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

In describing how the actor’s attention works Konstantin Stanislavski comes up with a relative but extremely useful division of the space around us, through which we can distinguish the main areas of our outer attention, i.e. the attention we direct to the outer world. These areas are the ones we “light up” by directing our senses towards them. Calling them “circles of attention”, he arranges these areas in a hierarchy of importance to the person acting on stage, and gives each of them a very specific role in the successful fulfillment of her intentions. The valuable contribution of this approach is relating concentration of attention to action, the latter being the decisive factor in determining what share of our attention each of the objects around us receives.

Using this simple pattern we can easily draw a picture of the distribution of our outer attention in real life. There are three major circles of the attention we pay to the outside world. The first one is – to use the Stanislavski terminology – the small circle. It encloses a relatively tiny space, its boundaries determined by the size and number of objects that interest us at a particular moment. The more focused our interest towards the objects within the circle is, the more stable these boundaries are. If I’m putting on paper a story or an article, for as long as I write my small circle of attention will certainly be constituted by my notebook.

At a certain point I might decide to continue my story on the desktop computer. In this case I’ll have to distribute my attention between two objects: the keyboard and the monitor. Even though both of them are within my immediate reach, they are separated from each other, which means that I’ll be operating within two small circles. What lies between them: the pen, the wallet, the cell phone and the coffee mug, is not related to what I’m doing; hence those objects are out of my area of attention. If I’m painting a vase on a stand next to the window my attention will cover even more small circles. I’ll be absorbed with an equal intensity alternatively by the palette, the canvas, and the vase. If I’m watching a horse race, my attention will jump between my bet and the other racers, thus forming a whole series of small mobile circles. In all of these cases the sum of the small circles forms the second major circle of human attention: the medium circle. It could also be called the useful circle, because all the objects found in it contribute to the fulfillment of our intentions.

The small circles within the medium circle are arranged in a hierarchy of importance. Let’s imagine that you are negotiating your annual pay increase with the owners of the company you work for. As a valuable part of the upper management you are being invited to a personal meeting with the president and the vice-president as well as the accountant general. Even though you predominantly address the president, you keep an eye on the other two in the room, especially in critical moments, such as when you get down to the numbers. All three of your conversation partners are included in your medium circle of attention, but among them the president represents the small circle, which holds most weight.

Let’s explore further. If the meeting is being held in an office, could the whole of the office space be counted as your medium circle? What if a big fat fly buzzes around, or the wind coming in from the open window keeps ruffling the papers on the desk? The medium circle is never a certain space in its entirety. This is why the most efficient way of determining it is by establishing the small circles it is comprised of, which in their contents and arrangement to each other are derivatives of our purposeful action.

Further on, there comes the large circle. It is formed by every object within the reach of our senses. Defining it certainly isn’t a question of size or distance. It could include the noisy construction site across the street as well as the smell of fried fish across the corridor. Every single irritant which we might see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is part of our large circle of attention. We might also call it the harmful circle, because spreading our attention as far as our senses can go always serves as a distraction to what we are doing at the moment, because it is irrelevant to our current business.

The harmful circle of attention stalks us at every moment of our conscious lives. As Stanislavski points out, the best way of preserving our concentration is to become fully involved in our action, letting it absorb us emotionally and “warm us up from within”. But concentration comes with the ability not only to focus, but also to quickly distribute and redistribute the focus among the small circles, to develop an attention that is flexible and capable of multitasking. This requires the additional abilities to quickly and clearly prioritize, briskly switch the priorities based on change of circumstances, confidently build up a strong imaginary wall between the medium and the large circles, and last but not least, be ready to blow this wall apart once an occurrence relevant to our intentions appears beyond it.

For the last six months the parents of 15-year-old Kevin are being repeatedly summoned to their son’s school. First the homeroom teacher, then most of the others express concerns over Kevin’s poor grades. Things get even worse when the deputy principal suggests a visit to the doctor, and even a check-up for ADD. Devastated, a couple of days later the father shares this information with his brother, who lives less than 30 miles away, in the uplands. Oddly enough, once hearing about his nephew’s drama, Kevin’s uncle doesn’t make a single comment on the family’s problem; instead, after a few remarks about the weather and another beer he suggests that Kevin is sent to him for the upcoming winter vacation. “The doctor can wait”, the uncle insists. “Do not put the burden of your panic onto the kid’s shoulders; let him take his time, and relax, for God’s sake!” Kevin loves to visit his uncle’s family, and his tears over his father’s initial refusal finally work: the next weekend he is on his way to his uncle’s town.

