SELF-CREATION
Anything that is consciously created, such as a work of art or an innovation in technology, requires the disciplined use of the phenomenon of our attention (earlier illustrated at the peak of the pyramid).
This attention represents not only the forefront of conscious evolutionary development but also the dynamic center of freedom into the future. The value that this inner freedom has for us is its power to affect the quality of our day and even life itself, if we use it wisely.
A sense of autonomy, the very heart of our dignity and quality of life, requires the freedom of our attention for self-creation--to constitute ourselves imaginatively or intellectually in a meaningful way. Cognitive therapists tell us that achieving a sense of autonomy requires two distinctive abilities. First, we must gain greater control over our self; that is, become more responsible for our thoughts and actions--a prerequisite for any civilized society. And, second, we need to find a rewarding object or support system (world view) to direct our thoughts to.
Basics of Cognitive TherapyIf our thoughts are more often about negative things, however, we will end up becoming negative and miserable. The seemingly increasing lack of civility today attests to this negativity inherent in many people. As they think, they live.
The act of attention itself goes to the root of the problem of negative thinking--a way to some form of self-destruction (drug abuse, suicide, crime). To illustrate this point, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that he could tell what someone’s religion was by asking him about what he does with his leisure. What Whitehead was implicitly saying is that if we know what a person directs his free attention to, not prescribed activities like work, family affairs, or social responsibilities, then we know what his religion is, what is most important in his life--the ultimate concern. If he spends all his free time bowling, playing golf, or horse racing, then that is his actual religion. For all of us, what we choose to direct our attention to defines who we are, what our greatest concern is. Essentially, where our attention goes, we go.
Taking control of this force of attention is to gain enormous power, the power to escape from bondage to external forces that can rob us of our freedom to choose the life that on reflection we find best. For people feeling a sense of meaninglessness, something negative has taken control of their attention.
A meaningful education seeks to discover what this negative thinking is based upon. Is it a false assumption--distorted reasoning (rational-emotive therapy) or thinking patterns (cognitive therapy)? Is it possibly true, but still has no meaningful relevance to their future experience (logo-and gestalt therapy)? Is this negativity based upon a feeling of inferiority (Adlerian therapy), or not accepting one’s true self (client-centered therapy)?
Yet, somewhat similar in technique, not in philosophy, to behavior therapy (analyzing problems in terms of conditioning), a daily attention chart should be used, noting the thoughts of the day (time and place) and then the reactions to those thoughts. This information would help clarify the particular mind-set. That is, what ideas or situations are causing this sense of meaninglessness, since other times of the day might be quite meaningful. Meeting a friend, engaging in an enjoyable activity, striving to accomplish something important are a few examples.
Taking control of our attention is the fulcrum from which a sense of meaning can develop. It is a basic act of self-assertion. Self-assertion is self-creation--a process of self-mastery. When we recognize someone who has mastered a difficult art or activity, don’t we gladly give that person the respect that he or she truly deserves?
Developing the skills to master an instrument, craft, or science is certainly not always an easy task. Mastering the skills needed to live our life in a meaningful way that will, at the same time, advance the quality of a civilization isn’t easy either. At times, very difficult. Yet, if we seek one of the highest ideals, that is to be free from bondage to external circumstances, isn’t our immediate challenge to first master ourselves? George Washington expressed this same belief when he said that “Man can only be free through mastery of himself.” Mastery of our attention means self-discipline--a persistent and invincible will or absolute commitment come what may, to exert some effort for what we think is valuable.
Self-discipline is the central attribute of a soldier. It is based on a highly developed will. A real revolution in the quality of life experience demands that we all become soldiers. This means that we must learn to take charge of the transcendent activity of our attention. And, as soldiers focus this attention on creating an ideal relationship with our reality. “Ideal,” someone might exclaim incredulously! Sure, the quest for an ideal may sound hopelessly utopian. Yet, I rather think it is more melioristic--that the world tends to become better if each human being seeks an ideal through some meaningful endeavor. Isn’t it the effort that really counts?
