The goal represents an anticipatory, desired and oncoming act. It always generates circumstances from among the facts we are (or will be) surrounded by. No matter how long it’ll take us – a second or a lifetime, its fulfillment requires acting upon each and every one of those circumstances.

Our goal resembles the mysterious lady of the medieval troubadour ballads, who stares down at us from her high inaccessible balcony. We can only hope and pray for the time when we will be allowed to kneel in front of her and kiss the tips of her fingers. But first she has to be persuaded to drop the rope-ladder – our only way up. In order to achieve that we have to pledge complete and unconditional devotion – otherwise she will remain another distant, intangible object of our fantasies. Then, once she graces us with her trust and the ladder falls clattering nearby, he have to start our shaky ascent, careful not to miss any of the narrow, crooked, unevenly placed steps. Overlooking just one of them, or not putting our foot precisely where it will hold will make us lose our balance and send us tumbling down. Yet if we are cautious and persistent, our efforts could be rewarded: at one point we might be able to leap across the rail and recite our oath for eternal love, winning over the lady’s heart for times to come.

If by comparison the lady on the balcony is our goal, the narrow, squinting and slippery steps are the lesser, simpler goals, the conquest of which would gradually lead us to the fulfillment of the big one. Whenever we set a goal for ourselves, a goal that is not achievable by a one-time physical action, we come up with a plan; this plan is an aggregation of other, smaller goals, or sub-goals (chapter VI.3.). Arranged in a sequence they clarify our effort and organize it in time and space.

If my goal is to surprise my wife with a nice Sunday breakfast, my plan would include at least a dozen sub-goals contributing to the fulfillment of the main one. First I have to set up my alarm clock for at least half an hour earlier than the time she usually wakes up. Providing that I have already taken care of the groceries I would need, getting out of bed at 7:30 would be my initial sub-goal. Once in the kitchen, my next goal would be to grind the coffee and put it in the coffee machine; then I’d probably have to take the eggs and the bacon out of the fridge, as well as juice, syrup and jelly, which would be placed directly onto the dining table. Oh, I would also have to get the old family china instead of the ragged “contemporary” coffee mugs. My fifth mini-goal would be to pull out the flour jar, break the eggs and start whipping my signature pancake mix. Three minutes later I would have to go through the pans, deciding which ones would best suit my needs. Thinking of which reminds me of the hashbrowns in the freezer, the preparation of which, together with heating up the pans, becomes my next sub-goal. And what if I add a couple of Eggs Benedict to the surprise breakfast…

I can surely go on with the list of the sub-goals (or objectives – according to Stanislavski) which my main goal would be divided into. As we can see, each of them, by triggering a simple physical action has one purpose: to straighten up the imbalances in the environment, occurring from the point of view of the main goal. If I want to wake up early in the morning the idle alarm clock would be an imbalance; since I want to make fresh coffee, the unground coffee beans would be also an imbalance; an imbalance would certainly be the uncooked eggs and bacon, sitting in the fridge, and so on. Hadn’t I decided to go ahead with my surprise breakfast, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of these imbalances; actually, they wouldn’t have been imbalances at all. For me they would have remained facts – amorphous, non-committing features of the environment. But my goal has made me reconsider the scope of my influence over the environment in these particular directions. It prompts me to look at my surroundings from a different angle – an angle that finds certain facts out of balance with my needs. In order for the goal to be achieved, these facts have to be overcome. They become factors influencing my action, or circumstances.

Each of our goals – big or small, sub-goals or a major – offers a unique point of view towards the outer world. It is like riding a horse around a grove. At every stop we see the same patch of trees, yet each of them stands in a position different from the one we’ve seen before. Some trees get larger and stick out right in front of us, others get smaller, shying away, and still others disappear completely behind the rest. In the same way every switch in our goals gives us a different perspective to the facts surrounding us: some of them can suddenly grow into big circumstances and occupy the lion’s share of our attention, while others, having been quite significant circumstances just a while ago, unexpectedly sink into obscurity. One way or another, every goal stirs some of the facts within our reach into a unique combination of circumstances, which we have to overcome in order to achieve our end. Even if they change with time, at every single moment these circumstances make a sequence based on their superiority in urgency, importance, and level of abstraction. This sequence is a situation – as any other conglomerate of circumstances. It is the goal that generates the situation we are acting upon. Dealing with it conditions our action. If we are not in a situation, there couldn’t be any action on our part. But no situation can exist unless there’s a goal to single out what from within the environment needs to be changed.

How are the situations, created by our goals, relevant to our comprehensive system of attitudes toward the world, called “perception of the environment”? Yes, once we have a goal we start acting upon the situation it raises; this way the situation becomes part of our perception of the environment. But what about the other “attitudes” – the rest of the circumstances in our outer hierarchy? Do they disappear, or they keep influencing our action in some way?

Since every single goal produces a situation, its state (active or inactive) at every moment depends on the state (active or inactive) of the goal itself. We don’t chase on a moment-to-moment basis every goal we have in mind. Unwillingly or not, we give some of them a “break”, because we get involved in solving more pressing issues. The situations stirred by the goals “on hold” continue to be part of our perception of the environment, but they stay inactive, latent, waiting to step back “on stage” once we revive the goal they’re related to.

While setting up the breakfast table I’m obviously not pursuing my goal to lower the mortgage for our house; so the situation determined by this goal – the high mortgage I’m paying and all the circumstances around it, is currently latent, even though it occupies quite a high position in my perception of the environment. So are the situations surrounding my scratched car bumper, tomorrow’s sale at Best Buy, or my obnoxious boss; all of them are parts of my outer hierarchy, but at this very moment they don’t matter, because they’re irrelevant to my present goal. In an hour or two my goal could change and some of these situations might begin to strongly influence my action; yet for the time being the china sitting in the cupboard is way more important.

On the other hand we rarely go after one single goal at a time. Even if we are not willingly multitasking, our mind and body find a way to tackle several goals at once. This means that at every moment our action is influenced by situations which are part of the “active” segment of our perception of the environment, but are not necessarily products of one and the same goal.  Even when I hurriedly whip the eggs for my breakfast pancakes, and compete with time, my brain is free enough to keep bugging me with other situations, like the dilemma: should I let my seventeen year old daughter go to the prom of her boyfriend, a year her senior. I still have a couple of days to decide, but this goal started intervening in almost everything I do recently. The pressing request of my daughter to go to the party and stay there almost all night, my distrust of her boyfriend, the nasty stories I’ve heard about proms – all these circumstances harden into a vicious situation which doesn’t go away even while I’m occupied with something utterly different. Then I catch myself beating my mixture too loudly and abruptly stop, giving an ear to what’s going on on the second floor. It’s still quiet up there, but my wife is a light sleeper – another circumstance of the main situation I’m reckoning with. This brings my attention back to my current goal, but not for long, because a second later my stare accidentally falls onto the china, which reminds me of my mother-in-law, whose dog has been sick for three days. This circumstance is part of a completely different situation whose importance is defined by my permanent goal to be the perfect husband, and that includes being a tolerable son-in-law. This is why I venture on the bold move to call my mother-in-law right now, in the midst of my cooking – a self-sacrificing tinge to the breakfast surprise for my wife. In less than a minute I am whispering pleasantries into the receiver squeezed between my ear and shoulder, interrupting myself only when I have to flip the pancake. In response my wife’s mother showers me with bits of information about her life – a new situation, which I do my best to recognize and honor. I can’t care less about her overweight poodle, but I don’t stop moaning and groaning with all the zeal the quiet house allows.

My half-hour shuttling through the kitchen in this early Sunday morning concludes with mixed results: first, half of the bacon is burnt (the smell of which actually wakes up my wife); secondly, I have decided to allow my daughter to go to the prom (which I know is a mistake), and thirdly – even though I sympathetically told my mother-in-law that I wanted to hang out more around her dog, she didn’t hear the words “out”, “more” and “around” – maybe because of the crackle of the frying pan, and got very, very upset.

On a larger scale the conclusion is, that even without initially having the least intention to do so, in a relatively short amount of time I pursued several goals simultaneously. In other words I dealt with a number of situations, completely different in nature, at once. This is the way we all act. Our goals constantly contradict each other; we often follow silly impulses and sometimes, knowingly or not, go against the logical flow of our interests. Moreover, the outer world constantly surprises us with its unstable, whimsical nature, so every goal of ours sooner or later gets in the way of other goals. Yet our perception of the environment finds a way to embrace in its fold all the different situations our goals create, establishing a behavioral pattern that is if not logical, at least traceable. How does it succeed in finding a spot for each of these situations in its own hierarchy without leaving us overwhelmed by their contradiction? The solution it is that it refuses to accept them intact. It disregards their inner hierarchies and takes their circumstances as independent entities, which it rearranges in its own, general hierarchy. If a situation brought to life by a goal is set up as an arrangement of circumstances relevant solely to this goal and disconnected from other situations and from time, our perception of the environment is built by taking into account ALL circumstances of the goal-created situations, which it puts in a completely new order. This new structure explains our every move within any timeframe, becoming an adequate reflection of our complexity as individuals existing in a ceaselessly changing environment.

In this structure it is the separate circumstances (no matter what goals they are related to) that have to compete for our attention, not the entire situations. This way we keep working on achieving our goals one step at a time, simultaneously with other goals. The rest of the circumstances of our perception of the environment stay inactive, until an inner or outer fact prompts us to chase the goal they are related to.

Being the only pastor of the small town that hired him, Robin passionately throws himself into pursuing all of his obligations. He strictly supervises the maintenance of the church’s property, watches closely over its finances, promptly announces the sermons and regularly meets with the top members of the congregation. Besides leading the worship services of every major Christian holiday, like delivering the sacrament during Communion or distributing bread on Easter Sunday he unflinchingly officiates the weddings and holds the funerals however rarely they occur in this sparsely populated area. But above all he devotes his fervency to reading from the scriptures and delivering their very essence to the believers. He spends nights in preparation for the Sunday sermon, doing his best to relate the message from the Bible to the lives of those in attendance. He loves the moment when he stands up in front of the buzzing audience, and the silence gradually makes its way amid the shushing of the elderly. His self-confidence comes from the ease with which he finds the most exact words to describe distant times and places, and use these descriptions to draw expressive conclusions. Once done with his testimony he knows that his week hasn’t passed in vain, and that he deserves his job, as well as the respect of the parishioners.

