All of Mimi’s intimate relationships have ended badly. She attributes her unfortunate history to a string of “loser boyfriends.” Ernest, the latest, attributes the failure of their relationship to her “unfounded jealous rages.” Her therapist, who is trying to help Mimi maintain a satisfying relationship, has a third point of view. While the therapist’s perspective is the least distorted by passion, her perspective is not the same as the objective truth [the reality as seen from no particular perspective]. Each of them feels certain that they understand the cause and solution to Mimi’s problem; they are all taken in by the illusion that their experience of reality is the same as reality.

Each observer has their own interpretation; nevertheless, most would agree that Mimi’s judgment is distorted by her excessive emotional reactions to her partners’ transgressions, as Mr. E’s is distorted by his excessive desire for the thrill of gambling. Because these distortions are invisible from their first-person perspective, our heroes act as if their experience of reality were the same as reality. And so, despite being savvy enough to figure out how to get what they want in most domains of life, they repeatedly fail to solve the problem that matters most. To add insult to injury, the solution to their problem appears obvious to most observers (including friends, family, and therapists), which makes their repeated failures all the more humiliating and puzzling.

As observers, we can see how their experience of reality is distorted by intense fear and desire, while our own perceptual distortions are invisible to us. For this reason, other people’s problems are easier to solve than our own. Needless to say, our solutions to their problems are doomed to failure because they lack the most important information: the first-person experience of the triggering event. The third-person perspective, however, does simplify a deceptively tricky problem.

The silver lining of recurring patterns of self-sabotage is that you get several examples of the cause-and-effect sequence to study. While neither the first- nor the third-person perspective is sufficient to solve the problem, the collaboration of the two is. Nietzsche’s insight about observing the phenomena we want to understand from multiple perspectives — in this case, to study the sequence of external events and internal reactions from the outside [observer’s perspective] and from the inside [first-person perspective] — is key to discovering solutions to these kinds of problems. Once you become familiar with the method of personal research, you can apply it to study how cause-and-effect contributes to your version of voluntary self-sabotage. Reviewing past episodes from the dispassionate perspective of an observer who has unconditional positive regard for you and from your first-person perspective at the critical moments of decision will enable you to know yourself well enough to use your mental faculties in the service of your interests and principles.

To utilize your faculty of will, you must know yourself and how you interact with objective reality. The optical illusions below provide an entertaining path to studying how you transform visual data [pixels on the screen] into your experience of what you see [e.g., patterns and meaningful images].  Your task is to observe the transformation from two perspectives:

• Third-person perspective: Observations of a researcher of visual perception
• First-person perspective: The personal experience of the subject who is taken in by the illusion.

Our sense organs don’t passively receive the truth about the external world.  Perception is a creative process; it’s something you do!   Ocampo’s pixels are meaningless until you transform them into an image, which can then evoke an emotional, aesthetic, or sexual reaction.    The visual transformation of objective data input by our sense organs into visual experience is a metaphor for the transformation of sensory elements of all modalities —the Nominal Stimulus Pool [NSP] — into subjective reality. 

Just as it would be a mistake to assume that your first interpretation of the pixels was valid and complete, it would be a mistake to assume that your experience of reality was the same as reality.   The image you constructed out of the pixels was not the only possible interpretation of the objective data.  In the same way, our experience of reality is one of the many possible interpretations of the NSP.  What we regard as reality is our nervous system’s best attempt to map the external world,  

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 noting, 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 respond to events in a timely manner.

Maps are fictions created to meet the needs of their users and the interests of their creators. Google Maps, for example, helps users navigate 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 I create to navigate 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 motivation at the moment.

The difference between a model and the real thing is self-evident when thinking about it abstractly, but when the situation demands an immediate reaction, you must regard your experience of reality as though it were the same as reality.  Accepting this necessary but bogus premise is a harmless concession to expedience as long as you remember that your current perception of the things that happen and your judgment of how to react to them is state-dependent.

Even though Mr. E. has access to more information about his internal experience than we do, our predictions of what he will do and how it will turn out are probably better than his.  That’s because our judgment of what is true is not distorted by how close he is to the casino.  Considering his history of recurring relapses and vows to never make that mistake again, you would expect that he would have figured this pattern out by now.  He doesn’t learn from experience because he is repeatedly taken in by the illusion that his current experience of reality is the same as reality.  After a relapse, the costs of gambling are close [he’s experiencing them now] and its benefits far away; so he appraises the costs to be greater.  Since it is obviously true,  he assumes that he will always judge things this way.  Alas, judgment is state-dependent, and when temptation is nearby, he will judge costs and benefits differently.

