of memories.
We recognize the outdated version as being us, yet distinctly different, thus in our comparison we conclude the situation is patently absurd. In addition to us never being able to truly know who we are now, or understand the totality of past states of being which make up the foreground of our present experience, there is the fact of other individuals having even more ignorance of our historical being. The separation we feel within, between our old self and new self, our recognition of ignorance, coupled with the isolation we feel in reference to others, undoubtedly creates an absurd mindset. Not to mention, if this line of thought is carried out, we realize our ignorance of others to be incalculably greater than the ignorance of ourselves, which if honestly admitted, is unbearably large as it is. This puts us in a strange place mentally, but not necessarily in a situation without hope, and not within a challenge too great to not be worth rebelling against, and overcoming through wisdom itself, aided by reason, virtue, discipline, and persistence.
We ought to rebel against the constraints of determinism in confining you to a predestined path by conscious effort towards escaping the confines consciously imposed through recollection of your past character, and instead pursue the character, state of being, place in reality, which you desire and claim to be better. Do not let the chains of your past hold you down, even though they literally do, even if we know that we are permanently chained through causality, that does not mean to give up on a path to greater heights than we have experienced, nor to sacrifice our thoughts and actions toward goals we set, but rather we should accept our condition in history, and fight against our inner demons urging us to immorality or to the ruin of our current condition through complacency.
Part of the fundamental problem we have as biological beings is the gap between our values and the production of meaningful solutions to the novel situations which we encounter. We know what actions are “good” yet the situations we encounter are difficult to discern as to what constitutes the optimal pathway for us to take. Our general mode of being and manner of operating in the world is dependent upon schemas of action that are responsive (adequately or not) to the multitude of situations we encounter in our environment. These situations elicit the manifestation of a schema through our assimilating the situation to the schema, and given that each situation (each present moment) is novel, we then have to accommodate that assimilated schema to meet up with reality in a manner that works for us. If we can intelligently adapt to novel situations, our schema likewise undergoes a modification that can adequately meet the challenge of the moment. Often times these schemas, which are always significant and hold our developed values in them, aren’t adequate, and for those situations, we have the ability to consciously manifest our values, in accordance with what we know, towards the production of a viable solution. In this manner we move through successive steps, albeit miniscule ones, in the manner Jean Piaget describes as genetic epistemological advancement. It is only when we reach an equilibrium between the assimilating and accommodating functions that our operations are adequately able to intelligently adapt to novel situations. This, as a requisite, is dependent on fleshing out the value structure that makes up the framework of the actions that are schematized.
Arising of the Existential question
Existential inquiry arises in every individual once he reaches the intellectual stage of being able to abstractly contemplate the nature of his own Being. This, for most people, begins at around the age of 12-14, and continues throughout life, constantly resurfacing. With the emergence of the problem of our own Being, and our place in the world, we seek for answers. We can find many of these answers in our values, which dictate those schemas which orient us in the world, and can prove of being better or worse at providing the fulfillment we strive after in life. The more effort, time, structure, discipline, and intellect one commits to the organization of one’s life towards a meaningful path will determine the amount of progress he is able to achieve in pursuit of the things he values, and the wellbeing extracted from such pursuits. Environmental factors, genetic disposition, culture, society, education, character disposition, all are relevant factors which contribute to the individual’s pursuit of meaning, and the amount of progress he is able to make.
Necessity of philosophy in evaluation
As always, we must live first, then philosophize. But in order to maximize our potential, in the directions we desire, we must philosophize, and we all do this, to a lesser or greater degree, whether it’s made explicit and regarded as such or not. Not only do we all philosophize, we can be better or worse at doing so, and the results of our philosophy are fleshed out in the experience of our lives, in the manner we live, in our subjective experience, in our relationships, and in how we tackle the present moments arising. We must seek to orient ourselves around a value system which can lead to the most desirable future, implying and necessitating an articulate defining, organizing, and implementing of actions in alignment with what we believe to be most important. Our time management and effort must be in accordance with the system of significance we place upon the values, rather than allowing ourselves to be carried along by the river of desire without receiving the potential wellbeing available to us through psychological integration and meaning optimization. While many values are inherent, those which we most seek to manifest oftentimes succumb to the temptations of others, unconsciously. The goal here is to philosophically uncover, organize, and optimize our lives towards the pursuance of a more meaningful life.
If Value’s Aren’t Regulated
If our value system goes unregulated, and we remain unaware of its effect on our lives, we run the risk of our lives being hijacked by things which serve to promote societal and biological desires, rather than the individualized desire which fulfills us. The assent to values which are of less importance and significance than those which we consciously can uncover as promoting wellbeing and providing meaning is the error we wish to correct for, for the benefit of our own psyche, and everyone else in our expanding circle of influence.
Given the potentiality of ideological possession, and the ever growing instantiation of ethics corrupting societally provided value structures, and the cultural importance placed upon material gain, our value system is becoming more vulnerable to the effects of powers outside our control, and less effective in providing the meaningful basis for a competent, efficient, creative, and fulfillment providing life. The question we must ask is whether we want our lives to be ruled by tyranny, do we want to be the slaves to our society and to our biology, or do we want to impose our will upon the content of our own lives, and by recognizing and optimizing the content herein, form a life which represents who we truly have the potential to be? Do we want to fulfill the potential we contain at being a competent, moral, beneficial human, or do we want to be swept along on the waves of misfortune produced by external and biological influences?
Conservation of the old
We should seek orientation of that which is available rather than throwing out the old system in its entirety, this problem of shedding off the traditional spiritual underpinnings was stated by Nietzsche as that which led to the nihilism and evil present in the 20th century after the scientific worldview become dominant and, in a causal sense, necessitated the potentiality of the “Death of God”. Novel explanatory conceptualizations of values aren’t impossible, just as novel “creations” aren’t impossible in any other domain, we just have to recognize that as with anything, the new necessarily contains the old, it stems out of it, in evolution and in technology, in morality and in science. The causal link between the datum of experience and potential values we have at our disposal is a link that cannot be sundered. As the value structure necessarily gives rise to what we place an importance on and what we pursue, it is an integral process of the mode of being which underlies all manifestations in our actions and experience.
Bottom Up Understanding of the Value System
One must first identify their value structure as it is built up biologically, in its embodied form, and secondly, in the conscious articulation of how it manifests itself consciously. We have an embodied perceptive system, that is built up from our genetic material upon conception. This perception seeks, from the first moments of an organism’s life, to “digest” and “filter” incoming datum through sensory receptors, which is mediated based upon, in the first case, genetic instruction. The schematic underpinnings that dictate our ability to do so, are encoded with reflexive abilities, and have the “ability” to perceive with the “meaning” of it being valuable to the continuation of the genetic material that instantiated it.
The perceptive ability of our Being is in itself our initial evaluation system, it discerns content in relation to the significance it has to us, and directs our nervous system towards mitigating and responding to stimuli, both external and internal. Two separate mechanisms take place in this initial evaluation of stimuli, on the one hand, our perceptive system is oriented around discerning content in our perceptible environment that has significance for us, which is one manner of saying that everything “naturally” has value to us. If things didn’t have value to us, we wouldn’t focus on them, and content wouldn’t ever be discerned and arise in consciousness. On the other hand, that very perception which selects significant content in our environment for filtration occurs based on our own perceptive systems modification by our value structure.
