The knight’s far-flung quest for the grail is legend. If he found the object, he would have in-hand a key to an encompassing truth that would make sense of his life. Today the search for this bigger truth takes place closer to home. Just as exciting, the quest is a creative process, dependent on intelligence, imagination and honesty and answerable to both the moral imperatives to which we are heir and the findings of science.
We commit ourselves to this search because we understand that an allegiance to unexamined belief or a lesser truth can cost us by limiting our resources. But we also commit to the search because we stand to lose mental faculties that we don’t nourish or exercise enough. We have learned that mental dexterity is not best served by shopworn thinking—by going down that same neural pathway repeatedly. In fact, mental agility is served when we are introduced to and interact with new ideas and explanations that shake up our mindsets, so to speak. So here we go.
In the previous post, I said that we’re in the world in just the way that we are, up and running, defined, often on autopilot. But we’re also in the world as authors and authorities intent on taking our lives to the next level. We can experiment with possibilities that benefit our unique intellectual and moral commitments and our one-of-a-kind natures.
Many values or authorities affect how we manage our lives, authority meaning here the right to control, command or determine. The authority to be addressed here is the subjective shepherd, the invisible self, who perceives the world in terms of what is presented by its immediacy, by what it senses or intuits.
All of us are constitutionally equipped by nature, with some added tinkering by nurture, to have an irreducible experience of life. Built into our physical systems, a raw intelligence that helps us to negotiate our way in the world, it just keeps going, no matter what. We know very well that this front line of stored offensive or defensive responses is just waiting for a stimulus. It can make us blush, or angry, or quiver or alert and on our toes.
To this visceral intelligence, history and language have added a construct I call the invisible self, the subjective shepherd. Though purely imaginary, we can’t help but think of this invisible self as a little person. It’s a director or producer, if you will, calling the shots based on a vision of and standards for a rich and rewarding—and maybe award-winning—life. However, in fact, not only is there no invisible self in charge of things in there, there’s no there in there either; no central information processer in the brain exists.
Nonetheless, the imaginary invisible self persists and what stirs its artistic sense and juices first is the raw intelligence mentioned above. However, depending, in part, on how we’ve been reared and educated, the invisible self has access to more truth, a descriptive and explanatory truth.
Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, this shepherd of our subjective experience tries, with its mental or outspoken language, to make rational and moral sense of the raw intelligence. It’s the first step to a new level of control, an embryonic but promising transcendent authority that may permit it to “get over” the visceral urgings in service of a larger purpose. Sometimes the invisible self is successful. But sometimes the invisible self has to give up, frustrated by its inability to summon the intelligence or the discipline to overcome its insistent feelings.
Unfortunately, because we typically don’t push on to a greater truth, this incomplete understanding is what shapes our mindsets. This means that without deliberate effort, we don’t have access to a bigger picture, a bigger range of (mental) motion that would move us to the next level. And, not realizing that a larger range of sensibility and control is what’s missing from the freely chosen and well-lived life it wants, the subjective shepherd protects the mindset it has and unwittingly foregoes the larger truths by which it would benefit.
A mindset is difficult to change because it isn’t nothing. It is physically embedded in our nerve cells. Its imprint affects our attitudes, postures and the stories we tell about our lives. The physical fact of the mindset, along with the subjective shepherd’s narrative protection of it, come at significant cost to our desire to further individuate morally and thoughtfully as the unique, one-of-a-kind person that we are.
Yes, how life shows up to the invisible self in its immediacy is a basic intelligence, a truth of sorts but it is only the beginning truth. Without practiced access to higher levels of intelligence and transcendent authority, it resonates with a mindset too narrow to match the sensibilities needed to negotiate the larger realities of a complex world.
In sum, the invisible self’s interpretation of its immediacy is information. However, its perspective is only a piece of the truth, only a part of the big picture. Many of our goals and commitments require transcending the experience of how life presents itself to the invisible self’s initial perception.
Over and over again, we must get beyond the immediate fear, get beyond the immediate anxiety, get beyond the immediate feelings that are described as anger, embarrassment, heartbreak, loss or defeat. We benefit, and the world benefits, when we are able to feel, think, listen, speak and act in accordance with the larger truth of our transcendent aims.
P.S. Particularly relevant to this post are the previous posts titled Bigger truth, bigger life; and The will to transcend, there’s life after everything; and if you’re up for serious inquiry into the prevailing mindset, address Fighting the good fight, exiting the ego-protection program.