[From Bill Powers (960504.1100 MDT)]
Bruce Gregory (960503.1140 EDT) --
So you misspent part of your youth in "est" -- I misspent part of mine
in dianetics. We seem to have come out of these experiences with one
most valuable understanding:
I noticed that it somehow stunned the perpetual "voice-over" in my
head into silence. (What's the point of paying attention to your
voice-over if it's just a mechanical subsystem blathering on
because that is what it was designed to do? Sort an internal
3CPO.) I found, in Bill's words, the only "sense of self" that
remained was a sense of calm watchfulness.
The "voice-over" is what I would now refer to as the activity of a set
of levels ranging from categories through sequences to programs. This is
the "rational mind," which is thought by some to be the pinnacle of
human achievement. The ability to establish premises, develop methods
and rules and algorithms, and work out the implications in a systematic
and orderly way is certainly a skill that is extremely useful and to be
valued, but it can also make one a slave to intellect, just as a
physical-development enthusiast can turn developing the useful skills of
the body into enslavement to them. The intellectual obsession can trap
one within a systematic framework in which rational processes, based
largely on imagination, take the place of present-time perception at
other levels, particularly lower levels where experience is less remote
from the real world. This kind of rational obsession, at any level, also
obscures higher levels of perception, so one forgets to ask questions
like "Why am I doing this?" One pulls the covers up over one's head and
loses oneself in the comforting intricacies of solving the problem at
hand, playing the game for its own sake instead of as part of living a
life.
I suppose it takes a bit of obsessing to get really good at anything.
Since we have only a limited lifespan, making a place for oneself before
time runs out probably demands focusing on one level, one kind of skill,
at the expense of others. But even if this is how life works, we can
still back off from the whole thing occasionally, and try to see both
above and below the levels of experience where we have settled into our
grooves.
In my youth I did a good deal of reading about Yoga and Zen and other
such stuff, mostly because people kept coming up to me and thrusting
books into my hand. I wasn't impressed by most of the whistles and bells
of Eastern philosophy, but eventually I decided that there were probably
a few people who had really understood something, with the books that
have reached us in the present being what was left after a long game of
Telephone (I whisper a message to the person on my left, who whispers it
to the next person, and so on until it's gone all the way around the
circle; then the last person says the message out loud and everybody
cracks up. "The dog went Thursday to the wedding?").
The method of levels came out of wondering (quite early in the
development of PCT, in the '50s) about self-awareness. Whatever else was
being sold by a particular philosopher, one message that came through
very frequently was that there really isn't any self to be aware of --
that when you're aware, you're always aware of something else. I finally
concluded that the original ungarbled message must have been that of
course there is a self, and an I, and a personality, and an ego, but
that you know about these things only as objects of awareness. As soon
as you notice them, you can't help also noticing that you're looking AT
them, from somewhere else. They are attributes of learned brain
functions, but they aren't the Observer.
The problem is that when we try to _think_ about these things, we have
to use whatever abilities we have built into our brains through
experience and reorganization. Even talking about them requires using
the language we have learned. So even if you have experienced this state
of "calm watchfulness," it has little significance until you work out a
way for subsystems in your own brain to live with the idea that they're
not the highest authority around here. This isn't easy, and I don't know
anyone (emphatically including me) who has it all nailed down.
People come at this idea from all sorts of angles. I read a great book
about an alcoholic woman who worked as a railroad laborer (really). She
had developed a total distrust of her rational mind, because it kept
working out reasons why she owed it to herself to take another drink.
She never got around to saying what it was that was doing this
distrusting, but it was clear that to her, her rational processes were
an "it", not an "I". She could see them working away, and felt the urge
to identify herself with them and go along, but somehow managed to
remain apart enough to see where they were leading.
The "voice over" is what some Eastern Philosphers have called "monkey-
chatter." When you become the monkey, it all makes sense to you, and you
happily follow along with whatever the chatter suggests, as if it were
Truth Embodied. But when you manage to stand back a bit, and view the
chatter simply as activity in a learned system, its recommendations
suddenly become a lot less compelling. You start considering other
things, such as whether logic is really the answer to the problem at
hand. Sometimes it's clearly not. Then you can let the monkey chatter
until it gets tired and falls silent, after which you do what's right.
In the best of all possible worlds, you wake the monkey up when it's
needed, and when it's done its job you send it back to sleep.
The real problems arise when the monkey becomes a 600-pound gorilla.
Since this gorilla is rational, but not smart, it can decide that there
really is no such thing as awareness, and set up defenses against
outside interference. Or it can decide that whatever is pushing it
around must be something supernatural, and turn into a 600-pound
religious fanatic. Or it can even decide that rationality is no good for
anything, and set up a logical system in which anything goes, or in
which certain modes of rational thought, such as mathematics or system
design, are the Root of All Evil. As I said, it's rational, but not
smart.
How the monkey does chatter on.
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Best,
Bill P.