The system of perception is modified in infanthood, and onward, through its environment, and the causal nature of that which is available to influence us. That which is available to be perceived, is filtered by what the biological system believes would be most optimal to the propagation of the genome, which is the starting point of our values, and generally what they are “subservient” to. Such imperatives hold background significance throughout life. While this is the groundwork of evaluation, in biological imperatives that imply the continuation of the survival machine towards puberty in which the organism can propagate the genetic material, the value and method towards which it achieves inbuilt biological aims is modified by the cultural, environmental, and interpersonal relations of the individual. These effects modify the value structure which modifies perceptions towards that which is useful to react to, and in such reactions, optimize the “wellbeing” or “beneficiality” of response in regard to novel situations. The biological system that is modified through life in filtrating perceptive data, is integrally tied up with our conscious experience, and its contents enter consciousness.
As we biologically intuit datum which sensory receptors “discriminate” as being useful to perceive, so too does our Being intuit which perceptions arise into conscious awareness, based on the same desire and imperatives which run towards the optimality of the organism. The contents of consciousness are in alignment with these desires, as they are modified by the environment and totality of our Being in relation to what the individual comes to understand, and believe, and intuit, or know, is the optimal aim towards which to guide himself. Whether or not it actually is, is irrelevant. What matters is that one’s values, regardless of conscious recognition or not, guide the individual’s moment to moment conscious experience, as well as his bodily reciprocity to the situation one finds oneself in in the moment. We always are operating under this basic low resolution conception of the value system, arising from the bottom up, from perception to consciousness.
Top Down Directing the Value System
Every moment is necessarily supported by an inherent biological value system, and the contents of consciousness as well as our embodied reaction to the moment are products of it. While the bottom up description explains the initial instantiation of our value system, it does little to aide us from where we’re at in top down influence. We ought to be able to give assent to our values consciously, and consciously direct ourselves towards values and aims which are our own authentic expression. What is important to you? What currently is taking up your time, mental space, and what are you currently actively pursuing? The answers to these questions may never have been made conscious, or we might not know exactly where they currently are at.
There is a concrete difference between what one’s actions show to be valuable to the individual, and what one believes to be valuable. Firstly, we wish to analyze what actually composes the individual’s life, and how it compares to what ought to compose the individual’s life. We must take an honest account of our time, and an honest account of our beliefs about what we desire to be doing, who we desire to be, where in our career we desire to be, where in our environment we desire to be, what kind of skills we wish to improve, what knowledge we would like to obtain, what character traits we would like to embody, and what psychological state we would like to have. In answering these questions as to where we currently are, we can find answers to what our unconsciously acted out belief system denotes as being our current value structure. In answering these questions as to where we would like to be, we can define what our consciously formulated value structure actually is. The gap between what is manifesting as an inherent value pursuit, and what we actually value will determine the difficulty in aligning the two. The goal, broadly speaking, is to bring the two into alignment so that our actions and time spent represents what our consciously formulated value structure is. In uncovering what is important to us, we can create a list of things we value, and in their evaluation, to the best of our ability, discover what it is that would provide us meaning.
Purpose of Uncovering Values
We must seek to uncover the values inherent in our deterministic biological nature, and in discovering their potentialities, consciously decide which we wish to embody and to which degree we wish to pursue their manifestation. The “creation” of values is necessarily a pursuit which is only possible with the addition of experience, and in fact, isn’t actually a creation. It is more a development, a modification, of inherent values imposed upon us through genetic and environmental influences. As far as our values as we find them in the moment, none can be created, but they can be altered through conscious direction towards novel experiences (all experiences). The prioritization, embodiment in actualization, and modification of what we value can be consciously directed. The derivation of meaning and importance allocated to the potentiality of value is what is “in our control”. While the values themselves are inherent, their discovery, and the systematic recalibrating of our actions and Being in alignment with them, or to modify them, is something possible to be directed consciously. The expansion of knowledge and experience exposes us to novel situations, of which we always are judging, and placing a value of importance on. This content of experience is the datum from which we have to work with in informing how to hierarchical order our values. We cannot value that which we do not know, or what hasn’t been integrated into our psyche as something holding value. This process ought to be done in a way which is optimal for you, and everyone else, now, and across time. The optimization process must be recalibrated as additional knowledge and insight into circumstantial navigation and our own nature become uncovered to us. As long as the value is in line with what is important to you, consciously, and is an accurate representation of that importance, then we can continue.
What Matters in Uncovering Our Current Value System
We necessarily find more meaning in the pursuit and attainment of the things which we consciously formulate as being of value rather than in the things which we unconsciously carry out in our daily lives (which still contain meaning and value, but they ought to become subservient to the higher goal). The reward system which manifests itself in pleasure and pride can aide the individual in determining if something is meaningful to them. If you gain a specific type of knowledge, create a specific type of art, make progress in a certain direction, and it feels good to do so, if it fills you with a sense of accomplishment, if it moves your psychological state to one of fulfillment, then it is being flagged through the reward system indicators that it is meaningful to you. That being said, every reward system flooding of the subjective experience doesn’t mean that it is a noble or consciously confirmed meaningful act, it merely can be analyzed in order to determine what consciously can be connected to something you value. If you find pleasure in food, sex, and alcohol, and the reward system floods you with a positive emotion which seeks to reinforce those stimuli, you must consciously analyze if they are in line with your value structure, if not, then they are not to be pursued in a goal oriented fashion towards the goal of a meaningful life.
If the activity is retrospectively analyzed as producing a fulfilling mode of being, as well as being in line with the consciously formulated conception of what your value system ought to be, then you can take that as datum towards something which provides meaning, and can be pursued in a goal oriented way. Pleasure and pain in this regard must be analyzed, in short, with discernment, in determining their potential for long term benefit, as well as to their usefulness and potential benefit for you, the people you care about, and the outward circles of influence with which we all are engrossed in (the chain of causality as it applies to relationships between sentient beings). This extrapolation and analysis can be carried out to a larger or shorter extent, but what is necessary before continuing on is that a number of values must be defined, even if it is rudimentary.
Prioritization Of Values
Once we have a list of values, we must hierarchically organize them in order of importance. This organization is predicated based on what we would spend the most time doing, and what would take precedence over the others in terms of effort. While philosophical articulation and elucidation may be high on my list, it always is superseded by people, in terms of family, friendships, coworkers, and any other human who needs help. In this manner, I’ve consciously chosen the value of compassion for people to supersede my most vehement interests. In this way we must organize our value system, in a way that is practical so as to be employable in our actual lives. The establishment of a hierarchy of values is crucial in future planning for how to organize time, and how to maximize the meaning and wellbeing provided to us by pursuing the values (and their distribution across our days/ lives).