As it turns out his time doesn’t pass chatting with his cousin in her room or daydreaming by the stove as he has expected. Instead, his uncle introduces him to an exciting new venture: duck hunting. Kevin is given a pair of new boots, a hunting suit and – wow! – a pump gun. Every morning both of them drive to the marshes near town, spread out the decoys and sink behind their blind. No matter whether they make a good bag or not, with each passing visit to the hunting grounds Kevin gets better in mastering the basics of the craft: operating the decoys, duck calling, helping his uncle setting up the blind or camouflaging their faces. Not wanting to miss anything the teenager develops a good taste for details. He makes sure to adjust the blind while his uncle is busy with the ammunition or the dog. Based on the weather conditions and wind direction his uncle tells him about he starts participating in deciding which spot is to be picked for the day. Every new flock enriches his knowledge of species, recognizing different birds on the wing according to their size and flight characteristics, and predicting where they would land. He even starts challenging his uncle in locating the biggest group of ducks in the fog only by listening to the noises they make.

Without even knowing it Kevin devotes his vacation to learning how to manage his attention. By unstringing decoys in the dark within the limited preparation time he learns how to focus completely in a small circle of attention; aiming his gun while trying to stay completely silent improves his ability to concentrate in his small circle even more; while watching the swimming or diving birds and choosing his target he perfects in quickly switching the small circles holding on to his medium one at the same time; by keeping an eye and an ear on new birds flying down without getting distracted by the bizarre clouds, the rain, or the sounds from other groups of hunters, he develops the ability to keep his medium circle flexible, and his large circle suppressed and outside his attention zone. He begins to excel in distributing his focus between following the direction of the wind by feeling it on his face and looking out for a new flock of ducks approaching from among the clumps of reed. By remembering the exact places of the calls or the different kinds of decoys in the trunk he even manages to cultivate his visual memory, and quickly bring it back to life upon necessity.

Three weeks later Kevin goes back to school. Even without the motivation of the hunting venture or the responsibility of being trusted by an adult his class results improve dramatically. No surprise – someone taught him how to use what he already had.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

The more integrated we are in society, the higher position our sense of morality occupies within the hierarchy of our self-perception. Being per se our signature under the contract with our community, our morality has the supreme power to elevate or sink any circumstance in our perception of the environment. The people from that poor neighborhood (chapter IV.1.) – no matter what their count was – would have acted differently, were their sense of morality strong enough to put the gangsters’ crime at the top of their personal perception of the environment.

The opposite relation, though, is also valid: the perturbations in our perception of the environment can significantly influence the position of our morality in our self-perception hierarchy. As Karl Marx has said, people’s “social being determines their consciousness”. Once our self-preservation drive is triggered due to misfortunes, we are more willing to abandon some of the behavioral codes comprising our morality. Since we often blame the community – or a certain part of it – for the situation we have gotten into (our turned-negative perception of the environment), we are willing to take action against it in order to restore our previous status. Therefore we secure ourselves with a selective morality, justifying our deeds as necessary and right. Deprived from some of its “ingredients” our “old” community-oriented morality becomes a hollow form, a feeble circumstance in our self-projection hierarchy, which guides us only when we have to shield our new life philosophy from the others, and preserve the authority we have in front of them.

The phenomenon of disintegrating morality into separate parts is the closest we can get to introduce its very essence. The behavioral codes mentioned above are nothing more (or less) than separate circumstances constituting our sense of morals. Morality is not a monolithic term; it is an entirely new conglomerate of circumstances within the conglomerate of circumstances forming our self-perception. These circumstances are also bound in a dynamic relationship; they fight for supremacy too. You don’t have to go far to find an instance. “Honor your father and your mother” and “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife” are the first two frequently clashing notions that come to mind. Both are crucial parts of our moral system, occupying a very high position in its hierarchy. Yet, often some of us have to choose between them, obeying one and inevitably neglecting the other.

