Chapter 09: The Self-Correcting Path of a Self-Regulating State

Our sense of control is perhaps the most common concern we have about living our lives. When we sense that we do not have dominion over relevant events to produce desired outcomes, or even power over ourselves from our emotions to our actions, we feel obstructed or imprisoned by life. Sometimes, it is as if we are strapped to a timeworn armchair and forced to helplessly observe the happenings of the world, while at other times we are unleashed unto the battlefield of our stories only to have little to no impact at all. When we feel this way, it merely means that we are sane. And for those of us who believe we are fully in control of our destiny, we are more likely to fortify a false perception of reality through devoted attempts at influencing or controlling others in an overarching effort to suppress an elementary truth of life. While it is true that responsibility ultimately falls onto us to direct the course of our lives within the capacity we are afforded to apply, believing in our mastery over our environment does not translate to being omnipotent rulers of the universe. If two or more of us were almighty beings acting freely without a basic degree of cooperation, we would instantly find ourselves in a cosmic standstill.

However, accepting the assumption that we do not truly control our fate does not mean that fate controls us either. We may not hold authority over the happenings of life, but we are not without the ability to make choices and affect our surroundings. The impact we can have depends on the conditions we face, and on how many of these conditions we know and are able to manipulate. This means that the more information we can acquire early enough, the more we can prepare ourselves for a wider range of contingencies. In addition, this presumes that we have some limited physical capacity to act on our knowledge. However, the constraint of time obliges us to make choices, which tend to divide between living our lives in the present and making provisions for a future that may never come. Those of us who only live to enjoy the here and now risk suffering later in life, while those of us who work constantly to secure our future do so often only to neither enjoy our existence in the moment nor later when we are older and likely less healthy. Given these realities, it is important how and where we strike a balance between being in the current now and building in the present for a future now. Moreover, this demands a comparable equilibrium between our partial reign over life and our submission to its will. Unfortunately, our obsession with control only ends in the loss of what we seek to have or, more sincerely, to experience.

We may be at the mercy of the universe and its conditions, but we are here because of those conditions. It is for this reason that we have a very intimate relationship with our environment. But we also have within us the capacity to glimpse into the mechanics of existence, and this positions us to improve upon our circumstances while keeping in mind that the defined settings of our lives could change so drastically that all of our progress and existential continuity could rapidly or almost instantaneously come to an end. Having this awareness cautions us not to ultimately operate in a completely self-centred mode while recognizing that our focus must be on our own selves with respect to our immediate functioning and particularly at the beginning of our lives.

Despite what we may or may not be able to control, we know there is always something we can manage, even if it is just a few of our own thoughts and some of our conscious choices. In addition, as individuals living in some measure of community, we are aware that life finds a way to create opportunities for us to gain some semblance of control over our circumstances. As long as we are alive, there is a glimmer of hope that something can happen regardless of how removed it may be from our expectations. We cannot rule over the events of our universe, but we can intercede on our own behalf to gain command of our actions as we negotiate with the various parts of our psyche. While much of our bodily regulation is mainly nonconscious, our minds are nevertheless the internal negotiators of our dominion. Elevating our awareness is essential to directly regulating ourselves, and this specifically necessitates the supervision of our own modes of thinking and the actions that seem to follow our thoughts, perceptions and feelings. To do this, we need to appreciate some basic principles and approaches to mastering our own lives through an expanded consciousness of our minds and realities, and then put them into practice.

SELF-REGULATION THROUGH THE PRACTICE OF MODERATION

Although we exist in a relatively consistent universe that supplies us with the minimum stability we need, it also generates constantly changing conditions, which also result in our shifting states of mind. This can cause our reality to appear unstable, but it is only our reluctance to change our response to the world and our failure to adjust our beliefs and expectations that create an impression of instability. The world may be volatile, but much of its unpredictability arises from our incomplete and flawed understanding of it. Nevertheless, instead of adapting our views, we tend to blame our internal feeling of disorder on this outwardly facing chaos. And while the external struggles of life may seem unfair to many of us, it is the impartial nature of the universe that compels us to regulate our own nature and amend our ways to align with reality since we depend on our environment to exist. It is our responsibility to preserve our existence and bring about a sense of balance within ourselves. This may involve changing our surroundings, but often it means being aware of our relative conditions as well as our capabilities and dispositions, which respectively include the limits of our abilities and resources and the directions set by our inclinations and preferences. This helps us to identify and seize the opportunities we are given and to prepare for and navigate around the obstacles we encounter as we determine which situations will increase the likelihood of leading us to a more balanced state.

