Self-perception is constituted by the known by us circumstances about ourselves, and its structure is formed by the degree of importance we grant to each of these circumstances. This “inner” hierarchy changes continuously. As time passes and our experience grows, we get to know ourselves better, because the longer our life is, the more opportunities we have had to check on the validity of our self-image. That’s why wisdom is being so often related to old age. A wise man knows a lot about the world, but most of all he knows about himself. This knowledge needs time to mature. Through it we get closer to being in harmony with the world around us. Not everyone, though, reaches this blessed stage. It is up to our character and the environment, both of which either grant or deny us this privilege. More often both of them are against us. More often we drown in the maelstrom of events having no time or strength to detach ourselves from our everyday life and to reassess our personality before proceeding further. As a result, instead of finishing our earthly pilgrimage as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, we end up as Shakespeare’s Pantaloon.

The circumstances life serves us with at any moment are very rarely pure in their essence. While looking for a spiritual advice we might feel the urge to satisfy an unrelated emotional need; together with experiencing physical pain we often try to focus on a rational decision we have to make; occasions of coveted sexual arousal are sometimes overtaken by a strong moral dilemma… That’s why at any single moment our self-perception has to refresh the hierarchy of inner circumstances, combining them into a modified, unique and relevant to this very moment arrangement. Our subsequent actions reflect the new arrangement, enrich our life experience and speak to others about who we are.

Laura is 35 years old, still single, and already a little desperate about it. Tonight, though, she is invited on a party at the new house of a girlfriend of hers, who has also invited, as she claimed, Laura’s perfect male match. The whole afternoon Laura criss-crosses the stores to find the pair of shoes that would go with her outfit. In a nervous anticipation of the event she totally forgets to eat. It doesn’t help that she finds the right pair of shoes only at 7:30pm, in a shop located 15 miles from her friend’s house. So she arrives at the party 45 minutes late. While ascending the stairs she feels a short, but acute pain in her abdomen – a logical symptom for a starving person with a gastric disorder. While kissing her friend hello she knows that she has to quickly put something in her stomach, since otherwise the pain would quickly increase to a critical point. The thing is that her friend rushes her to the parlor, where her “match” is chatting with the other guests. On top of that, having made her first two steps into the house Laura senses the peculiar and distinctive smell of the interior. Nothing special – many old houses smell like this, but for Laura this odor has a very specific meaning. This was the smell of her grandparent’s house, where, being five years old, she found her grandmother lying on the floor, dead from a heart attack. The shock she experienced back then made her parents never take her to that house again.

What should Laura do? She is in a cul-de-sac. She can stay and go outside to meet her “prince”, double up with physical pain a minute later and suffer the enormous emotional throe of recreating the nightmare of her childhood. Or she can rush to the table and start stuffing her mouth with the treats on the trays, losing forever the chance to call the attractive guy in the parlor her husband. Or she can run away from the house immediately, not only losing the guy, but risking rolling with pain on the street, since the taxi has been sent away, and the nearest food store is several miles down the street. Whatever she embarks on would have negative consequences for her, no matter that all of her choices would be justifiable – morally, emotionally and physically. Yet, the arrangement of the mentioned inner circumstances Laura comes up with will speak tons about her self-perception, as well as about her human nature as a whole.

Often, though, we are not able even to catch up with the pace of the changing events around us. No matter how dynamic our self-perception is, from time to time the dynamics of the outside world overpowers it. In this case what we act upon is our instincts. Unlike our self-perception, they are the circumstances about ourselves we are unaware of.

What hampers the dynamics of our self-perception? Why are we sometimes so hesitant in deciding what is really important and worth standing up for? Which are those factors that slow us down, and leave us being assisted by our unpredictable instincts? What about when our self-perception starts being so dysfunctional and wrong, that even if it guides us through the events of the moment, it hurts our interests instead of serving them?

There are all kinds of viruses that can impede the normal functioning of our operation system: mental or behavioral ones, viruses due to prejudices, inner complexes or insecurities, emotional traumas, bad upbringing or poor judgment of past facts. Some of them we catch ourselves; yet for others we rely on our social circle or our therapist. When pointed out to us, we sometimes agree on getting rid of them; yet some other times we don’t want to admit having them, or even reject the notion of their harm, labeling them as virtues instead. Some of the viruses can be so powerful that they risk twisting the logic of our actions beyond recognition, dooming us to complete failure.