When Steven got kicked out of his job he barely suspected the scale of rough luck that had overtaken him. He still had his investments, his resume and his professional knowledge, all of which were impressive enough to keep him optimistic. He took his time fiddling around for a while, and only when his wife started talking about the impossibility of booking the same vacation package as last year’s,  he started shopping for a new job…

It is November already, and Steven is still unemployed. Long gone are the yacht, the mountain cabin and the plans for two week leisure time in Aspen. Since no one has taken interest in him, neither his experience nor his professional knowledge as an engineer seem so solid anymore. Then there are the investments, which have been almost completely wiped out by the general economic downfall. Feeling the uncomfortable tickle of panic Steven starts calling long forgotten classmates and colleagues from his first jobs whom until recently he used to consider completely out of his life. After the first three awkward sentences of reminding them who he is he asks for any job opportunity they might have to offer. Several of his acquaintances agree to meet him. With some of them he has to stay late at night enduring their drinking and their sleazy sex memories; to others he should do some small personal favors like writing an article about their achievements or introducing them to his influential friends… Of course, Steven wouldn’t humiliate himself with any of these chores if he weren’t in a dire, hopeless situation. But the worst part of his job-seeking nightmare starts when he has to give some insider information from the database of his former company. The friend who asks for it promises that Steven will be hired by the end of the fourth quarter. As for the information, he claims that this is an innocent inquiry conducted for purely statistic purposes. A desperate Steven continues to provide the guy with information well into the first quarter of the next year.

Pressed by the circumstances Steven has gone far beyond what his morality normally would allow him to do. Yet, he doesn’t feel guilty. His self-preservation drive has come up with a version of his morality according to which his new behavior seems totally acceptable. This version contains behavioral codes like “You shall not commit adultery”, but completely omits the immediately following “You shall not steal”, farcically substituting it with, say, “showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

A perception of the environment topped by negative circumstances always suggests leaning to a self-centered individual morality, because our self-preservation drive is put on the alert. The more permanent the negative circumstances in our perception of the environment are, the more inveterate our egotistic morality would be. The loss of the job can seem to blow up our world, but usually this is a temporary situation. It doesn’t stay as our top outer circumstance forever. One day we come back to our senses and to the larger picture of our life. But if our upbringing is accompanied by ceaseless threats and punishment we inevitably start viewing the environment as something evil. Unfortunately, due to the strength of the first impression on an innocent soul we can be haunted by this notion forever. As a consequence we completely reject the community morality; to us it is a system of restrictive codes, whose acknowledgment means nothing but humiliating obedience. Instead, we develop an alternative, self-preserving morality that could last much longer than those temporary downturns in our morality caused by crises later in our lives. This is why smart parents educate their children by means of persuasion (as opposed to compulsion), thus appealing to their self-projection. They do everything to kindle the children’s instinct for socializing, which turns following community morality into a natural part of the self-expression of the youngsters. In their little minds the common interest ceases to compete with their own, and what to others looks like encroachment on individuality, to them becomes a rewarding experience.

As for adults, morality is independent of all outer cataclysms and occupies an immutable high position only in the self-perception of people who have “the general idea” (chapter IV.4.). Driven by high ideals and principles, they have the guts to face their own role and responsibility in the negative turn of their lives.

There is a very strong interdependence between self-projection and self-preservation (chapter II.2.). Every incoming bit of outer information activates one of these drives and disables the other. The moral codes we have to follow are not an exception of this rule. Depending on its essence , every incorporeal, spiritual demand which community imposes on its members, from manners to political ideology to religion, either “clicks” with our self-projection and mutes our self-preservation, or limits our self-projection, thus triggering our self-preservation. The results form two completely opposite trends. Self-projection produces individual morality that connects with the community; the groups which the person joins are not antagonistic but an integral part of a larger society; this individual believes in common morality and enriches its power through her own contributions. When triggered, self-preservation alienates the person from her community; even when its moral values happen to be worthy, once imposed by force they are met with mistrust and are never embraced; her individual morality defines itself mainly through the extent to which it opposes the larger morality of the community.