Regulating ourselves to maintain an overall physiological and emotional homeostasis depends on the steady monitoring of ourselves. It is like a thermostat regularly checking the temperature to determine whether warm or cool air is required to maintain the set point. Whether it is paying attention to what we eat or what habits we form, it is important to sustain this casual, unobtrusive surveillance of ourselves and others to learn and practice what is better for us individually and collectively from moment to moment and from situation to situation. It enables us to avoid unnecessary extremes and achieve self-regulation through the practice of moderation in everything we think, feel, want and do. Moderation involves observing limits and letting go of impulses to break rules or seek extremes without a legitimate purpose. Since our extremes tend to reflect our deepest fears and hidden desires, they act as distractions from truths we do not wish to admit or confront. However, they also represent the sharp edges of reality that we can use to illuminate our course through life so that we do not drift off into treacherous waters.

Practicing the principle of moderation parallels the ancient concept of taking the middle path. We find the middle path somewhere between any two opposing forces or positions and at the balancing point across all excesses. To moderate is to regulate between what is more and what is less, which can mean too much and too little, too quick and too slow, too long and too short, and too early and too late. It demands that we discourage our response to one extreme belief, action or event with an equivalent other, especially when faced with radical moral positions and polarized political views that pull us to the right and to the left of any issue. As those alleged values reach towards the boundaries of their ideals, they fold back into one another and fuse together to conclude as arguably the same thing, which is evident in the totalitarian regimes that have historically emerged from all ends of the political spectrum. The middle path of moderation requires that we recognize the perverse oversimplification of our extremes in order to align with the natural ambiguity of life.

We all know the current through which moderation flows. It runs between uncontrollable rage and negligent indifference, between uninhibited desire and repressed emotion, and between fastidious planning and restless spontaneity. When we regulate in this way, we do not fixate on control. We listen to our nature and guide it instead. This is why in order to learn to eat well, we must indulge at times so as to neither binge nor abstain. If we abuse the body through injury or neglect, we will overcompensate by letting gluttony react to deprivation, and austerity to overindulgence. Some extremes can take place concurrently such as when we gorge on a tantalizing meal and yet become malnourished due to the foods we chose to consume. This occurs even with the best intentions when we work to our limits and swing like a pendulum to the other side where lethargy and depression await. Typically, this is driven by the expectation that the investment we make will result in an overall net positive change. And although it may temporarily offer us relief, nothing remains permanent and everything eventually returns to its original state. This is a critical reminder that maintaining balance is not a one-time activity or objective. It involves an ongoing process of practice that feels decreasingly strenuous to follow.

It is our nature and desire to feel as if we are engaging in instinctively voluntary actions. This is to say that we want to act with conscious intention, but to do this so naturally that it seems involuntary and effortless. We want to achieve results without exhausting our resources, and without having to alert our emotions to coerce us to act. However, this feeling of effortless action only comes with much practice because we are not born with readily available capabilities except at the most elementary levels. While we may possess certain gifts and propensities within our biological repertoire, they still need to be developed and refined. We unavoidably must train to demonstrate smoothness in our performance. We do not always realize how important it is to constantly practice and enhance our skills because the value of our preparation and training is often only clear when the moment arises that an abrupt decision or action is required.

The key is to focus on premediated process instead of establishing premediated actions or decisions. This means that we act with the process in mind as its purpose without knowing the decision, action or outcome upfront. We do this because we do not know how our lives will be impacted by unexpected events. We can specifically prepare for the likely ones, but training for unlikely scenarios can exhaust our resources unnecessarily. It is like betting against the odds and hoping to win before you lose everything you invested. The sensible alternative is to learn how to adapt regardless of our future circumstances. The goal itself is not as important as being fully engaged in the act of changing. Since it is not uncommon for us to realize during the process of achieving something that our original goal may not have led to what we genuinely wanted or needed, it is the intrinsic value of what we do that matters more than what we hope to gain from what we do. Our relatively arbitrary goals merely serve to direct our attention and effort temporarily until new information redirects them again. For this reason, we should always reassess the inherent fulfilment of our efforts against the outward feasibility of our goals so that we do not deplete our resources before experiencing real rejuvenation or realignment. To do this, we should remain cognizant of our susceptibility to bias and distraction that filter or disrupt the information we process and alter how we interpret the world. But since many of our inclinations are innate programs with only partially adaptive functions, it is preferable to let their imperfections surface freely so that we can instantly catch and defuse them before they cause us more harm than good.