…In the realm of art the best depiction of human nature attacked and destroyed by viruses is that of the Theatre of the Absurd. Born from the public aftershock of WW2, it reflected the vulnerability of mankind revealed through the horrors the Nazis had been perpetrating for more than a decade. There were no more illusions about the irreversibility of human progress. Translated by art, this notion found its expression in characters that were so concussed by something (evil was never personalized), that they were not able to see, hear or feel what was going on around them. Some among the audience laughed at their irrelevance, but others were terrified by their resemblance to modern man…

***
The relation between self-perception and perception of the environment is a two-way street. Certainly, the information we get in the form of consequences of our actions enriches the knowledge about ourselves. But our self-knowledge also influences the way we accept and understand everything that surrounds us.

© 2009 Peter Budevski

Certainly, the sense of vocation is not the only type of self-projecting circumstances, which could occupy a top position in our self-perception. Moreover, no matter how strong a vocation is, at a certain point of our lives it can become irrelevant to the environment, which risks making us irrelevant. Successful people haven’t necessarily relied on their vocation. Some of them haven’t had a well-established talent at all. What those have been driven by was not their self-perception, but their extremely acute perception of the environment. They haven’t been seeking the right place for displaying their natural inclinations, or fighting windmills in hoping to create such a place. They have rather picked up and elevated in their inner hierarchy a circumstance, which they guessed would be in conformity to their environment, and worked hard to keep it there. Through their ability to adapt they have achieved the harmony with their surroundings. Of course, the ones who had some eminent inborn qualities might be haunted by the fact that they’ve turned their back on them; but others would be proud to have found the strength for the painful operation of rearranging the priorities of their youth.

As long as Scott was in his teens he was comfortable with following his call for being an athlete. He was well-built, strong and a fast runner; he loved football, and on the field he was a team-player and had a good eye for the play. That’s why he was in every game of his high school team, and even had a modest personal fan club. At his graduation he got invitations from several good colleges to enroll and, of course, to get into their football teams. The future of a celebrity sportsman loomed even brighter in front of Scott. Football was the activity he was best at, and the opportunity to make it his career choice was staring him in the face. But, to common surprise, Scott decided otherwise. He got into medical school. It wasn’t an easy decision. The offers he had gotten were pretty lucrative. But Scott didn’t want his active professional life to stop at the age of twenty seven; he didn’t like the prospect of later becoming a coach boring every one with stories of past successes; and he wasn’t enthusiastic about wasting his best years to something which wouldn’t be the job of his life. Besides, he knew that doctors made a pretty good living, so if he would learn and work hard the years ahead would be quite prosperous and successful. Scott gave up pursuing his vocation in return to a long lasting well-respected and secure professional future.

What Scott did was rearranging the circumstances at the top position of his self-perception. The positioning of the first one (his vocation) was the choice made for him by Mother Nature, while the positioning of the second (his self-initiated interest in medicine) – his own choice. In both cases he had a good chance of enjoying the taste of success, since both circumstances sprang from his self-projecting drive, i.e. they helped him develop his personality in alliance with the environment. 

But what if Scott fails at his medical education? He might have probably overestimated the complexity of the realm, or his own willingness to explore it. He might have spend too much time watching and talking about football, or just thinking about the good old days. Or, he might have been inconvertibly repelled by the sight of the totally real samples he had to practice on during the seminars. In any case, his perception of the environment has played him false. After several years of roaming like a ghost through the campus auditoriums Scott throws the towel. He admits having made a bad choice. What now? It is too late for him to go back to football. At the age of twenty-something he finds himself at the crossroads. One possible scenario for him is to look for a new start – to elevate a third circumstance in his self-perception hierarchy, which to energize him into another undertaking. But with some already wasted golden years Scott might fall into the trap of self-deprecation, which actually means that his self-projection gives way to his self-preservation drive. Hopefully this inner condition won’t reign over Scott’s self-perception for long, but while it does, he would be too far from getting his life back on track.