Yet he often becomes disappointed by the insufficient zeal of their religious worship. Their petty conversations, especially on important occasions like high masses or wakes, deeply bother him. He sees how little they comply with God’s will in their everyday lives, and even how disrespectful to God most of their life decisions are, not to mention their blasphemous language. He is aware of the sin of pride and constantly reminds himself to keep away from it; yet he can’t get over the feeling that in its overwhelming majority the congregation has a limited ability to comprehend God’s word. To no avail are his carefully prepared, ardent sermons about the bliss of opening up your mind and soul to the Lord’s glory. At the end of the day they seem to have little impact on the churchgoers’ frivolous approach to anything in life. As his first six months in this small town run off Robin begins to succumb to the belief that his efforts are doomed, and the whole place is hopelessly callous.

This same month happens to be the birthday of his father, who insists that his son visit him. Robin hasn’t seen his dad for quite a while, but these days he doesn’t feel like going anywhere. Yet he has always been a good son, and given that he has no siblings he yields to the pressure. On the day, after a twelve hour drive he sits across from his father in the small countryside cabin the old man has been living in ever since his wife passed away five years ago. Actually the son has been here only once; it was the father who visited Robin in the seminary, and then followed him around on his first assignments.

The two days of the visit pass quickly. The time spent with his dad once again reminds Robin of how witty and amusing the retired farmer is. On his part he doesn’t share anything; he considers himself mature enough to handle his problems on his own. The morning he is about to leave, his father invites him for a short walk through the garden of his small estate. In the very middle of it he suddenly stops and asks Robin if he likes what he sees. The young pastor looks around at the carefully tended and artistically arranged lush vegetation, and only then realizes what an amazing job his dad has done. In a relatively small perimeter Robin witnesses the perfect harmony between grass, flowers and trees, where sizes, forms, colors and scents seem to never compete, but rather complement each other in forming, as Robin sees it, a humble replica of the Garden of Eden. But the father doesn’t leave him much time to reflect on the scenery; he drags him to a far-end corner of the property, where they almost fall into a ditch full of fetid moist matter. “This is my compost pit,” notes the father. “Believe it or not, Robin, it is filled entirely with cut grass, chopped leaves, bush trimmings, as well as shredded dead branches from the garden. Well, it also holds some dung from the farm nearby. Quite disgusting, isn’t it? But you know what? It is an actual part of the garden. What you just saw is only the other half of what you’re seeing right now – this rotting substance comes from what you admired less than a minute ago. Moreover, that goodliness there can’t exist without the repulsive matter you have here. You let the ugly and unnecessary parts rot away, and then you put them back to where they’ve come from, because the beauty needs their support to preserve itself, and grow. The truth about any good and noble thing, Robin, is always in the middle. The beautiful can’t exist without the mediocre, since it’s the mediocre that the beautiful sheds away, and feeds on at the same time. It isn’t true that nothing is perfect. Look around and see for yourself the perfection of every single object you lay your eyes upon. Rather, nothing is pure in its perfection. Purity is a good quality for an ingredient, not for a substance. And we all want substance, not empty shapes, right Rob?”

An hour later Robin is sitting in his car, driving back to his congregation. He is smiling – his first smile in more than half a year. Within the next months he becomes one of the most active members of the community. He starts taking part in occurrences and activities that don’t have anything to do with faith and God, let alone with his church. He not only aids the boards and committees of the annual events like the fair, the middle school graduation ceremony or the sport tournaments in the municipality, but also does his best in privately assisting and consulting families and individuals in need, out of the church and outside of his regular work hours. His visits to the hospital turn into regularity, and often he finds the time to stop by the kindergarten and amaze the kids with stories from the Bible.

The truth behind the pastor’s abrupt change is that he understood what his father was really saying. Knowing Robin pretty well it hadn’t taken the old man too long to grasp his son’s low spirit, as well as the reasons behind it. That’s why he went ahead with his botanical lesson, referring in actuality to the complexity of human nature. What he had in mind was that peoples’ everyday behavior is not an immediate reflection of their values; that there are many petty, insignificant, often even ugly things we have to deal with – some of them part of our own nature. Our beauty, our honesty, our high spirituality inevitably coexist with qualities of less merit. It’s an inevitable speciality of who we are. The bigger point is how we try to resolve this conflict; do we make our best effort to find our own gardener who can separate the good from the bad and even make the bad work in our advantage.

Stripped of its moral message this notion reaffirms the contradictory – or parallel – nature of human action, whose – as it seems – most visible quality is its inconsistency. This distinctive feature of our behavior is conditioned by the changeable character of the world we live in. It is the natural response humans have developed towards an environment notable for its inscrutability. However, if we trace it on a moment-to-moment basis, and examine it in regards to the specific facts coming from the outside, the inconsistency translates into an intelligible polyphony of acts, devoted to fulfilling our goals by making selections from among the facts and turning these selections into situations. Within the share of influence of the conscious, this notion is an important part of the algorithm of human behavior.

© 2011 Peter Budevski

We imagine things by selecting and mentally combining features of the already existing and familiar environment (chapter V.4.).  This is how our dream destinations (chapter VI.2.), which obviously are also products of our imagination, bear qualities that are tangible. Taking these qualities into consideration helps us get closer to where we’re headed. We might have never seen the peak we want to reach, or the river we want to raft on, or the herd we want to hunt; yet if we aim at the peak, we make sure to take the high road at a crossing; en route to the river, we listen for the sound of flowing water; to find the herd we survey the terrain for traces. Since we know that the peak is at a higher elevation than our current location, and the river consists of water that flows, and the herd leaves traces, we do our best approaching them by subjecting our search to these characteristics. From mere facts describing our imaginary targets they become circumstances determining the direction of our quest.

The way we pursue our non-material goals directed to the outer world is no different. Each one of them is a combination of abstract features which have material parameters within our reach, i.e. they exist as parts of the reality that surrounds us. The non-material goal is like a balloon floating in the air above us, with its string hanging down from it. In order to catch the balloon we have to get hold of the string; a big and heavy balloon would have many strings – the more of them we catch the better our chances to get the balloon. We live in a material world. All of our aspirations related to it have to be carried out in its medium. The abstract nature of some of them doesn’t change the way we turn them into reality. Abstract goals represent a higher level of our strivings; they organize our behavior by making it stick to commonly valid circumstances, or categories (chapter V.5.). Their large range of applicability is demonstrated in numerous life cases where they impose their influence. In each of these cases though, the category displays itself as a specific, simple, unique circumstance that we must conform with in order to get closer to the goal.

So no matter if we want to go to Neverland or the milk-shop around the corner, to excel in math or in sack racing, to gain respect or weight, we always look around for facts that are related to our goal, because they are the ones that will help us achieve it. The goal tints the facts we are surrounded by, leading us into selecting the ones that are relevant to its accession. Then, in order to be fulfilled, the goal requires that we turn them into circumstances, or, in other words, act upon them.

What if I wake up one day and my sleepy glance falls onto the calendar, where a couple of weeks ago I carefully encircled today’s date. All of a sudden I am struck by the recollection that it is my boss’s birthday. I have less than an hour to buy her a present, gift-wrap it, write a card, and finally put everything on her desk before she shows up for work! She, or rather my job, is important to me, so my participation in the office celebration becomes my goal. In order to achieve it I have to contemplate my actions based on the new circumstances. The very first ones, of course, are the birthday and the time I have left. If it were a regular day, the fifty minutes until I had to show up for work would have remained a mere fact. Yet today this awfully little time unites with my unpreparedness for the birthday in a vicious situation, which urgently demands turning other facts into circumstances. Her mention from a month ago of how cute she used to find small papier-mâché figurines also jumps up from an insignificant fact to the position of a circumstance, since this kind of present is what I decide under the shower to surprise her with. The distance between my house and the art store (about which I otherwise couldn’t care less) also becomes a circumstance, because, even though I usually bike to the office, I have to use my car in order to make it on time. Already nervous because I get scalded in the shower while figuring out the figurine I should buy, I swoop down into my garage, whose door usually gets stuck halfway up. Under normal circumstances this would be a minor one, which usually takes me thirty seconds to overcome. Yet today I get entangled in the process because I’m hurried and gawky, which turns the crookedness of the garage door into another quite important circumstance, because I almost cut my finger, which makes me waste more precious time before taking the car out and speeding up toward the store, which, for its part, causes me to drive erratically and almost crash into a bus. From the bottom of my heart I thank God when I manage to slip out of the office of my boss seconds after I place the figurine of an old Mexican farmer with a big sombrero on her desk, and seconds before she shows up at the other end of the hallway. “All’s well that ends well”, I murmur to myself happily as I dart to hide around the corner. Having barely finished the sentence, I inadvertently kick an impressive and heavy gift-wrapped package some other colleague has placed next to the door. With my pride hurting even more than my foot I stump out of my boss’s blank sight as quickly as I can.

The goal related to my boss’s birthday has determined the flow of my action during the morning by making me conform with certain facts from my surroundings and adopt them as circumstances in my perception of reality. My goal also cancelled – due to lack of time – some of my previously planned chores (such as making an early call to my mom who had left me an angry message about how irresponsible I had been), transforming them into mere aspirations. Overall, it set the standard of what was important to me within this time period, and what options I should choose to act upon in order to achieve it. This defines action as a willful process of selecting facts and turning them into circumstances as parts of one’s dynamically changing general perception of reality, in the name of reaching a certain goal.

