Self awareness related to using tools from Buddhism

 

This is from a Quora answer I wrote, about what most or many people don't know, but don't realize that they don't know.  I'm saying that limited self awareness is one answer.  

I add a little on how tools from Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness, can partly resolve this, but a how-to for more in depth guidance would be a short book, so this doesn't get far.  I did write a short book on that, about a year ago, and even it didn't get that far.  

This is that answer:

What are a few things that people think they know but actually don't?

Most scope of knowledge and aspects of human experience, taken a certain way, but I wanted to take this in a specific direction.  I’m claiming that people think they know themselves but really don’t.

I’m into a few subjects, Buddhism being one of those.  Not only do most people who think they’ve got an intermediate grasp on what Buddhism is kind of miss most of the point, most people also don’t get how their own life experience, perspective, worldview, and even immediate process of perception work.  

Let’s stick to the second part; it’s a lot to unpack of how Buddhism is often modeled, versus how I see it working out in practice.  I could write 1000 words just trying to justify being a subject expert, and different people would interpret that justification differently.  Someone with essentially the exact same credentials and background could be either be a great reference or else relatively biased towards unhelpful and impractical directions; it’s funny how the subject works out.

[Later edit]:  let's add the high level summary of my Buddhism background, a sort of resume, more tied to it being interesting background than a convincing foundation of expertise.  I was into Buddhism as a personal interest for awhile, a decade or so, attempting some degree of practice along with learning.  I went back to university studies to help extend that learning and convert it into a form I could communicate, getting one degree in philosophy and religion (a BA), and then a Master's in comparative philosophy (having originally studied Industrial Engineering).  I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist (Theravada) monk once, for just over two months, and have lived in a Thai Buddhist society most of the time for the last 18 years. 

There is a layer of subconscious input in lots of psychological models, so it’s normal to sweep lots of an internal model of experience into a black box kind of category.  This works, but you can break down what is going into that, what processing is doing, and what the output means a lot more than most people ever attempt to.  Of course you can’t access the mechanisms of your own thoughts and reactions, as if reading code that your internal “operating system” equivalent is running.  But you can switch an awful lot of what is normally subconscious to the range of partial and limited conscious awareness.

How?  What are the odds I’m going to make any sense of this claim?  Not great, based on what’s here so far, but let’s keep going.

We are built up of societal inputs, conditioned to be who and what we are.  That conditioning starts when we are a baby, or really as long as nine months before that, and by the time we’ve learned quite a bit of language, at age 3 or 4, a lot of other conditioning has already happened.  By 5 a lot of that gets “fixed” into a personality.  That will keep changing over time, but perhaps not more than it has already formed, in one sense, or range of senses.  

We’ve already learned what a social self is, at this early age, we’ve grasped how we relate to lots of forms of desires (for food, related to interaction, and it just keeps going).  Ideas about negative experiences become clear, related to pain (physical mishap, or violence), social interactions that cause stress, about how lacks of different kinds of stimulus play out (hunger, being left alone), about decision making gone wrong, and so on.  Lots of this maps to what we ordinarily see as cultural components, but lots is more basic than that.  Culture tends to be about clothing choices, or social roles, interaction norms, aesthetic issues, then on to ethics, but our conditioning to be a human runs a little deeper.  

We can go back and unpack some of all that, and see how we relate to it uniquely as an individual.  We can become familiar with our own assumptions, biases, goals, and most importantly self-image.

In one sense it’s not difficult to, but in another it’s absolutely impossible (conventionally).  We simply examine our own experiences, in two different ways, drawing on a different form of reference input about patterns we might find.  

Note that I’m going to tie all of this to Buddhism, just not so explicitly, and not in a really conventional form, unless one already knows that framework of ideas.  I’m talking about using meditation to examine patterns of thought and experience, as our mind presents them to us as mental noise.  The reactions and desires that are “running” in our mind, to the extent this even exists as a singular, unified thing, show up as a sort of noise when we try to just sit and quietly experience our thoughts.  

Don’t take my word for it; go and just sit quietly, with absolutely no stimulus, for about 20 minutes.  The first half will be so noisy you might as well be watching television.  Then your mind might settle a bit, and more distinct thought patterns might stand out as more important, or at least less inclined to just dissipate.  But it takes a long time to experience anything like more clarity.  The point never really is “going blank,” it’s about relating to the noise in different ways.

We can also use a different but somewhat equivalent process to identify how our ongoing mental state, and immediate desires, and model of self, all play into our immediate reactions to external inputs.  That just keeps happening, right, but we are present for it?  Not present in the sense of fully aware of our current internal mental state, and why we react as we do.  Our current emotional state is sort of relatively clear to us, sort of not.  Where impulses and intuitions come from is generally not clear; we aren’t completely “in on” that subconscious layer.  We function well enough without that, but without the benefit of much of a degree of self-awareness.  In a limited sense we all do really know ourselves, but if you ask yourself why you did something or made a choice exactly at that time, and in that way, you’d have to unpack things a bit to get to that.  