THE HIGHER AWARENESS OF ADAPTIVE THINKING

Our continued survival and development depend as much on the way we think as on what we believe and do. In particular, our subsistence relies on our ability to adapt our thinking to changing conditions and the new information we continue to collect. A rigid mind may seem strong, but when it breaks or splits open, it takes an indefinite length of time to heal because it shatters into pieces that cannot easily tie back together when its built on a false foundation. On the other hand, a flexible mind is much more resilient. It adjusts to reality much faster by naturally fracturing along its pre-existing fault lines and rebuilding quickly. But whether the mind is inflexible or malleable, there are two basic ways in which it acclimatizes and responds to solving problems and making decisions, from the simplest to the most complex. We know them as intuition and reasoning that allow us to act quickly and deliberate carefully as needed. Not surprisingly, we associate these two tendencies with the primordial and more evolved areas of our brain, respectively.

We tend to consider our intellectual capacity to be the rational part because it involves our conscious reasoning in the analysis and synthesis of data we gather to answer a question or solve a problem. This includes breaking things down into discernable elements, defining and categorizing these elements, and relating them to distinguished events that we decide are relevant to our lives or occupations. This also requires that we link and sequence these distinct pieces to tell a story if a story can be derived. The ability to think in this manner is the prime contributor to much of our technological progress, but such contemplation can be of little value in an instant when a quick decision becomes vital and insufficient information is available. Unless we can gather all the required data in advance of taking a critical step and complete the bulk of the analysis with best options identified that consider costs, benefits, risks and advantages, it will not matter. A delayed response is always the wrong response, even if we later discover the right or best solution, because a delayed action is equivalent to inaction when an immediate response is required, whether it is to save a life, prevent an imminent catastrophe or seize the moment when a window of opportunity opens up to us.

This explains why we rely heavily on our training for every likely contingency, but we still require our intuition to make swift judgments and decisions. We may consider this to be irrational in nature since there is no consciously reasoned process followed prior to a choice being made or an action being executed, but intuition is built on sets of inherent and acquired programs that inform us of what we like and dislike, and what is good for us and what constitutes a threat. It also tells us what information to consider, and what to ignore or reject. We can say that intuition is pre-reasoned except that we do not always have the capacity to confirm its rationale prior to our actions, or that it has a rationale. Often we do not have conscious access to its programming or the source knowledge of its suggestion even after we commit to a specific decision or action. This means that we will not know if our so-called gut instinct is right until after outcomes align with our expectations, and even if they do, we nevertheless remain wondering what it is that we think we know. While we will be able to expedite our reasoned analysis on practical matters as we drastically increase our computing power to rival our intuition in terms of both speed and accuracy, on a personal or moral level, our intuition will always serve as a spiritual guide as we keep our tainted minds and cognitive biases in check.

Both of our conscious and unconscious processes are prone to error. They can both cause us unnecessary difficulties if we do not appreciate their strengths and weaknesses. Conscious reasoning helps to conceptually define and relate things as well as articulate our understanding of the world, but there is no end to the amount of information that we can process to describe concepts and inform decisions, which can lock us into what many of us refer to as analysis paralysis unless we set limits. On the other hand, our intuition may allow us to make snap decisions, but we are at the mercy of internal preference and external suggestion, which make us very easy to manipulate. Reasoning is as good as the information we have to process and the time we have to process it, while intuition can only be trusted as much as we can inform it and able to mitigate the risks of its prejudicial influences, which can include rationalizing our impulsive choices in hindsight to stage the appearance of reasoned thinking. Although we must afford ourselves the space to make mistakes and teach us what we have not yet learned, it is in permitting ourselves to suspend judgment that we approach the vicinity of an impartial state where our quiet minds can become faint receivers of the truth.