Example of Value System Prioritization
The natural inclination toward hedonistic pursuits may result in overindulgence and a large amount of time loss as well as a decline in health. We may consciously and verbally state that we have a desire and find meaning in philosophical knowledge acquisition, in truth seeking and mental exploration, the pursuit of which would better serve to provide meaning in our lives than that sensual drive which could dominate the psyche. The value of power and dominance may fill the opportunity cost of pursuing competency in a skill we value. We find that our current value structure, that which is ingrained in us through society and our biology, doesn’t always serve to provide the meaning and wellbeing which we have the potential of attaining. We pursue what is less meaningful at the peril of our consciously formulated abstract belief system. We still may value the objects of sensual pleasure, and we can allocate appropriate time in their pursual and enjoyment, as well as continue to value ambition in our careers leading to a rise in our place in the dominance hierarchy, but the differentiation of the values, and assigning an appropriate role to them in our lives is here the mission.
Planning Value Pursuance
With the hierarchical organization of our values in place firmly, yet remaining open to further modification, we can then work out the envisioning of what their carrying out would look like. This is a contemplative visualization of what the embodiment, improvement, or attainment of our values ought to look like. With this in mind, we are better equipped to work towards something, and are able to consciously adapt our mode of being so as to be in line with what that visualized image appears to us to be.
Based on our contemplative image of what the embodiment of our values is, we can plan benchmark goals toward their attainment. These can be concrete material or temporal milestones, or abstract urgencies in which we seek to embody. These goals and aspirations we can separate between benchmark placeholders towards the attainment of a meta-goal, or simply as guidelines in which to follow in the progression towards the attainment of more concrete goals. This applies to character traits, virtue embodiment, career trajectory, familial planning, etc.
Habitualizing Values
We can use our ability to consciously direct ourselves to promote the advancement of values, in the form of reinforcing the actions and thoughts, the phenomena which, as manifestations of underlying modes of being, can be used in a reflexive manner to promote the underlying value. The habitualization is necessary to conscious value instantiation and reinforcement, and thus the transmogrification of our value system to that which we consciously assent to. Habitualization to those consciously assented to values has the negative tendency of reducing values which we consciously perceive as less significant, as less time and concentration is allocated to them, as certain things become more prominent in our lives, others become less. Discipline and conscious direction are used, and in turn, also gain from the positive feedback loop of their increased actualization. This adds to the advancement of our ability to consciously direct our experience toward such experiences which are more meaningful. Of course habitualization, whether consciously or not, is often enacted for other aims, and in pursuit of values which we may mistakenly lend our assent to. Experiential wisdom and conscious attentiveness to the process of change in our values and the mode of being which embodies it will serve to inform the individual whether he is on the right path or not.
The Navigation Problem
We ought to have an established image in mind of a future reality with which we look to pursue, which is in line with our hierarchically organized value system while systematically having definite goals in which to pursue towards the embodiment those values. We can then analyze how best to navigate our lives in the direction of the established system. This implies time management, dedication, distraction and entertainment reduction, effort and discipline. Morality comes into question here, and our morals, like everything else we do, will dictate our experience of life and our effect upon the world. Every decision we make can be better or worse at being “good”, if we take for our standard of “bad” the worst possible state of suffering for everyone, as Sam Harris explains in his novel the Moral landscape. In operating from a moral realist meta-ethical perspective, we hold that our actions can move the dial in one of two directions, and since we find value in our subjective experience, and presumably of those we love, those we come into contact with, and in extreme cases, all humans or sentient beings, it is essential that our morals stem from our consciously deduced evaluation system. As for a minor-ethical theory that is optimal to follow, we find that “Wisdom Ethics”, or moral particularism, is the only system that can account for the vast landscape we encounter in novel situations. Moral dread and guilt are our guide here, and our value system ought to be optimized to account for the effects our actions have on others, as it does more than impact their wellbeing, but has rational self-interested implications as well.
Moral Shame and Dread
A sense of moral shame, and moral dread, are the twin pillars in Buddhism of morality, and we can apply the concepts to shame and dread in the face of deviation from what is meaningful, so as to fuel us in the right direction. The negative emotion experienced in deviating from the optimal path we have outlined, denotes a flaw in our discipline and drive towards what is meaningful. This shame can be recalled, and transformed into a reminder of what it feels like to experience such negative self-image, and allows us to dread its reoccurrence in the future. In this way we can systematically forge our trait of discipline to be fueled by the negative reinforcing attribute of suffering when deviation occurs. In addition, the reward mechanism in pursuance of our values can be altered and consciously recognized so as to be inspiration for future discipline reinforcement, of a positive kind.
Structuring Time
How we spend our time, and the quality of that time spent, will be an integral factor towards our individual trajectory towards our goals. We can retrospectively analyze our current time usage, on a day by day, or weekly basis, in order to see which areas need to be modified, and which can altogether be cut out, reduced, or changed, to be in line with our newly established value system. The analysis of the current system and formulation of the ideal system will aide us in disciplining ourselves towards a pragmatic pathway and daily framework in which to pursue our values. While rigid order and structure of such a sort can be overwhelming and stagnating to the individual, as stated by an ancient philosopher, live first, then philosophize, we can find a medium between organizing the chaos, as well as instantiating novel conceptions towards the system we established. The discipline it takes to create a structured day, allows us the freedom to pursue what we value. Far from being rigid and entrapping of the individual, such a structured and analyzed time management plan actually enables the individual to cut out periods of the day in which he was pursuing things which he doesn’t value as highly as others and in turn replace them with things he values more.
Now such definite daily scheduling can be done to varying degrees, and is always open to re-evaluation, and to alteration by the ever spontaneously arising trials which we encounter on a regular basis. The general planning of how best we ought to manage our time gives us an idea of how we should spend the day for it to be optimal, the broadness of categories, and the designation in the day for ulterior pursuits, all can be part of the “plan”. An ulterior mode of pursuing goals and of planning for the journey to meaning can be used in a more practical prioritizing method, rather than on a concrete schedule. For example, a time expenditure modeled can be based on prioritizing interests in the hierarchically organized value system, so that each node gets touched upon at least for a short time in the day. Higher values in the system would take precedence over lower ones, and more time would be spent engaging in them. If I was engaged in progressing a lower value in the system, and some insight or issue or object which needs attention arises which is categorized in to a higher value on my list, then I would sacrifice the time in the lower for the higher.
The use of wisdom and insight into the pragmatic actualization of time management allows us to navigate how, and when, we should sacrifice values for each other, and in the ways in which we can compensate for the rectifying of time loss in a certain pursuant. Our moral system combined with the value system, combined with practical wisdom, experiential data, all are important factors towards the prioritizing of our values and the plan or framework we devise in the planning of the journey to a meaningful life. If a meaningful, fulfilling life, one of psychological wellbeing, pride in accomplishment, and beneficiality of our deeds to our own mode of being as well as to those we value, is something important to you, then the difficulty and time spent in creating an optimal path, the discipline required to stay on track, and the suffering inherent in the sacrifice of lesser values for higher values, will be surely worth it.
Instantiating a Consciously Formulated Value System
We can to a greater or lesser degree forge an abstract conception of what an optimal solution to the embodiment of our values are. The pursuing and embodying our value structure in our daily lives is meaningful in itself. The path is itself fulfilling as we are spending time and effort towards that which we most value. As a caveat, the discovery of values, creation of a list which accurately represents our optimal mode of being, and the organization of time and effort, is a difficult process, but when the groundwork is laid, and the pursuit becomes habitualized, the wellbeing supplied by such a process is worth the strain. What is a better way to live, than the way you consciously decide is the best way to live? Necessary to the continued progression in the direction of your values is the constant recalibration, updating, and optimization of the path as well as the goals.
