American Buddhist Net

A few months ago, a friend recommended a book called “A Gradual Awakening”, by Stephen Levine.[1] This is a guide to meditation, and includes some great insights on mindfulness. Here is an excerpt.

“Moment to moment, the mind, the conditioning, is building some image of who it thinks it is. We think we're the beautiful, pleasant states; we don't want to be depression, anger, agitation, grief, frustration. We're attached to one aspect as opposed to another and, therefore, fail to see the process out of which it's all coming.

But it's very difficult to see what's real when we're actively filtering all the input, when there is "someone" in there trying to be something. The "I" is reconstructed moment to moment out of our liking and disliking of what is happening in the mind. This acquired judgment of each thing which comes to mind picks and chooses among multiple thoughts and images to construct its house, which is constantly dissolving in the natural flow of mind. This "I" is the facade chosen by mind to represent it. When choosing who we wish we were, we cull from the great mix an image here and there, and discredit the rest through some rationalization. What we choose, or what is allowed to remain, we call "I"--believing all the while that this "I" is choosing rather than what actually has been chosen. Thus the imaginary "I" is continually engaged in the compulsive activity of reforming itself. But this separate "I," this aspect of mind which chooses among its own images for something to be, is just more mind, just another passing thought, a bubble.”

This passage speaks to the root cause of most human problems, self-deception. It also reminds me of one of the classroom experiments that I prepared some years ago. That experiment was called “Psychorelativity.” Like the Theory of Relativity, which basically says that mass warps the space-time around it, PsychoRelativity proposed that the ego-based entities of our own minds warp the truth of passing information. In other words, we lie to ourselves to protect our self-image. This is part of what Stephen Levine appeared to be saying some twenty years earlier.

In the field of Psychology, biases and defense mechanisms have been named for the ways in which we lie to ourselves. Here are a few examples.

Self-serving bias: The tendency to take credit for success and blame external factors for failure.
Egocentricity bias: The tendency to exaggerate the importance of one’s role in past events.
False consensus bias: The tendency to believe that most people share one’s opinions and values.
Assumption of uniqueness: The tendency to overestimate one’s uniqueness.
Self-righteous bias: The tendency to regard oneself as having higher moral standards or greater moral consistency than others have.
In-group / out-group bias: The tendency to view members of groups to which one belongs in a more positive light than members of groups of which one does not belong.

Repression: Motivated amnesia
Projection: Misattributing some aspect of oneself to someone else.
Disavowal (or denial): Disbelieving a true memory or perception.
Reaction-formation: Representing an attitude or emotion as its opposite.
Rationalization: Attributing mental states to false reasons.
Acting out: Precipitately acting to preempt conscious awareness.

These are ubiquitous aspects of human psychology, not specific to any cultures or geographic regions. All people lie to themselves to some degree in these ways, selecting ideas and images that support their self-image while discrediting the rest, as Levine wrote. But these lies are, without a doubt, largely activated by the unconscious mind. As Sigmund Freud noted, much of life is a matter of unconscious activity, and therefore “rationalization” might not be the right word for this kind of mental filtration. The conscious mind, or the remembered present, is less involved in, and less capable of, directing our lives than most people realize.[2]

There are good reasons why we have developed this tendency to deceive ourselves. It is known that people deceive themselves in order to avoid trauma, and such coping mechanisms can be useful. But apart from this, self-deception evolved to serve other real human needs, as a means of deceiving others. Deception of others was an evolutionary advantage whenever there was a limited availability of certain necessities, like food and mates. But then, detection of deception also became an evolutionary advantage, as we learned to detect subtle physical clues in the deceiver. As a result, those individuals who could successfully lie to themselves were naturally selected because they were less likely to give themselves away when lying to others.[3] It turns out that the self-deception trait arose in conjunction with lie detection, with the two traits evolving in a sort of arms race.