We optimize our adaptation by integrating reason and intuition in an intimate collaboration between two modes of thought, where we consciously seem to manage one while the other surfaces without our direct control. But together, they empower us to live productively and peacefully by being open and trusting while being cautious and critical in a balanced and constructive manner. This means quickly focusing on the positive to identify and act on opportunities, and carefully considering the negative to detect dangers or costs and prevent future harm. This also means slowing down when do not need to act immediately, and speeding up when urgent action is required. When they work together in partnership and come into alignment, they become another mode of thinking or being. But to enable this merger as we confront constant corporeal and conceptual chaos, we need to consider engaging in two types of mental training. The first is meditation, which we can do on a scheduled basis to unplug our busy minds and help refocus. But the second, which can also be exercised during meditation, is our capacity for metacognition, or being in the state and practice of consciously thinking about our thinking. It is a self-observing and self-reflecting process where we monitor not only our surroundings, but what we are thinking and feeling, how we are thinking, what is triggering our thoughts, and why we are feeling the way we are in a given moment. While we cannot access everything about ourselves through pure introspection, it is nonetheless in the higher awareness of adaptive thinking that we can foster a progressively self-regulating mind in a constant reintegration of ourselves where nothing relevant or essential is excluded. We are entirely as much a part of the world as the rest of society and the universe.

The more we practice being in these mental states, the more we naturally learn to initiate them and moderate our emotional states. And if we practice when we are alone and through some form of meditation, we can do this more effectively when we are engaged in an activity and/or dealing with others. We will improve the flow of our awareness to be completely one with our environment and to see more clearly how things interrelate and work together. We will also enhance our creativity as we become less inhibited in our exploration and less imprisoned by self-doubt, but more temperate in our beliefs, feelings and actions. We will act without needing to think because we will have naturally trained our minds to imagine and see things before they transpire, or see all possibilities before one of them occurs. And it is in exercising this discipline that allows us to sustain a unified approach to the truth.

A SELF-CORRECTING MODEL FOR A WORKING BODY OF KNOWLEDGE

Our fear of uncertainty extends beyond the absence of clarity to include the insecurity we associate with the risk of harm, failure or dissatisfaction and the degree to which we lack control over outcomes we desire and the events we want to evade. This insecurity, at its extremes, generally divides us into the overconfident and the timid, or those of us who believe that we know more than we do and have achieved more than we have, and those of us who underestimate almost everything that we have done and do not realize how much more that we do know. But whether we are obsessed with being right or terrified of making mistakes, we ensure that we will be misaligned with reality and this reflects a fundamental departure from what we are designed to be. We should, and some of us do, focus on what we cannot see to further test what we do see because the desire to comprehend overrides the fear of being wrong. While there are some mistakes that we do not want to make at all and others that we hope not to repeat or at least seek to reduce in their frequency, there should be a safe measure of excitement in being wrong because it means that there is still something to learn with the opportunity to be less uncertain. This is the function of uncertainty management, where we develop our ability to assess uncertainty and tolerate risk by testing what we know and confronting what we do not know.

To perform this function well, we need to keep our knowledge distinct from the truth, which is universal, absolute and complete. We do not question the truth. We question claims to the truth, which comes in the form of beliefs and perceptions, and more importantly, our knowledge. Knowledge assumes there is some understanding and evidence to substantiate what we perceive and believe. But given that knowledge is relative or conditional and always limited, it is also likely to change as new information is acquired. We update what we know based on increasing experience and exposure to new evidence. Hence, knowledge is something that we expand and refine while the truth is something we uncover and clarify. In this sense, we grow in our knowledge, but we can only approach the truth. This means that knowledge is restricted to being treated as an approximation to the truth, which we cannot measure in absolute terms since an ideal is infinite or uncertain with no definitive value against which to compare. Consequently, we can only test and assess the relative strength among our proposed theories, and within the context of specifically defined criteria. Nevertheless, we continue to rely on our experience of events to determine what is true or false and make judgments about what is good or bad in response to our inescapable uncertainty.

