This theory predicts and explains “therapy-resistant dissociation”, or the common finding that none of the “woo” exercises like focusing, meditation, etc, actually work. (c.f. Scott’s experience as described in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective). If there’s an active strategy of self-deception, you’d expect people to react negatively (or learn to not react via yet deeper levels of self-deception) to straightforward attempts to understand and untangle one’s psychology.
It matches and extends Robert Trivers’ theory of self-deception, wherein he predicts that when your mind is the site of a conflict between two sub-parts, the winning one will always be subconscious, because the conscious mind is visible to the subconscious but not vice versa, and being visible makes you weak. Thus, counterintuitively, the mind we are conscious of—in your phrase the false self—is always the losing part.
It connects to a common question I have for people doing meditation seriously—why exactly do you want to make the subconscious conscious? Why is it such a good thing to “become more conscious”? Now I can make the question more precise—why do you think it’s safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?). I expect most people find themselves dealing with (partly) hostile telepaths all the time, and so Occlumency is genuinely necessary unless one lives in an extraordinarily controlled environment such as a monastery.
Social deception games like Avalon or Diplomacy provide a fertile ground for self- and group experimentation with the ideas in this essay.
Now I can make the question more precise—why do you think it’s safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?).
An answer I’d give is that for a lot of people, most of the hostile telepaths are ultimately not that dangerous if you’re confident enough to be able to deal with them. As Valentine mentioned, often it’s enough to notice that you are actually not anymore in the kind of a situation where the strategies would be necessary.
Unfortunately, many of the strategies also behave in such a way as to make themselves necessary, or to prevent the person from noticing that they could be abandoned:
Maybe I had a parent that wanted me to be dependent on them, so that they could control me. Even if I manage to break away from that parent, I may still have the belief that if someone wants to control me, then I have to genuinely believe that I cannot escape their control or they’ll hurt me. This belief will tend to get me into abusive relationships… and then that strategy again becomes necessary for protecting me while in the relationship, when I would never have gotten into that relationship in the first place if not for that very strategy!
Maybe I believe that if I cause someone else any discomfort, I have to say I’m really sorry and experience genuine distress. As a result, I always execute this strategy, believing it to be crucial for my safety. If I were to ever not execute it, I might notice that some people are actually okay with me not reacting in such an extreme way… but because I always execute it, I never get the chance to notice that it’d be safe not to.
One of the ways by which these kinds of strategies get implemented is that the psyche develops a sense of extreme discomfort around acting in the “wrong” way, with successful execution of that strategy then blocking that sense of discomfort. For example, the thought of not apologizing when you thought someone might be upset at you might feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, with that discomfort subsiding once you did apologize.
I believe this is also related to the way that awareness narrows around the strategy—feeling the original discomfort is very unpleasant, and the mind tends to want to contract awareness in ways that keep discomfort out. If awareness to broaden, then it would become aware of the unpleasant thing that the strategy is trying to push out of awareness. So for example, in the center of that discomfort of not-yet-having-apologized might be a memory of a time when you weren’t really sorry and your mother was upset at you… and if you were to instead execute the strategy of desperately apologizing, then that would feel somewhat less painful and your awareness would naturally contract around that act of desperate apology, causing the original memory and the pain associated with that to drop away.
And something that practices like meditation can do is to bring the original discomfort into awareness in such a way that it can gradually stop feeling so unpleasant. (Though this can also go badly and bring something painful into awareness faster than the person is capable of dealing with it.) If that happens so that the original pain stops feeling so painful, then the self-deceptive strategies can stop creating situations where they perpetuate their own need to exist.
Now that’s not to say that you would be guaranteed to be safe. A brief discussion I had on Twitter:
Me: I wonder to what extent significant parts of Buddhism got so focused on renunciation because that’s the “safe” kind of mental transformation in the sense of not upsetting secular rulers.
While the kind of practice that dismantles societal programming and makes you go out in the world to change things, can easily become a threat for established power structures and a target for being rooted out.
Societal forces exerting evolutionary pressure on spiritual practice and selecting it for increased harmlessness/renunciation.
(Parallels of this idea in the context of corporate mindfulness training programs and such left as an exercise for the reader.)
(Or for that matter, parallels in the context of notions like “our group of ten people meditating is by itself an act of healing the world”, which have some truth to them but also conveniently keep any change pretty localized and non-threatening.)
David Chapman: Yes this is very much the case in the history of sutrayana vs vajrayana. Vajrayana was typically reserved for the aristocratic elite, for this reason, and intermittently also appropriated by anti-establishment forces when they could.
Aneesh Mulye: This wasn’t so much of a thing in India; yes, it happened, but engagement with the world and with rulers was def a part of Indian Buddhist (and Shaiva, and most if not all other) traditions.
One solution involved only an elite having access to the hardcore agentifying stuff.
The extermination of all Indian Buddhism (what’s called ‘Tibetan’ today, but that’s just because it survived only in Tibet), and all Tantrik institutions (and Indic, generally), engaged with the world as they were, at the hands of the hateful Muslims, is why this didn’t survive.
So apparently there were times in history when meditators did get a lot more confidence and self-insight, used that to become more powerful until they were seen as threats and wiped out, and that’s why so many of the surviving meditative traditions are focused on things like withdrawing from the world and living as ascetics.
