Change and Self-Discovery

A common view is that life is a learning experience. All learning is trial and error, since we rarely know in advance what is the best for us. Even when we seek advice, what works for the person giving advice may or may not work for the person asking for the advice. What this view entails is that we learn best (in terms of character development) by making mistakes and then eventually discovering the consequences of what we did. Then our unhappiness is the incentive to change, so as to avoid as much as possible making the old mistakes again. What we need to learn most is better relationship skills.

What we find is that our relationships confuse us in various ways, and we find that we lack some social skills. The way out of our predicament lies in exploring ourselves psychologically; by doing this we can identify where and how we are confused and limited. This way is a very long-term process. It took many years for us to become as limited and confused as we presently are, and so it will take many years of self-exploration to assimilate our negative experiences and be able to transcend them. The primary difficulty is that we have to learn self-awareness, and this takes time.

Overall, it is not really just an attempt to patch up our difficulties. Rather, it means that we try and attain an harmonious sense of identity. This implies that many of our beliefs, values and attitudes will change over the years. It is often easier to change when we are in our mature years; in our youth we rarely have the ideas and experiences which we will need in order to change.

Asking Questions about Oneself

To begin learning about oneself, we have to start from issues that are currently important to us. It is difficult to analyse issues that are positive ones for us: we can always think up many reasons why we are successful at something, and it will be difficult to decide which one is true. Whereas negative issues, or issues that distress us, usually have far fewer possible explanations. Hence the best way to begin a journey of self-discovery is to focus on our limitations and failures. When you feel that something is important to you, always ask “Why”. Why is that something important?

However, sooner or later you will realise that in order to answer your questions you need ideas about the mind and the way it works. Suitable ideas will enable you to identify your problems far more easily. I questioned myself a lot in my mid-20s, but it got me nowhere. For some months I excessively analysed everything. I analysed so much I couldn’t make any decisions. My mind went round in circles and so I often sat on my bed wondering what to do. It was many years before I understood the reason for the mind going round in circles: the mind behaves this way when we demand solutions from it but we lack the ideas needed for the solutions.

In my 20s I had the usual narrow scientific education (all science, and no culture). When I embarked on my psycho-analysis in my 40s, I read an enormous number of books, over a period of many years, in order to get the ideas and information that I needed. Therefore, in order to do effective self-questioning, the person needs ideas. What is required is a broad knowledge of life, and not a deep but narrow understanding of one or two specialities.

Beginning the process of self-discovery is not easy. The old saying things get worse before they get better applies. When you start to discover your weaknesses, you will perhaps go through some degree of shock and say “how did I end up like this, when I have the best of intentions?” What you need to keep in mind is that you are learning to observe how the subconscious mind functions (and it functions in the same way for everyone). Hence you are not necessarily responsible for most of the negative states of mind that make up your life.

If we are interested in spirituality, we may believe that the mistakes we made in the past will count against us. This is a mistaken belief. Because humans have a subconscious mind, everybody makes mistakes. Mistakes cannot be avoided in life. The most harmonious attitude to take is that it does not matter if we make mistakes, so long as we learn from them. By learning from them we will be much less likely to make the same mistakes again in the future. That is the usual process of acquiring wisdom, by trial and error.

When you begin to get one or more answers, analyse what the answer does for you. Does it explain meaning (some aspect of the meaning of life), or justice (why you have sometimes felt that you have been victimised in life), or freedom, or what? You analyse not only questions but also the answers that the questions generate.

The Strangeness of the Mind

As a person explores his mind he becomes aware of the strangeness of the mind. This strangeness plays havoc with his high ideals, whether of justice, ethics, freedom, spirituality or similar. I consider three forms of strangeness: abreaction, mind swings, and dramas.

a). Abreaction
This is covered in detail on the lower section of the Home page. Here I just mention that abreaction is a sequential flow of particular emotions. There are four regular forms of abreaction, and two less-frequent forms. Abreaction links happiness with unhappiness, excitement with distress. A person may start feeling very happy and excited for a short while, then a few hours or a day or two later, he feels very distressed or antagonistic or confrontational. This switch in mood is very baffling till we learn to understand it.

b). Mind Swings
The mind likes to swing between extremes. This is slightly different from abreaction. Every time you have a high experience it is usually followed by a down experience. Negative states of mind usually follow positive states of mind. The depth of the negativity is proportional to the height of the positivity – the higher you go, the more down you subsequently go. Some down experiences are obvious, like depression, whilst others are not so obviously considered to be down states, such as headaches and aggression.

