Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Experience

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The importance of beliefs and desires is that they govern our behaviour and help generate our experiences. When our beliefs and desires feel right, then our behaviour becomes regular and predictable; but when we become uncertain about some of them, we may find that our behaviour fluctuates, thereby causing varying degrees of conflict in our social situations. Beliefs and desires are themselves the product of our motivations and values. We usually consider that we know what our motivations are, since we more or less know what our beliefs and desires are. But conscious beliefs, conscious desires, conscious motivations are not the only source of our experience. We also have subconscious motivations, and these give rise to subconscious beliefs and subconscious desires.

Subconscious Motivations

The majority of subconscious motivations may have only minor importance, but some can be potentially significant. When we are confident about our conscious beliefs and desires, then the subconscious ones usually do not exert much influence on us. However, once we lose that confidence, that certainty, then the subconscious ones begin affecting us and troubling us. We find that subconscious influences that are significant ones can cause us to go through long periods of distress and suffer intense anxiety when we encounter obstacles to our aims.

The person is not usually aware of his subconscious motivations. These subconscious aspects of mind are seldom in harmony with the conscious aspects, since the subconscious mind usually has the reverse or opposite values that the conscious mind has. When the conscious and the subconscious aspects of mind are sufficiently at variance so that they cause noticeable conflict, we become confused and prone to doubt.

Conscious motivation generates conscious behaviour and conscious experience.
and
Subconscious motivation generates subconscious behaviour and subconscious experience.

Subconscious experience seems a strange concept, but it is strange only because the person has a low level of self-awareness. When a person is not aware of his subconscious mind then he is not likely to be aware of his subconscious experience. For example, a person may believe that he follows a particular occupation because he likes meeting people. His beliefs and desires focus on the joy and fun of mixing with interesting people. But at a subconscious level of mind he may be more concerned with attaining a sense of power over people (this is his subconscious motivation). So underlying his relationships will be a desire for power. His subconscious mind will then try and lead him to mix with people that he can dominate, and so his choice of occupation is not as apparent as he thinks it was.

Another example. I might see myself in my social relationships as being a nice guy, but nevertheless sometimes I meet with hostility from others. Why should this be so, when I am just a nice guy?  At a subconscious level of mind my behaviour might be sending messages of dependency, of needing emotional support, thereby evoking a hostile reaction in others who do not want to provide this support.

Non-Aware Experience

When a person has a low level of self-awareness, which is the normal state of the average social person, he or she is often not aware of the ways in which they behave in social situations. We sometimes describe this curious situation by saying the person’s body language is sending mixed messages to other people. When we are not fully aware of our behaviour then also we are not fully aware of our experience. Awareness is the key that ties behaviour to experience.

Our experience only becomes linked to our behaviour once we have developed an adequate level of awareness.

With adequate awareness we can monitor our behaviour in order to clarify, or even to know, our experience. What we do is to monitor our behaviour to discover what effects it produces. We can then compare the observed effects with the effects we expected to see. We then explore the reasons for any differences between observations and expectations. Having arrived at some reasons for the discrepancies, we can then test those reasons during our social interactions. The reasons suggest what it is about ourself that we should look for during our social interactions.

Now we can understand why experience without awareness becomes a source of sorrow and perplexity and doubt. The differences between actual effects and expected effects will generate confusion and conflict. Because the person is not monitoring his social behaviour, so he cannot get to the source of his confusion. The subconscious experience generates confusion and doubt when social relationships do not match our conscious expectations. What we can deduce from this predicament is that if our conscious expectations are not being met, then it is our subconscious expectations that are really driving us. Hence when we feel confused, it is more than likely that our social relationships are orientating around our subconscious expectations. So we are likely to cause conflict in our relationships without deliberately wishing to do so.