As we learn that we can question anything and everything, we also discover over time that all unconditional claims will be disproven or challenged adequately to be fully or partially abandoned. Given this reality, it is clear that we can benefit from simply shifting our confidence to our best representation of the unknown truth without assuming or asserting we have knowledge of its absolutes. Although falsely claimed absolutes impede our cultural progression towards the truth, there is no need for them because building a body of knowledge only requires that its parts fit together. When they do not fit, we seek out new components and/or reconfigure existing pieces so that they better integrate with one another under a new or revised paradigm. The primary viagnostic tenet is simply that there is a fundamental order behind everything that preconditions our existence without necessarily determining it. This suggests that we are pursuing a stable yet expansive truth, where everything we come to believe or know merely reflects a version or a slice of the genuine truth regardless of how closely it approximates its essence. If we begin by assuming that our body of knowledge is inherently false or incomplete, but treat every elaboration of that knowledge as taking a step closer to the verity of life, then we need not concern ourselves with its imperfections other than to gradually drive towards better and better elaborations.

Since the truth is not accessible to us in absolutes, all we can do is develop a working model of the truth, constantly applying and refining it as an arrangement of patterns and principles in collaboration with those who share the same intent. This affords us the freedom to be wrong while always aiming to better grasp a problem or a set of problems. We use our knowledge to build more accurate representations of the world with solutions that may help mitigate risks, resolve recurring issues, and ultimately actuate decisions that sincerely improve the quality of our lives. These representations are theories and simulations of realities past, present and future that we try to explain and illustrate in one form or another. If they reflect the truth, then their solutions will prove to be sustainable. Otherwise, the impacts will be negligible. Sometimes the impact can be significant, but instead result in exacerbating the problem. But regardless of the outcome, the focus is on building more stable working models of the truth that can be dismantled at any time if a completely different view, or a fusion of views, can cover a wider and deeper comprehension of reality.

The full spectrum of truth can be expressed between 0 and 1 inclusively or as a probabilistic scale that ranges from 0 to 100 percent, where 0 means being completely false on one end and 1 means completely true on the other, where absolute uncertainty with no idea lies exactly in the middle. We can find absolute certainty or complete confidence with no doubt whatsoever on either edge of any measureable dimension. However, we operate somewhere in the space between total ambiguity and indisputable clarity, and we effectively deal with uncertainty by reducing our concern with individually isolated events and focusing on learning from each occurrence to increase the predictive probability of future events when we look at these events as a whole. The more experience and information we acquire, the greater the opportunity there is to establish a stronger degree of confidence in our judgment. This allows us to accept failure with the intent of increasing success, or to look at success and failure as a form of verification in approximating the truth. It is in this way that our knowledge also becomes probabilistic and its accurately calculated probabilities can inform our response to the world.

We need to treat errors and risks as inputs into our actions and decisions, respectively. We can derive confidence from failure as much as we do from success if we bother to question why we failed. When all we care about is winning, we only focus on winning. Eventually it reaches a limit where the focus shifts to how to break the rules and engage in deceit in order to maintain the illusion of winning. However, if our focus is on quality and truth, then we come to look at all experiences as stepping stones towards value or meaning. We switch from trying to portray a falsely flawless existence to building a self-correcting model for a working body of knowledge that is weary of perfection. Perfection is not found in the outcome, but in the process of testing against the principles or characteristics of the truth. For instance, we measure the strength of a good model by its sensitivity to conditions. If it demonstrates a growing ability to adjust to or predict across a multitude of situations, then it is reliable. This also suggests that it is inclusive and expansive in that we can steadily account for more and more seemingly divergent points of view. In addition, it has to possess predictive and solvable value beyond simply being explanatory in nature. This means that it is supported by evidence that increases our confidence and preferably the confidence of others as well and that it must ultimately be practical or applicable in some form, where we should see greater alignment with reality.

FOLLOWING PATTERNS WITHIN GOVERNING BOUNDARIES

Much of what we know about the world is not focused on why things work as much as how things seem to work. This is the more pragmatic side of our knowledge. While there is little doubt that knowing why offers tremendous more power that can be generalized to many other situations, we do not feel the need to question something when we know how it works. We only find ourselves pondering on what is missing in our conception of the universe or its cause when something does not work or suddenly changes in a way that defies our expectations. We do not always need to know the root cause of all things in order to interact effectively with our surroundings, but our environment does demand that we appreciate what matters in the nature of things, expressed as patterns and boundaries. Hence, it is not a coincidence that we are all designed to perceive existence as changing patterns across space and time, regardless of whether or not we comprehend the underlying order of the universe.