Preservation of Value
As we spend time in embodying our value system, in instantiating it into our daily lives, in pursuing what is meaningful, we necessarily gain experiential data and feedback from the real world which we can use to modify the entire system. This is a constant process, as we gain experience, we gain in wisdom, as we gain in wisdom, how we navigate our lives, and the structure with which we abstractly create in which to navigate it, all are modified and can be improved. We should be disciplined, yet hold ourselves and our plans as fallible, we must remain determined, yet simultaneously never hold ourselves to be infallible. What we pursue, the method we use to pursue it, the knowledge gained and the application of that knowledge, must be constantly evolving, in order to better serve our wellbeing and better represent our true values. The abstract ideal values we contemplate often don’t serve the pragmatic utility we gauged them to, and the plans we make always will encounter room for optimization. This recalibration process is something the individual unconsciously undergoes as he moves through life, but here, being as we are phenomenologically analyzing our experience and existential condition, the progression and concrete conceptualization of such novel insights and experiential practicality of actions and time management can and, in my opinion (for our pursuit and journey to be optimal) be something we formulate consciously.
Care and Concern in Attention
The amount of time and concentration any content exacts from us is in exact relation to the amount of “care” or “concern” it has to the totality of our Being. Any phenomenal state that arises merely signifies its meaning to us, in some fashion or another, and we ought to manage the causal foundation from which it stems if we wish to alter our experience away from it. This can mean pursuance, integration, removal of dissonance, or reframing. One way or another, all content of experience is open to modification, and if it happens to be aversive to us, we ought to put forth effort towards its integration, and this doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be carried out.
One manner of promoting our values is in a “negative” revelatory strategy. This requires analysis of those things which fill our consciousness, with which our attention is more prone to be consumed by, give a semblance of meaning, challenge, and desire by their very nature of our directedness towards them. These positive phenomenal states (not optimistically positive, but rather manifesting) provide a clue as to what we value. Whether it be a memory, a skill, a topic, a person, a saying, a thought or an emotion, if it is constantly arising into conscious awareness, and modifying our Being in accordance with it, it is safe to say that it is something we value, whether it is a consciously deduced value or unconsciously embodied. An undesired mental content that produces a conscious concentration despite our desire to remove it from experience, whether it’s a moment or a mode of being, or an archetypal pattern, is content that has “consumed” or “overtaken” the psyche, and it must be something we haven’t adequately overcome. If something is adequately overcome, then it is stored in the unconscious as the conquered bit of chaos which has become ordered. If something produces enough negative subjective experience in us, it is due to the value of that content being high for us. Its integration leads to the baseline of our development that we have moving forward, and while its temporal modification is still inextricably connected to us, our schematization of it allows us to accommodate novel situations to it, and simultaneously to assimilate the schema to those situations. In other words, it becomes part of our pragmatic toolkit.
Benefit of Dealing with Reoccurring Problems
By analysis of what negatively affects us, we not only progress towards the removal of accumulated problems, but we better equip ourselves, psychologically and on a neuroplasticity level, to be better able to deal with challenges that arise in the future. Thus we should seek to optimize our being towards the ability to deal with the totality of problems, through the progression of a fortified character that can do so, and we do this through the individual “problems”. Problems here are any content of subjective experience that we are aversive to, that create dissatisfaction in us, that aren’t consciously desired. Even a deficiency of a conscious desire can be seen as a problem, the rectification of which would be the overcoming either of the desire itself, or of the fulfillment of the desire. The overcoming of the unconquered and the progressing of character enables us to be wiser in our dealings with any problem in the future, and thus is well worth our time in pursuing.
Hardships in Value Pursuance
The silver lining in the case of a meaningful life, necessarily entails hardships, tribulations, unknowns, and their confrontation and conquering. Such potentialities of misfortune or loss should be clearly visualized, even in the extreme case, so that if they arrive, we can be prepared and have an idea of what it would look like to best handle them. This is encapsulated in the Stoic concept of “momento mori” or “remember death”, in which the visualization of the worst, and the ideal way in which to handle such loss is consciously clearly presented to the individual, so that he can embody the virtues and the mode of being he deems most appropriate towards the handling of such challenges while remaining faithful to the developed belief and value systems which give his life meaning. The strength of will to be supportive of family, rather than to be traumatized and a burden in time of a loss of a loved one, or in sickness and in misfortune, provide the individual and those he cares about the best version of oneself so as to aide in the alleviation of suffering. While this may not be a value inherent to everyone, and this is necessarily making a value judgment which, to me, is real and important, yet may not be uncovered as the optimal path by everyone, but as an example this type of visualization enables the individual to embody that image when or if the worst so comes. The visualization of worst case scenarios enables the individual to be the least hindered from deviation of his value system in the face of adversity, as well as provides him the opportunity for character growth despite great tragedy. Our worst fears, the suffering and the undeserving pain which befalls all of us, can be navigated so as to be a positive and beneficial experience in the progression of moral excellence. Rather than view our challenges in pursuance of our goals as a hindrance, which they are, we can simultaneously view them as stepping stones to greater competency in their navigation.
While on this journey the difficulties and tribulations which we previously forethought of may not be the only difficulties to arise, and more often than not, novel distractions and impediments to our wellbeing will constantly prove to be challenges to us in the progression of our being towards the goals which we establish in line with our value system. Seeing as expected or unexpected trials are inevitable in the pursuit of anything difficult, and what is meaningful is never easy, their emergence and handling is of utmost importance to us.
The most difficult situations are opportunities for the greatest victories in our lives. There is no sense of pride, personal growth, and inner peace, without a necessary struggle to overcome difficulty. The opportunity for virtue grows in the face of adversity. When the going gets tough it is the most difficult to do what is correct, to remain virtuous, to sustain from indulgence or resist the urge to escape from reality and what is honorable, for this reason it is in those very situations which we are afforded the greatest opportunity to overcome, and by doing so to advance our wisdom, virtues, and self-image. The pursuit of goals in accordance with the predefined value system, towards those objects of desire which may include but are not limited to skill improvement, character trait growth, psychological wellbeing, career aspirations, relationship development, all are noble and worthy goals to pursue, and in their progression all require necessary hardships.
Once we have a well-defined value system, and goals have been established with a rationalized pathway towards their attainment, we must voluntarily opt to overcome any difficulty that is a necessary prerequisite toward the achievement of the goals, and any other hindrance which diminishes the progression must be dealt with. There is a necessary distinction between the potential hardships which stand as obstacles towards goals one is not inclined to pursue, and those which are directly in the pathway towards the values which one does value. The pursuit of unnecessary difficulty for the sake of difficulty itself, may be useful towards the development of confidence and discipline, and general ability to withstand pain and suffering, but we are not urged by optimality to pursue such tasks. Here I am speaking of only those obstacles which lie directly in the path towards our pre-established values. The unnecessary waste of time and effort to do something difficult in a field which holds no value to the individual, must be tempered by the individual’s intentions and overall insight into the benefit of such pursuit. If an endeavor is not beneficial and useful, yet it is difficult, the endeavor must surely be shunned and not pursued. This isn’t to say that there isn’t potential for personal growth, just that the aim of goal attainment and the difficulty here described are of those which directly hinder one’s progress to their established goals.