State-dependency is invisible from the first-person perspective, because your current judgments are always judged to be valid from the first-person perspective, and so we are each inescapably vulnerable to the Soul Illusion.  It shows up each time Mr. E fails to benefit from his expensive education and voluntarily repeats the same mistake he swore he would not.

Considering their history, the future of our heroes looks bleak.  But that is because they are blind to the truth, and the truth will make them free!  The truth is that nobody has a valid and complete map of reality; anyone who thinks they do has been taken in by the Soul Illusion.  The certainty that they see things as they are will not protect them from the consequences of acting as though they know the truth.   Optical Illusions are harmless fun because you can recognize them right away.  The illusions that really take you in are the dangerous ones, the ones that can cost you everything of value.

Examples of the Soul Illusion:

• I have immaculate perception — Mimi feels certain that her boyfriend would rather be with another woman, and every unintended slight and insensitivity on his part is further evidence of impending abandonment. Thoughts and images of that unwanted outcome dominate her attention, not because they are objectively probable but because they are attention-grabbing. Salience trumps evidence and reason! Mimi considers herself “data-driven,” but in matters of the heart, she is uncharacteristically insensitive to data and reason. The Map-Territory Fallacy [the bogus assumption that what she perceives as reality is the same as reality] is responsible for the twin curses that drive her prophecy of failed intimacy:
  • Gullibility (Premature Judgment) —  For example, she accepts as true the prediction that her lover will abandon her for another woman without sufficient evidence.
  • Dogmatism (Stubborn Certainty) —  Once she assents to a judgment, she becomes stubbornly loyal to it despite contradictory evidence and logic.

• My current perspective is permanent — I see things as they really are, and so I will always see them as I do now. After a relapse, it is obvious to Mr. E. that the costs of gambling far exceed the benefits.  Now that he “knows” the truth, he feels certain that he has solved his problem and is no longer at risk of making the same mistake.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this poem about his daughter. It could have been written about Mimi by Ernest, her ex, who loved her dearly. He saw her as the ideal partner for life. . . . that is, until he met her horrid version. As he describes it: “One night we got into a fight over some minor oversight on my part — I had gotten hung up on the computer and showed up 20 minutes late for our date. When she opened the door, she was no longer the adorable lover who usually greets me with a kiss; she had been transformed into a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.” Mimi hated his self-centered description of what happened that night; she experienced it differently. As she explained to her favorite cousin, “It’s like there are two versions of me. The normal me is kind and loving, and he should be as considerate of my feelings as I am of his. If he really loves me,how could he be so inconsiderate?  His actions demonstrate that he’s lost interest in me, probably because he is involved with another woman.  I want that bastard to feel the pain he causes me!” According to Ernest, “Mimi is nuts! There is no other woman.  Before I commit to a lifetime partnership with her, I need to know which version is the real Mimi!”

In Stevenson’s horror masterpiece, the good Dr. Jekyll creates a potion with no evil intention, yet consuming it transforms him into the monstrous Mr. Hyde. Mimi’s transformation also results from a “potion,” but one produced internally by her own nervous system. When she interprets her boyfriend’s absence as a threat, her body releases adrenaline and cortisol—the biochemical signature of the fight-or-flight response. This response is dose-dependent. At low levels, it produces a mild surge of arousal that can feel energizing or even pleasurable. At moderate levels, it sharpens attention and prepares the organism for action. But at high levels, the same process becomes overwhelming: perception narrows, interpretations become extreme, and the individual experiences fear, anger, or panic as if they were unquestionably real. In other words, the same underlying mechanism that can enhance performance at one dose can, at an excessive dose, transform the individual into a version of itself that voluntarily acts in ways that predictably promote unwanted outcomes.

