• Her friends think Mimi is a great catch; she is beautiful, affectionate, and very smart. Sadly, she is better at attracting intimacy than keeping it. Her previous lovers claim that her jealous rages drove them away. Mimi claims that her anger was an appropriate reaction: “He deserved to suffer for staring at other women.” Mimi’s problem looks different than it feels. She’s right to say that her friends don’t understand because they only see how it looks from the outside. Only Mimi has access to what she sees and how she interprets it. But Mimi doesn’t fully understand her puzzle either because she only experiences how it feels from her first-person perspective. Her friends can see that some of her boyfriends were good guys who really did love her and stared at other women no more than the typical male. She can’t see that the traumas of her childhood distort her interpretations of the actions of her intimate partners. To know herself well enough to solve her puzzle, she has to observe her reactions and their triggers from the inside [how the sequence feels] and from the outside [how it looks from the dispassionate perspective of an observer who has unconditional positive regard for her and is rooting for her to get what she wants].
• Most people see Mr. E as a gifted problem-solver.  He shares that opinion and attributes his many successes to his “smarts” (his ability to figure out how to get to the outcomes he wants).  While he may look successful, he doesn’t feel that way.  He sees himself as a failure because he is on the verge of losing everything important to him if he fails again — and the smart money says he will.   In contrast to his ability to predict and control the people and events at his office, he can’t control himself.

Problems resulting from excessive appetite [Mr. E.] and excessive emotional reactivity [Mimi] look simple when viewed from the perspective of a dispassionate observer, but solving it seems impossibly complex when you experience it from the first-person perspective. Both Mimi and Mr. E. can usually figure out how to get what they want except when it comes to the problem ruining their lives. The cause of their problems is obvious to most observers: Their passions distort their perception, resulting in bad judgments. This frailty is all too human; the keys to its solution are carved above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Mr. E attributes his disastrous financial situation to bad luck; Mimi blames her history of failed relationships on her “loser boyfriends.”  Friends and acquaintances are more likely to attribute their recurring failures to internal causes such as stupidity or a disease.  All of these explanations involve causes that are outside our heroes’  control, rendering them useless. In contrast, studying cause-and-effect from different perspectives can reveal the nature as well as the solution to their puzzle.

In fact, there is a silver lining to the recurring patterns of their uncharacteristic problem-solving failures: They get several opportunities to study the sequence of external events and internal states that take them to unwanted outcomes.  To taske advantage of this painful education, they will research how cause-and-effect plays out from two perspecitive: How it looks from the outside [from the dispassionate perspective of the researcher] and how it is experienced from the inside [from their first-person perspective of reacting to the things that happen.

Thought Experiment

To become familiar with this method, study the sequence of external events and internal states that take Mr. E. from a high-risk situation to a relapse using our personal research method of observing cause-and-effect from both the first- and third-person perspectives.  Readers who have never wrestled with an excessive appetite may judge it to be a simple problem to solve.  If you are fortunate enough to be in this category, you’ll have to exercise your cognitive and imaginative faculties to appreciate the first-person perspective that makes this trap so difficult to escape.   So, suspend your disbelief and pretend that you are Mr. E  shortly after a relapse.  See if you can create imagery with enough clarity and detail to affect your current psychological state.  If you were able to get a feel for his frustration, self-loathing, or shame, you might grant that he was sincere when he vowed he would never gamble again.

To get a feel for why he violates the sincere vow, use your imaginative faculties once again to approximate his motivational state when he was “on the road to get away from it all and just a couple of hundred miles from Vegas.” See if you can increase the state-dependent distortions of judgment by accepting his internal dialogue as valid: “I’m not going to gamble.  I need a break from the stress I’ve been under, and a four-star hotel room for fifty bucks [instead of a dingy Comfort Inn in the middle of nowhere] is the right way to use my vacation time.”

Like the rest of us, Mr. E is bound to obey the laws of cause-and-effect.  Researching the sequence of external events and internal states that take him to the familiar unwanted outcome will enable him to work with these laws to promote preferable outcomes.   But he doesn’t feel he needs to do the research.  The grandiose dogma that his current experience of reality is the same as reality distorts his judgment even when in a contrite state following a relapse.  He doesn’t need to study cause-and-effect from a different [third-person] perspective because he is certain that now he knows the truth and will never gamble again.