In not becoming aversive to sickness, misfortune, and disagreeable situations, we can develop discipline, temperance, and the equanimity to be better equipped at handling problems in the future. It is the meaningful journey of developing morals in alignment with our values that sustains and provides the meaning in which we are looking for in life.
The skills used and gained in merely confronting difficult challenges with good intentions and a firm resolve itself is enough of a reward for opposing them. While we cannot, as a determined being, choose our fate, we can through knowledge acquisition, habit, discipline, and consistent testing, improve the deterministic precursors which manifest action in a way to conquer fate itself in every moment. The voluntary forging by fire method is undertaken by the man who wishes to improve his character while at the same time prove to himself his character is worthy of being respected. The positive subjective experience felt after attempting to overcome a difficult situation in which we are uncomfortable is naturally produced in any situation which is “foreign” to our currently developed mode of being and subsequent experiences. In other words, the confrontation and voluntary decision to attempt to overcome an unknown or challenging situation, produces an inbuilt biological reward. There is something inherent in us which seeks to discover, to explore, to expand our horizon of knowledge and understanding, and it is made into an object of which we can consciously “desire” by the subjective reinforcement of positive emotion in its acquisition. Whenever we learn something new, adapt to a novel situation, become comfortable in an area of which we previously didn’t know how to handle, whenever we travel and discover new places, gain insight into better ways to live, we always are psychologically rewarded by a positive emotion. This can be explained evolutionarily.
Encountering the Unknown
Our emotional system evolved in such a way to promote survivability and reproduction. Ledoux states that “memory is first and foremost a cellular function that facilitates survival by enabling the past to inform present or future cellular function, whether in a single-cell of multicellular organism. The same is true of much of the rest of our psychological life and its manifestations in our conscious minds.” The expansion of memory, and thus the neuronal circuitry which underlies cognitive capacity, is expanded only in the face of novel situations, which gives us good reason to believe that the brain would develop in such a way to promote the experience of overcoming novel, difficult, unknown, situations. The emotional response system signals a positive emotional state in the achievement of such actions, improving the individuals instinctive drive to pursue such interests in the future. The memory of the emotionally positive state produces by the reward system was evolutionary developed to improve the organisms desire to repeat the action, in an operant conditioned way. Currently, we can consciously recognize this ability and, in self-directed conditioned way, seek to consciously direct our behavior with the “reward” of psychological wellbeing in mind as the outcome of pursuit of the unknown.
Richard Dawkins uncovered that the survival circuit (connections between different neuronal areas of the brain) is employed by modern humans, as well as our ancestors, in the promotion of the genes goal. The “method” to which our genetic material uses in its goal of reproduction and survival is that of employing a survival machine (our bodies) to defend, feed, and work towards the goal of the genetic material. Being that we have the subjective experience of consciously directing the survival machine entails that the greater ability we contain to confront novel situations, and overcome them, the greater chance our genes have in their reproduction and survival. For our ancestors, the expansion of knowledge was directed towards the goal in ways such as environmental adaptability, threat recognition, cooperation within groups, etc. The expansion of territory in the uncovering of unknown grounds, enabled the individual to have cognitive access (whether unconsciously habitualized and reactionary, or conscious, depending on which point in development) to more food and water, shelter and habitational resources within his “known” domain, which increases the opportunity of different choices better suited to different situations. This developed improvement in knowledge of the immediate environment, its predators, and in dealing with other individuals of the same species, contributed to a better ability to navigate life so as to increase the odds of the individual surviving and reproducing. This trait in uncovering the unknown, in knowledge acquisition, and the genetic basis for the ability to learn, in general, would naturally be a trait selected for, as those less equipped mentally would necessarily have less success in navigating life towards the age of reproduction, and their genetic material would be less likely to be passed down.
Dr. Jordan Peterson explains the neuroscientific literature on the subject of exploration of the unknown in his Maps of Meaning lectures in a way which also coincides with the experiential notion we gain by pursuing the unknown. He explains that the desire to explore and the optimization of the psyche in accordance with it has been discovered to be located in the hypothalamus, which, not coincidentally, is the home of the dopaminergic system which serves as producing an experientially perceived pleasurable response to survival related activities such as eating and sex. The relatedness between the stimulation of the reward system and the biological urge to explore are inextricably connected in our hypothalamus, and give sufficient ground in explaining the benefit of physical territorial expansion, which in modern life, can be expanded to the novel exploration of the unknown both psychologically and within different fields of knowledge which are connected to our biological value system, which we here seek to make consciously explicit and to consciously direct ourselves in pursuit of. The reward of meaning pursual is thus adequately expressed in the neuroscientific literature in this way. Thus we have a philosophic, evolutionary, and psychological foundation for which to explain why pursuing challenges is not only pleasurable, in their completion, but also to why it arose in us and how it is beneficial to survival for our ancestors.
An important distinction must here be stated, that the evolutionary system that drove our ancestors to develop these cognitive attributes was directed towards survival, but now, in the current zeitgeist, we have access to the same system and its benefits with the additional stipulation that they can be acquired without the direct pursuit of survival related knowledge. People find pleasure in gaining knowledge in the study of ants, or myremecology, which surely is not in any way beneficial to our genes. The areas in which we can employ our ability to explore and confront difficulty are not limited by those which increase reproducibility of the genome. That being said, our conscious goals have likewise evolved into a myriad of different interests and pursuits, and regardless of our current value system, the basis for growth remains, and is rewarded in the same way in which uncovering distant territories, or new food sources, which worked for our ancestors.
Given the evolutionary benefit of “uncovering the unknown”, “learning”, “desire to explore”, and its subsequent physiological change to the brains relational reasoning, and thus “wisdom”, we can likewise carry on the tradition in a novel way. The acquisition of improved mental capacities, and the expansion of knowledge, evolutionarily, would necessarily entail a greater survivability, but for us, in the modern era, it can entail greater psychological wellbeing for him who is seeking growth in any given area of expertise, or character improvement, or overall wellbeing. The application of diligent striving in pursuit of a value which we have personally developed as being “important” is the necessary “meaning” which can provide us with purpose and thus psychological wellbeing as we move through life, and here we have a scientific basis for why this is so. The philosophical school of existentialism has described many methods of which we might find meaning, but here we have a combined production of evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical factors which denote the reason why pursuit of further growth towards an object with which we value, can, and does, produce the meaning with which we can hold as a mitigating factor in the question of existential dread and mitigates the suffering of existence.