Letting ourselves be driven by self-preservation is an actual refusal to comprehend, let alone to change the environment in our advantage. For a certain period of time this might grant us the room for inner recovery from a blow from the outside, but if a self-preservation circumstance takes a permanent top spot in our self-perception it starts acting to the detriment of the personality. The cocoon we find ourselves in starts growing thicker, isolating us from our surroundings more and more with every passing day. If maintained at the top, with time self-preservation gradually makes our personality deteriorate; we become less involved in the life of our milieu and more irrelevant to it. Moreover, our detachment from the environment gradually diminishes our chances to find an adequate self-projecting circumstance, since our perception of the environment has become outdated.

…Unless you decide to project yourself through confessing your self-preservation choices – which is exactly the point of departure of my Man from the Underground (from Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” – see Introduction). Being neglected, humiliated and beaten up by the environment his whole life, he finds an odd way of paying her back. He takes his frayed, threadbare, outworn, sweaty and bloody undershirt and starts proudly waving it as an ensign of honor. His vocation, whatever it was, didn’t receive a green light from society; he wasn’t able to find a way to adapt to it either. So he paradoxically (The Paradoxalist was the name of the film we made) turns his history of self-preservation into a philosophy, and hopes to get royalty from it. At the end he crashes under the weight of his pathetic attempt, but for at least a brief period of his life he has been happy, really happy… This is the only example I can come up with of someone who managed to project himself at the expense of the environment.

© 2009 Peter Budevski

There is a set of circumstances which casts an extremely powerful influence over our ever changing self-perception: our natural vocations. As a matter of fact, they represent its most cherished, its sweetest part, since A) following and developing them requires less effort and causes more joy than any other activity, and B) they bring us self-confidence through reinforcing our sense of uniqueness and even superiority to others. A self-perception where vocation occupies a leading spot in its hierarchal structure is one of a very happy person… 

Each and every one of us possesses natural vocations organized in unique constellations. ‘A born artist’, ‘a born musician’, ‘born chef’, etc. are not mere expressions; they bear the truth about somebody’s extreme skills, which couldn’t have been appropriated by even the most sophisticated education or elaborate training. The majority, however, is not so lucky. Our inborn vocations are not always that strong, or visible. They are buried deep inside us, and it takes them a lot of time to reach the point of public exposure. The unfortunate truth is that most of us leave this world without having manifested our natural talents. Some people don’t even realize their very existence. This occurs either because of the environment, which makes their natural inclinations irrelevant to their struggle for survival, or because of lack of character… Or, most often, because of both. Usually it is the combination of outer and inner circumstances on a certain stage of somebody’s life that might either kill their innate vocations, or make them flourish.

Our proud march through the toddler’s age is especially vulnerable to factors detrimental to our inborn qualities. Since we haven’t yet developed a very high degree of self-awareness, we are also far from having the character to resist harmful outer circumstances. That is why early childhood is an age of crucial significance to the pace and direction of our personal development. 

Let’s say that there is a second edition of Leonardo da Vinci snoozing in Pamela. Unlike the other three year olds, she sees the world in beautiful shapes and colors, which never stop amazing her. Each day brings new excitement coming from the continuous revelation of how lovely everything around her is. Until one day she discovers the pencil… Her animation is beyond limits. The environment has offered her a splendid opportunity to pay back for what has brought her so much delight. And like Leonardo in his creative inspiration she devotes her mind, body and soul to expressing herself, completely forgetting to eat, drink or pee. It is only the pencil and the white wall against her that are important… Without hearing the usually noisy Pamela from the kitchen, her nanny is happy too: she can totally devote her time to the important phone chat with her boyfriend. Soon one of Pamela’s parents comes back from work. He has had a bad day or a fight with somebody, or a pang of his midlife crisis. The ugly circles covering the living room walls are way more than he can handle, especially at this particular day. For the first time in our little girl’s life he loses control. He flies at her, grabs her by the wrist and slaps her several times. Then he reaches for the pen and breaks it into pieces. His yelling drowns her horrified cries. A second later he is by the table, breaking one by one the color pencils, which someone has given her just the day before. And so on… Guess if that girl would soon think of taking a pencil in her little hand, let alone drawing. And when this ever happens again, it would hardly be done with even a hundredth of the excitement she has felt in that first creative moment.