It’s not perversity, stupidity, or a disease that causes our heroes to repeat their errors of judgment; it’s the dogma that their current experience of reality is the same as reality.  As viewed from a dispassionate perspective, their experience of reality is distorted by their current emotional/motivational state.  For example, when Mimi feels threatened, she interprets the things that happen from a different perspective than when she feels loved.  The more intense the emotion, the greater the state-dependent distortion.  Mimi’s boyfriend, who was hoping for a lifetime partnership with the version of Mimi he created from his initial interactions with her, has grown weary of the unnecessary drama she has created for the two of them.  She is blind to the evidence and reason that show her fears to be unfounded because she regards her current interpretation of reality is the same as reality. 

Mr. E. is taken in by the same illusion.  Even though anyone aware of his history would judge a trip to Las Vegas to be a terrible idea,  Mr. E. confidently expects a positive outcome.  When Mr. E. is in this motivational state, he appraises each decision he makes along the path to relapse as a good one.  A different version of Mr. E. shows up after a relapse and will judge those same decisions from a different perspective.  In either case, he will feel certain that his current appraisal is valid.  Needless to say, his feeling of certainty is worth nothing!

The sequence of events that happen to a soul and the soul’s reaction that becomes the next event in the sequence, looks different from the outside than it feels from the inside.  To know yourself well enough to exercise an intentional influence on the course of events, study the sequence from both perspectives.   Each point of view reveals something the other can’t see.  Only a collaboration between the two perspective can reveal enough of the puzzle to enable its solution.  To do this research you’ll have to select a persona for the researcher.  The only restriction is that the persona you choose must have unconditional positive regard for you and be aware of your core motives and values.

The image you saw changed in the absence of any changes on the screen because the image doesn’t exist on the screen. Images are subjective phenomena that are created by and exist only within a living soul.  When you look at these graphics, your eye and brain transform raw optical data [the pixels] into subjective experience [the images].  A similar transformation takes place when you listen to music: The psyche creates subjective experiences (rhythms, melodies, emotional reactions, etc.) from raw auditory input (pressure waves vibrating the ear drum).   Without the transformation of objective data into subjective experience, a reaction would be impossible.  The subjective world we experience is different than the objective world; it is a model, a map that guides our reactions to the things that happen.  Intrinsic to maps is a feature that is so obvious that it hardly seems worth mentioning: The map is not the same as the territory. 

With the sole exception of Lewis Carroll’s map (which scales a mile to the mile), all models of reality come with the Map-Territory Disclaimer: The map is not the same as the territory.  The disclaimer is worth mentioning, even though it is blatantly obvious at an abstract level, because Darwinian forces demand that biological creatures regard their perceptions as valid so they can react to the things that happen.

Maps are fictions created to meet the needs of its users and the interests of its creator. Google Maps, for example, helps users navigate their way through unfamiliar territory. For a fee, Google will highlight your business location so that it appears larger and more salient on the map than it objectively is. Likewise, my subjective reality is a fictional model of reality that I create to navigate my way through the stressors and temptations that come my way; Like Google Maps, the representation of reality that I create ignores some details and accentuates others depending on my needs at the moment.

The distinction between a map and the territory is self-evident when you study the transformation of objective to subjective reality from an abstract perspective, but when you actually have to react to the things that happen in real-time, you must regard your experience of reality as though it is the same as reality. Accepting this necessary but bogus premise is a harmless concession to convenience as long as you remember that your current perception of the things that happen and your judgment of how to react to it is state-dependent. Mr. E’s appraisal of the wisdom of a detour through Las Vegas is distorted differently during the remorseful state following a relapse [“it would be the worst decision of my life”] than when he is driving through the high desert while on vacation to get away for the stress of the office. At that moment, his map of reality is so distorted by his proximity to the incentive that he expects that a Las Vegas detour will have a positive outcome.  From the dispassionate, third-person perspective, we are skeptical of his naive prediction and would bet that the actual outcome will include the sincere but familiar intention to never gamble again.

Weirdly, Mr. E. has access to more information about his motivations and internal experience than we have, yet our prediction is way better. That’s because his judgment of what is true is biased by his current motivational state. He interprets reality differently when he says that he’ll never gamble again than when the pain of the last relapse is far away, and the casino is nearby. His prediction about his Vegas detour is wrong because his experience of reality is state-dependent, while the objective reality is independent of his current state.

The Soul Illusion results from the tacit acceptance of a necessary but bogus premise of first-person perception: “My experience of reality is the same as reality.” He is bound to recurring patterns of unwanted outcomes because learning doesn’t prevent him from being taken in by the same illusion the next time he encounters it. This illusion is intrinsic to consciousness, so you can’t escape it or cure it. However, by observing how you transform objective to subjective reality, you can utilize the same cause-and-effect principles that used to cause unnecessary suffering in the service of your interests and principles.