Purpose and its Inextricable Link to Difficulty
The fact that such a system exists within us, rewarding us with positive emotion after attempting and specifically achieving difficult tasks, shows that we are built with a source of purpose that is tied into exploration of the unknown, as well as tied to moral duties. This is both biologically, and socially explainable, and is a major reason why virtue ethics, and the continued effort to improve one’s own character and focus on the greatest virtue one might be able to embody in the moment, is so widely accepted and implemented. This is why the stoics make sense to us, and why people choose to embody stoic philosophy in daily life. There is an intrinsic biological reward for consciously carrying down this path, and in viewing the world from a meaningful perspective expressed in the ability to act virtuous in every moment. We gain psychologically the power and embodiment of the wise old man archetype (Carl Jung), as well as reliving an individualized version of the heroes journey (Joseph Campbell). The hero goes out to enforce order upon chaos, to confront difficulty, for the good of the people. He encounters trials and tribulations, he falls down, he stands up and continues. He faces the ultimate source of tribulation, chaos embodied, which in our case is a difficulty which we do not currently known how to handle. In the persistent conscious decision to overcome, and in the victory over the “dragon”, or that which symbolizes a pressing difficult task, the individual receives the treasure, the gold, the fountain of youth, the immortal elixir, the philosophers stone. In our situation, he progresses in the direction of the area which he wishes to pursue, he gains in virtue, expertise, wisdom, or knowledge in a specific area. The hero then returns the boon to the people, he saves the world, he shares his loot with the broader society, and is hailed as a hero. We take the knowledge, the benefit, the gain acquired through difficulty, and are able to manifest the newly developed benefit in our interactions with others, in a way which is beneficial (if the goal is noble). We utilize our psyche to attempt to overcome unknown. In so doing, we organize the chaos in our lives, and we experience subjectively the greater ability to exert our power and influence on the world.
Phenomenological Analysis
The meaning seeking mode of being itself is something which can be elucidated by a phenomenological analysis, as can the mode that attempts to overcome challenges based upon these values. By understanding these modes of being, we can both understand our own nature, as well as the necessity for us to employ them. When analyzed retrospectively using a phenomenological method, the mode of being which is employed in the pursuit of meaning through opposing difficulty is marked by its intentionality, as is every noesis. The noesis here, we will denote as “difficulty opposition mode of being” which is marked by a noema which is abstractly defined as the conscious recognition of difficulty and conscious volition to confront and overcome it. The noetic characteristics here implies directionality tempered by temporality, in so far as the present moment is characterized by the pasts values directed towards future overcoming. Care or concern is uncovered as being directed upon a content which is valuable enough to be consciously assented to in its significance in overcoming. Therefore, in any matter of meaning pursuance, we ought to be embodying the values that authentically represent ourselves in our temporalized care structure.
In encountering difficulty, and embodying the mode of being which is voluntarily inclined towards its overcoming, we experience a negative emotional response in the perception of the object, but the mode of being modifies the object so it is simultaneously something which we strive toward. This noesis is more readily available the more we experience it, and we can more readily experience it through the pursuit of such difficult objectives, the positive feedback loop between the noema and noesis is strengthened. The more difficult situations we encounter, and in reciprocal fashion confront and oppose, the more the noesis is instantiated as a response to future novel unknown or difficult situations. The benefit of this mode of being is clearly seen in the individual’s reinforced psychological state in encountering difficulties in life, a benefit which necessarily entails an increase in wisdom (the ability to navigate life regardless of the situation). The secondary characteristics influenced by such a mode of being would be psychological confidence in confrontation, discipline in maintaining a value system regardless of external factors, and wellbeing produced by the meaning derived through such pursuits.
Existential Benefits of Meaning Pursuance
As we become more competent and efficient at embodying our values our ability to consciously direct our Being towards that mode of being previously described as “difficulty opposition mode of being” becomes more desired and readily available. The conscious recognition of our own carrying out of difficult tasks creates a psychological influence that lends itself to the dopaminergic strengthening of meaningful actions. As we strive on diligently in conscious pursuance of our values, we become the person we had the potential of becoming.
Of course this whole structure of biological imperative, moral imperative, will to overcome, benefit of overcoming suffering and difficulty, the meaning inherit in all these claims that arises from the nature of our being, the nature of the universe, is arising within a universe that ultimately that has no meaning in itself. It is only due to our being humans, due to us arising as beings that have the biological inclination to transform our experience into one in which meaning exists explicitly for us, albeit for the transient lengths of our short lives, that enables us to uncover the meaning which we always contained, and continue to contain as a potentiality. The meaning created in this meaningless framework truly does matter, yet only to us, as the experience of pleasure and pain in sentient beings is the necessary precondition for meaning and morality. The modification of our subjective experience through the pursuit of overcoming difficulty is one that isn’t a zero sum, we have more to gain from it than to lose. The time, effort, diligence, in pursuit of a value which is important to us, fills us with meaning, and entices us to strive on through this life filled with the slangs and arrows of misfortune.
While Plato’s Forms provides an explanation for our limited conceptualization abilities in how the conceptualization is related to the collective co-understanding of phenomena, it lacks phenomenological evidence as to its claims of our access to the permanency of concepts. It claims to deduce a linking between individual conceptualization and the totality of knowledge, but it is unverifiable in experience, and incompatible with modern scientific understanding of linguistics. The forms regarded as the source of our concepts of objects in themselves, we are told they are from which we draw our understanding of objects in ourselves, from a transcendental realm which we draw from. The case is, we conceptualize bottom up, not from a transcendental realm down to the conscious, but from the genetically inherited on up to conscious understanding – from our sensory and bodily perceptions, filtered through the biologically ingrained value systems, up to conscious manifestation. Regardless of the efficacy of Plato’s rationale, the understanding of how our perception and linguistic systems formulate conceptualizations in regards to objects is useful to an understanding of ourselves, and these are, as he regarded, shared amongst the set of all humans, to a degree. While we don’t necessarily have access to a realm of forms in which to draw our concepts from, there are internal consistencies in regards to evolutionary structures and aspects of our psyches that we can uncover as modifying our perceptions and thus our experience in the way in which our value system filters content, and influences our actions. Towards these collective unconscious foundations, Carl Jung has delineated several that markedly present themselves in our own Being, and are recognizable across cultures and languages. These aspects of the collective unconscious which are relics as well as influencers, affecting our development and our current experience, Jung defined as archetypes. The formulation and social implications of concepts is developed by our minds in the organizing of symbolic representations of reality, the concepts themselves do not exist outside of us, rather they exist below our conscious instantiation of action. Their definitions are modified by us, their linguistic “creation” is done by us, and their usage and application is derived from the neural structure within us. While these archetypes are surely unconscious, we can recognize our relation to them, and their essential structures, at least in part, through methods of introspection and in recognizing projections.
It is useful in the continuing development of one’s own psyche to have a personal experience of recognizing the emergence of archetypal personalities, more so than a merely conceptual, scholarly understanding of the concepts used to denote them. While our own individual psyche may not have had an archetypal personality rise to the surface and manifest itself in complete possession of the mind, which would be obvious upon retrospect, it often is the case that the archetypes merely manifest themselves in certain modes of being, small periods of time, in our perceptions, evaluations, judgments, and actions. While it is rare that a single aspect of our psyche hijacks the entire system, their interrelated influences upon our lives is available to be deduced by a phenomenological analysis of the content of our own subjective experience. Whether the archetypes are obviously presented or not, we can always recognize their influence within us in some way. It will be useful for this exercise to have a conceptual understanding of what the shadow, the anima, the trickster, the wise old man, and the hero archetypes mean mythologically as well as a knowledge of the analytic psychology tradition and their roles in the psyche.