People would assume the opposite; of course they know why they do what they do.  Routine demands it; they have burdens to work, eat, sleep, conduct social functions, and so on, and each individual choice or action, or thought, relates to working through all of that.  That’s right, in a sense, but we can drill down to mapping broad inputs to specific outputs, if we try to.

Lots more channels through self-image than we might initially expect.  Or maybe we would expect that.  But the forms it takes, and individual inputs and finer reactions, thoughts, and actions, wouldn’t normally be apparent at all.  It’s all a little counter-intuitive.  In the end we have built up fairly developed images of social selves, with some dimensions that are more evident than others, and we act on goals related to maintaining or extending those.  In lots of cases the drivers we act on aren’t social in the sense of an external demand, limitation, goal, or pressure, but instead relate to a dimension of internal self-image and self-definition, which acts within and internal cause and effect loop.

So it’s hard to push all this to the next level, adding examples of that, making it clearer, but the claim here is that we can learn about the make-up of our internal reality by listening to the noise residue from it (using meditation), and we can examine the same kinds of things by breaking down our immediate reactions and process of forming external reality (using mindfulness training to extend momentary reality of internal mental inputs).

Let’s go with one example, and then let this drop, since it’s not supposed to be longform writing, but already is.  My son, who is 17, and his mother argue over what time he should go to sleep.  In this modern context, or I suppose when I grew up too, at that age he would normally be expected to make those decisions himself.  But among his friends all of them make terrible choices about this very thing; they sleep late, at 2 or 3, either getting by on 4 hours sleep a night or else that plus a nap.  It would be better to sleep 8 hours a night, or at the most extreme 7 plus an hour as a nap.  

He claims that he functions better on less sleep, which is difficult to evaluate, but it’s probably not accurate.  There is a genetic variation that makes that the case, for some few, but in general people still developing a complete brain structure need that rest to support a more positive outcome.  Probably all of this should have been resolved by better parenting and more assignment of responsibility when he was 13 or 14.  You try being a parent and making that work perfectly.

Here I’m claiming that it’s not just the extra activity of gaming or scrolling media that he is interested in, since he gets in plenty of that, but the relative freedom to make the same choices as his friends.  That’s understandable; that part kind of works.  But if he could take a longer view he might value having a better developed brain and mind more.  If he could see how it all maps out he should be able to notice that it’s all partly a form of protest, and that her well-grounded concern is valid.  His internal view of self, related to valuing freedom and self determination, is actually causing him a problem, because that sufficient sleep would benefit him.

Of course I’ve had this explicit discussion with him, so the theory behind this set of ideas is clear.  It just doesn’t map out to internal self-awareness yet; he can’t see all of the parts at work within his own internal processing.  On one level he really does think that he would function better on 6 hours of sleep.  That’s even though on another level he knows that boost in adrenaline from running short on sleep is temporary, and not completely sustainable, at least as an optimum.  

Looked at one way this all boils down to ego; his view of self and how he maps out reality is inflexible, and tied to inputs and outputs he isn’t completely clear on.  He is making decisions based on reasons he is getting wrong (the reasons and evaluation form, not just the final evaluation process result).  Looked at another way it’s a problem related to short term and long term decision making.  Two more hours of watching videos is a short term gain; two more hours of sleep is a long term better choice.  Kids need to learn this kind of evaluation process on their own, ideally at 14 or 15, instead of 17 or 18.  I suppose most really put it all together between sophomore and junior year in college, if ever.

It seems strange saying that if he sat in meditation 20 minutes a day he could figure all of this out for himself.  I guess that’s the general claim here.  He could also map out how he sees his future better, how he deals with childhood ending, and other thorny issues, like themes related to romantic relationships.  Pretty much no one is trained to evaluate reality in this way at early stages of life development; it’s rare enough for adults with real problems to take up such tools in adulthood.  And there are other paths to a similar goal.  During my freshman year of college I tried out all sorts of crazy sleep cycles and almost all of them not working well identified how normal sleep really is relatively optimum.  Who knew?

Someone would need to try to make use of these tools to confirm that they work.  In general that’s not normal, to do that.  There would have to be some unusual driver pushing them to put in lots of atypical effort and exploration.  That leads to another set of tangents I’ll not pursue here; why did I do that?  I’m kind of an odd person, and my life experiences were atypical.

I suspect all of this is not so convincing.  I do appreciate feedback about it though.  The more functional parts are probably a bit too vague to critique in standard forms, but input based on intuition or related or unrelated experiences would be interesting.