Vocations are the first individual qualities on display in one’s behavior. They can play an extremely significant part in determining the person’s perception of reality, hence the development of the character. At different points they can serve as detrimental or stimulating inner circumstances, the effect of which can echo throughout the person’s life.

When a kid is continuously praised and encouraged for doing something which he likes to do and does with ease, it could serve as an incredible compensation for the things he is not able to do…

The environment repeatedly challenges little Dave with circumstances, which he, unlike his classmates, has hard time overcoming. He can’t throw the ball far enough, he is a slow runner, and some of the others don’t get tired of mocking his speckles. But Dave is very good at writing short stories, and his parents have already enrolled him in the writing class at the community center, where he has gained the admiration of instructors and participants alike. And even though it’s not that he doesn’t care about his deficiencies in comparison to the others, their mockery is less likely to stir a deep complex of low self-esteem, simply because he carries the awareness of his alternative capabilities. As it turns out, Dave is a winner, because he has managed to keep at a top position of his self-perception a circumstance, product of his self-projection drive. If it wasn’t for his strong vocation, and the environment (his parents), he could have been quite unhappy. His inability to throw the ball, and his speckles would have constituted the top layers of his self-perception, which would have triggered his self-preservation drive in either avoiding others, or trying to pathetically make everything possible to be liked. But now, because of his realized vocation, Dave is quite independent, and his perception of the environment is a positive one – the clowns that mock him are a relatively insignificant circumstance in its hierarchy.

Yet in some other cases, even if acknowledged, vocations can be harmful to one’s harmonious co-existence with the environment, since the latter could turn out to be adverse to their display. Occurrences like these have their roots in the social, economic or cultural situation surrounding the person. In a dictatorship, for example, your interests, or even tastes, as natural as they could possibly be, are being severely censored, if their manifestation doesn’t fit into the regulated pattern of behavior. In the middle of last century the governments of the Soviet bloc used to forbid people, especially in their young age, to wear long hairs and beards. The way you looked was not your personal choice; your tastes were subordinate to official rules. Not to mention the way you thought or felt, or perceived reality… The consequences of this assault on individual freedom would be bitter and visible through the rest of your life…

In our lives the sense of vocation is the first inner circumstance to determine individuality. It is given to us by nature. We are not talking here only about talents; tastes, interests, even the simple channels of primary curiosity could be all viewed as innate inclinations, which define us as human beings at a very young age. They are also the first to kindle our self-awareness, because their manifestation is for us the first sign (besides the way we look) of how different we are to the others. That’s why if at this age someone with authority undermines or opposes our vocation, he risks deranging our whole personality, since vocation is our personality. At the same time getting to know and preserving our God-given strengths at the top of our self-perception could make us stay true to ourselves and develop within us a very positive and beneficial perception of the environment.

© 2009 Peter Budevski

Throughout our lives, up to the simplest actions we perform, our behavior is being driven by two major instincts: self-projection and self-preservation. Our survival and well-being depend on how we manage the balance between them.

As we develop, we gradually become aware of our own unique spiritual, emotional and physical needs, inclinations, capabilities and strengths, on one hand, and our weaknesses, on the other. This process inevitably turns self-projection and self-preservation from mere instincts into powerful driving forces.

The choices we have to make for achieving the balance between self-expression and survival start becoming more and more conscious based on what we know and want about ourselves. Each and every one of these choices finds its ultimate reference point in our self-perception. We reassess our urges, necessities and strongpoints, as well as our known natural limitations, so that the action we undertake won’t limit our self-expression, keeping us safe and unharmed at the same time. Subsequently, after our action has taken place, the results of it lead us to conclusions, which enrich our self-perception.

Our self-perception is built of circumstances about ourselves which we are aware of. They are arranged in a hierarchy which changes constantly according to the results of our actions. But this hierarchy is not only dynamic; it is also contradictory. It is built by circumstances which are being supported by our self-projecting drive, and others, supported by our self-preservation drive. Those two groups, one being the engine of our personality, the other serving as brakes, are in a ceaseless conflict, with each one of them trying to push this or that of “its” circumstances to an upper, more important place, where it would have more influence upon our actions. The final arbiter in this struggle is the environment. Our experience in dealing with it either empowers or discourages a certain circumstance in its significance to our behavior, rearranging its place in our inner hierarchy.