Patterns emerge from this undisclosed custodian of reality as propensities and habits that seem to carry specific properties and countlessly varied relationships across all entities, which are strung together by forces and energies in recurring series of events that are generated by merely observing them. Patterns reflect the behaviour of all things and the natural course to which they align. They are habitual in that they provide the stability of familiar routines on which to cooperate and then collide to form new patterns. The world may be in flux, but it accommodates life with periods of security long enough for it to adapt and reproduce itself. If the truth is etched in patterns, then we can follow and predict them in terms of when they will regularly change or how long they will generally last. While a pattern is never absolute or permanent, it has an underlying logic to it that we can trace. And the more patterns we can trace, the more alignment we are able to achieve or experience.

However, patterns are not entirely independent as a concept because they are tightly linked to boundaries. And although it is customary to associate boundaries with divisions and narrowly see them as points where things end, they are best understood as guides for patterns. They tell us where and when to stop so that we know where and when we do not need to stop. They establish scope in order for us to focus on something without being completely distracted by everything else. They allow us to build by steering the very same patterns that we rely on in our quest to live life and participate in our narratives. Nevertheless, boundaries do provide a sense of separation, as in inclusion versus exclusion, and they act as a line of distinction between and among things. More importantly, these divisions are often meant as a kind of defense or protective layer and as a trigger to detach ourselves, particularly when a threshold is reached like when something becomes so hot that it might burn us. They serve to protect us when something is close enough to hurt us, but they also give us something to transcend. In this sense, boundaries not only suggest limits we should not exceed, but they define goals to reach or targets to surpass. Hence, there are barriers we should not breach while others we need to break.

Boundaries are essential to describing duality and codependent origination, where two things must coexist for each one to conceptually subsist such as light and darkness, or new and old. While there can be one boundary that divides two sets of things, we equally recognize how two boundaries can contain one thing in perpetuity such as the way we depict a wave as having a crest and a trough. There is a limit above and one below that holds the definition and span of that wave. We can also apply this to morality since we cannot grasp the concept of good without evil. Otherwise, the good would have no meaning. Morality establishes the dividing lines between good behaviour and bad deeds, or more broadly between how to live our lives and how not to live life. This is similar to how we think about health or performance, which is measured against targets or thresholds. Anything above a target is good and everything below is poor, or anything passing a threshold is bad, and anything maintained under that threshold is satisfactory. However, success or morality is just as much about the patterns we see as it is about the boundaries we set.

Our will to follow patterns comes from seeing their value or experiencing their ease. When we do something because it makes sense and not because we are told to do it, we own it. We live it. But when we feel obliged to perform a deed, we feel pain. We can only endure it. And in the absence of the right boundaries, even good patterns dissipate and we can become lost. We may fight against them when they are perceived to be too rigid or we may neglect them when they are too loose, but boundaries are necessary because there are no patterns without them, and boundaries are meaningless without patterns. Moreover, boundaries are not necessarily fixed. They can be flexible in that they change over time or apply only to a specific situation or set of conditions. If we could treat boundaries such as our morals or goals as a list of guidelines to follow, then we would utilize them more effectively to interact with the world and with others. Knowing that they can move or change means that patterns can always change as well because everything is conditional. There are no absolutes in the universe except for perhaps that there are no absolutes in the universe. If we accept this, it will make our knowledge potentially more valuable and our morality easier to practice and to bear as we permit ourselves us to be self-correcting without shame or guilt and self-regulating without being controlling or restrictive in our being.