IDEAL RELATIONSHIPS
To provide a meaningful education requires that we learn to direct our attention to the arena in which our will operates. To do this, we should ask the most basic question in all philosophical thinking--”What is the nature of reality?”
Only by adequately answering this question can we come to understand the answer to a following question about what our relationship to this reality is now--good, poor, confused. As I will discuss in more detail later, the key word is “relationship.” Relationships govern our life. We are always in a relationship to some thing, event, or person. In exploring our everyday relationships, we can then learn how we come to feel and think the way we do. Changing this relationship, if necessary, to a more meaningful one is an act of self-creation.
In answering the first question as to the nature of reality, it is often just considered as one total, actual, present life experience. The fullest extent and conception of reality, however, is not just one present experience but two, a personal and an ultimate one. To understand the differences and similarities between the two has therapeutic value. The value resides not only in the refined sensibility it creates but also in the illumination it sheds on the cultivation of ideal relationships.
The discussion of the immediately lived personal reality should come first--similar to gestalt and existential therapy. What does it consists of? What makes it pleasant or unpleasant? Can it be changed? The reality that I’m speaking about is the one you are in right now--its smells, sounds, sights, thoughts, and feelings.
In essence, your reality, any reality, can be said to be the sum of your thoughts and feelings, that is, what you are attentive to. As you read, for instance, your reality consists of the words before you, the visual gestalt around these words--the book itself, the hands that hold it--the thoughts in your mind, and the possibly vague feelings of your body. Is the room cold, is the seat comfortable, is the light poor for reading?
These reflections are not superficial or unimportant, for they relate to how you feel and think about your personal reality--again, what you may be attentive to. Everything else is as if in a void if you are not thinking about it, such as whether it is cold outside, the neighbors are quarreling, or the Earth is about to be hit by a meteor.
All you know is what is encompassed by your attention at the moment. The attributes of this reality depend upon the act of your attention. The activity of your attention defines you and affects your state of being.
Now what about the other reality? It is as meaningful as your personal reality might be, but it is a larger one, even bigger than the town or world of which you are a part. It has a manifold, multi-dimensional quality. One of the names given to it is “Ultimate Reality.”
The quest for a religious experience concerns itself primarily with this larger reality more than just the personal one, a reality some call "God." The seeker yearns to establish efficacious contact with this ultimate reality, with the source of all life and matter. That is, to go beyond the specific, the immediate, and the temporary to the fundamental, the universal, and the eternal. The anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death (1974), expressed this yearning when he said that “Man is a creature in search of something greater than himself.”
Though greater than ourselves, what really is this ultimate reality? And why is it that so many people throughout history have turned their full attention to this reality, trying to come into some union with it, using all their attentive willpower?
Saints, prophets, and martyrs, for instance, express similar devotion to a belief in a religious reality. Yet, can't we say that this ultimate reality includes all of what is present and beyond our moment’s attention, the whole of what is--the world and its life, the universe and even its possible abundance of extraterrestrial life?
If we agree to the existence of this ultimate reality, can’t we also conclude that this larger reality is what all of us are already an intimate part of now, even though not always aware of in our own personal reality? How could we be separated from it? The “Reality Logo” shown below illustrates this participatory relationship we have with all of reality.
Ultimate reality is the infinite manifold; it contains everything, including your personal reality--the center always being your own attention. The partly sensory, partly rational, partly supersensory, and partly superrational aspects of ultimate reality revolve around and, at times, attract the magnetic quality of your attention. Later chapters will expand on these attributes of the whole of reality. They will form a basis for developing a true self-image, or maybe more modestly, as true as our minds at this time can encompass.
REALITY LOGO
Ultimate/Personal
Mind Morality
Space..................Time
Aesthetic Sacred
Eternity
By contemplating the significance of the reality logo, a more radical sense of our true self-image can develop, radical in that we come to realize some fundamental truths. The sublime magnitude and enchantment of our present reality can arise from the understanding that each of us as a center of attention is one of the manifold “faces” of Ultimate Reality. The search for something greater than ourselves need no longer be sought somewhere else, it is already with us if we will just be attentive to it.