You can observe (and personally experience) the effects of a mild dose of this transformative potion by collaborating with Stevenson to induce an adrenaline rush. Even though he is a clear and evocative writer, his creation is no more than words on the page until you invest your attention and imagination to transform them into your subjective reality. Most scary movies are too silly and poorly done to elicit much of a reaction from a sophisticated audience. Once in while, however, a film will come along that is so well crafted that it becomes easier to suspend your disbelief, which enables a fiction to evoke the intended reaction.  Another way of framing your part of the collaboration is to give your assent.  Unless you regard the artist’s fiction as though it were true, horror movies are no more than a bore.  If you paid the admission fee to watch one, and got the thrill you were hoping for, then your collaboration with the artists was successful, and you experienced: Intentional Trance Formation.  Mimi’s trance formation was unintentional.  She gave assent not because she wanted to be entertained, but because she assumed that her interpretation of the  facts available to her was true.  Any difference between reality [he lost track of time because he was engrossed in what he was doing] and her experience of reality [his absence shows he no longer loves me, and worse, loves someone else] may produce a reaction poorly matched with her interests.

“As great an artist as he was, Stevenson’s ability to create fictions that evoke terror pales in comparison 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 triggered the release of fight-or-flight hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which, like Dr. Jekyll’s potion, changed her biologically. Mimi’s impressive creative faculties enabled her to induce a transformation of her body without the use of drugs, visual prompts, or any other external aid. Sadly, the trance she induced was poorly aligned with her intentions to establish a trusting lifetime partnership. Ernest, who sincerely wanted the same outcome, explained his predicament to his buddies: “She changed from the sweetheart who gives me joy to the monster who gives me pain.”

The trance formation was induced by the fiction she created from the fact that he didn’t show up when he said he would. Her excessive reaction resulted from acting as though she knew the cause of his absence when she did not. That premature judgment triggered a biological reaction that transformed her. Her fury was temporary, but its effects were irreversible. From her perspective, her reaction was not irrational—it was the natural consequence of the reality she was experiencing. If her subjective reality was the same as reality, he got what he deserved; if it wasn’t, she destroyed the intimate relationship she wanted so badly. Ernest was the most recent of her boyfriends, and not all of them were as guilty as she judged them to be.

Ironically, the initially bogus assumption that anyone who claimed to love her would ultimately abandon her triggered a sequence of events that made her fiction come true. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, like this one, illustrate the recursive relationship between handicapping expectations and objective outcomes.

Not all examples of voluntary self-sabotage have this recursive feature, but they all involve Unintentional Trance Formation [UTF]. This tale of Mr. E illustrates how UTF can cause an otherwise successful fellow to voluntarily choose a path that predictably leads him to unwanted outcomes. His business associates judge him to be competent, not because he never makes mistakes, but because he learns from them and eventually figures out how to achieve the outcome he intends. After a disastrous relapse, he employs the strategy that usually serves him well. He steps back and observes what happened from a distance. In this case, he tallies his gambling wins and losses and then the pleasures and pains he derived from the activity. His observations lead him to the unmistakable conclusion: The costs of gambling far outweigh the benefits. On the basis of this appraisal, he plans to abstain from gambling; his wife and everybody who cares about him support this decision. Unfortunately, his plan doesn’t account for the trance-formative power of temptation. When he gets near the casino, a different version of Mr. E will be in the driver’s seat. He is savvy enough to recognize that temptation is a potent foe that can distort his judgment, but his challenge is more profound than the version that is not experiencing temptation can appreciate. He cannot foresee the depth of the distortions because his foresight, like everything he experiences from the first-person perspective, is state-dependent. It’s not just that his judgment and perception are different before and after a relapse; he is different! Each version of Mr. E is reacting to a different subjective reality; what makes no sense in one makes perfect sense in the other.

It’s one thing to understand that other people’s judgments are distorted by their current psychological state. Everybody, including our hero, knows that he will appraise gambling differently when his judgment is influenced by remorse over his previous relapse than when he is under the spell of temptation. This is abstract [third-person] knowledge that most observers, including our hero, understand at an intellectual level. This kind of knowledge is cheap in that it can be acquired quickly and easily. If you were not aware of it before, reading the last paragraph may be sufficient. First-person skill development, on the other hand, is more expensive; it develops slowly and requires personal practice. For him to know himself well enough to exercise a willful influence over his reactions during high-risk situations requires understanding the abstract principles of cause-and-effect as observed from the outside [objective reality], and the practical skill of utilizing these principles to influence subjective reality [what happens inside].

