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Meta-Cognitive Awareness

We learned how to think when we were children, and most of the time we still think that way. Some schools of thought distinguish between the primitive mentality of childhood and more advanced cognitive strategies. Neurosis [problems with anger, anxiety, and depression] and addictive disorders [such as substance use, overeating, compulsive use of sex, games, or money] are maintined by the mentality of childhood.

An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience, including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings are merely temporary state-dependent phenomena, and not part of objective reality. The objective world is populated with events; beliefs and reactions, and the story that gives it meaning exist. The technical name for this realization is: Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

Passions [including fear and desire] bias perception. Since it is easier to be detached from outcomes that do not affect us, it is easier to see the solution to another person's problems than our own. From the dispassionate perspective of the observer self sabotage is easy to spot and its solutions are pretty obvious. But the person in the crises is blinded by local passions cannot see the way out of the most obvious traps. One way to escape an addictive is to learn to detach from your passions.

Meta-Cognitive Shift: Shifting from the perspective of the actor to the perspective of the spectator, in order to dissociate from the local motivational state. If you can shift to the dispassionate perspective of the observer you can be free, at least for that moment, from the Soul Illusion!

Mindfulness Meditation facilitates one kind of Meta-Cognitive Shift called Awakening.