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

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

Our perception of the environment is strongly individual due to our individual self-perception. The subjective arrangement of the circumstances in it is a result of our inborn inclinations, qualities and preferences, on one hand, and our experience, on the other.

Many of the differences among us in terms of the way we digest the environment derive directly from our genes. We like things that are often disliked by others because our natural tastes, unlike theirs, make these things attractive to us, and vice versa. But we also adore or fear other things because our memory has stored the information of how sweet and attractive, or respectively how unpleasant and dangerous to us personally such things can be; we plunge into or avoid different ventures to a different extent than others, because our conscious assessment of our own strengths or weaknesses is different than theirs. This is how our self-knowledge, which combines our innate tastes and our experience, determines the degree of significance we grant to the various circumstances of the outer world. Therefore, from the hierarchy of these circumstances, which is visible through our behavior, one can judge our self-perception.

Mike and his girlfriend are studying for a college test in her apartment. It is late in the afternoon when they hear the slam of the front door. A couple of seconds later the teenage brother of Mike’s girlfriend appears in the living room. He is crying and rambling something that no one can understand. After a while it becomes clear that three older boys have just apprehended him in front of the building, slapped him several times across the face and taken away the twenty bucks he had in his pocket. Obviously now the boy isn’t as much scared as he is humiliated. His adolescent pride and dignity has just been unscrupulously violated, and his sister starts worrying that this threatens to turn his whole fragile world upside down. That’s why her whole attention turns to Mike, as the Man in the situation. But his reaction is nothing like what she expects. After a few more questions and a long silence, instead of jumping from his seat and darting outside to deal with the gangsters, he goes back to his notebook. His girlfriend is angry and disappointed. After taking care of her brother she barely says a word until Mike leaves. Less than a week later she breaks up with him.

Of course, she knows that Mike isn’t a bodybuilder. She knows that especially when she is present Mike feels uncomfortable around strong muscular guys, and she guesses that he is pretty sensitive about his short stature. But she also believed that he loved her, and has naturally admitted looking after her to be one of his top priorities. Now she understands how wrong she has been. As it turns out Mike’s self-perception has the circumstance “I’m unable to fight and I dread fighting” on a higher position than “I love her and I would do anything for her”. Probably these two inner circumstances have never had to compete with each other before, so the result must be a total surprise not only to Mike’s girlfriend, but also to Mike himself. The interesting part is that Mike’s girlfriend is able to grasp the real Mike (or his true self-perception) by revealing his perception of the environment in a critical moment: since he obviously chooses the circumstance of the upcoming college test over the circumstance of the incident, the latter is obviously not so important, which obviously means that everything related to her, as dramatic as it may be, is not so important, hence she herself is not so important to Mike! Which girl would stay in a relationship after having made these conclusions?

Our self-perception is visible through every single choice we make from among the circumstances of the environment. Even within the smallest, most insignificant situation one can distinguish a part of our inner essence. The genius of Konstantin Stanislavski discovered this interrelation more than a century ago. His famous Method of physical actions is based on this notion. It affirms that the inner life of the character with its most subtle nuances can be experienced by the actor and revealed to the audience by building up a precise score of his/her physical behavior. Why? Our physicality is a demonstration of the individual preferences we have towards the circumstances that constitute the environment. By observing our physical life one can gain a clear impression of our preferences – the hierarchy in which we arrange the outer circumstances. Since our perception of the environment (or hierarchy of outer circumstances) is interlocked with our self-perception (chapter I.1.), the physical actions we perform reveal our inner life in all its complexity.

Let’s take a look at the simplest physical action from our everyday life: our gait. The way we walk is not just a display of our physicality; it is molded by our psychology as well. The proof can often be found in the weird way we keep balance, or the pattern of “decorating” our walk with all kinds of unnecessary movements that go beyond what Mother Nature requires from us. These “additions” are a direct result of the way we perceive the environment, and speak volumes about our self-perception.

The first and most obvious sign of our inner life comes from our body posture: it indicates, even to an unprejudiced eye, whether our self-perception is topped by a self-projection or a self-preservation circumstance. People who are driven by the urge to project themselves are not shy of revealing how their body functions; they openly enjoy their physicality. The impression some of them give is as if they walk on air. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who hate or fear their surrounding world. They often have their shoulders slumped forward, or their chest is sunken, or the palms of their hands are turned backwards. Their whole posture indicates discomfort; their body looks like being pulled systematically down towards the ground.