Your personal research began by exploring how your nervous system transformed an array of meaningless pixels into meaningful images that could evoke aesthetic, emotional, or motivational reactions.  As you personally discovered, the process of transforming digital data into a subjective experience is not flawless.  Your personal experience demonstrated (harmlessly) that you can be taken in by the bogus assumption that you see things as they are. Needless to say, the illusions you can spot are not nearly as dangerous as the ones that take you in. Intense emotional and motivational states distort subjective phenomena, including perception, judgment, and the appraisal of judgment. What will look like bad judgment in hindsight feels like good judgment at the moment.

Popular versions of the Soul Illusion:

• The Illusion of Immaculate Perception— Mimi feels certain that the unlikely explanation for her partner’s tardiness is valid because it automatically came to mind when she wondered why he was late.  [Of all the possible causes of his lateness, this is the most attention-grabbing attribution.  Whatever captures her attention will determine her subjective reality]  The illusion that her subjective reality is the same as reality is responsible for her gullibility and dogmatism in the domain of intimacy but not other domains of her life.   She considers herself to be data-driven, but in matters of the heart, she is uncharacteristically insensitive to data.  Offspring of the Illusion of Immaculate Perception that complicate problem-solving:
  • Gullibility — She gives assent to the belief that her lover will abandon her for another woman on the basis of insufficient evidence.
  • Dogmatism — Once she regards her prediction as true, she unreasonably resists contradictory logic and evidence.

• The Illusion of Resolute Judgment [I will always judge things as I judge them now]:  After a relapse, it is obvious to Mr. E. that the costs of gambling far exceed its benefits.  Now that he “knows” the truth, he feels certain that he has solved his problem and will never gamble again.   Subjective truth is state-dependent.   His assumption that he will always see things from his current perspective is bogus, and so his prediction that he will know this truth in the future is an illusion.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

— Marcus Aurelius

To get the most out of a novel, movie, or other work of fiction, suspend your disbelief and take in the information as though it were true.  By allowing yourself to be taken in by the fiction, you can fully access the emotional experience the artist is attempting to elicit.  In exchange for granting this assent, you get to be entertained.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson is trying to scare you, and since you are reading it for entertainment, you want to be scared.  So, the two of you collaborate to evoke the experience of terror for the thrill of it.  The magic happens when each collaborator does their job skillfully.  Stephenson did his part by using his words evocatively, but unless you invest your attention and imagination to transform these words into meaningful images and stories, they mean nothing.  If you were able to access the terror you hoped you would, you did your part well enough to induce Intentional Trance Formation.

Stephenson’s ability to evoke terror by creating fictional stories pales compared to Mimi’s.  The thoughts and images she created during the 20 or so minutes she spent waiting for her boyfriend to show up for their date (or at least call to explain his absence) were sufficient to elicit a radical change in her emotional state.  Once she transformed into Ms. Hyde, she was no longer the warm, supportive woman who he had been attracted to; she had been transformed into a monster who chased him away.  Ironically, the bogus assumption that her partner would eventually abandon her initiated a sequence of internal states and external events that transformed what had been fiction into fact.

Not all self-sabotaging patterns have this recursive feature, but all involve Unintentional Trance Formation.  Mimi doesn’t want to drive her  lovers away, but, as she explains to her friends and family, “I can’t control my emotions.”  Nevertheless, without requiring drugs or any other external assistance, her faculties of imagination and concentration were sufficient to work herself into an emotional frenzy.  In this altered psychological state, she changes from a sweet yet sophisticated Mimi into a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.  Mimi is the one who initiated the transformation that made her prophecy come true!

Perceiving an event is like taking a photo.  When the photographer triggers the shutter, the photo records how the world looks from the point of view of the camera.  There are many possible camera angles from which to photograph a particular subject.  Professional photographers purposely position the camera to achieve an outcome that serves their aesthetic or commercial intentions.  There are many possible explanations for Mimi’s boyfriend’s tardiness.

In contrast to the photographer, Mimi didn’t choose a perspective from which to interpret her boyfriend’s failure to show up for their date.  Her perspective was chosen for her by a factor outside of her control:  Salience.   Rather than directing her attention to the interpretation most likely to be true or the one most likely to promote an advantageous outcome, her attention was captured by the most salient [attention-grabbing] interpretation.  In the subjective reality induced by this interpretation, the sweet yet sophisticated Mimi had transformed into a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.

Ironically, Mimi’s body could only produce the malevolent potion if her faculties of imagination and concentration were sufficiently well developed.  Mimi has the capability to take advantage of her cognitive talents rather than be handicapped by them, but only if she learns how to use them.   Mimi’s development may have been set back by her unfortunate childhood, but now she is an adult.  Like the rest of us aspiring adults, she can enhance her ability to mindfully influence her emotions and appetites by practicing Hypnotic Suggestion.  So, I invite you to use the  “Heavy Leg Script” from the venerable Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale to structure your first-person experience of intentional Trance Formation.