Every goal causes changes in our perception of reality by stirring new circumstances for us. We might formulate our goals as briefly as we want, but they are always conglomerates of requirements, which go hand in hand with – and depend on – each other. In the course of action these requirements translate themselves (and often branch out) into numerous concrete circumstances. The more important our goal is, the more requirements it contains, hence the more circumstances it puts on our way. Those requirements become goals themselves, which are constituted by other requirements, and so on, until we reach the level of the simplest physical actions which contribute to the simplest requirements (sub-goals). On the other end stands the goal of our dreams, that all of the smaller goals are part of, even though they often contradict each other. It is because we constantly and restlessly look for new, more efficient avenues of approach toward it. In this search for the shortest pass we might even change the super-goal itself, yet in its essence it will always boil down to achieving a harmonious, balanced relationship between our self-perception and our perception of the environment.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

Human life unfolds like a day spent in the depth of the woods, if we were dropped there by force of nature. At first we don’t have any idea where we are, and the noises and sights emerging from the murk don’t mean anything to us. We survive due to our instincts, as well as the help coming from others. Gradually the flicker of our experience combined with the torch light from the ones who stride alongside our crib start guiding us into recognizing the world. By the time we walk on our own we can already distinguish in the day spring haze the tall old tree from the tiller, the rumble of the waterfall from the purl of the streamlet, the scent of the meadow from the stench of the swamp. Even though the patchy darkness still makes our steps uncertain, we gradually learn that everything we sense falls into either of the groups of Secure or Dangerous. Not too long afterward we get to know what is good or bad for us, and start choosing the good over the bad. The older we grow the more deliberate and independent our choices become. Our route deviates more and more from the common path, until the bright sunshine of the advancing day finds us completely separated from the rest, feeling mature enough to experience the beauty of the woods without mediation. But once we stop hearing their voices we discover that the sun is not shining that brightly anymore, and thick fog has obscured our view. When you are on your own the forest doesn’t look that hospitable. Yet we are full of energy and quite optimistic about our future. Approaching the prime of the day God has promised us in this moorland, we find ourselves strong enough to fulfill what we’ve meditated about earlier; we boldly intend to reach the destination of our dreams. Some of us aim at the peak we’ve only heard about, or seen from afar; others imagine a quiet lawn full of flowers; still others dream about a mysterious cave bearing the world’s secrets. From among all the “good” features of the forest every one of us selects the ones that are most attractive to him or her, and combines them in their minds into the location of their lifetime. Once the goal is set, we embrace the woods as the space that envelops the setting of our dreams.

At first we won’t accept substitutes: we hike through the fog in search of the full embodiment of our Wonderland. We don’t doubt even for a second its true existence. Meanwhile the forest keeps surprising us with unforeseen gifts, as well as obstacles. The former broaden our idea of what we strive for, while the latter teach us the lessons of survival. It is the balance between them that conditions our success. Often the floating trunk which we happily ride downstream would lead us into the fiercest cataract; the picturesque track we enjoy skipping on would bring us to an insurmountable crag. Luck plays such an important role in any of our endeavors. At other times we find out that the deep muddy road is the shortest way to the open sunny clearing, and the high cliff grants the only access to the crystal water underneath it. In those cases our progress depends on our shape and determination. Do we have the strong legs to get through the mire, or the courage to jump from the break-neck height? Luck and determination – these are the pillars of our mission’s success.

Passing its zenith, the sun reminds us of the time we have left. The fog is long gone, yet the spot we are looking for feels more and more remote, risking draining the meaning out of our entire journey. The necessity to adapt our destination to our current position grows together with the fatigue we experience. Without stopping to fight or avoid the impediments on our path, we lower our eyes and try focusing on closer, more achievable locations. The high summit changes into a hilltop, the flowery meadow turns into a tight patch of grass, the magic cave becomes a simple hollow. The transformations occur impalpably, keeping our sense of purpose intact. We stop seeing ourselves as the ultimate conquerors of the forest, and adopt a more modest, less intricate self-understanding, harmonious to our reduced expectations. By bringing the idea of the space we seek closer to what the rest of the day can offer we preserve our inner balance. Counting the hours, and then the minutes to sunset in a more and more hectic search of a place even remotely similar to our initial dream is not what would work for us. We come to the conclusion that peace could be found wherever. We begin enjoying the simple beauty of the “ordinary” trees, grass, rustles and scents that surround us, and settle down in a reverential expectation of the last of the sun’s rays that would kiss us farewell. The luckiest of us don’t even bother waiting for this moment; they build their Wonderland inside themselves, marveling at it no matter where or when. What they’ve dreamed for while young they attain by dreaming about for the rest of their lives.

Everybody’s story is different. There are people who get rewarded: they manage to reach their dreamland and enjoy their achievement in a real, material way. On the other hand, those who don’t show inner flexibility to the changes in reality stop moving forward and bitterly shut their eyes to avoid looking at the ugly sites around them. Besides, age is not a by-product of passing time. Some of us never – even at the beginning – see themselves as future “kings of the world”; others ground their ideals pretty quickly and suspend their journey in order to make the most out of their immediate surroundings.

However, throughout our day in the woods, all of us are united by a single striving: to change our environment in accordance to our needs. Both quantities in this formula are variable. Our self-projection drives us into a continuous battle with the obstacles the environment imposes on our advancement. Sometimes we win, causing changes in the environment. Yet some other times the environment doesn’t succumb to our efforts. In order to prevent us from being psychologically and even physically crushed our self-preservation modifies our needs to make them relevant to the unfriendly environment. This two-way process never goes into standstill. Its dynamics is ensured by the slight preponderance of our self-projection over our self-preservation drive: whatever the blows from the outside are, sooner or later we retool our strategy and proceed further. The constant process of adaptation to the environment and advancing towards changing it is what we call human behavior. It always streams in two directions: toward the outside, and toward ourselves. Both of these flows constitute action. Its ultimate goal is to build a harmonious relationship between our inner and outer worlds.

Fourth-grader Stella‘s first crush is her girlfriend’s brother. Being a year older, he still goes to the same private school, while Stella is just a starter after three years of homeschooling. Recently her parents got divorced, then her mom found a job in another city, so here is chubby little Stella, in a completely unfamiliar place, proudly making her way through her first school month ever. Another month later everybody knows about her feelings towards the boy. Completely innocent and socially inexperienced – even for her age – she shares with the other girls practically everything, including the small poem she dedicated to him. Soon most of the class starts snickering behind her back. Things get even worse when the news spreads and a good half of the school gets involved. Suddenly it becomes hip to make jokes about “ugly fat” Stella, and tease her girlfriend’s brother about the “love of his life” – as the poem read. The tall, blond, good looking boy, a heartthrob of every girl in school, gets pretty mad by all the clownish scenarios his classmates keep recreating about him and his sister’s friend. Stella’s attempts to get closer to him before and after school, or during lunch only fuel the mockery. But things get really out of control when one morning the students are greeted by graffiti on the fence near the entrance showing two locked hearts with both Stella’s and the boy’s initials underneath, and the inscription Beauty and the Beast. Outraged, the subject of Stella’s affection decides to strike back. He persuades his sister to ask Stella over to their home for a play date. Stella enthusiastically accepts, hoping to see the brother and even hold hands with him in sharing the pain from the insults of their classmates. Shortly after she arrives he shows up and, exactly as she has expected, invites her to spend some time with him, urging his sister to leave them alone. But instead of sitting down and talking about their relationship he proposes a game. Actually it’s a surprise photograph of her he wants to take. Without further explanations he covers her eyes with a blindfold and helps her out of the living room. In the back yard he poses her somewhere and tells her not to take off the blindfold until he says so. Then he starts asking her to take a step or two back and forth for the perfect position. Trembling with sweet expectation Stella follows his instructions. Suddenly at one of his commands she stops feeling the ground underneath. Her horrified cry and swinging arms don’t help much. Having completely lost her balance she reels backwards and heavily falls into what turns out to be the swimming pool. Petrified by the shock she can barely make a sound. All she does is flap her limbs in a desperate grasp for air.

The next day everything at school starts as usual, with the exception of Stella’s running nose. She has easily forgiven her friend for letting her fall into the pool, especially since he deeply and honestly apologized – even though the goal of the game was actually never revealed. But things start changing at the very first break. Stella can’t help noticing how quite a few of the students start laughing when they see her, trying to hide some paper once she gets closer. This continues during the lunch break as well, and probably would have lasted the whole day if one of her classmates doesn’t mercifully show her the photograph of her with spread legs and arms exactly while falling into the swimming pool, taken and distributed by her beau. Never before in her young life has Stella felt such an excruciating pain. As days pass by, it turns out to be a long-lasting one as well. To no avail gets the brother reprimanded, and Stella moved to another school. Only several months after the incident can she look at herself in the mirror again, without jittering and getting panic attacks. Gradually she gets used to what she sees there, and accepts it, even though she doesn’t like it that much. Her legs are a little short for her torso, her behind too heavy, and those long arms look so flaccid…

Getting out of that horrible experience Stella rediscovers herself and her body. From now on she will probably have many encounters with boys and, later, men, and her new knowledge about who she is and how she looks will make her aspirations more achievable. Within these several months Stella manages to adapt to the world and become stronger. She abandons the dreams of the loveliest lawn next to the clearest lake; she understands that she will never reach it. But the small pebbled parcel by the brook will make her way happier, because some day it can be truly hers – as long as she doesn’t forget what she wants, and keeps adapting.

Humans have developed an extremely high ability to adapt themselves to their goals, as well as adjust their goals to their capabilities, always with a slight superiority of the former over the latter – like our gait that makes human body slightly tilted forwards. However, the processes of adaptation and adjustment often force the pendulum of our perception of reality to swing into the range of dramatic changes, which not everyone is capable to endure. As with evolution, it is not the strongest or the fittest, but the most flexible who succeed. There is only one way to reach the highest possible degree of flexibility: action. 

© 2010 Peter Budevski

Throughout its contradictory, meandering development psychology has invariably been devoted to one major goal: explaining the bond between human nature and human behavior, or in other words, our inner content and its outer display.  The premise that human actions are integrally related to their context is what makes the science of psychology possible. The context of the action explains its true purpose, and the action itself reveals the essence of the context from which it originates. To this day man considers this formula as the gateway to gaining a better idea of who he is and what his intentions are.

Stanislavski doesn’t make an exception. He takes this interdependence as the basis of his system, and develops it further by focusing his work on the ultimate role of action as both a stimulator to the inner life of the actor and an indicator of the inner life of the character. He defines action as an integral and purposeful process of accomplishing a certain goal in a constant interaction with the circumstances, conducted in a unique way in time and space. This notion allows him to use action as a bridge for actors to grasp their roles in depth and create truthful and emotionally charged performances.

Even though he stops short of expanding his research over action in everyday life, his discoveries reach a point that goes above and beyond acting as a form of art. Stanislavski advises that the path to fully experiencing the inner life of the character starts with executing the simple physical actions the character would perform in a particular situation. The idea here is that the unforced recreation of the physical conduct of the imagined individual would stir within the actor a genuine familiarity towards the character. The value of this approach from the point of view of real-life human behavior lies in emphasizing the importance of simple acts in the course of comprehending the person’s bigger agenda. According to Stanislavski human actions are strongly related to each other by cause and effect, thus forming a sequence which winds like a thread through our entire individual existence. He calls it the through line of action – the bright red line that dominates our development.