Once we set off the careful observer would reveal even more about us: from the indications of which segments of the environment we perceive as important he could successfully guess on the specific circumstances that crown our self-perception. The young girl who passes the crowded open space restaurant with an alluring swagger obviously considers the world a place filled with men appreciative of female beauty; hence one of the important circumstances of her self-perception is her seductive appeal. The lawyer who thrusts himself forward even while shopping with his wife obviously views humanity as members of a stupid jury who need intrusion into their physical space in order to return to their senses; his self-perception is dominated by the circumstance of his persuasion weakness. The stumbling doorman at night who raises the blood pressure of every late arrival to the building by walking slowly to unlock the front door obviously wants to underline his importance and reinforce his authority in a world that passes him by with indifference; his self-perception is being consistently eroded by the inner circumstance of his own insignificance.

A famous instance on the role of the external traits as a bridge to the inner essence of a character is Stanislavski’s description of his work on the part of Dr. Stockman from Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”:
“On their own accord my second and third fingers used to stretch forward for more persuasiveness – as if to implant into the interlocutor’s very soul my emotions, words and thoughts. All these needs and habits appeared instinctively, unconsciously. Where did they come from? Later on I accidentally revealed their origin: several years after Stockman’s creation, at a meeting in Berlin, in a scientist I had known from before I recognized my fingers from Stockman.” (“My Life in Art”)

© 2009 Peter Budevski

Perception of the environment is the way we view and understand our surroundings. It is the other half (next to self-perception) of our general view on reality. In its essence it reflects the importance that we grant to the various parts of the world we live in. Streaming through the attitudes in our behavior, it is an extremely powerful indicator of our individuality.

Our perception of the environment is visible through every single act we perform. Take a look at a house built by its owner. From its appearance you can tell a lot about how he perceives the area he lives in, i.e. his immediate physical environment. First there is the local weather. What does he like or dislike about it? Does the house have a roof, or it is crowned with a flat terrace; are its windows small, with wooden shutters, or they are wide and tall; is the front door big and heavy, or there’s just a light glass framework in front of you? All of these architectural elements are designed, apart from the style, to interact with the facts of the environment to the best interest of the inhabitants.  Because of this interaction those facts turn into circumstances. The steep roof would prevent the snow from settling on top of the house (circumstance #1); the shuttered windows could be a protection from the strong wind (circumstance #2); the dark paint on the outside probably serves to keep the scarce warmth coming from the sun inside during the winter (circumstance #3)…

But the weather is just a separate feature of the environment. The house has plenty of adjustments that speak even more about the individual’s perception of his surroundings. The many locks on the thick door are an obvious safeguard from thieves (circumstance #4); the tall wall fencing the garden prevents the invasion of wild animals (circumstance #5); and the amulet above the gate chases away the evil spirits (circumstance #6)…

Through further observation you can come up with dozens of other outer facts the person in charge has decided to deal with. Some of them he has tried to avoid, others, to strengthen, so that he can get the best out of the environment. In both cases the facts turn into circumstances, because they have influenced, in this particular case, the design of the house, or, in other words, the direction of the owner’s action of building a home. This is exactly how our perception of the environment operates. We constantly evaluate the facts surrounding us, and work on overcoming or using them, thus transforming them into circumstances. These circumstances join a hierarchy of other ones and arrange themselves in correspondence to their importance. The more important the circumstance, the better its chance of receiving more of our attention and to influence our actions.

Even though some circumstances could be equally essential to many people (all houses in the area have sheer roofs), the judgment of a circumstance in terms of its significance is strictly subjective. If our homeowner was obsessed with earthquakes more than the weight of the snow on his roof, he would have planned and budgeted the additional supporting pillars first, and only after that, if there were some money left, would he consider the steep roof. Also, it doesn’t matter if the fact one deals with is commonly acknowledged or not; evil spirits might have a more significant presence in somebody’s hierarchy than, say, robbers.

Like our self-perception, the perception of the environment is constructed by circumstances, arranged in a certain subjective hierarchy of significance. This gradation doesn’t include the facts from our surroundings that don’t concern us; it doesn’t include the facts that we instinctively connect with either. It regards only the circumstances with which we consciously communicate, or in other words, about which we make conscious choices. Air, for instance, is one of the most important facts of the outer world; but since we breathe by instinct, in an everyday situation it definitely doesn’t have anything to do with our perception of the environment.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly how we can trace the origin of the infix “life situation”. Since “situation” is a conglomerate of circumstances, expressions like “I have to improve my life situation” target some of the circumstances in one’s perception of the environment. In this particular occasion the exclamation, translated into scientific language would sound like: “I’m unhappy with my current priorities; I have to stop relying on circumstances which put me down, and elevate the status of some previously neglected ones, which I have to either confront or give my support to.” Unfortunately, we don’t give the scientific approach too many chances…

Let’s play a little longer with the-house-of-our-dreams example. If we embrace the notion that one’s perception of the environment is visible through his premises, a logical question arises: why are there so many identical houses in almost every town? The reasons might be strong circumstances coming from the location of the area (geography), the necessity of aesthetic harmonization of the different parts of the whole (style), or the townspeople’s inner need to go with the flow (fashion). The last possibility is, of course, the least desirable, because individuality is being replaced by some abstract aesthetic authority. It is still permissible if the result is tolerable; yet fashion always invades and obscures the territory of the individual perception of the environment, preventing the person from freely expressing his/her unique personality.