Possible interpretations of sensory input are continually battling for your attention because the winner gets promoted to be your subjective reality while the others pass away in oblivion.   Viewed from the perspective of what’s good for you, the battle is between the most salient interpretation of reality and the interpretation that would evoke the motivational/emotional state best suited to your current challenge. 

When Mr. E is sufficiently distant from his last relapse, stimulus elements related to the thrill and satisfaction of gambling periodically drift into the stimulus pool, and when they do, they attract his attention [the definition of stimulus salience].  If he gives in to the temptation to allow his attention to be sucked in, a recursive process, similar to audio feedback, will rapidly and powerfully amplify his motivation to gamble.  If his favorite uncle were still alive, he would have suggested that Mr. E redirect his attention to more useful thoughts,  But that wouldn’t have been as much fun as allowing his imagination to run with the imagery and so taste the vicarious thrills and pleasures of being in Vegas once again.   Investing his imagination and attention in such fantasies elicits a payoff that is similar to the thrill he gets when he is actually gambling.   This experienced thrill is a manifestation of biological secretions that transform the ex-gambler — who finally learned the lesson that he couldn’t control himself at the casino — into the gullible rube who feels certain that he will control himself this time.   

Mr. E, in his four-star hotel room in Las Vegas, was in a different trance than when he was on the road and appraising the pros and cons of a side trip to Las Vegas.   The pros included amazing hotels, restaurants, and nightlife, and the cons included the danger he would relapse back into gambling.  Since he sincerely felt that he could and would control himself, the cons were trivial.  So, he decided to enhance the quality of his life by taking that side trip.   Will it work out the way he predicts? 

The smart money says, “Hell no!”   Nevertheless, it is not impossible for him to act as he said he would, but unless he does something radically different, he will follow the predictable path to the usual outcome.   To follow a more advantageous path, he would have to use his knowledge of how cause-and effect operates in his subjective universe to influence the sequence of external events and internal states.  There are several ways for him to influence the causal chain intentionally.  His best shot is to work with his perspective the way a photographer artistically positions the camera.  Even if he did, it would be unrealistic to expect Mr. E’s puny ability to aim his attention to win the battle against the highly salient local temptations.  Mr. E is advised to show respect for his challenge and take control of his attention at the first sight of Nevertheless, volitional control of attention is a skill that strengthens with practice.  To practice directing your attention, choose a target for it and concentrate on that thought or image despite the more salient distractions that seek to capture your attention.  Naturally, your will to maintain control of your attention will often be overpowered by a distraction that is momentarily more salient.  The strengthening exercise is to recapture your attention and direct it back to the intended target.  You can use a mantra as the target, or the “heavy leg” audio, or simply count your breaths.  The objective is to exercise your ability to choose what occupies your consciousness.

Pavlov (does that ring a bell?) conditioned a dog to salivate when he rang a bell paired with placing acid in the dog’s mouth.  After a few pairings, the dog salivated whenever Pavlov rang his bell.  The mechanism of Pavlovian conditioning turns out to be a good model for conceptualizing self-control of one’s passions.   Just as the sound of the bell caused Pavlov’s dog to secrete saliva, thoughts and images of her boyfriend abusing her trust caused Mimi’s neuroendocrine system to secrete the potion that transformed her into Ms. Hyde. 

Pavlov had control over the dog’s salivation because he, not the dog, chose when to ring the bell.  Mimi’s trance formation is unintentional because she, like the dog, doesn’t decide when to trigger the conditioned reaction.  Her reaction was determined by the stimulus that captured her attention.  The most salient information — not necessarily the most important or helpful information — will capture her attention and induce trance formation. 

Through no fault of her own, the unfortunate events of her childhood conditioned Mimi to react to the things that happen in intimate relationships in ways that are poorly matched to the task of establishing a secure and loving relationship as an adult.  She can’t undo the past, but she can know herself well enough to exercise an intentional influence over how she reacts to the things that happen.   

To induce trance formation intentionally, use your imagination to pretend that a reality that would cause the intended experience is true. So, to intentionally induce the subjective reality that your right arm is heavy, pretend it is made of lead; to induce the experience of lightness in your left arm, pretend that Helium-filled balloons are tied to your left wrist, pulling it upwards.   In the battle for which side captures her attention during the critical high-risk situation, images that signal potential abandonment are far more capable of inducting transformation than their competitors because Mimi is not pretending it’s true; She is certain.