This marks the next stage of his path toward the character; it rises over the small acts and introduces a more complicated part of action: the decision-making process. The suggested bits of action grow larger, and the dilemmas become harder to solve. In order to empower the actor in justifying the choices the character makes, Stanislavski introduces the objective – the anticipatory, desired, and oncoming action plan, a crucial prerequisite of any conscious action. All conscious acts we perform, Stanislavski argues, are guided by objectives which, in their aggregation within the stretch of a lifetime form the super-objective of the individual.  As with so many of Stanislavski’s other principles the value of this one significantly exceeds the prescription of a practitioner. It exposes the essence of human nature by delving into its innermost layers—that is, our desires. Pondering somebody’s objectives makes that person accessible not only on a rational level, but on an emotional level as well, since we all, actors on the stage of life, have if not similar desires, at least a similar urge in getting what we want from life. The question “What do I want?” followed by “What am I doing?”, “Why am I doing it?” and “How am I doing it?” are the first to be answered by the actor on behalf of the character. They also represent the most efficient, if not the only true means toward understanding human behavior in general, because they make us connect with the very essence of our drives, and in a scenic way at that: they prompt us to watch in our mind’s eye instead of hear, guess, or read about.

For its part the overall notion of the crucial role of action that both accrues from and reveals the character allows Stanislavski to unify the parameters of human behavior around action, and explain them through the prism of their relation to it. Up to now the science of acting considers infrangible terms like attention, circumstance, situation, event, tempo-rhythm, sense memory, emotion memory, and imagination, because all of their practical definitions are related to action. This elevates his theory to that of an integrated and holistic system, which can only be enriched and reconfirmed by the newly discovered isms Stanislavski talks about later in his life (A Tribute…).

Yet as important a role as action has in his work, it is not what this great director and theoretician considers the ultimate resort to understanding and recreating human behavior. The altar he bows to is a significantly more obscure, vaguer entity: our subconscious. For Stanislavski action is what the stage is for the true actor: an important medium, but not the target itself. As with any other innovator in art he aims at the source of the deep, ceaseless inspiration, which you can’t set up a manual for.  Action is the closest Stanislavski can get to rationally explaining human behavior. It is the foremost outpost, the pier overlooking the vast ocean of the subconscious.

Stanislavski’s conviction that the subconscious is the ultimate source for the actor’s creativity actually means that he believed in man’s ability to pull out of his inner depths, and to genuinely experience the passions of any other person. This premise is of extreme importance not only for actors. It opens the door to the exploration of human nature as a collection of identical individual qualities (inner circumstances) engaged in unique interrelations (hierarchies). Surely each and every one of us is a unique being, but our uniqueness lies mostly in the arrangement of our characteristic features – both inborn and contracted, all of which can form myriad combinations. The case that many of these features are out of the reach of our consciousness doesn’t make them non-existent. They are part of our nature, but since they don’t influence our behavior in any way, they remain inner facts. Yet in the setting of an outstanding outer situation, or through consistent training they can become accessible to our consciousness, i.e. become circumstances. This is exactly what delving into the subconscious means. What results from this process – the inspiration, that Stanislavski loves so much to talk about, is an immediate product of the discovery of the unsuspected powers we have in our possession. The flow of fresh facts about ourselves that springs to life from the depths of our subconscious fills us with the awareness that we are worth much more than we have shown so far. The newly found self-confidence facilitates our access to those facts even further. No wonder that man has created God in his own image – the idea of the omnipotent and omnipresent spirit is incorporated in all humans, the difference being that we have buried an enormous part of our godlike features deep inside us, hidden from all, and mostly from ourselves. In this regard the ultimate truth, which mankind has been seeking for generations through religion and philosophy is simply that we are all made of one and the same clay; but since the truth is not a truth unless you embrace it with your soul, there are people who don’t give up digging deeply until they find on a transcendental level that they bear the whole of humanity within themselves. “Holy men” – that’s what some would call them.

Jason doesn’t remember his parents. They died when he was still a toddler. He has been brought up by relatives. He didn’t have a parenting model he could look up to. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t have a good relationship with his two daughters either. He is not able to understand their world, and whenever his wife prompts him to intervene in matters regarding the eighteen year old twins he does it awkwardly, as if it’s not his kids he’s dealing with. Sometimes he overreacts and his shouts wake up the neighbors; other times – which looks even worse – he tries to hold hands with either of the girls and fix things by sharing his own irrelevant experience. Maybe that’s why neither of them doesn’t seem too shaken when he agrees to fly on a civil mission to Afghanistan. As a National Guard officer and a working engineer he is invited to join a crew for tracing out a road-bed in the southern part of the country in preparation for a major highway construction. The money is good, and since he would be absent for less than three months only, the family agrees to let him go.

At the end of the second month of his assignment the convoy finds itself in a mountainous area near an abandoned village. As they start setting up the camp the military guards alert of a possible hostile presence. It turns out to be just two teenage boys asking for food. Yet everybody is still suspicious. From the middle of the terrain Jason watches how the boys are being warned not to come any closer and advised to go home as quickly as possible. Through the falling darkness he spots the two tiny figures sinking into a dark tumble-down hut six hundred yards away, on the other side of the valley. Shortly before the break of dawn Jason finds himself six hundred yards from his camp, holding almost his entire weekly ration in one hand, and knocking on the hut’s bullet ridden door with the other. As the door opens he picks out the frail silhouettes of the boys pressed against the opposite wall, pointing two long crooks towards him. Unfazed, Jason steps inside and leaves the food on the table. Then without a word he turns around and gets out. A dozen steps into the field he looks back to see the boys standing in the door’s frame, eyeing him silently. It takes Jason a while before deciding to walk back and hand the grip of his dirk to the bigger boy. For the next thirty seconds the three of them stand still, looking at each other, the precious military knife in the boy’s hand. Ten minutes later Jason is assembling his tent, his brief absence having been noticed only by the two guards from the current shift, who don’t say anything. Another forty days or so, and Jason reunites with his wife and daughters.

Months after his encounter in the Afghan village he still can’t explain to himself what made him do what he did there. Even more inexplicable is the new way he now communicates with his girls. He is attentive and calm; his advice is assuring and respectful; his overall demeanor is self-confident, yet loving and warm. For the twins it feels like they’ve gotten a new version of their dad; for him it is as if he has found a heretofore unknown part of himself. It looks like his absence from home has something to do with the change. Or probably it was that chilly morning, or perhaps the night before to have served as a turning point in Jason’s self-perception as a parent.

What actually happened was that the unexpected and extremely strong and unfamiliar outer circumstances (the hungry alien boys, the rough and scary surroundings, the loneliness, and the memory of the dear and distant faces of his loved ones) stirred an overwhelming amount of compassion and warmth in Jason’s heart. Plucked out of his narrow circle and thrown into an environment of a life-and-death struggle, he faced occurrences that his arsenal of hitherto convenient, securely-checked and well-trusted qualities simply couldn’t handle. He could have stayed indifferent to the situation, or found in himself the motivation for a bold and humane reaction. The inner facts of his subconscious allowing him to level up to what was going on around him turned out to be within his reach. He transformed them into circumstances. The others remained numb; probably just the two guards who didn’t say anything got a little closer to activating some unknown qualities in their own possession. Later on, once Jason became aware of the totally new behavior he was capable of, he preserved the sense of the new qualities that have lead him to it, and let them determine his conduct further, this time in regards to the most sensitive part of his world – his daughters. It was the action he had executed in the small, almost abandoned village that prompted him to dig into his subconscious and find there inspiration for being a person he had never been before.

Stanislavski was right: it is action, and action alone, that brings up new layers of our hidden nature. It is action, and action alone, that raises us closer to God.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

In the process of deconstructing the working mechanism of our attention there’s a crucial question relating it to every aspect of our behavior: what determines the direction of our focus in the stretch of a certain amount of time? We constantly swap the objects of our attention; switch from the outer world to our inner self; change the degree of concentration. What logic does this ceaseless broken line follow?

The very notion of human nature being driven by its perception of reality (chapter I.1.) is based on the idea of our awareness of the facts about and around us (chapter II.2.). But humans are not computers; they simply don’t have the capacity to be occupied all the time with all the facts that concern them. In order to be able to process the incredible amount of information from within and outside of us our mind is constructed to work selectively based on the moment, i.e. it chooses the accordant level of our inner and outer hierarchies to reckon with.

A mother might love her child more than anything in the world; she easily might be ready to sacrifice her life for him. Yet after having put him to sleep in the other room she might as easily forget about being a mother, giving herself up to, let’s say the latest fashion trends in the new magazine. At this point she is far from acting upon her fundamental priorities. Her current behavior is constructed in accordance to low-key inner and outer circumstances – her need to indulge in the dream world of celebrities, and the quiet, peaceful environment that makes it possible.
 
How do we choose exactly which circumstances to build our current behavior on? What determines the pursued accordance between our self-perception and perception of the environment? If we are aware of our top inner and outer circumstances, why don’t we steadily organize our every activity around those circumstances? As complex as the answer of these fundamental questions might be, it has a simple starting point – the level of accordance depends on the amount of information one needs on a moment-to-moment basis to keep the balance between her self-perception and her perception of the environment. Once the baby is asleep the mother has overcome a significant outer circumstance – her baby’s needs – whose importance in her perception of the environment was determined by a leading inner circumstance – her maternal drive. It has been her self-perception of being first and foremost a mother that has made her meet first and foremost this exact challenge coming from the environment. But now she is tired. She allows this information (or fact) about herself to become a driving circumstance of her self-perception for the time being, since the environment no longer asks her to act as a mother. This creates a new imbalance with her perception of the environment. Her following actions are directed toward regaining her harmonious status quo with her surroundings, i.e. her comfort zone.

By eliminating the newly irrelevant outer circumstances she works on establishing a new level of accordance. She moves away from the door to her baby’s room and goes into the living room, where she turns off the home phone and puts her cell phone on vibration; then she opens the window slightly and turns on the small lamp next to the sofa; finally she pours herself a glass of juice, sits down and reaches for her magazine. The balance is restored.
 
