Flight from Experience 3: Gnosticism

Gnosticism, refers to a theory of human happiness, which in the ancient world was connected to a special knowledge about transcendence and the human soul, whose salvation lies in divine liberation from forces outside the individual. Gnosis today means an intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths or an esoteric form of knowledge. In the modern world transcendence has been replaced by an immanent source of healing. Happiness and salvation are achieved by means of the integration of conscious and unconscious drives or habits or the creation of a social order which provides a human solution to the problem of evil. In either case, human beings are themselves the sources of their own healing and happiness. Such ideas are alluring today, in part, because people commonly take experience to be equivalent to knowledge. However, to insist that happiness results either from the integration of unconscious drives or in the creation of social orders alone is to reject human experience in favor of some mythic version of experience.

I will start by pointing to a commonly debated point: Is it possible to love someone else until I love myself? Some people insist that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. Others are not so sure. We may ask the parallel question: Can I really know anyone else unless I first know myself? Again there are different opinions. If anything brings knowing and loving together it’s relationship. And, of course, people often wonder how they can be in a healthy relationship without first becoming healthy individuals. If I do not know and love myself, how can I know and love my spouse, partner, family, friends, etc.?

Gnosticism offers a clear answer to each of these questions. You can’t! If we need the appreciation or approval of others to feel good about ourselves, we make them responsible for our mental health and well-being. If we look beyond ourselves to role models to learn out how to love and live responsibly, we are being untrue to ourselves. If we hope for someone, anyone, or the universe or God to save us, we will be waiting along time. No help is coming. Gnosticism offers the hope and promise of self-salvation and self-grace. This why we cannot know, love or be in genuine relationship with anyone else unless start with ourselves.

My first point is that this kind of self-salvation, self-knowledge and -love, rests on a certain forgetfulness of experience. Everything we learn, we learn by first experiencing something. This does not mean that experience is the same as knowing. Insights begin with experience and are verified by returning to experience. I have had many experiences of hearing people speak in foreign language. But I do not know what those speakers are saying. I have also been frightened when coming upon things in the dark that I perceive dimly but do not understand. I recall being startled in a dark and unfamiliar room when I saw a black figure which I took to be a crouching animal and that turned out upon further inspection to be a large throw-pillow.

So experiencing is not knowing. Experience together with ideas however insightful, appealing or well-expressed is not knowing. But knowing begins with an experience that is not understood and returns to verify, upon further investigation, an initial guess in experience. The sounds coming from foreign speakers and the confused outlines of obscure figures are the stuff about which we ask questions on the road to knowledge. Those same sounds and outlines are what we later use to assess our initial interpretations. When I saw the dim and frightening image in the dark room, my instinct was to run. My mind suggested a few further questions to test the original impression. Surely, what appears to be an animal would present additional information or data: shouldn’t I hear or smell something that supported the idea? If it were an animal, certainly its presence might be accounted for: did my hosts have a pet or was there a door or window open? Further questions along these lines may or may not have settled the issue, but in the end the simple act of turning on the light provided me with the final experience and information that I used to disconfirm my first guess about the nature of the figure. Knowledge involves a learning cycle that moves from experience through thinking and back to experience. The return to experience supports, corrects or disconfirms what I thought was going on. We build up our ideas about things, people, cultures, traditions, the world, God, and even ourselves piece by piece by being attentive and curious about our experiences and returning to experience to verify, challenge, correct or dismiss our first impressions.

Gnosticism supposes that knowledge involves only the first two moments of experience and interpretation, grasping the whole picture from just the initial encounter with experience. Since there is no return to experience to verify ideas, gnostic ideas are held to be true because they are invulnerable to challenge or further question. They are not subject to second-guessing because of their revelatory, self-evident or creative nature. They are closed to challenge or question as a revelation by those in the know, who communicate to us the impressive truths that government, media, your family or the church don’t want us to know. Or they need no verification because they are self-evidently what we discover within ourselves, perhaps by entering altered states of consciousness. Or they are closed to investigation as the aesthetic truths that we creatively invent for ourselves. Gnostic wisdom attempts to circumvent the long, slow process of self-discovery and self-correction by completing an end-around that avoids the return to real contact with everyday experience in the process of verification.

My second point about the kind of knowledge on offer is that it involves a flight from the process of social experience, understanding and verification that constitutes history. The process of knowledge that begins experience and ends with experience constitutes a social cycle of self-correction. There is a history to my knowledge of myself, others, my world and God that plays out as a virtuous cycle. There is also a history to our common knowledge that follows a similar path of experience, ideas or plans, implementation, re-evaluation, and self-correction. The re-evaluation and self-correction of plans and policies happen in a return to experience in light of which we judge whether or not things have actually gotten better or not. This is history in the sense of a personal or intellectual and communal autobiography. It is history as lived. But history means something else as well. We cannot avoid representing to ourselves this process of knowledge itself. Besides the history that we live, there is the history that we write about and try to explain to ourselves.