Though we don’t know what ultimate reality or the totality of what it signifies is in any cosmic context (more on this later in the chapter on the sacred), we can gain a great deal of meaningful knowledge about our own relationship to it--what we are attentive to within the ultimate one.
The meaning for our life is not in our own personal reality or in the ultimate one. It is in the relationship between the two. Though each of us is a unique pattern of relationships that creates our personal reality, this uniqueness cannot be separated from the great, inclusive system of relationships encompassed by ultimate reality. We are each what is called a self only among other selves and in relationship to the universe. Our life has meaning only in these relationships.
THE LAST MAGICIAN
The feeling of separaton, whether from others or a divine being, often caused by the fast-paced and transient society we live in, can be very destructive to mental health. Loneliness or alienation is the result. Yet any person feeling in this way is really living in an illusion.
Rather, each of us is an ecological being in a continuous and interdependent connection to the divine ultimate reality. What we choose to direct our attention to and think about out of this reality either can give us a feeling of significance or meaning--an ideal relationship--or can make us feel worthless or unfulfilled--a poor relationship.
So the ancient maxim that “Man is the measure of all things” that has been the foundation of our liberal arts education for nearly two thousand years is only partly true: true in that we often use ourselves as a standard of reference, untrue in that we are the only criterion for judgment of the world and ourselves.
Believing the false idea that we are an isolated standard or final measure of the world, wholly encased within our body privately and alone, can lead to an extremely negative perspective, a solipsistic attitude or even a nihilistic one--the major cause today for the disenchantment with the world. We end up thinking that the world, life, and our personal reality are without any redeeming values. Meaning means nothing.
In contrast, if we awaken to the radical nature of our reality, and disgard the inaccurate assumption that we are isolated and the “measure” of the world, then everything takes on a new and deeper meaning. The real basics seeks to bring forth this sense of meaning by simply and accurately redefining ourselves as the “measurer” of all things. As a center of attention, we are.
The higher dignity given to us by this newly understood role takes us beyond an isolated “object,” a ghost locked in a machine or a mere private consciousness located within a body, and places us in a more meaningful connection with our environment. Moreover, the plague of the subject/object split that thinkers have grappled with for centuries can be cured with the realization that we are elementally in an intimate communal relationship with an edifying ultimate reality.
Meta-Consciousness, spoken about earlier, is the meaningful realization that makes us sensitive to not only our immediate personal reality but also to the larger order to which we are related. By the willful direction of our attention to that interactive relationship we find that we live at the enchanting and transcendent point where nature and spirit somehow meet--certainly no ordinary place.
The understanding of our bipolar reality, both personal and ultimate--its interrelated and interdependent ecology--indicates that we participate in a relationship of an extraordinary nature. It teaches us not only that we are created by our environment but also that we help to create it with our transcendent willpower and attention. We are both created and creator, as depicted by the arrows going inward and outward of the “Reality Logo.”
The attentive observer is directly and intimately involved, both as a receptive consciousness and as an affective one. That is we have a powerful say in the reality manifested in our own lives, since ultimate reality is literally a collective thought disclosing itself in the sacred place of our own reflective minds. The significance of this awareness implies that we must learn to become our own magician, which means that in the end we contain our own future within ourselves.
At every moment we can choose what we wish to see, observe, or record. It is our choice. Read a book and enter another world. Step outside, a different world presents itself. Close the eyes and the visual world disappears. By our actions or inactions (in silence), we create the total aspect of life that we will experience according to our inner vision. Don’t we have a right to select our vision of the world--especially if it is validly based and it is something worthwhile to think about and act upon?
In the next six chapters of Part Two, judge for yourself whether the basic nature of your reality is something worthwhile to think about. Rarely is this knowledge presented in any integrated way in higher education curriculums, or focused upon by therapies in such a multi-disciplinary way.
The overall intent of "the real basics" is to foster a way, first, to think bigger and better about what it really means to be alive. Then, secondly, to apply this transformative knowledge in our everyday life. The mental health term I use for this encompassing and practical approach is "onto-therapy." In the process of this therapy or real basics education, we become the sole and final creator of our own experience--the last magician!
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