Mr. E is where objective data is translated into meaningful experience. The data itself doesn’t trigger the emotional/motivational reaction; it’s the interpretation that does. But each interpretation must be made from a particular point of view, and so all interpretations are biased by the perspective from which they were created. Our hero’s biological predispositions and conditioning history introduce a systematic bias that shows up as a repetition of the same mistake. The fictional tale of Mr. E serves the same function as Ocampo’s artwork: to elicit a subjective experience that you can observe from the outside and the inside. Specifically, your research collaboration can observe the transformation of words on the screen into the meanings you experience, in the same way it previously observed the transformation of pixels on the screen into the images you experience.

So, suspend your disbelief and imagine that you are Mr. E soon after a relapse. His wife is disheartened by his failure to abstain from gambling as he said he would, and he feels worse about it than she does. He swears, “I’ve learned my lesson this time, and I’ll never gamble again!” But she’s been here before and replies, “You’re full of shit! I know you better than you know yourself, and you’re going to do what you always do. You’ll gamble the next time you get the chance.” He claims he means what he says, and a lie detector test would show that he is telling the truth. Nevertheless, just as she predicted, it wasn’t long before he voluntarily drove himself to the casino and gambled.

If you could replicate her third-person perspective, you would experience one reality; a different reality would emerge if you could replicate his first-person experience. The latter is much more difficult to create because it requires you to regard his obviously distorted perspective as valid and complete. Nevertheless, neither of their models of reality is valid and complete. She doesn’t have access to his subjective experience and is, therefore, blind to what causes him to act as he does. Even though he has access to all the information available to her [including his history of failed commitments] in addition to his own subjective experience, he is blind to what is obvious to her (and to everyone else). Each perspective has access to the information the other one lacks. To use the optical illusion metaphor: Like the researcher, she has access to the pixels [objective reality] but not to the images [the meanings that cause him to act as he does]; he has access to the image he creates, but is oblivious to the reality from which he creates it [the pixels have no intrinsic meaning and could be interpreted as, say, a pretty girl or birds tending a nest]. The collaboration offers a different, more comprehensive perspective on cause-and-effect than either would alone. This metacognitive perspective inoculates our heroes against the Soul illusion: The dogma that they know the truth when they do not.

Earlier, you created different images from the same pixels. Now, see if you can use your cognitive and imaginative faculties to create different psychological states [remorse and temptation] from the same facts provided in the tale of Mr. E:

1. Induction of the trance of remorse: His point of view after his most recent relapse was as a self-loathing loser who had lost control over his actions and destroyed everything he had worked for his entire lifetime to build. In hindsight, he judged his decision to gamble a mistake and would undo it if he could. He understood that what he did in the past could not be undone, but he hoped he could prevent future catastrophes by swearing never to gamble again. Sadly, he was taken in by the illusion that since he now knew the truth, he would always judge gambling the same way.
2. Induction of the trance of temptation: Sometime later, when the pain caused by gambling was far away, and circumstance brought him closer to the casino, his experience of reality changed. For example, gambling no longer seemed like an error of judgment. The version of Mr. E making decisions during high-risk situations perceives and judges reality differently from the one who sincerely intended never to gamble again.

To induce trance #1, imagine the thoughts and images that would go through your mind if you lost more money than you could afford, and felt that you failed yourself and your family.  The more detailed your fictional, first-person thoughts and imagery are, the more authentic your emotional reaction will be and the more interesting your exploration . . . .

(See if you can induce the trance of remorse now).

If you were able to elicit frustration, self-loathing, or shame, congratulations! Using your mental faculties alone —without the aid of drugs, video prompts, or any other external aid — you created the suggested phenomena. This creative process is similar to the one you used to transform Ocampo’s pixels into meaningful images. Contrast this Intentional use of your mental faculties to induce state change with the unintentional trance formations responsible for our hero’s perverse pattern of resolving to quit gambling and then voluntarily choosing to gamble.