Developing and following a sense of morality in accordance to the commonly acknowledged values of humanity as a whole is an investment, the dividends from which arrive only if we don’t expect them. If we do, we violate the very core of morality. Being the reason for thinking and behaving unselfishly, morality takes its revenge when we start playing around with it and adjusting it to our own ends. Remember King Lear?

© 2010 Peter Budevski

A very common deviation from the harmonious model of individual moral development is the opposite syndrome to the one described in the previous chapter: that of the deflated ego. It occurs simply because in the process of discovering our convergence with the rest of humanity we lose the grounds for our sense of uniqueness; we feel disappointed, defenseless, as well as overwhelmed by having to compete with everyone else. Why do I have to participate in this stupid sack race, instead of just enjoying the birthday cake? Why should I keep kicking the piñata, since Carl is stronger and will smash it in a single hit, making my efforts look ridiculous? Why did I have to come to this party at all?! I’ll definitely skip the next one!

The drop of self-confidence, of course, can happen at any stage of our lives, due to any series of unfortunate events. The result is losing (or not being able to build at all) what Anton Chekhov calls “the general idea”. We stop trusting our judgment, which makes us pliant to random outer influences. We start floating around like a boat without sails. Chekhov’s description concludes the grim scenario: “When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external impressions, a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound.”

If not cured on time, the fear of “a bad cold” triggers our self-preservation drive, and we develop a defensive moral position devoted entirely to justify our isolation. This means, of course, front-loading our perception of the environment with non-existent negative (malicious) circumstances (chapter III.4.). We fear and hate the others, and our self-projection gets entangled in planning irrelevant and ungrounded actions against them.

Shortly after returning from boot camp Andrew goes back to continue his military training. In six months he is sent overseas. He gets a discharge two years later when his daughter is almost three. He finally marries his girlfriend, and the young family moves to the big city where Andrew finds a job as a salesperson. They live together for less than half a year. Both of them have changed, and no one is able to restore the harmony between them, let alone revive the passion, which brought them together in their teens. Taking the child with her, Andrew’s wife returns to her mother. Andrew is left alone. He knows that his military service has changed him. Yet he feels that he has become more responsible, more organized and more reliable than the boy he was just a couple of years ago. That’s why he doesn’t have any explanation on this sudden turn of events, except that the world has turned against him, after all the sacrifices he has made for the people he loved.

After getting into several fights with his customers Andrew gets fired. In another couple of months even his former fellow-soldiers can’t recognize him. His occasional drinking and smoking weed turns into a regular habit, and he cuts off almost all of his ties with his past. His new contacts are the occasional encounters with some other lost souls in the near-by bar.

Certainly, this is just the initial swing of the pendulum. Unless clinically unsocial, a human needs the company of other humans. We are herd animals, and actually to remain in a position of isolation is not the choice which most of us would make. Sooner or later we get involved in a certain community, and before we know it we appropriate its collective view on life, and its morality (Harry’s story). The general motive here is to restore the balance (equilibrium) between our self-perception and our perception of the environment. This is a very common process, and it goes through the following stages:
1. The community that accepts us becomes a leading circumstance of our perception of the environment.
2. The positive nature of this circumstance (again, chapter III.4.) induces a change in our self-perception. Since we strive to deserve the right to be part of a community, which we view as a remedy to our low self-esteem, we attempt to prove our merits. Our self-projecting drive is revived, and a positive circumstance takes the lead in our self-perception hierarchy.
3. We restore our self-confidence, which bonds us even more to our new group. Our new morality has little to do with what we believed in before.

The great Heinrich Heine has the perfect description of this kind of union:
Seldom did we know each other,
Seldom were you understood;
But our souls soon came together
When we met in filth and mud.
In other words, our morality crawls out of the self-preservation lair and climbs back onto the self-projection ladder, working on strengthening the bond with the new community.