Our self-perception is a dynamic combination of two dialectically related drives: our self-projection and our self-preservation. Each of them is built of circumstances arranged in a hierarchy of importance regarding our behavior. Both hierarchies constantly compete to become a driving force in our self-perception by catapulting at least one of their circumstances higher than any of the circumstances of its rival (chapter II.2.). The only way an inner circumstance can emerge out of its latent state and begin ruling over our behavior is to connect with a fact from our environment and establish a level of accordance. Even though being a mother could occupy the highest position in someone’s self-perception, once there is no outer fact this inner circumstance can relate to (since the baby is asleep in the other room), this someone would immediately be directed by another inner circumstance – say, that she is tired. This circumstance might not be as strong as its predecessor, the baby’s needs, and could relinquish its strength within a second: the mother would jump up from the couch at the very moment she hears the baby crying. Yet if the baby continues sleeping silently, her fatigue would easily find a partner fact (or facts) from the outside world: “There isn’t much to do, and I have a place to rest, and I have my magazine.” Therefore she can lie down, relax and browse through the articles and the photographs.

With the baby out of the picture the top circumstance of the mother’s self-projection drive loses its partner circumstance coming from the environment. Now her self-preservation drive takes a turn: it reminds her of how exhausted she actually is. But this is not necessarily the norm. What could have followed was her self-perception to be won over by another self-projection circumstance: were she not so tired she could have taken out the textbook for her upcoming classes in Spanish, for example. This act would be a further display of her self-projection. But for the time being it is her self-preservation that is stronger. Its power allows it to find a partner fact from the environment, establishing a new level of accordance. This way it rules her self-perception and determines her behavior.

How do both of our drives find outer facts? We are being bombarded by them ceaselessly throughout our lives; we don’t even walk among them – we swim in them. What our inner drives do is send our outer attention in search of relevant facts, the facts that can relate to them and help them establish a level of accordance. Further on, those facts already found by our outer attention shine through the windows of our senses (chapter V.2.) and illuminate our perception of reality, with our self-perception being the first to meet the light. Depending on the nature of the fact that gleams the brightest and the longest, it is either our self-projection or our self-preservation that, through our inner attention, turns it into a circumstance of our perception of the environment, connects with it, and thus starts influencing our behavior. Essentially this is a power battle between both drives, because whichever manages to engage an outer fact to build a level of accordance with one of its circumstances, and not the competitor’s, would take control over our behavior.

Once established, the level of accordance has its outcome. It represents a new conglomerate of outer facts (chapter V.6. ), eligible for the hunt performed by our two inner drives. In a plausible scenario the mother could fall asleep, and shortly afterwards be woken up by the baby’s crying. Depending on her self-perception there are two major choices she can make. She could rush into the kid’s room and do her best to comfort her son. In this case it would be her self-projection to promote the new outer fact into an outer circumstance, and begin determining her behavior. Yet in this emerging level of accordance her perception of the environment wouldn’t be the only affected party. The sudden crying has become a major outer circumstance, so it inevitably would exercise its reverse power over the mother’s self-perception. Since she has left her baby unattended, she would decide that she is a lousy mother, which would become the illuminated (or active) part of the way she sees herself at the moment. In another version she could as easily be a lousy mother, and let the baby cry, putting on her earplugs to not be disturbed any more. This version would be driven by her self-preservation, which would keep intact the established level of accordance between her exhaustion and the chance to rest in the living room. The new fact – the unrest of the baby, would not become a significant circumstance, and wouldn’t change the mother’s self-perception. In both options the fact coming from the environment strives to cause an impact (reverse power) on the mother’s self-perception. The strength of this impact depends on the degree to which the self-perception connects with the fact, or in other words, the strength and sustainability of the level of accordance the fact builds with one of the two inner drives.

The rationally and willfully chosen level of accordance lies in the very basis of our consistency. Let’s roll the mother’s evening back to the last minutes she is spending with her sleepy son. What if, no matter how strongly she thinks of herself first and foremost as a mother, she suddenly starts worrying about her husband being late from work, or today’s argument about the neighbor’s loud dog, or her broken nail. Her level of accordance would be irrelevant to what she is doing at the moment. The probability of her failing in her present activity would multiply by the minute. Her only weapon against it would be her attention – not only towards the baby’s needs, but to the processes going on within her as well.

Like outer attention, our inner attention also operates within three major circles: small, medium (useful) and large (harmful) (chapter V.1.). The small inner circle is as flickering a light as the small circle of our outer attention. It too flies from object to object, trying to make a connection between them. The only difference here is that our inner small circle operates with circumstances, not with material objects. The same comparison is valid for the useful and the harmful circles. Used in our outer attention they are spatial categories, while if applied to inner attention they deal with non-material entities called situations.

In the process of building and sustaining the pursued level of accordance the useful circle of our inner attention is actually the spot of light which the chosen, relevant facts from the outside world throw onto our perception system. We don’t allow an irrelevant outer occurrence or phenomenon from the harmful circle to muddle its boundaries. This is why we focus on each separate fact already passed through the stage of prehension, and direct the small circle of our inner attention to explore it and find its right place in the right hierarchy of circumstances. Only then our current level of accordance includes just the inner and outer circumstances it is supposed to be formed of, and is stable and resilient against any kind of distraction. As a result, we develop a behavior that not only reflects and expresses our self-perception, but is also capable of improvising: adequately assimilating all the new, unexpected facts appearing from our surroundings. Once her belated husband comes home, and the mother intends to comfort him, she has not only to redirect her outer attention from the baby to her man. She also has to stop viewing herself as a mother and become a friend and a lover. There is no way she can change her self-perception. However, once having focused on the things she likes and loves about her husband she would rather let them illuminate her inner necessity to feel like a real woman, her urge to be a subject of adoration, and her sexual drive. If she manages to keep these outer and inner circumstances the only occupants of her useful inner circle of attention she would achieve the desired level of accordance. Remaining steady in her overall priorities she would be completely immersed, happy and successful in following just one of them.

The method of deconstruction we apply in explaining the way we act works only if supported by the awareness of the polyphonic structure of human behavior. Isolating a separate path of events for the sake of clarity should go hand in hand with the notion that there are multiple other inner and outer processes developing simultaneously. The important point here is that all of them follow one and the same general logic, which is built on the struggle between our self-projection and self-protection drives, and the level of accordance their circumstances set up with the outer facts able to reach and illuminate them. This principle regards the level of extensive, horizontal development of our behavior. But it is equally valid on the intensive level. Our general perception of reality operates on numerous scales. The higher position a circumstance occupies in our inner or outer hierarchies, the stronger or the longer the impact by a fact coming from the environment should be in order to displace it. The changes our perception systems experience on a daily basis have little effect, if any at all, on our top inner or outer circumstances. We follow the broken line continuously, even if it often goes against our super priorities. This phenomenon doesn’t undermine these priorities. Sometimes it even injects them with additional power.

No surprise. Its name is Life.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

If outer attention communicates with the objects outside the windows, inner attention, being its alternative, deals with the images on the opposite wall (chapter V.3.). These images differ in kind. The products of our memory are essentially photographs – they hold literal impressions of our past. The ones reflecting our imagination would be more like sketches of dream images, or comic books. They combine familiar fragments into unfamiliar configurations, and bear the mark of our individuality. For their part, abstract realities would display themselves as abstract paintings – the kind of art deprived of any concrete form or literal contents. The coloring and the shapes wouldn’t be telling stories; they’d rather speak in proverbs and sayings. These canvases would manifest the synthesis of our revelations, the extraction of the valuable from the layers of many similar occasions.

The three noetic realities – of memory, imagination and abstraction – constitute our general perception of reality. As such they very rarely display themselves separately. They typically overlap and complement each other at almost every moment of our active life. The inner wall of the corridor appears more lined with collages than with separate images unitary in style.

In the manner the shadows from outside the windows fall on the opposite wall, our inner attention allows the objects of our outer attention to reach the relevant portion of our perception of reality.  Inner attention seldom operates in total isolation from the outer world. Most of the time it works in a close collaboration with our outer attention under the guidance of our self-perception. Let’s trace how exactly this occurs in real life.

For her thirteenth birthday Flynn is taken out by her grandfather who wants to buy her a “live” present. The old man knows well enough that it’s better if a pet is chosen by its future owner, than given away as a surprise. So both of them go to the big pet shop, where he lets Flynn browse through the cages and make up her mind.

What Flynn is going through is the stage of prehension. In an unknown world our self-perception directs our outer attention in search for facts, which would either satisfy us, or threaten us. Using our senses, both our self-projection and self-preservation drives (chapter II.1.) would pick the facts that relate to them, or, in other words, which are relevant to their hierarchies of circumstances, and dismiss the rest.

Flynn likes animals. Being near most of them has always excited her. She loves feeding and petting them, because by doing so she feels good, and maybe a little important (self-projection). Yet she is scared of big pets. They make her tense and insecure. So she quickly passes by the canine section in search of something more intriguing and close to her heart (self-preservation). In half an hour she narrows her quest. Under the patient eye of her grandfather she runs back and forth between the small isle with the turtles and the bird room. Her excited pace shows that she is pretty close to her final decision. It is the small tortoise with the red nose and the bright-yellow canary that she is choosing from.

Thus Flynn enters the phase of evaluation. Pertaining to our survival and welfare the facts chosen through prehension become eligible for further investigation, or evaluation. Our self-perception judges them according to their power of influence exactly over our survival and welfare, and arranges them as circumstances in the hierarchy of our perception of the environment. This process is part of our inner attention, because the new facts have to find their place in the abstract reality of our perception of the environment. In order to achieve this task our self-perception first uses our inner attention to revive the corresponding section of our perception of the environment. It is like illuminating the shelves in the dark cellar where the newly arrived wine of the same vintage rating is supposed to be stored. Then you just arrange the bottles – our self-perception executes the arrangement of the facts in between the already existing outer circumstances. It compares their strength with the strength of the rest, and places each of them on the spot of importance it deserves.

Flynn’s case is obviously not a matter of survival. Nevertheless her attention goes through evaluation with equal intensity. As an animal lover (self-perception) she first has to revive – or get the sense of – her specific preferences (perception of the environment). Then she tries to grade against those preferences the different facts representing each animal. She evaluates their cuteness, the care they need, the way they smell, the noise they make, which of her friends already has a pet like this, and so on. But her inner attention is not alone at work. As it happens most often to all of us, her evaluation process goes hand in hand with prehension: Flynn constantly double- and triple-checks the appearance of both animals, and feeds with the information her decision-making (or evaluation) process. Finally she points to the canary. It could be her love for singing as part of her self-perception, and hence the importance of sound as part of her perception of the environment, that has caused her choice. She carefully puts her arms around the golden bird cage, and happily leads her grandpa out of the store.