One of the ways by which these kinds of strategies get implemented is that the psyche develops a sense of extreme discomfort around acting in the “wrong” way, with successful execution of that strategy then blocking that sense of discomfort. For example, the thought of not apologizing when you thought someone might be upset at you might feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, with that discomfort subsiding once you did apologize.
Interesting. I’ve had friends who had this “really needs to apologize when they think they might have upset me” thing, and something I noticed is that they when they don’t over-apologize they feel the need to point it out too.
I never thought too deeply about it, but reading you, I’m thinking maybe their internal experience was “I just felt really uncomfortable for a moment and I still overcame my discomfort, I’m proud of that, I should tell him about it”.
Sounds plausible to me. Alternatively, telling you that they didn’t over-apologize still communicates that they would have over-apologized in different circumstances, so it can be a covert way of still delivering that apology.
I like this a lot! A few scattered thoughts
This theory predicts and explains “therapy-resistant dissociation”, or the common finding that none of the “woo” exercises like focusing, meditation, etc, actually work. (c.f. Scott’s experience as described in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective). If there’s an active strategy of self-deception, you’d expect people to react negatively (or learn to not react via yet deeper levels of self-deception) to straightforward attempts to understand and untangle one’s psychology.
It matches and extends Robert Trivers’ theory of self-deception, wherein he predicts that when your mind is the site of a conflict between two sub-parts, the winning one will always be subconscious, because the conscious mind is visible to the subconscious but not vice versa, and being visible makes you weak. Thus, counterintuitively, the mind we are conscious of—in your phrase the false self—is always the losing part.
It connects to a common question I have for people doing meditation seriously—why exactly do you want to make the subconscious conscious? Why is it such a good thing to “become more conscious”? Now I can make the question more precise—why do you think it’s safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?). I expect most people find themselves dealing with (partly) hostile telepaths all the time, and so Occlumency is genuinely necessary unless one lives in an extraordinarily controlled environment such as a monastery.
Social deception games like Avalon or Diplomacy provide a fertile ground for self- and group experimentation with the ideas in this essay.
An answer I’d give is that for a lot of people, most of the hostile telepaths are ultimately not that dangerous if you’re confident enough to be able to deal with them. As Valentine mentioned, often it’s enough to notice that you are actually not anymore in the kind of a situation where the strategies would be necessary.
Unfortunately, many of the strategies also behave in such a way as to make themselves necessary, or to prevent the person from noticing that they could be abandoned:
Maybe I had a parent that wanted me to be dependent on them, so that they could control me. Even if I manage to break away from that parent, I may still have the belief that if someone wants to control me, then I have to genuinely believe that I cannot escape their control or they’ll hurt me. This belief will tend to get me into abusive relationships… and then that strategy again becomes necessary for protecting me while in the relationship, when I would never have gotten into that relationship in the first place if not for that very strategy!
Maybe I believe that if I cause someone else any discomfort, I have to say I’m really sorry and experience genuine distress. As a result, I always execute this strategy, believing it to be crucial for my safety. If I were to ever not execute it, I might notice that some people are actually okay with me not reacting in such an extreme way… but because I always execute it, I never get the chance to notice that it’d be safe not to.
One of the ways by which these kinds of strategies get implemented is that the psyche develops a sense of extreme discomfort around acting in the “wrong” way, with successful execution of that strategy then blocking that sense of discomfort. For example, the thought of not apologizing when you thought someone might be upset at you might feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, with that discomfort subsiding once you did apologize.
I believe this is also related to the way that awareness narrows around the strategy—feeling the original discomfort is very unpleasant, and the mind tends to want to contract awareness in ways that keep discomfort out. If awareness to broaden, then it would become aware of the unpleasant thing that the strategy is trying to push out of awareness. So for example, in the center of that discomfort of not-yet-having-apologized might be a memory of a time when you weren’t really sorry and your mother was upset at you… and if you were to instead execute the strategy of desperately apologizing, then that would feel somewhat less painful and your awareness would naturally contract around that act of desperate apology, causing the original memory and the pain associated with that to drop away.
And something that practices like meditation can do is to bring the original discomfort into awareness in such a way that it can gradually stop feeling so unpleasant. (Though this can also go badly and bring something painful into awareness faster than the person is capable of dealing with it.) If that happens so that the original pain stops feeling so painful, then the self-deceptive strategies can stop creating situations where they perpetuate their own need to exist.
Now that’s not to say that you would be guaranteed to be safe. A brief discussion I had on Twitter:
So apparently there were times in history when meditators did get a lot more confidence and self-insight, used that to become more powerful until they were seen as threats and wiped out, and that’s why so many of the surviving meditative traditions are focused on things like withdrawing from the world and living as ascetics.
Interesting. I’ve had friends who had this “really needs to apologize when they think they might have upset me” thing, and something I noticed is that they when they don’t over-apologize they feel the need to point it out too.
I never thought too deeply about it, but reading you, I’m thinking maybe their internal experience was “I just felt really uncomfortable for a moment and I still overcame my discomfort, I’m proud of that, I should tell him about it”.
Sounds plausible to me. Alternatively, telling you that they didn’t over-apologize still communicates that they would have over-apologized in different circumstances, so it can be a covert way of still delivering that apology.