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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2009 Peter Budevski

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2009 Peter Budevski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2009 Peter Budevski

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