The most popular method in recognizing features of these personalities as existing within our own unconscious psyche is through reflective conscious recognition of their manifestations in relation to adequately defined characteristics of their essence, yet, here I am posing another method. Through identification of the manifestation of them interpersonally, we can utilize our personal relationships in discovering how we have projected these personalities onto others, and in noticing how our distinct relationships cause a modification of our own mode of Being, look to how and why that being is modified in such a manner. Often times others seem to reflect characteristics which we subjectively notice as being in a certain meaningful relation to us, whether it is in representing a pattern common to certain archetypes, or whether it is something agreeable, disagreeable, etc. In analyzing our individual response and interpretation of others manifestations, and our reactions to them, we can learn about the structures which have developed within us to produce such judgments or perceptions. The way in which we perceive and judge others, is necessarily formulated through our current inbuilt value system, and in recognizing our subjective experience in how and what perceptions arise to conscious awareness, we can learn, not only of the values and beliefs in which we use to perceive and signify content of consciousness, but also of the archetypal structure which has been unconsciously at play in our own psyches. By recognizing that a certain person displays qualities that relate to the mythological formulations of the archetype, we can narrow them down and find if we are projecting an archetypal image onto them. Apart from analysis in this way, the feeling someone gives us can point us in the right direction in determining the archetype projected onto the individual.
Conversely, once we have realized that a person contains traits that are comparable to a previously conceptualized archetype, and identified that archetype, we can further analyze that individuals’ character and personality, and understand something about ourselves through our own repetition of similar actions and traits stemming from the psychological state. In other words, we notice that those traits they are embodying can be categorized into an archetypal structure, and extrapolate that those qualities we notice in others are noticed due to our own perceptive system containing a representation of them unconsciously. We contain the traits, and the evaluation, that make up our interpretation of the archetype represented in the other person. Perhaps these regarded archetypes in our own experience have previously possessed the psyche, came to the forefront and revealed themselves, maybe they are suppressed, or maybe they have previously been integrated and accepted into the whole. Regardless, the traits within the projection, if they are noticed, can be learned to be qualities of potential we contain within, as the way through which we view the world, the perspectives, ideas, feelings and actions which we embody in experience is conditioned by the archetypal influence upon the unconscious, the conscious conceptualization arising out of that inbuilt structure. By consciously recognizing a projection of a previously conceptualized classification, whether it’s a Jungian classification of an archetype, or personality, or otherwise, we become enabled to see how that archetype is at play within our own daily lives, and how it is affecting our own minds.
For example, if we find an individual which we despise, hate, regard as immoral, holding beliefs and values completely opposite of our own, perhaps we have discovered, through our own judgment and our awareness of it, a projection of our own shadow. That feeling of disgust in viewing or experiencing that individual, in noticing these phenomena in our perception of another as representing at least some aspects of immorality and content we wish not to be part of our own character, we effectively learn something about the constitution of our own character, and its developed relationship to morality. The reason this hate arises, or the negative connotation we embody in relation to that person, is due to it being a projection of an unconscious archetype of the shadow within ourselves, we are recognizing outside of ourselves, part of ourselves, through an internal process. The only reason that reaction would take place, is if that external idea, or archetype, has been developed within us prior. This isn’t saying it has manifested or taken over our psyche, just that it exists as potentiality, or as influencing manifestations we don’t recognize as derivatives of that source. Our own inner comprehension of the shadow is what enables us to perceive others as immoral, manifesting an inner feeling of repulsion, dislike, unpleasant emotion, and other such negative modes of being conditioned by the perception of the individual embodying the archetype. We unconsciously contain the potential for all the same actions which reflect personality traits, and they can be symbolized and conceptualized with the overarching term of shadow, as well as seen to be present in the other person. In consciously recognizing a projection of an archetype, and then drawing the conclusion that this archetypal understanding and projection is a symbolic representation of the inner content, we can connect our interpersonal discoveries reflexively to understand our own psychological inclinations and their underpinnings.
All archetypal conceptualizations become inherited to a greater or lesser degree in a nascent state, containing universal hereditary and shared functionality as biological structures. Through development, a second layer is developed above the initial inclinations which affect our perceptions, and become modified by individual experience, culture, society. We have the blueprint in which our Being is constituted from the start, in the perceptive value structure and the ability to recognize and relate to phenomena in a specific way, as inherited by our genetic material, and psychologically conceptualized, additionally, in archetypal structures. Both conceptually delineated systems, the biological, and the archetypal, become modified as we develop from that initial starting point, they build upon the foundation that is inherited in vast, yet limited and guided directions.
The personal nature of the archetypal layer of the unconscious naturally grows out of the universal unconscious, as does the personal shadow archetype grows from the original propensity to have a shadow that is inherit in humans and has the same qualities across all mankind. What you perceive as projected is necessarily a combination of both, as the foundation lies inherent and is built upon and modified by the subjective experience. This process, recognition, and structure is shared among all the basic, large, Jungian archetypes. As Jung said, it shouldn’t be forgotten that these archetypes are impossible to pin down and define, and seriously are unconscious, but we can still obtain, an albeit small inference, into their nature and their roles in our lives by understanding them broadly and abstaining from ever admitting that our conscious conception is all encompassing nor sufficiently precise. Basically, it takes one to know one.
The original symbols of good and bad, before language, in primitive humans, developed out of the organism’s ability to decipher what is beneficially useful, and on the contrary, harmful, to it, just like any other evolutionary developed attribute. We can imagine certain symbols which were found in human’s prehistoric pictures / experiences which later on were used as religious symbology, to get an idea of the impact certain symbols could have had in improving our wellbeing once we understood them, leading to higher cognitive ability in the acquisition and understanding of symbols, and eventually to language. Although in their primitive form, these symbols went pre-conceptualized in their abstract utility, their direct perceptional advantage in recognizing, and differentiation, was fleshed out in experience.
A symbol of what is good or bad is useful to the organism in aligning his aim, or in avoidance, both geared towards survival and prosperity. Two examples of symbols which in their practical understanding increased survival, and later became central to religious mythology, are the snake and the apple. A bright red fruit, or a red apple, symbolizing the affirmation of life, sustainability, ripeness, nutriment, prosperity, as that which enables life to persist, obviously is something to be aimed at, as something representing, generally speaking, cross culturally, the good. In regards to “the bad,” this was symbolized as the snake, as that which is dangerous, deadly, life negating, cunning, hard to see, easily mistakeable, as that which is a threat to life, obviously representing the bad, the original symbol of adversity. It is clear to us why the distinction became archetypal in nature, as those which could recognize ripe fruit lived, those that couldn’t, died, and thus the descendants of the lived, lived to carry whatever genetic propensity allowed for the heightened awareness of the attribute. In the same method, those that could identify a snake, and those that couldn’t, had very different fates, thus the recognizeablility of what the symbols represented led to the necessary evolutionary development in reference to both phenomena.
In pre-symbolic worldly experience, the benefit of recognizing these two means the difference between life and death, and became a societally inherited trait through the reproduction of the individuals who had the greater propensity towards “awareness” and other factors that contributed to identification. As the knowledge was passed down through generations, the symbols become ingrained in their beneficiality, regardless as if the actuality which they represented was decisive in life and death millennia down the line (modern day – we still recognize and have natural tendencies of significance in regards to red, ripeness (female attractiveness) as well as snakes (ropes still scare us)). Obviously these two phenomena aren’t the only factors, but their predominance as meaningful symbols, and their evolutionary implications, are still prevalent among modern man.