We tend to look at the world with undying impermanence. Nothing lasts and yet the laws that supposedly govern the cosmos are permanently fixed. But what if the world is always changing while only what matters lasts, and what if the amoral impartiality of life simply directs us to align with what it is that truly matters. This would change the way we approach life. Unfortunately, we would need to unlearn what we have learned to realize what the universe, or what many of us think of as God, is trying to convey to us. This still means following patterns and maintaining boundaries that demonstrate alignment and adjusting either of them when they no longer do. It is surely and profoundly helpful to think of existence as following patterns within governing boundaries because it empowers us both to stabilize and to change. However, our fundamental challenge lies in our honesty with life to develop authentic narratives from which we can mine our own meaning found in our true sense of self and in a sincere relationship with the outer world. Our inner stability can only come from letting go of what is not real and neutralizing our attempts at perpetually substituting the truth with a false reality.

THE NECESSITY OF A DUAL RESPONSE TO REALITY

Our neural circuitry is configured to assume order in the world. Our brains function specifically to detect patterns, identify boundaries and form associations that help make sense of our existence. This directs us to generate maps and constructs of our surveyed universe, including notions of our own selves. However, we cannot respond comprehensively to the whole of reality. That is beyond our coding and training. Instead, we are selective by design and we fabricate or reconstruct everything we do not fully perceive. In a sense, our experience is already partly an illusion, and our willingness to align with the truth is dependent on the degree to which the truth serves us or threatens us. Hence, if we wish to move towards the self-correcting path of a self-regulating state, we have to learn how to manage our tendencies in dealing with reality and more specifically, our fundamental state of uncertainty regarding what we think we know or what we cannot clearly and easily comprehend. While this may encourage us to question and understand our world, including ourselves, it also sparks an inherent desire for total certainty. This causes a cognitive split between two dissimilar inclinations or modes of response to an incomplete and uncooperative reality, which we can distinguish as delusionism and metarealism.

It is impossible for us to be entirely certain about the truth, which also consists of many realities that we do not wish to contemplate. Consequently, we have a crucial need and tendency to feel a stable sense of confidence about our conception of the universe, including others and ourselves, which allows us to function and make decisions. This self-assurance serves to alleviate the deep fear of the unknown, the constant stress of facing or anticipating negative events and the generalized anxiety of an aimless existence. Whether it is being directly exposed to the raw elements of our environment or securing our place in the socioeconomic jungle that overlays the primal world, we all need to delude ourselves enough to ignore our entrenched self-doubt and associated insecurity in order to engage life. This tendency and process can be referred to as delusionism. On the other hand, we also have a functional requirement and inclination to seek out the truth by examining, explaining and testing our experience to arrive at a more objective or veritable model of reality. We feed on our uncertainties to expand our comprehension of the world and convert them into opportunities to acquire genuine confidence in our ability to learn rather than in what we think we know. This can be referred to as metarealism.

Although we are limited in what we really know and much of it is ambiguous if we actually bother to question or examine any of it, we still need to respond with a basic sense of assurance about what we believe. Both of these tendencies support our need to build trust. But while delusionism bolsters self-confidence by altering our perception of reality in defense our self-serving beliefs, metarealism builds resiliency into our constructs of reality by challenging our own perceptions and seeing beyond what we think we know individually and collectively. In either mode, we perceive patterns and boundaries as we establish relationships between things we experience, but delusionism is less concerned with truth as it is with the persuasiveness of a narrative, regardless of its veracity, in order to protect our minds from unwanted conditions and reduce feelings of instability. However, at its extreme, it causes us far more harm than good because it is susceptible to exaggerating reality based on the smallest sliver of truth or to forming judgments based on conjecture such as distrusting someone due to a misunderstanding or a misperceived threat. It can create an accusatory world where someone or some group must always accept blame to remove responsibility from ourselves as well as encourage egocentricity and idolatry as forms of salvation from the unbearable facts of life.

Delusions build upon delusions. We actively validate our attitudes and judgments by focusing our attention on any information that confirms our misconceptions or biases. A common way to achieve this is to seek out others in the largest numbers possible that share our views, or to adopt a prevailing belief or set of beliefs with a pre-established following and forego the need to fabricate one ourselves. Shared delusions are the most difficult to challenge because there are always supporters to help dispute any point of view that runs contrary to one that we have accepted as our own. But our own narratives are usually the most effective because we can unconsciously borrow immortal myths and archetypes from our ancestral past and apply them to contemporary societal issues that convey the absurdity of actual events we have suffered without drawing direct attention to them. In the film The Fisher King [9], set in the moral malaise of sharp socioeconomic division, we encounter an eccentric character living among the homeless. Having developed a persona named Parry a few years after bearing the tragic loss of his wife in a mass shooting that he witnesses, he channels his trauma through an Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, where he fights with his hallucination of the evil Red Knight that symbolizes his inner demons with which he struggles to dispel. His delusional pursuit reflects his deep desire to be healed by the unspoken meaning he seeks with the redemptive help of Jack, a former radio personality whose narcissistic and provocative affect synchronously triggered the event leading to Parry’s tragedy.