The principal means of lessening confusion and conflict in our relationships is the development of self-awareness. This development requires an empirical approach to these relationships. This means that we cannot rely on any rational analysis of our difficulties until we have established the empirical facts of these difficulties. Awareness enables us to detect aspects of ourself that we have been hiding from ourself; awareness enables us to discover the subconscious mind. Hence awareness is the key for eliminating confusion and conflict in our experience since it brings the subconscious mind into consciousness. So in our approach to understanding relationships, empiricism identifies the facts of our behaviour, and awareness (as a factor of empiricism) identifies patterns of thought which link to those facts.

When a person is unaware of some aspect of his experience then he cannot analyse it in any valid sense. This lack of awareness has given a marked flavour to some theories of existentialism which have attempted to explain the malaise and confusion of various aspects of twentieth-century experience. The bane of many Continental theorists is their disdain for empiricism. Hence they lack data on much of the experiences that they wish to analyse. Non-aware experience is just a vague fog in the mind, a fog that eludes clear definition. The inability of the thinker’s intellect to analyse non-aware experience just produces anxiety, despair and doubt. This is the central core of existential pessimism.
Non-aware experience is non-analysable. In this situation we can only speculate and phantasise.

One characteristic of modern European society that separates it from pre-Renaissance and classical society is that it has developed skills in reflection. Descartes inaugurated the first serious attempt at reflection, but he based it purely on rationalism. He did not feel the need for empiricism, since he was not interested in analysing relationships. This attitude was right for his times.

Nowadays, relationships cannot be ignored, and they have to be explored empirically. Awareness is an empirical technique, and so this is the missing ingredient that the Cartesian consciousness needs in order to achieve intellectual harmony.

The Usefulness of Doubt

Doubt is a state of mind that people find unpleasant. Is there any use for it?  To answer this we have to consider the function of doubt. Doubt becomes highlighted during times of change, whether personal or social. These times generate conflict, because our beliefs no longer match our experience. We become confused and uncertain. Our anxiety becomes intense; when it is prolonged, we start asking the question “why is this conflict happening to me?”

Anxiety dampens our happiness and leads to doubt concerning our beliefs. In more everyday language use, the combination of anxiety and doubt is called worrying. For the moralist and ethical idealist, sooner or later anxiety brings up questions of morality. The person believes that he is a good person, so why do bad things happen to him?

Doubt makes a person question the value of his present standard of morality, which is no longer meaningful to him. Morality ceases to empower our old beliefs. This situation always happens in times of change, since we are encountering new situations and facing new challenges. New situations and new challenges need new beliefs. New social conditions require new ethical values. For example, advances in health care have brought issues into the limelight that no one considered years ago: medical ethics is breaking new ground. To discover new values implies that the old morality has to be examined to see where it has become inadequate. Once some new values have been formulated, they can then be tested to see if they remove the person’s conflict. A successful resolution of doubt indicates that the new values are exactly those that the person needs. A more harmonious set of beliefs has been discovered.

Personal Evolution

The analysis of anxiety has been a difficult challenge for thinkers. Some existential writers regarded anxiety as an ontological condition, a condition that is a part of one’s Being. It is not, but the reason why the claim was made is plausible. Anxiety is always associated with the process of personal evolution, by which I mean the process of developing character and living by ethical beliefs. So anxiety can co-exist with one’s Being (co-existence is not always easy to separate from what is one’s nature). Personal evolution occurs when the combination of anxiety and doubt de-stabilises the person, thereby requiring him to change his beliefs and values.

Anxiety is a potent influence that facilitates the development of self-consciousness. However, this process has its drawbacks. Personal evolution is usually a very unpleasant experience, since we have to face up to our psychological limitations. If the intensity of doubt is too great to handle, then the person may sink into a crisis from which he will find it difficult to recover; or he may give way to violence in his social behaviour.

The violence occurs once his character has become de-stabilised by the crisis and his subconscious resentments come to the surface. This predicament has shaped human history. In the past, when values arose principally from religious beliefs, so in times of change the conflict over values led to violence between orthodox religious groups and their heretics, and violence between religious groups and non-believers.

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