Approximating Mr. E’s remorseful trance was easy because you can identify with his reaction to making a costly mistake when you should have known better. Replicating trance induction #2 is more challenging, especially if you don’t have a personal history of battling temptation. In that case, this exercise, analogous to working out with heavy weights to build muscle, will strengthen the mental faculties required to induce Intentional Trance-Formation. So, once again, suspend your disbelief and imagine you are interpreting reality from our hero’s perspective. He is giving himself a vacation “to get away from it all.” After a few days camping around Yosemite, he’s on the road to visit his buddy in Arizona when he realizes that if he took a short detour, he could spend the night at his favorite four-star hotel in Las Vegas. His covert dialog: “I’m taking a week off work because I need a break from the stress. I could spend the night at a dingy Comfort Inn in the middle of nowhere or at a four-star hotel for fifty bucks.” When he imagines what his wife would say if she overheard that comment, he imagines telling her, “I’m not interested in gambling, what I really want is a relaxing vacation. The luxury of a great hotel room, fantastic food, and entertainment is what I’m seeking.” If his wife could hear his response, she would judge it as an intentional fabrication designed to justify going to the casino. But she would be reading him wrong. Despite all his faults, Mr. E is an honest man; his claim is not deception, as a lie-detector test would show. His sin was ignorance of himself, not deceit. While on the road thinking about that dialogue with his wife, he was not intending to gamble. However, once he arrived at the hotel, his proximity to temptation transformed him.

Despite the many opportunities he’s had to observe how temptation transforms him into a loser who has no control over his appetite for gambling, he fails to anticipate what will happen to him as he approaches the casino.  In this sense, his wife knows him better than he knows himself.   His research collaborator [third-person perspective] knows him the way his wife and other dispassionate observers do, and could introduce him to The PIG [The Problem of Immediate Gratification] — the hyperbolic relationship between the trance-formative power [TFP] of a temptation and its immediacy [in terms of space, time, or psychological distance].  Because the relationship is hyperbolic [the graph shows Y=1/X ], the influence of temptation increases gradually at first but progressively more rapidly as he gets closer to the casino.  Finally, during his walk from his parking space to the front desk, he passed the entrance to the casino, and its influence on his subjective reality increased so rapidly that he was trance-formed before he knew what hit him.  The Mr. E who promised his wife he would never gamble again was no longer in the driver’s seat.  It was not that he lost control of the vehicle; he lost control over who was operating it.

Unlike his lifelong commitment to refrain from gambling, his actions are irreversible. Once his relapse has happened, he can’t undo it; all he can do is prevent himself from making the same mistake again. Evidently, committing to abstinence is not as potent a strategy as he assumed it would be. Perhaps it was in the past, but his history of broken promises has cost him the power of his word. While his past relapses have been unbearably costly to his financial security and his relationship with his wife, perhaps the most destructive consequence of gambling after he promised not to was the damage done to his belief that he would do what he said he would.

As luck would have it, the gambling metaphor is well-suited to illustrate how self-control is lost: When Mr. E makes a commitment, he is making a bet that he will honor it. If he does, he wins, and his belief that he will do what he says he will do is strengthened. There is no requirement that he make a commitment; he does so, often publicly, as a voluntary guarantee to strengthen his resolve: “This is more than an intention, I’m betting my reputation that I do what I say I will do.” Because he is guaranteeing the outcome, he is giving long odds, so more is lost on a single failure than is won from many successes. Each time he fails, subsequent commitments are worth less, until his word is worth nothing.

This dirty little joke, like Ocampo’s artwork and Mr. E’s tale, is intended to elicit a reaction that you can observe from the first- and third-person perspectives. What it lacks in couth, it makes up for in brevity, and I hope it evokes laughter, rather than offense. In either case, your biological reaction will give you the chance to observe a magical transformation: The letters on the screen, which have no more intrinsic meaning than the individual pixels of Ocampo’s graphics (or my computer’s 1s and 0s that are the source of all these data sets), are transformed by a certain creature into a meaning that triggered a reaction you personally experienced. This sequence of objective data in and emotional reaction out gives your research collaboration the opportunity to observe an extraordinary transformation that can be studies no other way.

A farmer’s wife is in the kitchen doing the dishes when her husband walks in carrying a goat.

He says, “I want to introduce you to the pig I’ve been fucking.”

She says, “You moron, that isn’t a pig, it’s a goat.”

He says, “I was talking to the goat.”

The joke’s punchline reveals a different interpretation of events than the one you initially assumed to be true, which elicits the subjective experience of getting a joke. When you observe your reaction from the perspective of the researcher and the subject, you can see that neither perspective alone is sufficient to fully appreciate what it means to “get a joke.” The researcher cannot access the first-person experience, only the subject’s overt reaction; the subject may laugh but not know why.