The importance of the second type of history and the way in which we think about the process of knowledge is that we learn to take control of the process of self-correction both personally and socially. If we represent knowledge to ourselves accurately we can collaborate authentically with own natural process of learning and loving. If we misrepresent the process of knowledge to ourselves, we inevitably fail to live responsibly. Gnosticism offers an explanation of knowledge, love and relationships that, as I say, involves a flight from experience. it prevents us from becoming active and responsible collaborators in our own personal and social growth.

Certainly, we can become better at loving others as we learn to know and love ourselves and correct our mistakes or the direction of our living. And we do this most effectively and efficiently if we consciously and deliberately commit to the cyclical path. But the commitment is one we make from wherever we happen to find ourselves. The process of living itself is one that we have already begun and we are already well on our way. We need not possess an invulnerable idea about ourselves before claiming that we are coming to know ourselves. We need not possess the ideal self-love before making improvements in our love of self or others.

Gnosticism claims that we do not really know and love ourselves or others until we know and love the whole thing that we are a part of. In reality, knowledge and love are the culmination of a long and cyclical process.We do not really wait for our lives to be explained to us before we start living them. We live a bit, stop and reflect on what we are doing, get some ideas, go on living, reflect some more and perhaps correct our first ideas, go on living perhaps putting some of the new ideas about the process into action, and gradually progress to a fuller and fuller sense of what it means to love self and others. It’s a beautiful cycle we call human growth. Learning to cooperate with this ongoing cycle is the challenge of adult living.

Flight from Experience 2: Challenges to Self-Awareness

The practice of modern psychotherapy, going back to Sigmund Freud, is based on the idea that mental health depends upon gaining insight into one’s issues. The more we understand ourselves, the happier we will be. To this has been added the awareness that in order to gain insight we have to begin with experience and observation. Here’s the rub…it turns out people are not great observers of their own experience. Consequently, mindful self-presence is an increasingly important tool in contemporary psychotherapy. But we should be cautious not to assume that mindfulness alone will lead to happiness. Rather, it is a vital first step that points beyond itself.

Moving, as the scientific method does, from observation to hypothesis (insight) practitioners of talk-therapy simply presumed that individual subjects were capable observers of their own experience and simply needed help interpreting it. The subsequent focus on experience is grounded in evidence from clinical practice and scientific research that individuals are often not very reliable witnesses of their own experience. The most important intervention in the domain of experience (prior to interpretation) is the practice of mindfulness or nonjudgmental self-acceptance, as it is sometimes called. The goal of mindfulness is to allow oneself to be present to whatever occurs within the range of conscious experience. That means being present to thoughts, feelings and sensations as they occur, in real time. This is easier said than done, and the difficulties help to explain why individuals are not often reliable witnesses to their subjective experience; and hence why many people have difficulty understanding or gaining insight into that experience (which, after all, they do not adequately observed as it occurs). First, let’s look at several challenges that arise as one tries to cultivate this capacity for mindfulness. Second, let’s see if we can get a clear picture of the promise and goal of mindfulness, lest we go only half-way and wind up in an equally difficult or perhaps a worse place.

The first challenge is to overcome a lifelong pattern of allowing life to just happen and of passivity. In this way, one thinks and acts merely by habits that one has acquired but has not really chosen. Habits are formed in the course of daily living, and the person who has passively gone along with things now possesses habitual ways of thinking and feeling that may be useful or comfortable but that are not intentional or deliberate. Along these lines, mindful presence is frequently contrasted with a state of forgetfulness, of acting as if one were sleep-walking or on automatic pilot. To be mindful is thus to be awake, intentional, deliberate in one’s thinking and acting.

A second challenge follows upon the first. One of the habits formed in daily living is the habit of ‘extroversion’. Extroversion here means an orientation outward or away from the self or subject who is doing the thinking, feeling and sensing. Thinking is always about something. Sensations are always a response to something, even if the something is just an inexplicable firing of neurons somewhere in the nervous system. Similarly, feelings are either about something (perhaps something pleasant or unpleasant) or arise from within the physiology of one’s body, like a mood one cannot seem to shake. The extroverted consciousness is oriented to what these inner processes are about or are responding to. The extroverted way of thinking, feeling and sensing is exclusively focused on the content of the thoughts, feelings and sensations.

This extroverted habit leads to what Acceptance and Commitment Therapists call ‘fusion’. To the extent that one is operating on automatic pilot, one does not make any distinction between the content of these subjective operations and events in the world independent of oneself. Fusion means that the content of one’s thoughts or feelings are fused to objects in the world and both are fused to one’s sense of self. Sensations are taken as reflections of reality. Feelings are signs that something good or bad, fearful, dangerous or beneficial is really present. Thoughts are representations of the real world. In addition, I AM my thoughts and feelings. In this literalist orientation to thoughts and feelings, there is no distinction between the content of one’s inner experience and the world independent of the self.