It is uncertain if Andrew will find a social circle relevant to his potential. If he remains bitter to the world, the more plausible scenario is that he will start fiercely reversing his life, consciously going against the principles that have guided him before. People, who have fallen in the trap of self-pity and its twin sister -hatred to the world, are the ones who form, among others, religious sects. Sects are typical examples of communities, which help their members by just claiming spiritual superiority over the rest of humanity. It is not on accident that we often use the word “sect” when describing a group of people united in a non-productive way. What the founders of these groups rely on is that the self-projection of people who are hurt or rejected by life is very pliable, able to be harnessed in antagonistic and hostile ventures.

The most graphic examples of choosing a community out of desperation or spiritual impasse are related – as one can imagine – to the most vulnerable members of humanity – children. The very first example that comes to mind at the beginning of the 21-st century is the child soldiers in Liberia, Sudan and Congo. In the least dramatic scenario these kids have grown up feeling desperate and without the most basic means for survival. They must have felt lucky to be saved from starvation, but what has turned them into the most loyal (and cruel) soldiers is the restoration of their dignity by entrusting them with a mission. With self-projection on the rise due to a clear new direction, their self-perception becomes inextricably bound up with their new community. Without any other outer influence the terribly twisted equilibrium between their self-perception and perception of the environment gets stronger and stronger, turning them into some of the most tragic symbols of our modern world.

On a larger scale, the sad effects of this kind of human integration are to be viewed everywhere. All philosophical theories, ideologies, doctrines, policies or behavioral patterns that in some way or another divide humanity are the results of the efforts of people or groups who feel threatened by others. It is amazing how many justifications mankind has come up with to excuse these divisions! Yet all of them can be traced to self-preservation. The power of the mob is founded on the force of terribly insecure people, whose moral development has stopped at a certain premature stage. On every stop there are others who share the same insufficiency. It’s just a matter of time and place for them to meet each other, and before long, the group is formed. Now they can go back to where the thundering train of humanity passes and scream out their right to exist. Not that anybody threatens them – but still… there might be owls disguised among those birds!

© 2010 Peter Budevski

We all cultivate the ability to distinguish “right” from “wrong”. It develops along with our growing up. As we get older, our interaction with the environment becomes more and more complex, enriching our knowledge about both the outer world and ourselves. The first accession of this knowledge is our self-awareness. At a certain early stage of our lives we discover that we are just an entity among many others, and that the world exists independently of us. Together with viewing ourselves as subjects of influence over the environment (our primary self-perception), we sensibly start perceiving ourselves also as objects of its power. Our sense of exclusiveness crashes, which jump-starts the process of identifying ourselves with the others. The circle closes, stirring in us the crucial notion of social interdependence and reciprocity. We grasp that our best behavioral choice is to do to others what we want them to do to us, and to not do to others what we don’t want done to us. This notion becomes a very important circumstance in our self-perception. It gives us the key to living in harmony with the environment. Gradually it evolves beyond our own interest, and becomes a lens through which we clearly see the true shape of any human act. This is when we can claim to have developed a sense of morality bordering on terms like responsibility, fairness, justice, and integrity, thus gaining our position of trustworthiness in the eyes of others.

Unfortunately, this whole development doesn’t reach its completion with every human being. Our maturing is often accompanied by factors detrimental to the formation of a personal morality, which can be proudly exposed to the world.

Generally, the “stumbling” occurs as we retain the sense of our entitlement to more rights over the environment than anyone else. This sediment dilutes our judgment on any moral issue since we give ourselves an unfair advantage over the rest of our community. The conflict here emerges from the need to put the common interest above our own – a requirement which we view as an encroachment on our individuality. Why should I care about waiting for the others to sit around the table, since I’m so hungry? Why do I have to hold hands with the rest of the family in a prayer before the meal, since my soup is getting cold? And why must I hold the spoon this way, and not that way, since that way is a lot more convenient? (Certainly, these examples regard more specific aspects of individual obligations to the community like behaving oneself, sharing spiritual rituals and demonstrating good manners, but at the end all of these boil down to the fundamental category of morality.)

If not cleared on time, the path to an objective, community-oriented morality gets completely clogged, and our development is redirected towards the creation of a self-serving morality, which will be harmful to us in the long run. When our self-projecting drive includes circumstances that neglect the interest of others, our self-projection is in constant danger of being opposed and stopped.