You understand the experience of getting a joke because you’ve gotten jokes in the past and have first-person knowledge of the experience. Without that personal experience, you would not be able to fully appreciate the phenomenon from someone else’s description. Just as you can’t use words to define the color blue, you can only define it by referencing other first-person experiences, such as “it’s the color of the sky.” Given this limitation in communicating about first-person experience, we can define the experience of getting a joke as somewhat similar to the reveal at the climax of a detective story or the reveal of how a magic trick was performed. Reviewing your past experiences, you may notice that the more surprised you were by the difference between what you assumed was true and what you discovered was actually true, the greater the subjective reaction to the reveal.

The jokes, magic shows, and other reveals your future has in store can do more for you than merely amuse; they can protect you from repeating the same costly errors you intend not to make again, by reminding you of how easily you can be taken in by the illusion that your experience of reality is not the same as reality. Understand this: You don’t have access to the truth, and are easily taken in by the assumption that you do. The images that you “see with your own eyes,” like the reality you experience with all your being, are fictions that you confabulate to make sense of the complex array of sensory input you receive from the outside world. Your appraisal of the validity of your map of reality is distorted by the same biological predispositions and conditioning history that created it, so your judgment of its validity is worthless. It’s not that you don’t know what is true; it’s that you can’t know what is true. There is no way to avoid the biases that emerge from your particular perspective, and there is no way to escape the fact that every point of view has its own biases

The ancient Greeks not only understood the limitations of human knowledge and the dangers “of believing that one knows when one knows not,” but they chiseled the solution to the problem of voluntary self-sabotage into the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Carved into the stone at the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are the 3 Delphic Maxims.  Their placement at the entrance reveals what those seeking guidance from the Oracle. needed to know before they asked about their future and what they should do.  The Oracle was not a fortune teller, though she was never wrong.  Anyone seeking supernatural knowledge of what would happen to them in the future was too naïve to benefit from her counsel.  Even the god, Apollo, who spoke through the Oracle, couldn’t foretell what their future would bring, because the seeker was assumed to be a responsible adult who would decide which course of action to take.  Responsibility for the decisions lay with the seeker, not Apollo.

Three Pearls of Wisdom

• Nothing to Excess: In retrospect, we appreciate the wisdom of this advice, but, being all too human, we don’t follow it. Allowing excesses of appetite or emotion to dictate our actions invariably causes problems, which are deceptively difficult to solve.
• Know Thyself: The solution requires knowing yourself, which is the deceptively difficult part. Knowing yourself is more difficult than it appears to be because subjective phenomena look different from the observer’s perspective than they feel from the first-person perspective, and each perspective is incomplete.  To understand what’s going on, you have to observe cause-and-effect from both perspectives:
  • Psychological — observing the transformation of objective data to subjective experience from the outside [third-person perspective of a dispassionate researcher].
  • Phenomenological — observing the same transformation from the inside [how it is experienced from the first-person perspective of the subject].
• Certainty Brings Ruin: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is. This is so because from the first-person perspective, there is no difference between objective and subjective truth; from the third-person perspective, there is.  In other words, from the first-person perspective, “seeing is believing.”  From the researcher’s third-person perspective, there is obviously a difference between reality and the subject’s experience of it.   The researcher is not taken in by the illusions that result from the subject’s first-person perspective; the subject is.  Being fooled into believing something that is not true is particularly costly for those who feel certain that their experience of reality is the same as reality.

I wanted a photo of myself for this website, so I went through the ones I had, looking for the least embarrassing one. I chose this one because I thought it makes me look good, better, in fact, than I actually look. This realization led to a sequence of thoughts: “Maybe I’m deceiving the public by misrepresenting my appearance. . . . Wait a minute, maybe this photo is accurate, and it’s the others that make me look worse than I really look.”   While these self-focused ruminations evoke emotional reactions in me, they are meaningless from any other perspective.   Each photo shows how I looked from a particular camera angle at a particular time. There is no “most valid” camera point of view, just as there is no most valid point of view from which to judge an event. Likewise, there is no correct perspective from which to judge my value, lovability, shame-worthiness, etc.

A professional photographer intentionally positions the camera to evoke the intended reaction [aesthetic or emotional] in the viewer.  Like the photographer, Mimi and Mr. E have the freedom — some would say, the responsibility — to choose a point of view that promotes their intended outcome.  The idea of purposely choosing a point of view rather than passively accepting the default may evoke ruminations similar to mine above; for example, “I don’t want to misrepresent the truth for some selfish purpose.  As your personal research revealed, every subjective reality is a misrepresentation of the truth.  Like photographs, each shows how things appear (not how things really are) from one of the many possible points of view that could have been selected.  Your appraisals of the validity of the fictions you create are worthless because they are distorted by the same biological predispositions and conditioning history that created the fiction.

