The process of thinking involves a doer and a judger, the judger will be judgmental about how we do things, this is our self-dialog. The self-dialog is a product of judger’s analysis of raw observations (our senses and thoughts). When we find the analysis to be not what it should be, we try to escape what is, which sometimes results in more of what we are trying to escape and does not help at all with identifying the root cause. Explanations and strategies of dealing with these struggles can be found in ontology (existentialism) and developmental psychology. It is also found in religious and other texts being mentioned as detachment from the ego, which is the end result.
Suffering is part of our lives. It is about how we perceive our experiences. We can reframe suffering by finding a meaning to it, to a cause that is greater than ourselves.
Let’s have a look at this from the perspective of subject-object theory:
Subjectify - to identify with a subject or interpret in terms of subjective experience
Objectify - to treat as an object or cause to have objective reality
When we experience, we are a identifying with our experience, we are the experience. When we have an experience, we are treating the experience as an object. Its about understanding ourselves as a system that applies our conditioning (values, biases) on our raw observations to produce idea or actions. To make a value more objective it needs to become known, we need to observe ourselves to get to a point where we can see that we have a value. We need to see our idea/action as it is. After observing, an idea will start to emerge around similar ideas/actions patterns which can help us form an understanding of the underlying decision generating structures. By having conditioning instead of us being our conditioning we are better suited to deal with problems.
The challenge is to observe without analysing our experiences. It is a skill that needs to be learned and mastered. The more you try to do it the better you will get at it. Ideally we want to be aware of ourselves the whole time we are conscious but that will not be possible when we are learning a new skill or doing something new to us. Meditation is one way to do it but it is not the only way, we can practice observing while we are performing mundane chores.
References:
- Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
- In Over Our Heads (Robert Kegan)
- The Book of life (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
- Social photo by Duangphorn Wiriya on Unsplash