To the extent that one is somewhat awake or intentional, sensations, thoughts and feelings may not be taken quite so literally. The thinker may demand some evidence for the thought. As one slogan has it, “Don’t believe everything you think.” Feelings also may be subjected to inner scrutiny: “If it feels good, does that mean it is good?” “I am afraid, but am I in any real danger?” But if this half-awake attitude is less literal than that of the sleepwalker, it is nonetheless still oriented to the content of conscious experiences and not to the conscious subject of those experiences. The content of experience and the content of psychological insight (interpretation or hypothesis) are not yet adequately distinguished, when one does not yet possess an adequate sense of the self as observer and the self as thinker or the self as actor.

In contrast to these modes of being, mindful presence is oriented to both content and operation. To be mindfully aware of ones thoughts, feelings and sensations is to acknowledge what these are about and to heighten awareness of oneself as the observer, as the one who thinks these thoughts, feels these feelings or has these sensations. Better yet, mindful self-presence is awareness of the self to whom these thoughts, feelings and sensations are present.

At this point, the third challenge arises. A common difficulty with being mindfully present to whatever occurs is the adoption of a negative attitude toward or evaluation of the self to whom these things occur: I know that these thoughts are my thoughts, and may not represent reality as it really is; but my thoughts are usually entirely wrong and I don’t know how to correct them; and these feelings are my feelings and may not be the best guides when it comes to making decisions about what is good and bad, but my heart always leads me astray and I cannot change it; and these sensations are my sensations, but I don’t like them and want them to go away. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to cultivate a sense of and develop a strong connection to the self as observer when one is locked in an ongoing battle with the content of what occurs.

Flight from Experience 1: Observation Biases

The orientation of contemporary psychology is primarily to experience. Depth Psychology originates with Sigmund Freud’s theory of unconscious drives and early childhood events. Central to Freud’s approach was insight into the way in which drives and early experiences shape one’s current thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Freud’s own approach has been characterized as archeological because it centered on bringing to consciousness problematic forces that have been operating below the surface of awareness due to unconscious drives and unremembered childhood experiences. In more recent decades Freudian therapists have brought more attention to beliefs, fears, and habits as they function in the present while acknowledging that these likely were acquired in early years. This goal of understanding how thoughts, feelings and habits may be influencing the quality of one’s work, relationships and life in general is the dominates the majority of psychological interventions.

To the extent that an individual’s goal in counseling is psychological insight, a necessary first step is observation of and attention to the data that the insight will be about. Biases related to research and decision-making seem to have become common knowledge. For example, a confirmation bias refers to the temptation to focus on evidence that supports my own thesis and an egocentric bias inclines me to make choices that benefit myself personally. A good method for, or good conversation about, research and decision-making is an important aid to resisting such temptations.

Biases also exist that tempt us to be poor observers of our own experience. Here good observation means heightening conscious awareness of inner experience. Biases that skew such observations include avoidance of feelings in favor of thoughts about feelings (what some psychologists have termed intellectualization) and avoidance of feelings that are not only uncomfortable in themselves but that evoke secondary feelings, for example, shame or anger. A good method such as mindful self-acceptance or a good therapeutic conversation help to limit the destructive impact of such biases.

Part of making a good observation is managing thoughts and expectations about what I should be feeling or what other people might feel or what I am expected to feel. Such thoughts about what I must be feeling or should be feeling will occur, but mindfulness exercises cultivate a capacity to look past them and to constantly check such thoughts against inner experience as it occurs in real-time to see if the thoughts are accurate. Similarly, a therapeutic conversation brings a person into the present of ongoing inner experience and makes it possible to correct thoughts about what must be going on against what is occurring in inner experience.

Heightening conscious experience means adopting a welcoming attitude to whatever occurs and being open to, even seeking, novelty. Very often thoughts about my feelings are drawn from the pool of knowledge that I already have about myself or from things I already know about people in general. What matters most in psychological insight is learning something new. That means being open to the as yet unknown parts and depths of myself. To be open to the unknown is to hold my ideas about what I am or must be feeling lightly and be ready to add to my personal the catalog of feelings whatever this new inner experience might turn out to be.

A welcoming attitude serves as an antidote to selective attention and poor observation by managing secondary experiences. What I am feeling about a person or situation is distinct from what I might feel about being uncomfortable in the first place. Here, for example, is where shame or anger about feeling sad, weak or embarrassed might come into the picture. Such secondary feelings often complicate the process of self-discovery. They function as a filter that pre-selects which feelings I’d be willing to allow into the catalog and which feelings I would not. Feeling ashamed about or angry because of some inner experience means that the primary feeling is banished from the catalog and I’ll never discover whatever I might otherwise have learned about myself.