And now for the reveal: Since your appraisal of the validity of your own judgments can’t be the basis for your selection, Nietzsche advises using utility as your selection criterion.  Rather than passively accepting whatever perspective your biology and conditioning history have dealt you — and hence which you judge to be valid — let the artist, who intentionally positions the camera to achieve an intended effect on the viewer, be your guide for selecting your point of view during high-risk situations.

Every observation must be made from some point of view — you cannot take a photograph or interpret the things that happen from “no particular perspective.”   If you don’t intentionally choose your perspective, your biology and conditioning history will choose it for you, and, like a marble rolling downhill, you will follow The Path of Least Resistance to wherever it leads.   If you can detect a pattern of unwanted outcomes in your history, you will benefit from Nietzsche’s suggestion.   The next sections describe how to create subjective realities that promote rather than sabotage your interests and principles. 

• Reification: Treating an abstract model as though it were the real thing.  Examples:
  • Regarding a map as though it were the same as the territory;
  • Treating beliefs, appraisals, or emotional reactions as though they described objective reality.  For example,  after Mimi’s breakup and Mr. E’s relapse, each feels like a failure. Reification occurs if they give assent to this interpretation and regard it as objectively true.
• De-reification:  The opposite of reification, recognizing that the fictions you create to depict reality are made up, and you could have created other, equally valid interpretations of the same data.
• Volition: Using your mental faculties to influence the course of events in favor of your interests and principles.
  • Just as you created different images from the same ambiguous array of pixels, you have the power to create different subjective realities from the Nominal Stimulus Pool [NSP] you were dealt.  Predictably, some of these maps of reality will lead you to better outcomes than others.  Will shows up as using all your faculties to navigate your way to the outcomes you want (as judged by your rational self).
• Suggestion: The intentional use of reification to induce trances well-matched to getting the outcomes you want.  Ordinarily, you would unintentionally reify whatever interpretation your history conditioned into you.   But when that is not working out well, you have the power and responsibility to choose a better one — one chosen on the basis of its utility, not your appraisal of its validity.
• Unintentional trance formation: What is typically labeled as pathology results from reifying a premise that, if true, would elicit an emotional or motivational reaction poorly matched to one’s desired outcome—for example, “those who are supposed to love me will ultimately hurt me” or “I feel certain that I won’t make the same mistake again.”
  • Negative Suggestion: Try not to let your nose itch. Be aware that scratching your nose within the next 60 seconds would suggest that you lack self-control.  See if you can make it for a full minute without touching your face near your nose before reading the reveal:
    • The ironic mechanism revealed: To determine if you are successful at having a nose that is not itching, you must compare your current sensations with your imagined experience of your nose itching.  Imagining your nose itching induces the ironic effect.
  • Intentional trance formation:  Reifying a premise on the basis of utility rather than on your appraisal of its validity (which is set by your biological predisposition and personal conditioning history).
    • The Heavy Leg Script from the venerable Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale will give you a chance to experience the phenomenon of hypnotic suggestion personally.  If you accept the invitation (click here) and play your part as the subject, you will personally experience your leg growing heavier and heavier, even though you know, on a rational level, that it weighs the same as always.

Volition is an art, similar in some ways to photography.  Both transform objective data into images capable of evoking subjective reactions in the viewer.  

There are many possible explanations for Mimi’s boyfriend’s tardiness.  However, unlike the professional photographer who intentionally chooses where to place the camera, Mimi’s perspective was chosen for her.  Rather than selecting a point of view because it was most likely to reveal the truth or because it would promote a desirable outcome, the most salient [attention-grabbing] perspective determined how she interpreted the things that happened. 

Mimi’s childhood traumas distorted her perspective of intimacy, but now she is an adult who has the responsibility to navigate herself to outcomes she judges to be desirable.  This responsibility informs the perspective from which to judge the actions of her intimate partner in the same way that the professional photographer positions the camera to achieve the intended purpose of the shot.