Flynn places the existence of the bright-yellow canary on a very important spot in her perception of the environment. Her whole day revolves around it now. She feeds it, cleans its cage, strokes and plays with it, listens to its songs, and often just watches its every move in wide-eyed adoration. Unfortunately a couple of weeks after she gets it she forgets to close the cage door and the bird escapes. It has obviously managed to fly out through the open window, and all efforts to find it are in vain. The next day the family finds a few scattered yellow feathers in the back yard. Some wild animal has taken by surprise the little singer. Now Flynn has to deal with the outcome of her initial decision – the one that prompted her to choose the canary as a birthday gift, and to wrap her world around its presence. 

The outcome of acting upon a circumstance from the outer world always “fathers” a conglomerate of new facts, which differ from its “parent” in a very significant point: some of these facts regard not the environment, but us, because we have willingly participated in their creation. It has been our decision, and the direction of our behavior that determined the specific outcome, i.e. the specific group of facts. Therefore, this group would mirror not only the environment but also our own efficiency, strengths and weaknesses. This opens more work for our self-perception. Certainly, it would again use our outer attention to process all the new facts through prehension, and after that our inner attention – to get the chosen ones through the stage of evaluation. But with this the job of inner attention won’t be finished. Together with recreating in complete detail the relevant section of our perception of the environment, our self-perception uses inner attention to evaluate its own relevancy, and then find the suitable spot for each of the new facts in the right hierarchy. This way these “second generation” circumstances enrich and update not only our perception of the environment but our self-perception as well.

Flynn, sensitive as she is, is crushed. She cries her eyes out in a dramatic reaction to the death of her pet. The loss of the canary immediately occupies the top spot in her perception of the environment. But this is not the only change. Her inner attention projects this outer circumstance onto her self-perception grid, creating a new important inner circumstance: Flynn not only admits her fault but finds herself unworthy of dealing with important matters such as looking after anybody, even if it is a small bird.

There is another characteristic that distinguishes the facts from the first and the second generation, and it is that the latter, unlike the former, already have a context, that relates them to the ones that have created them. As we know from math, every two dots can be connected in a straight line. Straight lines indicate direction; they establish trends. If you follow the line and it hits a third dot, you instantly make the link with the previous two, and understand its essence better, even before studying it. You know at least one of its qualities: the quality that unites its two predecessors. This unifying quality is already an abstract feature. With time there’ll be other facts aligning themselves along the straight line, strengthening the trend in our perception of reality. This means that we often pick as circumstances facts without studying them in detail, as long as one of their characteristic belongs to an established trend. (In a social context this could lead to profiling and prejudices; in the realm of the psychological – to complexes.)

Apparently Flynn’s anguish will persist for quite a while. The shock for her soft heart is too big to go away overnight. The straight line between the two dots – “I tried hard” and “I failed miserably” already cuts sharply through her daily routine. But her inner crisis could grow even worse. Since her self-perception is already topped by a negative circumstance, it is very possible that she starts selecting as circumstances other facts similar in essence. Once she, leaving for school, forgets her pen or ruler at home – as all kids do – the missing item might occupy a very high spot in her perception of the environment. She might not let this outer circumstance go for the rest of the day, this way easily allowing her inner attention to raise the circumstance of her negligence even higher in her self-perception, creating a dangerous, self-destructing trend. With time all similar facts down the road could be subject to the swarming effect (chapter III.4.), gathering around this trend, and causing a huge change in her self-perception, which may even become permanent. 

The process of establishing trends in selecting facts and converting them into circumstances might also use facts from our past, which our self-perception hasn’t instantaneously dealt with. Since they haven’t been subject to immediate interest they have sunk “unstirred” into our memory, becoming part of our general knowledge but completely unrelated to our behavior. At a certain point, triggered by a consecutive similar occurrence (the straight line), our self-perception directs our inner attention to reveal from among the facts of our memory the ones relevant to the current situation. These could be either facts about the outer world or about our own selves. Once retrieved, they update respectively our perception of the environment, or our self-perception, and become part of our experience.

A month later Flynn unexpectedly finds out that the canary’s escape wasn’t her fault. Her teary little sister tells their mother that it was her who left the cage door open, and then was too scared to confess. In less than a day Flynn is back on track to becoming the cheerful girl she used to be. Liberated from the main cause for her sense of inferiority, she begins to gain her self-confidence back. Forgetting the school rulers and erasers doesn’t seem that important any more. Her perceived negligence resigns its superior position in her self-perception hierarchy. Yet its place has to be taken by some other circumstances. What Flynn needs now is reassurance – a healing unguent for her inner wound. Her self-preservation drive obligingly provides her with the previously overlooked facts her friends have tried to console her with: her loyalty towards all of them, her consistency in going after her goals, her attention and love for her smaller sister. But the inner boost comes in the form of past facts too. Her self-perception unearths some memories which she has almost forgotten. Looking back at her negligence complex, Flynn wonders how she could not have thought of things like her attentive care to her cousin’s kitties at the annual family reunions, or the whole day from three years ago she devoted to her baby sister while her mom had a medical emergency. Returning to her experience is the final push that helps her fully overcome her crisis.

This is the basic route our inner attention follows. It could certainly include the selection of imaginary facts – equally important as the facts from our present and past. The examples might differ, but the mechanism stays completely the same. Also, in provision to the complicated nature and high number of the facts that cross our path, it ceaselessly overlaps the described stages of the operational cycle, jumping with a lightning speed back and forth to serve the cascade of new information that pours over us every moment of our lives. The faster it shuttles, the firmer our grasp on reality is.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

This post is a direct continuation of chapter V.4.

3. The Reality of the Abstract. Resorting to the past feeds our strength for dealing with the present, and directs us in shaping the future. “History teaches everything, including the future”, wrote Alphonse de Lamartine in the 19th century. This truth applies to individual human beings as well. It becomes possible because the past, through our memory, contains a very valuable asset: our experience. Along with the personal qualities we possess, experience is the most vigorous prerequisite to our development as humans. Providing us with the practical knowledge about making the right choices, it is our priceless life consultant. It gives us the grounds for comparison between what is now and what was then, thus advising us on our current decisions. Experience is our integrated remembrance about the outcome of our interaction with similar situations. It rarely derives from a single event. It is rather a lodgment of repeated trials with variable success, which, unlike our memory, we hold within close intellectual reach.

The basic difference between memory and experience is that memory contains the mere facts from our past, amorphous and irrelevant to the present, while experience groups them by similarity and looks for their meaning and influence beyond their specific occurrence. This way it transforms them into factors to our present behavior, or circumstances in our perception of reality. If memory is the base firmly attached to the ground of the specific, experience is the rocket, which is designed to freely roam the infinite space of summarization.

Imagination too uses our memory to outline the way we perceive ourselves and the environment. But in its relation to the past imagination rather performs consolidation, while experience executes the function of section. Imagination uses facts from the past and combines them as circumstances in new situations (chapter V.4.) Yet in its part experience extracts the similarities from among past situations, setting the path to the creation of a new kind of circumstance. In order to be applicable to the present these circumstances are not particular anymore; they appropriate a fresh feature called abstraction. Once they are completely stripped from their specificity they reach the level of categories.

Experience is not necessarily a direct contributor to our ability for abstract-thinking. Many of the categories we operate with don’t have a straight connection to our past. However, experience develops our insight, our predilection for extracting meaning from objects and phenomena above and beyond their immediate worth. It combines and unifies their qualities into abstract categories which relate in one way or another to the overall environment we live in. This way experience becomes the primary generator of our ability to create and operate with abstract realities.

Dan has just dropped his new toy behind one of the tall (for his height) kitchen cabinets. The problem is that narrow as it is, the cabinet is not wheeled, and Dan’s precious lead soldier has been stuck behind it for eternity. Fortunately Dan has spent the five years of his life observing different kinds of objects, including food. He knows from experience how slippery his hands can get when he sprays salad dressing on them. So after several failed attempts to free the captive soldier by pulling the stubborn piece of furniture away from the wall, he decides to smooth its path, and pours half a bottle of olive oil onto the linoleum in front of it.

Even though the success of this liberation strategy is questionable Dan definitely succeeds in liberating something else: the oil from its immediate purpose. Ignoring its other properties he turns the abstract quality of its slipperiness into a circumstance, which makes possible the non-standard bond between the floor, the cabinet and the oil itself. His subsequent trials only confirm his skill to operate with objects on a more abstract level. Soon the olive oil is being supplemented with liquid soap, then dish-washer fluid and at the end his father’s shaving cream, which only his mother’s appearance and her horrified shrieks prevents from being enriched with the gallon of motor oil stored in the garage.

Weirdly enough, his parents pull different abstract circumstances out of the situation created by Dan. His father gets mad about the wasted value of the materials involved, while his mom acts obsessed with the messiness they have created. But no punishment can stop Dan from pushing the limits of his intellectual development. Once familiar with lubricants, and comfortable with the abstract nature of qualities, he finds a new use for his knowledge.

Referring to the different ways his uncle talks to people’s faces, on one hand, and behind their backs, on the other, Dan suddenly starts calling him “oilyman”. Even though this act strains his relationship with the uncle even further it obviously strikes a chord among the rest of the family. The nickname tops the family pop chart for several weeks in a row, and gets Dan public acknowledgement for his notable naming abilities. A couple of years later Dan’s growth as an abstract thinker would return to this topic again, when he learns that “oilyman” could be substituted with “hypocrite”. But for him this is just a word change, since he has already gotten to the very essence of the definition. In another year or so he also reveals that the opposite of hypocrisy is called “integrity”, as well as the meaning of it. On his tenth birthday Dan is already quite comfortable with categories, and doesn’t need a material reminder to get to their essence. Far behind are the days when he, for example, had to recall the positioning of his room’s window every time he was supposed to distinguish left from right.

The lead soldier stuck behind the kitchen cabinet was just an episode of Dan’s self-introduction to the reality of the abstract. Can you imagine how many other occurrences Dan has had in his early life before becoming so well-grounded in the other side of the Moon? 

Abstraction is a result of philosophical summarization. The degree of summarization we are capable of determines the level of our intellectual development. Many primitive cultures have a vocabulary indicative of this notion. In the Arctic for instance some tribes haven’t had the word “snow”. Their language included a word for snow falling from the sky, snow fallen on the ground, etc., but not for snow as such. The summarization of the substance never took place. It wasn’t “extracted” from its concrete physical exhibitions into a more abstract category.  It remained trapped in the terms of its immediate material shapes.