19-year old Andrew has been a prize student and graduates high school with a gold medal. He is also a great pitcher, and helped make his baseball team a regional champion. On top of that Andrew is handsome and enjoys the attention of every girl in town. He excels his friends in almost everything, which gives him a well-founded sense of superiority. He enjoys life, and feeling mature for his age, wants to grab more from it without delay.

Three months after his graduation he moves out with his girlfriend, despite the fact that she is still in high school, not to mention the fierce opposition from his parents and her divorced mother. After another couple of months just as their summer savings and credit cards get drained, she becomes pregnant. Andrew is too proud to ask for any help from his parents, but since he is still in no position to take care of two more people, he accepts the fact that his girlfriend must move back with her mom.

He continues to avoid any talk of marriage and keeps praying for two things: his parents to unblock his college fund, and a quick win at the fantasy baseball he plays online. Things get pretty rough when his father visits him and makes it clear that his support will take place after Andrew takes responsibility for the girl and his future child. Pressed by the circumstances Andrew makes the decision to enlist in the army. He does this more to hurt his mother and to play the victim than to achieve a stable, long-term solution for himself and the people dependent on him. Yet nobody stops him, and so Andrew has to pack his bags and jump into the unknown.

His final day in town he spends at his girlfriend’s home. It is all kisses, tears and assurances of eternal love. The next morning a tense, and a little over self-confident Andrew enters the boot camp. But the last thing the drill instructors want to see in any new recruit is excessive self-confidence. The jokes which Andrew cracks to the others during the introductory briefing don’t help either. For the next nine weeks Andrew is subjected to all the outrages known from the folklore of basic army training. For instance, he must check on the condition of his chemical gear by putting it on a little too often and running a mile or so in rugged terrain, and after that leave it behind while in the gas chamber, where he has to test his resistance to the tear gas by singing the Star Spangled Banner in a loud voice.

Having demonstrated his sense of superiority, or independence, from the very beginning, he receives little support from the others. This whole attitude stuns Andrew who so far has received only admiration or, in the worst case, friendly envy. One word in particular sticks into his head: “arrogant”, repeatedly screamed at him by one of his sergeants.

Probably it is too early for Andrew to reassess what drives him into this kind of situations. After all, the boot camp lasts for just a little over two months. He has his hometown, his friends, and the prospect of a two-year active duty contract, which would secure his future. Yet, having had those unexpected and – to a certain extent – painful encounters, he returns to his town with a calmer, if not wiser outlook on himself and the people around him. He calls his parents and sets up a meeting with them, for the first time without accusing them of anything, or expecting any offers for financial support. He still has his life in his hands.
 
The problem with having a self-serving morality is that it often leads us to decisions, which we have to pay for long after we have abandoned it. Failed trust can’t be easily reversed. Isolation imposed by others is not removed without proof that reform has taken place. Even if we demonstrate skills or knowledge of extreme value to the community, we still face the risk of being rejected. Common principles are more important than the potential benefit from one’s contribution to the cause. The exceptions only confirm the rule. Like the one made by the citizens of Venice who entrusted the defense of their city to a moor, despite his perjurious conquest of its most beautiful and virtuous daughter – Desdemona.

© 2009 Peter Budevski

In order to truly start belonging to a community it is not enough to adjust our actions to its morality. If we don’t go beyond this stage, we will be justifiably considered conformists – not fought off, but not respected either. Since morality determines the very identity of any social group, community always makes sure to “implant” its morality not only into our perception of the environment, but into our self-perception as well, and from a very early age at that. This means that if we intend to be embraced by our fellow community members we have to embrace their morality first, turning it into our own.One of the most important conclusions humans have come up with along their path to forming alliances is that by letting community morality become a fixture of our self-perception, we stop viewing it as an outer circumstance which we always have to take into consideration; we acknowledge it as an inseparable part of our own nature and view its affirmation as another way of self-enhancement. We turn into our community’s deeply convinced defenders, thus reinforcing its power. This is the way every community, big or small, works. It accepts in the fold only those who have turned its morality into an important inner circumstance of their own.