We need delusionism to cope with harsh nature of our experiences and the incongruence between our preconceived notions of life and the contradictory information we receive. We deploy many cognitive defenses to stabilize our unsettled sense of reality, which includes evading disturbing questions and filtering out detrimental evidence as we permit our marketed lifestyles to feed our preoccupation with corporeal indulgences and social dependencies. We often do this by pre-emptively reinventing or dismissing the truth to reconcile our misaligned beliefs and perceptual conflicts. However, as we leverage these inborn inclinations and acquired strategies, our artificial universe evolves into an immense complexity of distorted perceptions and rehearsed justifications to maintain a chiefly fictitious life with its scripted identities and values. We translate our stories into a customized series of short films produced to fit within the scope of our own delusions, and to appease our fixation with control. Unfortunately, without a harmonizing mechanism to engage reality and uncover genuine meaning in our lives, we find ourselves ill-equipped to counter the flaws and perils of our alleged instincts along with the uninvited pain and discord of our rewritten memories submerged in the oceans of our subconscious kingdom, where we wait to drown our essence in oblivion.

We may think that skepticism and critical thinking injected with a seemingly healthy dose of realism can guard us against the extremes of delusionism, but they do not drive us directly towards the truth. They can only help to prevent mistruth since we are inclined to revert to the subjective and defend our conception of existence against any empirical proof that may generate debilitating doubt and deepen our insecurity. While almost anything can be refuted given enough time and access to the right information, we cannot escape delusionism because every interpretation we have of the world is potentially and likely a delusion in the context of our relative knowledge. Hence, to be truly objective is to be divorced from any interpretive value of the facts, which also consequently impedes fulfilling our fundamental need for meaning. This is not realism, but anterealism, as in before reality is perceived.

Despite our tendency to amend reality, we do possess the genuine will to seek the universal truth that is tied to our innate desire to uncover our essence since they are ultimately the same thing. To approach this, we test our capacity to escape the current paradigm that shapes our perception in order to reach a higher or deeper sense of the truth that opens us up to another level of meaning at the risk of finding no meaning at all. This is metarealism, and when our beliefs become disparate, we break through perceptual barriers to see what was not seen before. This typically involves removing the impenetrable layers of defenses we have accumulated to circumvent elements of reality that either elicit our vulnerabilities or run contrary to the incoherent stories we have developed around our maladjusted characters. However, at its extreme, metarealism exposes us to the danger of lacking a viable paradigm through which to perceive the world. And without a shared model with others, it can also incapacitate us in the development of positive social interactions and possibly hinder our normal functioning if we find ourselves enveloped by emptiness. Hence, the alternative is integralism, which to balance metarealism with delusionism because while metarealism allows us to see beyond, delusionism enables us to participate in the great narrative of sentient existence. We have to remember that life is like a game or a story. It is simultaneously real and not real.

At any given moment, we are either trying to create a reality that suits our beliefs or attempting to align our beliefs to reality. And although these two tendencies may seem to diverge, they serve complementary functions that define the necessity of a dual response to reality. In unison, they provide an all-encompassing sense of meaning where we intersect fact and fiction to convey the universal truth, and where their balance mitigates the individual risks that they pose to our personal health and fulfilment. As long as we apply moderation along our self-correcting path, our self-regulating mind will align with the patterns and boundaries of life to quell the fear of our uncertainty. We are always faced with the danger of being absorbed in thought and emotion that can pull us deeper into our delusions and obsessions with control, but this penchant for fantasy is a prerequisite for developing our viagnostic narrative. It is in the art of the imagination that the stuttering expression of our ineffable essence escapes the confinement of reality, and it is in experiencing reality for what it truly is by suspending with our acquired versions of the truth that we discover the meaning we seek in the motives we need.