The same measurement could be applied towards any individual, with the highest recognition given to the one able to connect in a coherent relation facts that seem irrelevant to each other in the eyes of the rest. All scientific discoveries in the history of mankind have been made by those who, accidentally or not, have found the common, mutually binding quality of certain abstract facts. Their talent in summarizing their experience in order to get to these facts, along with the ability to combine them as active circumstances in new, previously unknown configurations is what distinguishes these people as ensigns of human progress.

A classic example is the famous physical law of Archimedes who after discovering it ran naked into the street screaming “Eureka!”. This law states that a body immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. Archimedes was struck by the revelation while watching how the water in the bath began rising as he was dipping his body into it. Even though, as the legend says, the discovery process was quite spontaneous, it still followed a certain common logic. It included two obvious abstract facts – the water’s fluidity, valid for all liquids, and the mathematician’s own body mass – a characteristic of all material objects. It was his experience, as in any other sane person, that brought him to this level of abstraction. His next step though was an assumption of a genius: combining these two abstract facts with a third one – buoyant force, which to explain their mutual relation.

The value of the discovery is that it is a combination of circumstances on a very high level of philosophical summarization, applicable to all fluids and material objects. It is actually a situation created by nature itself. As such it represents an open structure: by adding to it new circumstances – specific qualities of different objects, it could be enriched and blended into endless combinations, thus having an endless number of applications. This principle is valid for every law of nature. It also stands in the very heart of the reality of the abstract.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

This post is a direct continuation of chapter V.3.

2. The Imaginary Reality. Imagine an ant crawling up your neck, or a lemon wedge being shoved into your mouth. Almost instantly you begin feeling the maddening tickle or the tart taste, yet without having any contact with the irritant itself. By introducing to your inner attention a couple of imaginary facts your sense memory tricks your body into experiencing the sensation so that it starts reacting “in real”.

In our everyday lives we make use of these “in real” reactions more often than one might think. We frequently smile, laugh, chuckle, puff, frown, sigh, mug or nod in complete dissonance with our inner arrangement. We present, or show, or deliver, or lie about some make-believe state or condition, without practically having or going through it at all. In other words, we perform almost all the time. It is our tribute to the norms of communication with other humans, even though – as the following example would show – sometimes we go beyond that. Motive doesn’t matter. The important point here is that in order to be persuasive in our demonstration of what we are undergoing we have to get as close to experiencing it as we can. We trick ourselves as much as possible, so that our current behavior becomes indistinguishable from the one we are trying to recreate.

How do we achieve that? – By selecting currently non-existent facts about the world and ourselves, and, through our sense memory giving them the power of circumstances. Thus we allow our behavior to be influenced by them, and reach the inner state we target. This kind of behavior can be brought back to life from our past, or “borrowed” from what we have seen. Or, it can have an imaginary source, never seen before and completely invented by us. But how can our sense memory recreate a reality that is not part of our past and practically hasn’t happened to (or been witnessed by) us at all? If not the sense memory, what feeds our imagination?

Say you are at work but suddenly you receive an unexpected call from your spouse. She desperately needs your help, and urges you to take the rest of the day off. You’ve been around your boss long enough to be sure that he wouldn’t honor your reasoning. If you are really determined, and you are a slicker you might come up with an excuse as old as humanity: you are sick. So you enter the boss’s office playing out the symptoms of a cold or a fever. You apologize in a hoarse voice, but before continuing you have to overcome the cough first, yet not being able to stop wiping your running nose while holding your chest in pain with the other hand, and so on. You’ve already gone through this kind of sickness in the past, so for your performance you’ll be directly using your sense memory. It is also equally possible that before knocking on the door you decide that today you are struck by a more serious illness, which in reality you haven’t suffered from so far. In this case you’ll have to rely on recreating the symptoms you’ve only witnessed in others. Your visual memory will obligingly provide you with the kind of behavior typical for an infected person of your choice.

But if you are desperate enough to go to the extreme you might come up with some exotic kind of pain, which has been labeled as the next plague but which nobody has yet witnessed. Think of the health alerts society periodically gets. In this case, in order to securely avoid detection you might want to add to your sick person’s behavior an imaginary twist, a symptom that others are unfamiliar with, yet that is quite impressive and totally believable. This is already the stage of exploration of the imaginary. And if you are a good actor, within two hours everyone will talk about the plague and express sympathy for you, and you’ll be compassionately let go for the rest of the week.

Your display of imagination has earned you an enviable victory over your boss’s lack of empathy. However, your inspiration has a simple source that you only made easily accessible. The imaginary reality which your inner attention evoked and you applied to your behavior was entirely rooted in your sense memory even though you’ve never experienced it before. The difference was not in the object of your inner attention but in the way you used it.  You delved into your past looking for memories of familiar illnesses but instead of just embodying your recollections you deconstructed them, and then reassembled the parts in a free and effective manner: the cough accompanied by shortness of breath turned into stridors, the shivering shoulders made your helplessly flaccid arms tremble in convulsions, and your fast blinking eyes all but assured everyone around that it was a matter of seconds before you passed out.

When we use our imagination we still follow our experience; we just liberate it from the weight of its logic and consecution. We carefully extract facts from our past and rearrange them in a free and unrelated to any previous occurrence hierarchy. These facts become a combination of circumstances which has a new, totally different and unexpected message. Imagination is our ability to make a selection of past facts and include them in our perception of reality in a creative and unconventional, yet meaningful way.

Creating imaginary realities is a process which may or may not stop at the door of visible behavior. We can focus our inner attention on picking up facts and using them to build whimsical structures in complete isolation from the environment. But – as in the above example – we can also let our imagination be part of the communication with our surroundings. Whether it is directed inwards or connects with what is outside of us, our imagination unfailingly works in the same manner.

Let’s explore the kind of human activity which requires imagination most – art creation, and more specifically, acting. Actors behave unconditionally in a conditional environment. This means that they refer to and often communicate with people and objects which don’t exist. They have to imagine the entity of their interaction. Yet their pattern of achieving that virtually doesn’t differ from the pattern of the rest of us: from among the description of the unfamiliar object they choose familiar features, and focus their inner attention on them. Their sense memory provides them with the separate sensations they have had in communicating with those features in the past – the same way we got the sensations from our ant or lemon wedge. But since their imaginary object/partner/environment is presumably more complex, those separate sensations have to be interwoven together in an original manner relevant to their imaginary source. What inevitably follows is that this combination of sensations (hierarchy of circumstances) draws the actors into a concrete and emotionally charged attitude which they act upon. This way the degree of strangeness of the previously unknown entity doesn’t really matter. It could be something never seen or heard before: a crystal cave, an underwater castle, a flying carpet, a hobbit, a speaking egg, a tin man. All of them have familiar qualities which can stir powerful sensations and raise their tangibility to the point of eliciting an utterly unconditional sentiment.

The ease with which we are able to imagine non-existent material articles is derivative to the simple way in which we perceive the real ones around us. We rarely turn into circumstances all facts characterizing an object; we rather pick the features which stir the biggest interest, or impose the greatest challenge, and build our attitude on them. The rest never make it to the level of factors (circumstances). If we are asked to share our impressions about a wall we are standing by – a tall, thick, red brick wall with barbed wire on top and chipped plaster corners, bearing a washed out graffiti mural, and dotted with holes, we would surely award it with just one or two adjectives, which very possibly won’t even reflect its most specific features. For some the wall will be just tall, for others – thick and red, for still others – a tilted ugly structure, a prison wall, a piece of history, etc. Barely two people out of hundreds will share matching views about it.

The selection of the important facts depends on what really matters to us at a particular moment. It is our self-perception in its relation with our perception of the environment, which determines what qualities of the surrounding objects are most important to our intentions. Creating imaginary realities works the same way. Depending on our motives we combine into an invented situation only those facts which seem significant to us. They could be just a few – their number far from sufficient for a detailed description of the reality in our heads. But if they are vivid and exciting to us they would serve as a widely open gate to the made-up land which might absorb us completely.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

If exercising outer attention is like walking down a corridor and receiving sensations from what is outside of its windows (chapter V.2.), our inner attention could be compared to turning to the opposite wall and communicating with the photographs, drawings, and paintings hung on it.

Inner attention is the ability of the mind to create or recreate non-material realities, and analyze the incoming information. The realities brought to life by our inner attention fall into one of the following three basic categories: the past, which we revive through our memory; the imaginary, invented by our imagination; and the abstract – a product of our experience. These three categories overlap continuously; the landscape of the past is interspersed with the shadows of the fictional, and abstract ideas often dwell in memories of physical structures. Yet in their core essence these realities differ significantly from each other. In order to achieve a clear explanation of the working mechanism of inner attention, we first need to explore each one of them in detail.

1. The Past. Regarding their origin both the imaginary and the abstract stem from the memory of our own past. The concrete sensations about what we’ve already experienced are the first our inner attention learns to dig into. Only afterward, based on whatever has been “dug out”, do we become capable of imagining or thinking in abstract categories.

Sense memory is the master of ceremonies in the process of remembering. It is our priceless bridge to the land of “before”. Without it we would be completely deprived of the opportunity to reach any occurrence of the past. By recovering vividly the sensations we’ve experienced in encountering a certain situation, sense memory actually leads us into recreating many of the circumstances of this situation – sometimes to the smallest details. In regards to this process we are all artists. We might not be able to express what we recall: to paint our inner visions like a painter, or describe any of our sensations like a writer or a poet. Yet by bringing back to life what our senses have stored in memory our inner attention can reproduce equally strong and impressive realities. Who hasn’t had the occasion after smelling a forgotten bottle of perfume, or hearing an old song, or coming across a dusty toy in the attic to be directly “catapulted” to a past reality where everything seems unquestionably real? It is our sense memory that not only restores the familiar sensation from another time, but opens up a tunnel in our present through which we, like Alice, abyss onto another earth.

In his “Remembrance of Things Past” Marcel Proust remarkably describes a flashback he experienced, starting with a bite of a little cake soaked in a spoon of tea. The taste of the madeleine, as he calls it, suddenly restored a recollection of a scene from his childhood in a town he hadn’t visited ever since, where on Sunday mornings his aunt used to give him the same treat dipping it first in her tea. This unexpectedly familiar sensation unlocked a door in his memory through which a complete reminiscence of the town and his time there rushed in. “And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers […] immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre […]; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. […] In that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.”