The most visible proof are the oaths which we are supposed to take when it comes to being accepted into certain communities – a new homeland, a new religion, a new fraternity, brotherhood, or, for that matter, when we get married or assume elected office. Even though they are nothing more than overt declarations of personal subjection to the morality of the group we are joining, events like these make the most solemn moments in the life of the group. They underline the fact that individuals willingly embrace the community’s moral principles, thus celebrating its significance and influence.

But the real oath is our changed or improved behavior, which reveals a way of thinking relevant to the moral codes of the group we have striven to conjoin. The group is always hungry for proof, and through our actions we continuously feed that need. For most of us there isn’t a single reward bigger than acceptance. Eager for more of it, we spend virtually our whole lives trying to determine the right moral vibe of our surroundings and turn it into our own. Sometimes we spend years in planning to join a certain community. Sometimes we suddenly find one or feel the urge to join another. Sometimes we become threatened by expulsion from our own community, which reinforces our self-improvement efforts. All in all, our underlying effort is to make the community believe that we are – or will be – its best moral ensigns.

Harry wants to become a painter. Succumbing to the pressure from the rest of the family, his father invites a friend of his, a professor in architecture at the local university, who goes carefully through Harry’s sketchbook. After encouraging the teenager, the professor is invited to the back yard where he and Harry’s father start chatting about the good old times. Ten minutes later, attracted by the lowered voices, Harry overhears the professor’s real opinion about his talent – “Joe, I’m really sorry to say that, but your son won’t become a great painter…” This turns Harry’s world upside down. Drawing has been his dream since he was seven, and now his life seems totally empty and meaningless. For the next month he experiences the worst crisis of his young life. He shuts himself up, almost stops eating and spends the days staring at the reflection of his pale face in his room’s window.

Then he meets his neighbor, who he has a crush on. The only thing that used to scare him about her and prevented him from inviting her to the movies was that she was a Goth. Harry didn’t get those guys, and felt uneasy in their presence.  But now… now it’s different. “Wow, look at you”, exclaims the girl, “You totally look like one of us!” Harry laughs the remark off, but then starts asking her about her friends. In a couple of weeks Harry already has his black clothes, his black and white makeup, his chains and metal accessories; he starts following his neighbor like a puppy, learning about Goth and experiencing the double joy of being close to her and getting accepted by a group of people who don’t give a damn about his talent, or the lack of one. But not only this has made his new community attractive. He likes the Goth concept of the depressed artist, misunderstood by the world and withdrawn into himself. This stereotype is very close to him right now. He can’t care less about their tattoos, graveyards, their music or self-cutting. But he learns how to go through all these things, because that’s what the group is about, and he dreads the possibility of not being admitted into it. Within less than a month Harry starts a collection of Type O Negative, secretly throws away his jeans and most of his t-shirts, and even makes two cuts on his underarm, which he carefully covers when being around his parents. He also avoids sunlight and doesn’t smile.

Harry accepts the philosophy of the community he wants to belong to, and turns this philosophy into his own. Even though the overall logic behind Goth is not even a little bit close to what he really likes or enjoys, he embraces the culture with his whole being; he knows that otherwise he will be expelled and this time the humiliation won’t occur in the solitary darkness of the hall leading to the back yard.

The treasured reward of acceptance is so powerful that it can work on our nature like a biscuit on a dog: when promised, it might make us do (and believe in) anything without even questioning. History provides us with numerous examples of this pattern. The civilized world was shocked by the horrible criminal enterprises of the Nazis and astounded by the fact that so many Germans were capable of taking part in them. This phenomenon was least related to some national peculiarity. For many fear wasn’t a factor either. It was the individual self-perception disciplined to embrace as its own the general moral outline of the time – that of the revival of the great German nation. From that point everything that followed was a consequence of this decision. On a macro-level Nazism and communism might have been the global geo-political monsters of the last century, but they haven’t fallen from the sky; their occurrence was due to the eagerness of many, many poor and uneducated people to be accepted into a strong, victorious community, no matter to what degree they had to sacrifice their personal morality.

© 2009 Peter Budevski