Let’s say that John is extremely proud of his muscles. He is the strongest kid in his class, and he never misses a chance to impress the girls by threatening or even beating up some of the other boys. And since some of the girls get really impressed, the awareness of his physical strength becomes a top circumstance in his self-perception. A couple of years later John is admitted in a sports school, where most of the boys in his new class are stronger than him. Girls’ attention being still his top priority, he realizes that he is no longer able to attract it through his muscles. So John starts inventing pranks on the teachers, thus evoking the approving laughter and interest of some of his female classmates. Isn’t it logical then, that physical strength drops from the top position of John’s inner hierarchy, and is being substituted by his naughty imagination, which serves him much better in the changed environment. Both inner circumstances are parts of John’s self-projecting drive. Within a period of several years each of them has occupied the leading place in his self-perception. And he has changed their position in his inner hierarchy because of the changes in his environment. But let’s imagine further, that on one of his consecutive pranks John is caught and severely reprimanded by the principal. He gets so scared of his potential expulsion from the school that he stops joking on the expense of the teachers once and for all. For the time being a new circumstance takes the leading position in John’s self-perception – his inability to get over the stern school rules. This circumstance, obviously, is pushed upwards by his sense for self-preservation. Due to it John changes his behavior completely. It would take him time to restore his self-confidence and find another self-projecting circumstance suitable to his changed perception of the environment.

Our self-perception is directly connected to our perception of the environment. John has underestimated the power of the principal in enforcing the rules. This circumstance has been an insignificant part of his idea of the surroundings. That’s why he allowed himself the liberty to go against those rules. Once he discovers that he is wrong, the principal’s authority becomes a really important circumstance in his perception of the environment – to the extent that he rearranges his priorities, i.e. the hierarchy of circumstances constituting his self-perception and driving his behavior.

© 2008 Peter Budevski

Since the dawn of mankind people’s behavior can be categorized in two main courses of actions. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take our primeval ancestors, whose daily grind wasn’t “burdened” by the technological achievements of modernity. What must have been the life of a man occupying the Earth 50,000 years ago? His activities would have been organized around caring for and protecting himself, caring for and protecting his kin, reproducing, and playing. Certainly, behind each of these four descriptions there lies a multitude of various actions, but these categories cover basically all of his behavior.

As anyone can guess, it was a behavior driven by instinct rather than principle. But animals had even sharper instincts. What was the key of man’s success in gaining superiority? What were his priorities that helped him A) survive, and B) dominate the animal world and become the most advanced being on Earth?

A closer look at his activities reveals that only a quarter of them were devoted directly to his immediate physical survival. Caring and providing for his family, protecting them, creating children, participating in games with others, painting cave walls, or painting his face for tribal rituals – all this goes far beyond survival. Animals do almost everything to survive, and less to project themselves (mainly through the instinct of reproduction and caring for their offspring).

With humans it was different. Humans succeeded because of the different balance between the two basic instincts. The activity to take care of his physical self was important, but of equal importance were the rest of man’s endeavors. If the need to survive activated his self-preservation instinct, the fact of living in a certain environment and depending on it presented a challenge to his self-projection instinct, through which he could gain the right to be an active part of this environment.

Being two sides of a coin, i.e. both aiming at the subject’s survival and well-being, the two basic instincts bear a very important difference: self-projection is a strive for personal development and enhancement of influence over the environment, whereas self-preservation restrains communication with it; self-projection initiates the notion that survival is a function of coping with the surroundings, while self-preservation views dealing with the surroundings as dangerous, or as a matter of constant compromises and limitations.

The passage of time hasn’t changed these instincts. The Paleolithic era was just a cog in the long chain of human history throughout which man has educated himself to deal with the environment.  Since the most significant part of the environment was his community the examples discussing people’s relations with the environment should primarily focus on their behavior within their community. Community life is what switched the priorities of our primeval ancestors and put the self-projection instinct of the individual in a position of superiority over self-preservation. This is a major fact that defines the progress of humanity through the ages, and outlines the way we can approach individual human behavior today.

© 2008 Peter Budevski