In domains where you have a history of unwanted outcomes, don’t let loyalty to your appraisal of what is true prevent you from following Nietaxhe’s recommendation.  Nobody, not Socrates, not Tolstoy, and in this domain certainly not you, knows the truth; those who think they do are punished for their arrogance by the unwanted outcomes of their premature judgments.  You can discover what is false, but not what is true. Seeking the truth by examining the same subject from different perspectives is the best strategy, but expecting to actually discover the truth is an example of “Einstein Insanity.“

Artistic ambition is one thing; actually evoking the intended reaction in the audience is another. Talented photographers improve with training and practice.  The thought experiment in which you pretended to be Mr. E. on the road to Las Vegas gave you some practice working with your faculties of attention and imagination to induce Intentional Trance Formation.   Now, you dedicate these same faculties to exercising with an old-fashioned hypnotic induction: the  “Heavy Leg Script” from the venerable Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.  The first listen will prepare you to do your part of the collaboration the next time you listen.  So, suspend your belief about what is true and give assent to these bogus suggestions.

Different ways of interpreting the things that happen are continually battling for your assent, because the winner gets to live as your subjective reality and so can influence how you react emotionally and behaviorally, while all the other possible interpretations are relegated to die in oblivion. We all have the tendency to interpret the things that happen from the perspective dictated by our biological predispositions and personal conditioning history, which is analogous to taking a photograph from wherever the camera happened to be at that moment.  A serious photographer positions the camera in the service of evoking an intended reaction in the viewer.  The path of least resistance is to continue to accept your automatic interpretations of the things that happen. The path of greatest advantage requires that you choose the point of view from which you interpret the things that happen. 

For example, the root of Mimi’s problem is that she automatically gives assent to the bogus assumption: “Those who are supposed to love me will ultimately hurt me.” As a result, she tends to interpret the normal mishaps that happen to couples in ways that evoke reactions poorly suited to establishing a secure and loving relationship. Unfortunately, Mimi is stuck with the realities of her history, but she has the power to choose her perspective — the point of view from which she interprets the things that happen in the present. We, as spectators, can only watch as Mimi unconsciously chooses the interpretation that will determine how she interprets her boyfriend’s boorish, but typical male missteps. Will her judgment be biased by her conditioning history or her current interests and principles? She has the power to choose, and so do you.

Volition, the power to intentionally influence the course of events, is the reward for completing a developmental passage that nobody can take for you, nor spare you. The passage from the carefree mentality of childhood to the existential realization that you have a finite amount of time to do whatever you choose. The ancient Stoics studied how to maximize your powers of volition and cautioned against wasting your time being angry or frustrated by bad outcomes. They would much prefer that you dedicate your precious energy and talents to working with what you do control. The primary message of this school of thought is the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As an adult, you have the responsibility to choose how you will use the time you have, for example: maximize your pleasure, do good works, accomplish what you judge to be important, etc.  The challenge is to get the creature you inhabit to act as you will  Perhaps you’ve noticed that your body has a mind of its own.  Freud used the analogy of the horse and rider: The ego is like a rider on horseback, who is able to guide the horse only when the beast is willing. But when the horse encounrters a mare in heat, the animal’s passions, not the rider’s intentions will likely determine where the rider ends up. Nevertheless, a well-trained horse is more likely to follow the rider’s will. Here is one approach to exercising your will by training the creature you inhabit:

1. 1. Use the personal research method to observe the sequence of external events and internal reactions that typically lead you to bad outcomes.  That is, observe the sequence from the first- and third-person perspectives.  Review several examples of the sequence until you arrive at a collaborative understanding of the cause-and-effect mechanisms driving it.
   2. Know yourself well enough to recognize the sequence of external events and internal reactions that takes you to the outcomes you want.  Of particular interest is the high-risk situation that induced the Unintentional Trance Formation — that is, where state-dependent phenomena such as judgment, motivation, and response probability distribution changed.  [For example, that moment occurred for Mimi when her adrenal potion transformed her into the monster].
   3. Suspend your beliefs about what is true.  The Greek Skeptics recommended that you develop your ability to withhold judgment and simply collect data for as long as possible before you give assent and decide to accept a particular interpretation.  For example, for Mimi to prevent her fight-or-flight reaction from ruining her love life she must replace the map of intimacy that was conditioned into her when she was young with one more likely to help her navigate to the outcome she wants.
   4. Accept the suggestion by reacting as if it were true.   Hypnotic inductions are useful practice to enhance your skill of intentionally influencing your subjective reality.