Everything that makes sense to us now, had its roots in an evolutionarily developed process. Thus, the importance in recognizing such phenomenon is the difference between life and death, and natural selection created an unconscious formulation of such things which is able to distinguish these phenomena clearly, and perhaps this unconscious ability manifested itself into the original symbols of such things, which we now interpret as good/evil, implying an unconscious, archetypal, value system manifesting its contents into the symbol. Symbols such as these are of utmost importance to primitive societies, groups, and individuals, in expression of an inner truth, in passing down knowledge, as being used as a precursor for language, and later in the development of consciousness. In this way symbols of all kinds develop, from external reality, introjected to the unconscious, then expressed externally.
We all understand unconsciously why the Biblical story of Adam and Eve makes sense, regardless of how strange it may sound in conscious formulation, it is due to the strong symbolism which is inherit within it being immediately understood sub-consciously. The knowledge of good and evil, which is the light of awareness, of consciousness itself, becomes metaphorically entwined with the ripe red apple/pomegranate, (also taken perhaps from Greek mythology) as truth. This protected produce of God himself, who represents that which creates, sustains, and is the highest aim of all life and from which in pursuing (the highest ideal of our potentiality) places a restriction upon the apple. In its consummation, it brings humanity to the divine, it brings freewill, awareness, and life, to the determined being and leads them away from the “walled garden” or protected society, into the full nature of truth, autonomy, in short, consciousness and its suffering. It is that forbidden understanding, the unknown, towards which we strive, and it is in our disobeying of the highest ideal, that we suffer the life of mortals. The snake is the anthropomorphized representation of the highest evil, of Satan himself, of betrayal and the one who leads astray, away from the highest good which is represented in the image of God and his word. The snake is death, and that which hinders life from being protected in the walled city, it is that distraction and desire which perverts our course from the highest possible aim, our greatest potentiality, and leads into suffering.
This story not only makes sense for us, but has the tremendous staying power in still affecting believers across the world who feel it represents a deep truth of existence, which it does, literally, and metaphorically. The story represents phenomena which are of utmost importance to understanding ourselves, and directs us to survival in pursuit of the good and the recognition of evil in order to avoid it or be dealt the punishment. All other symbols, religions, myths, which have staying power in captivating millions, all emerge in this manner, by primitive man introjecting external phenomena, developing them into symbols through evolutionarily ingrained archetypal creative power, subconsciously, and finally in their successful emergence as a good representation of relatable phenomena, apparent in ancient stories and iconography. These creative works help mankind and society in pointing us in the right direction, giving us a framework of understanding toward greater cooperation and survival. Only much later, with much more developed consciousnesses, are we able to examine the very symbols which gave rise to our intellect, and we are able to tease apart the meaning which underlies them, this, in general, is the task of the depth psychologist.
An unbalanced psyche in the direction of overwhelming conscious direction to action will unerringly result in an overwhelmed psychic state. A clear distinction must here be made between conscious awareness – an awareness of consciousness’ contents, and conscious direction – an arising thought in consciousness with the intentional content of directing an action or proceeding subsequent phenomena. While conscious direction is an emergence from the unconscious, and conditioned by prior factors, its biological role is useful in everyday life to override automatic instincts, emotions, and other natural hindrances, as well as for understanding and maneuvering through complex social behavior and innovation and exploration of unknown frontiers. The conscious rational faculty always is employed in conscious direction, and is a tool we have at our disposal for intuiting and planning, for evaluation and contemplation. This is entirely useful, most of the time, but as we will see, employment of rationality, and conscious direction, can often be sub-optimal and a hindrance to progressing towards our aims, and in manifesting action in accordance with our values. That being said, one can be aware of the content of consciousness while limiting consciousness’ desire to counter the unconscious in controlling every moment of the individual’s life.
Wisdom dictates the appropriate action in a given circumstance, in certain circumstances it is most beneficial to consciously employ the use of the unconsciousness in acting spontaneously or emotionally as opposed to the rational attitude of consciousness. This is possible to do, and can cause relief in circumstances of “overthinking” minute decisions of little importance, by consciously employing a spontaneous unconscious mode of being (reciprocity) in the face of the present moment’s perceived qualities. We can opt for this mode of being marked by spontaneity rather than conscious direction when the situation calls for acting quickly rather than having a delayed, rational response. The conscious employment of this method doesn’t upset the ego and the controlling nature of the ego, neither does it give too much free roam to the unconscious as it is conditionally put into play.
A conscious direction to walking on the muscular or individual motion level, is increasingly impractical as you grow past the infants initial understanding of the action. It is something best picked up, learned, and delegated to the employment of the unconscious. You can spend all day focusing on the raising of the heel, the bend of the knee, the twist of the hips, in making a single step, or, as we normally do, we merely walk without conscious direction of the individual motions. We can see here how overthinking in the form of over directing in many cases is entirely impractical. In this way one can delegate, or resist the urge to have a consciously directed mindset, and in turn utilize the psyches unconscious to the benefit of the individual, this is part of the integration aspect in the growth of consciousness. The ability for the psyche to use its parts to the best of its abilities is here the topic in question. One wouldn’t want to unconsciously direct an army, just as one wouldn’t want to consciously direct every movement of every soldier, we don’t want to remain unconscious through life, neither do we want to focus on blinking or inhaling and exhaling every moment of the day.
While the unconscious is not conscious by its very nature, the relinquishment of control by the conscious part of the psyche is possible, enabling a spontaneous, perhaps emotional, instinctual response. This instinctual or habitual response can be trained in accordance with our consciously uncovered value system, through the prior employment of conscious direction. Every experience seeks to better inform our knowledge, both consciously integrated and unconsciously collected, and the conscious direction towards patterns of behavior can serve to form the body and its responses to the environment in an optimal way. In terms of recognizing the difference, and evidence towards the usefulness of the employment of unconsciousness, we can attempt to experientially realize it in our everyday experience. Just try consciously either smiling or mean mugging any passing human as they pass you on the street, then consciously choose to stop, and just allow the whole of the psyche to naturally give the response which is most naturally manifests, given the individual interaction. Or consciously choose to blink your eyelids down, then back up, then restrict the conscious directing of the activity, and see how every moment of the day your unconscious is directing your eyelids. This demonstrates the effect, and ability of consciousness in both its own ability to be a direct causal precursor, which yet is still determined by causes, but also to relinquish the conscious knowledge in the form of a thought depicting the bodies next action, causing an “unconscious” reaction.
I say all this to say, we don’t know exactly when and what we should be consciously aware of, or in which situations to rationally or spontaneously enter into, this is a question of wisdom, and I think a mixture of both is the only answer, and a well-integrated psyche is that mode of being which is best prepared for such an endeavor. Through experience we learn which things we value enough to provide optimal conscious direction in response to, and which things are better off handled unconsciously. It is possible to consciously direct the implementation of unconscious behaviors and this can often be useful and wise.
Seek Truth 