It appears that this arms race between individuals has grown to a battle within the individual. We all strive to maintain a positive internal self-image, but the increasing amount of time and energy that we devote to this task is presenting risk to our real, physical selves. We seem to defend our self-image as much or more so than we defend our actual physical selves, and we usually defend internally by lying to ourselves, or engaging in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith”.[4] Additionally, since the self-image is not real, we are not only wasting energy lying to protect it, we are actually reducing our chances of being able to respond to any real challenges in our physical environment.

In order to preserve a positive self-image, we must fit it into our ever-changing worldview. Today our mental environment can change very quickly as a result of the bombardment of sales and marketing pressures from mass media. If we pay attention to this, it forces us to make rapid adjustments to either our worldview and/or our self-image in order to hold the picture together. To complicate things, the mass media are now controlled entirely by corporate interests, and individuals may not have the mental or emotional skills available, as usually provided through evolution, to respond to whatever agenda these corporations might be pursuing.

The lies of 9/11 present just one painfully obvious example of our current, escalating self-deceptions. In the US and other western countries, many people buy into very obvious lies in order to avoid making real changes in their personal or social lives. Much of the self-deception in our culture seems to be a means of procrastination, or acceptance of easy answers in order to continue a life of immediate gratification. We want to believe that we can continue this feeding frenzy of cheap energy and cheap goods indefinitely, and if anyone suggests otherwise, we’ll look for other answers.

A good example of the mass deception caused by self-deception is the US presidential campaign, which has been dominating the headlines for years now. This circus of self-absorption has been a means by which corporate interests have framed the questions in our national discourse, diverting attention from more serious issues. In such a media contrived discussion, we fool ourselves into thinking our opinion matters more than it does. We’re also fooled into thinking the issues discussed are those which matter to us most, and to the future of our communities.

But just what is Barack or Hillary’s position on the breakdown of democracy through the use of easily compromised electronic voting machines? And what do Mitt and McCain have to say about the plans and performance of the private bankers that run the Federal Reserve Bank? More importantly, does any conscious person really believe that installing a different career politician in the White House will result in significant social change? The incredible answer is yes, many people do believe just that, and they believed the same thing when the new Democrat led Congress was elected in 2006.

Some of us also believe that celebrities can save us from the deception in our lives. When celebrities speak out for truth, sacrificing their careers, it is a noble thing. But how do the opinions of celebrities give more meaning to the simple facts available to all of us? When we look to celebrities or academics for simple truth, we are acknowledging our own inability to think for ourselves.

Whether we know it or not, many of us are in the process of making some crucial choices. Those choices may be in favor of our continued physical survival, where we accept the facts of resource depletion and government-sponsored terrorism and act to expose and address those appropriately, or at least respond in acts of real self-preservation. If we choose such a life-sustaining path we will certainly have to give up many of our opinions and beliefs, which serve purposes that are less tangible and much less urgent. On the other hand, many of us may choose the path of the ego, and continue to patch together a tangled-web worldview that relies on accepting ever-increasing amounts of fantastic explanations and stories. Those who choose the latter option, consciously or unconsciously, are not likely to see real, positive change in their future.

The understanding needed for real, positive change might very well come only from individual mindfulness, as taught in Stephen Levine’s book and in other teachings of Buddhism. Even if we cannot stop the next major terrorist event, or the collapse of the global economy, we can begin the process of our own gradual awakening. This must certainly lead to a brighter future, if only for the benefit of the next generation.

Going forward we need to understand and teach the differences between people and the larger entities they create, like corporations and governments. We also need to understand and emphasize the education of human limitations, including self-deception and uncertainty in communications. It is up to us now, as individuals, to make the needed changes from a personal and then local community level. First we must let go of that "someone" in there trying to be something.

Endnotes
[1] Stephen Levine, “A Gradual Awakening”, Anchor Books, 1979, pp 37-38
[2] Ap Dijksterhuis, et. al, “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect”, Science 17 February 2006:Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 1005 – 1007 (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/1005)
[3] David Livingston Smith, “Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind”, St. Martin’s Press New York, 2004
[4] Christopher Frost et. al, “The Psychology of Self-Deception as Illustrated in Literary Characters”, Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, (http://www.janushead.org/4-2/frost.cfm)