While developing his thesis about creative individuality Michael Chekhov gives an example about several artists who supposedly have to paint one and the same landscape. He introduces the suggestion that the finished paintings will be quite different from each other since each of them will reflect the creative individuality of its author. “Their pictures will tell us,” continues Chekhov, “that one of them was more charmed by the atmosphere of the landscape, another by the beauty of the form and line, the third by the language of contrasts, and so on.” The atmosphere, the form and line, the language of the contrasts, etc. are respectively the most important facts in the individual vision of the artists, i.e. in their perception of the environment. They see and paint everything in front of them faithfully, but their creative individuality emphasizes the elements they are mostly impressed with. The creation of these “entirely different pictures” means that the photographic facts of the objective reality have not only been graded, but also turned into circumstances by the authors’ interpretation.

In our trials to grasp the world around us we can be such artists as well… As long as we don’t go with the flow.

© 2009 Peter Budevski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2009 Peter Budevski

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2009 Peter Budevski

Immediately after having been pulled out of the womb we manifest our first instinct as humans – to breathe. We suck in our first gulp of air from the new world we have been introduced into. With this we start our life journey: the complicated and exciting interrelation with our environment.

At first, of course, we don’t know how to deal with it. All we rely on is our instincts. Yet with every passing day we subconsciously gain the experience necessary for our survival. Soon there comes the time when we, having sensed hunger, cry not only due to our instinct, but because of the sparkle of discovery that we can influence the environment. The conditional reflex that makes us cry when hungry is being gradually substituted by the decision to express hunger through crying because this turns out to be the most efficient way of being duly fed.

For most of us this actually could be our very first decision. It is an easy one indeed, since hunger and the ability of the environment to satisfy it are two of the few circumstances we have to deal with. Nevertheless its success charges us with the courage that we can somehow manipulate the environment according to our needs.

A few million heartbeats later we start feeling the inner necessity of expanding our physical territory. At first we turn on our sides, then we crawl, until we finally figure out that the best way to achieve our goal is to walk on our feet. What has occurred within us is no more and no less than the natural instinct to explore our surroundings in order to be able to get more out of them. This instinct is an inner circumstance, meant to push further our development as humans. As it turns out though, we haven’t had the slightest clue of a major obstacle: the earth’s gravity. What has been so far just a fact (“Wow! My rattle toy fell on the floor!”) transforms itself into an extremely important outer circumstance, occupying a top position on the list “Characteristics of the Environment I Shouldn’t Forget About.”

But things don’t stop here.

The revelation of gravity not only broadens our understanding of the environment but also transmits new information about ourselves. By evaluating gravity through our continuous trials and failures we are hit by the discovery of our weakness and unpreparedness. The broadened perception of the environment has fired back. The sense of our poor ability to keep balance and stand on our feet becomes a new, shocking part of our semi-conscious, semi-instinctive self-perception. Being obviously relevant to our intention to start walking, it appropriates the quality of a new inner circumstance, which challenges our ambition. The looming conflict strikes us with a choice: should we give up or keep trying? At the end our urge to walk wins over. Long before succeeding, our undeveloped, instinctive selves line up the contradicting circumstances in another, inner hierarchy: the sense of our weakness gives way to the superior sense of the necessity to win over a certain quality of the environment, which has so far held us back. We walk away from our first major encounter with our surroundings with deeper knowledge about the world, and about ourselves.

This knowledge is our perpetually evolving general perception of reality. Gained by testing both the nature outside of, and within us, it represents an interactive combination of our perception of the environment and our perception of ourselves. Each of these halves is built by a hierarchy of circumstances, which changes continuously due to the degree each circumstance affects our intentions at any moment. For instance, once we have started walking without any help and stand firm on our feet, it’s a matter of days for us to completely forget about gravity – the circumstance that has occupied a top position in our perception of the environment for quite a while.

As we get older, our knowledge increases along with our needs. Our growing necessities constantly meet new obstacles, which we arrange into an ever changing hierarchy of outer circumstances. The path to overcoming them elicits from us unsuspected qualities. The courage and self-confidence gained from this process stimulate the eagerness to pursue new challenges, thus paving the way to discovering and developing our own nature even further.

Our self-knowledge doesn’t gain less if we occasionally give up under the pressure from the environment. However, this kind of self-knowledge often suggests lower self-confidence and could be the basis for developing inner crises and complexes.

The development of our general perception of reality determines our progress as human beings throughout our lives. It is one of the fundamental features of our individuality.

In order to get the full picture of how our general perception of reality works and explore the factors determining its development we must first examine each of its components separately.

© 2008 Peter Budevski