Starting from a high state and then dropping down to a low state is fairly obvious. What happens if we go in the other direction? If we are in a low state, such as depression, what do we crave? – excitement. The level of excitement we pursue is equal to the depth of depression that we sink into. This is why drug addiction is so hard to combat. If a person has a poor quality of life, then the most effective form of excitement (and temporary freedom from emotions like guilt and fear) is to resort to mood-altering drugs. It is personal preference what drug is chosen, whether cannabis, heroin, alcohol, tobacco (tobacco is a mood-altering drug since it offsets anxiety), etc. Alternatively, to switch to excitement we may generate a mood of mania. If we pursue this choice then we end up becoming manic-depressives (otherwise called bipolar disorder).

c). Dramas
As the person explores the subconscious mind, he finds that his code of morality or ethics becomes challenged. As he tries to keep in mind his ideals of goodness, so he finds that he becomes influenced by their opposite forms of badness. Hence the more good he can be, the more bad he can be too. The real peculiarity of the subconscious mind is that good and evil are opposite faces of one reality, the reality of a life lived on Earth. Good and evil are the opposite polarities of an endless cosmic rhythm of positive and negative feelings. Moral codes keep good and evil separate, but the subconscious mind links them together.

Each person experiences negative emotions like guilt, shame, despair, etc. But he tries to ignore them if possible. He may blame himself for the episodes of guilt, shame, despair, etc. He never understands that they usually come to him unbidden, as part of the cyclic flow of positive and negative feelings. This is the darkness, the strangeness, of the subconscious and unconscious minds. The person may be responsible for some of the episodes, but not for the majority of them. In the cyclic flow of positive and negative feelings, what happens is this:
An emotion comes up into normal consciousness, and then the person puts a scenario to it.

The scenario reflects his experiences and aspirations. If, for example, the emotion is one of happiness, the person searches his mind for a previous experience of happiness that he can attach to the current emotion. If, for example, the emotion is one of guilt, then similarly he searches for an experience of guilt to attach to it. This searching is done subconsciously, since the person is not usually aware of doing so. This is how each person creates his own dramas (once he has become an adult and can live his own life). When emotion is intense, each person puts a drama to it.

Intensity of A Journey

The intensity with which a person journeys on the road to self-discovery varies. If the intensity is low, we may begin a search; but when times get hard, we abandon the search and resume directing our intensity into materialist desires. Hence many 1960’s hippies ended up as respectable businessmen. When the intensity is medium, we become satisfied with following a teacher. But when the intensity switches into top gear, nothing can satisfy us, and so we leave the teacher that we have been following. In my life, the intensity of my journey varied over the years, and hence my experiences ranged from the shallow to the deep.

What we are likely to find is that when the intensity of our journey varies, then it affects our ideals. The energy with which we pursue our ideals can be called a drive. So low-intensity ideals are the response to a low-intensity drive, whilst a high-intensity drive gives rise to high-intensity ideals.

When the intensity of our drive flares up, most of our ideals that were formed at a lower intensity begin to disintegrate. Low-intensity ideals have to crash before we are able to discover ideals which suit a high-intensity drive. Overall, when our ideals are low, and our intensity is also low, we can change by reforming ourself. But when our drive is high, it is not a question of reforming ourself but of radically changing ourself – we have to leave the past behind (including many of our ideals). Obviously some ideals can survive as we begin to change; for example, I have always been a libertarian socialist (which means I am not a state socialist). Hence we have to let go of our lower ideals before we can discover higher ideals. The lower ideals are not necessarily wrong; it is just that we have outgrown them. Since we don’t usually like letting go of our familiar views of ourself and of reality, we usually have to go through some disaster that forces us to let go. Then we feel lost and may drift through life wondering where it all went wrong. We are in the wilderness. So for high-intensity idealists, there is usually some disaster waiting to happen to us.

I have journeyed on the path to wisdom, not faith. In the past I had faith, but it was not enough for me – it didn’t answer the questions I asked. The star that I followed was the search for meaning in my life. Why do we become intense in the search for meaning? My present view is that the main factor is a deep sense of injustice. The person feels that he/she does not deserve his/her bad fate. Hence a deep feeling of injustice drives the search for meaning. People who are satisfied to believe that they do deserve their bad fate will always stop their search when they find a teacher; this point in the spiritual journey is the stage of faith. However, a human teacher can never assuage the feeling of injustice, and so the high-intensity idealist eventually has to leave the teacher and continue his/her search all alone. He or she has to go beyond faith. I presume that my journey’s end will be the point where I can enter into an harmonious relationship with my own higher self.

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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.	Learning about Oneself In situations where determinism[¹] affects us, we regularly re-enact difficult behaviour patterns. We cannot do otherwise (because of the fear instilled in us from events and experiences in our past). When we finally have had enough of this, we decide to change. This is when we start to learn about ourself. So long as each experience, whether good or bad, still has something to teach us, then we regularly repeat such experience. When a particular experience has exhausted its usefulness to us, then we feel a strong urge to change. We change in some way – it may be a positive change (success) or a negative change (failure). Each success has something to teach us, and each failure also has something to teach us. One way of looking at this process is that we go through a multitude of experiences in order to extract what is useful from them.
Sub - Headings
Asking Questions about Oneself
The Strangeness of the Mind
Intensity of a Journey
References