Certainly for most of the time we don’t recover our past by accident; we use our will-power to get to a certain moment of what we have already experienced. But the mechanism by which we do it stays the same. It is our sense memory that does the job. The better it works, the easier our access to what has happened is.
 
It takes Natalie almost a week to recover from one of the biggest shocks of her life… The car robbery happened on a small road in the countryside. The man pretended to be hitchhiking, so she stopped her car, but as he approached she had second thoughts and was about to take off when he blocked her way. Jumping to her side he tried to force the door open, and then started banging wildly on the window with a stone, finally smashing it into pieces. From the next minute or so the horrified Natalie remembers just brief unrelated fragments: the man taking her keys out of the ignition, snatching her purse, leaning over and rummaging through the big bag on the passenger’s seat, then – or was it before that – pulling her head back and running his fingers through her hair and across her neck and chest.

Her next recollection is of his dark figure sinking into the woods, and the squeaking noise of car brakes behind her seconds later. Together with the man’s sharp stench of barn sullage lingering in the car for hours, this is all her memory has stored from the incident. Not a face, not even a specific feature or mark. “Pretty insufficient”, is the conclusion of the investigators. After failing to retrieve any fingerprints of the intruder they relied on the help of the victim who turned out to be too scared to remember his face and create a police sketch.

But once the shock is gone Natalie’s horror starts transforming into anger: anger toward the criminal, toward the stupid trip she took, but mostly toward her own fear and helplessness. She decides to do everything in her power to help the police with the investigation.

In an effort to restore her memory of the mugger’s face she asks her husband to go with her back to the crime scene. They both agree that this kind of reaction to what happened will work best for her recovery. With him by her side Natalie visits the roadside spot. Yet her memory remains completely numb. She suggests they go back in the late afternoon – the time when the actual attack occurred. Meanwhile she even rearranges the car’s interior the way it used to be. But the second attempt doesn’t produce better results. Natalie is on the verge of a new crisis. She feels that her inability to give the decisive push to the investigation makes her almost deserving of what has happened to her.

To settle her down Natalie’s husband persuades her to make a last attempt the following afternoon. Subjecting herself to the final challenge Natalie spends the night hectically writing down in extreme detail all she can remember, even though the attacker’s face remains completely hidden from her memory. The next day at dusk they visit the spot for the third time. Natalie stops the car and clutching yesterday’s notes closes her eyes. Her husband quietly gets out leaving her alone with her painful recollections. Suddenly, less than a minute later a loud bang on the window makes her jump in her seat. Mortified she leans back while the bangs continue for another couple of seconds. Then someone opens the door and a horrific stink fills the car as the hooded figure reaches for her purse. As Natalie finally gains the strength to start screaming, the man stops abruptly and reveals his face. It is her husband, who has re-enacted the robbery preparing himself as carefully as he possibly could. He has even recreated the criminal’s stench by putting on an old sack he has found the day before in an animal shed nearby, soiled with dirt and manure – just so he could revive as many circumstances from the attack as possible.

The shock works. Mere seconds after getting over it in a sudden flashback Natalie recalls the face she’s been desperately trying to recover all these days – up to the very last feature.
 
Taking the risk of returning Natalie back to her nightmare, her husband has jump-started her sense memory by provoking a flare up of a situation similar to the one in question. Her inner defense had protected her sanity by shutting out the details of a destructive experience. However, by going willingly against her own self-preservation instinct Natalie – with the help of her husband – has achieved something more significant: the restoration of her self-confidence.

We are never able to recreate our record in full detail. But whatever occurrence we are looking for has always a certain sensation attached to it, which we pull like a string of a bell. If the string doesn’t break, the porter of our memory sets the door ajar, and grants us a peak to the exposition of “things past”.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

Outer attention is the ability of the mind to direct the senses toward certain parts of reality and analyze the incoming information. Imagine a long corridor with a row of windows on one side. As we walk past we experience different sensations from the environment beyond them. We can see, smell, feel, hear, and even taste whatever objects exist on the other side. Sometimes what we come in contact with is interesting enough to make us stop and enjoy it for a while; other times the landscape is so boring that we quickly move on. Each of these windows represents a certain time frame of our communication with the outer world. All of them make the most exciting part of our days since they allow us to exercise our senses and cherish the life we are given in its entirety.

I still remember my first terrifying encounter with an existence without senses. Despite his contradictory legacy Jack London’s Wolf Larsen drew tears to my eyes when I first read about his final days. My teenager imagination was appalled by the possibility of being alive without any chance of knowing what’s going on within or outside of your body. I guess I’d been lucky to not have witnessed this condition in real life, yet the last chapters of “The Sea Wolf” haunted me for a long time with the enormity of the described tragedy.

Certainly we are not able to seize all of the occurrences outside the windows. Some of them just escape our notice. But what we capture isn’t equally appreciated either. We automatically dismiss most of it as irrelevant to our current business. We grade the rest since those stimulants differ in their significance to us. As a result some of them barely leave an impression, while others get the lion’s share of our attention and stay with us even after we pass the window they’ve come from. We might see a branch of ripe peaches waving at us from outside, but instead of reaching for a fruit keep moving forward in search of a familiar voice, or a favorite sight.

How does the process of selection and arrangement of our sensations work? Without a doubt, research is the initial step. In order to rate the information, we have to first receive it. We enclose the objects of interest in our useful circle of attention (chapter V. 1.) and with the help of our senses squeeze out whatever we want to know about them. The more challenging or complex the object is, the more time and energy we need to grasp its appearance. This stage is called prehension. Prehension is apprehension (or understanding) by the senses (Merriam-Webster); it is the impassive examination of the object’s specific properties that may or may not be of any use to our cause. Only after prehension can we proceed with our trial to make sense out of the obtained information.

Each new bit of information (or fact), watching for us from beyond every new window, competes to cast its influence upon us. Once we are aware of it, the information is passed to a court which determines its importance. The major judge in the courtroom is our self-perception. Since it determines what realms of the outer world we are to be interested in, it places the fact in wait into the corresponding spot of our perception of the environment. The placement of this fact in our outer perception’s hierarchy determines the degree to which it will weigh in on our behavior. This process is called evaluation. It represents the actual analysis of every single piece of information coming in from our environment, and effects the right arrangement of importance of the external information so that we can act efficiently in close communication with our surroundings. Prehension and evaluation represent the fundamental prerequisite of action. They determine its ultimate success.

What can prevent these interrelated processes from speedy contribution to our interests? Obviously, the answer here lies in the degree to which our attention is susceptible to distraction, on one hand, or bad judgment, on the other.
 
Nobody in the company can accuse Bob for being careless about his responsibilities. On the contrary: to many of his colleagues he seems too stiff and overly focused on his job. He is the last to show up and the first to leave any office celebrations; he never mingles with anyone after work; nobody has ever seen him in something else than in his black slacks, white shirt and tie, even at the occasional “casual Friday”. Yet these days carelessness is exactly what he risks being fired over, and inefficient attention is what he has to blame for the situation he has fallen into.

Everything starts with an interview he conducts with a prospective employee for the archive department he heads. She is a graduate from a high-profile college, and her credentials are brilliant. As a good professional Bob would be able to acknowledge that, if only he could get over the fact that she is a good-looking, blue-eyed blonde. Now all Bob thinks about during the conversation is the cheerful stir among the company jerks that her hiring would cause. They used to mock him for far less, and he knows, especially since he is single, what devastating consequences for him her presence in the department could bring.

Not wanting to become the joke of the year, Bob lets the candidate go, hiring another, far less qualified person instead. A couple of weeks later Bob signs a major contract with a computer firm for digitizing all the archives under his watch, currently representing several decades of data stored in dusty piles on the vast depository shelves. The nerd from the firm he meets with doesn’t get into too many details about the job. Actually he shouldn’t. In him Bob sees himself twenty years ago: energetic, ambitious and full of hope. He doesn’t want to scrutinize the offer, because this would put unnecessary pressure on the guy. Besides, Bob wants to play the cool, all-understanding senior business partner he never had. So he shakes the young fellow’s hand, takes the thin folder with the offer and gives him the advance check.

Next Monday Bob is called in for an urgent meeting with his boss – the owner of the company. In his office Bob learns that the firm he has hired is notorious for the bad service they provide, and is currently under investigation for fraud. Then, he is severely reprimanded for not hiring the blue-eyed blonde, whose graduate project has meanwhile received a prestigious award, and who in her acceptance speech has cited Bob’s company as an example of a short-sighted, sexist organization. Bob feels humiliated as well as scared for his job, especially since the owner’s son – the company’s new CEO, shows an inexplicably cold attitude towards him. He leaves the room in confusion and fear.

Actually there is a very good reason for the CEO’s attitude, even though today he and Bob met for the first time. A couple of days ago the guy got quite a rough treatment from Bob. Were Bob more attentive, he would have noticed the young man running across the lobby that morning, and seen his distinct outer resemblance to the old owner. Back then, having gotten to the elevator first, and lost in his thoughts, Bob didn’t make the effort to hold the door for him, instead letting it close just seconds before the poor fellow could reach it. This derogatory behavior obviously hasn’t passed unheeded, and now Bob has to reap what he has sown. 

What Bob endures is the consequences of the impediments he has put in front of his attention. He has let fear and prejudice distort the information about the female candidate, whose merits would be crystal clear to anyone with even lower intelligence. He has allowed his personal sympathies to stand in the way of a cool estimation of the contracting firm, acting against the established patterns he is actually quite familiar with. In both cases his evaluation process performed far more poorly than what one would expect, thus preventing the facts from getting their well-deserved place in his perception of the environment.

Last but not least, Bob has also made a critical mistake in his prehension during that morning two days ago. Not only did he fail to open his senses to a new fact worth noticing (the surprising appearance of the owner’s son in the building), but even trampled on the most common of common courtesies, neglecting to hold a door open for the person behind him.

Very often it is not our general life philosophy but poorly managed outer attention that makes our decisions inadequate to the ambitions we have and the status quo we maintain. Failing to keep our senses sharp enough and falling into the trap of prejudices, superstitions, or inner complexes can give us a distorted idea of the world and prevent significant outer facts from becoming strong and helpful circumstances in our perception of the environment.

© 2010 Peter Budevski