Chapter 17 - Viagnostic

It is our tendency to see the struggle of life as an external battle. This is understandable since we often confront circumstances that we must escape, change or overcome. However, it is far more common for us to face doubts, uncertainties and contradictions about life, and yet despite our natural desire for a stable and reliable view of the world that includes ourselves, we rarely look inwards to see from where this mentally relentless fight originates. For many of us, our reluctance to be more introspective is due to our inherent suspicion that the great existential war is actually with or within ourselves, where the truth we both seek and avoid is likely packed, mangled and concealed behind our consistently biased perceptions. Nevertheless, we routinely engage in psychological combat in the sociocultural battlefields of our minds, where we uphold our insecure beliefs and bury our disquieting memories of experiences that shape how we define ourselves and determine the way we approach our persistent struggles.

We generally like to think of ourselves as distinctly precious individuals living in a mechanized society that serves as the background against which we can project who we are and enable what we can become. This is a typical and unquestionable view that permeates our global civilization by being embedded in our modern liberal cultures that are only contrasted by those deemed more traditional where the individual is absorbed within the community that grows from a shared ancestry to form the basis of our identity and occasionally lay claim to what we are. However, since we can concurrently promote our individuality and tie our identity to our families and communities, it is vastly more important for us to realize that, regardless of our cultural inclination, we are not exactly who and what we believe we are.

We do not often consider the likelihood that our notions of the self are merely products of our socialization. This is because we unknowingly inform much of what we believe about our own identity through others around us, while our societal instruction turns each of us into an unsuspecting cog in an artificial system, whose purpose is to optimize the environmental conditions of sentient life for its own preservation. In addition to our indoctrination, we are inundated by unconscious persuasions that activate our ingrained cognitive filters to detect and quarantine any invasive or dissonant thoughts that challenge our overall picture of the world or obscure the narrative that binds together the complete photo album of our lives. Consequently, we lie to ourselves more than we do to others in order to secure our self-centred delusions and exaggerated certainties that collide with an uncooperative universe of seemingly competing and oscillating realities.

Although we know that the world is not as it appears and that there is an underlying complexity to the simplistic portrayal of life presented to us, questioning the limits of any knowledge we possess and facing the endless streams of conflicting information we encounter almost daily reduces our degree of confidence. This is why so many of us live in denial or distraction as a means of psychological survival despite our education. It ranges from practicing intentional ignorance to evade unsettling awareness to building an arsenal of rationalizations that defend our frail versions of reality against every intimidating idea and inconvenient fact. But we only need to turn inwards to expose the inner workings of our intricate psyche that can awaken all of us unless we are entirely entranced by self-affirming success.

Our emotional states fluctuate between moments and between situations as if we mentally sway in our thoughts and feelings through life in a state of impermanence that mimics existence. And although some of our fears and desires will remain, others dissipate to the point where we cannot remember why they mattered in the first place. In addition, many of us witness how our most sacred beliefs and self-righteous attitudes towards others can change slowly or abruptly depending on where our tolerance fortifies and when our patience diminishes. We discover that what we once valued is no longer valuable, but sometimes it is only to realize its value again later in life. Hence, while we naturally see ourselves as distinct and continuous entities over the course of our lives, we cannot deny the variety of roles and identities that have dominated us in how differently we have thought, felt and behaved over time. We know that we are more than one person contained in a single being with its own history.

Yet despite this awareness, we try to force a solid and stable sense of self onto ourselves that we reinforce in the presence of others before we even come to know the whole of what we are. And much like any material that we can mould into a desired shape before hardening, our identities are fashioned early in life and often without our conscious consent given that we have been consistently told who we are even before we were born. Although some of us are fortunate enough to be in the care of those who encourage our potential with a minimal exhibition of partiality, many of us are groomed for a preordained life with a predefined set of identities and roles to be performed within a highly structured society. And depending on our sensitivity to our true essence and on the incongruity between our inner nature and our exterior society, our compiled and rehearsed self can easily unravel to mistakenly label us as dysfunctional rather than condemn our allegedly supportive system that obliges us to accept a contrived reality at odds with our intimate lives and healthy relationships. This is an elaborately deeper truth of an oversimplified life we are never taught.

Each of us functions like a live orchestra where each musical instrument is tuned to vibrate to a distinct concern, which individually executes a program to direct our attention and behaviour towards collectively prioritizing our needs and fulfilling our goals. These innate and acquired programs compete and cooperate with one another in order to form the community of the mind that manages our motivation to live and our awareness of the self through our active participation in the world. We may think of this as an intrapersonal village governed by a council of primal agents who voice our needs and interests in the auditorium of our consciousness where a unique symphony of natural and synthetic identities echo the roles that define and develop our narratives and their meaning through our sense of utility. However, this cerebral colony can also divide and shift between an inseparable experience with our environment in which we partake and a hallucinatory partition from the universe that promotes our cosmic narcissism in the growth of what we typically describe as our ego.

THE COLLECTIVE PATHOLOGY OF THE INDIVIDUAL EGO

Consciousness is an emergent property of life that arouses a great deal of wonder, debate and study because it is a phenomenon inherent to our experience and the functioning of our lives that challenges our understanding of existence. And although we associate it with both the mind and the self, it is nevertheless a state that we subsume within the broader condition of sentient life. This means that much of what we are falls outside of our self-awareness and far beyond our deliberate action or conscious choice. We can also claim that what we consciously experience is illusory, which makes distinguishing what is real or fictitious absurdly more complicated. However, consciousness itself is not an illusion. It is essentially the working field of our perceptions, thoughts and feelings, where we configure reality to respond to it as well as where we can imagine any version of existence regardless of its viability. Moreover, consciousness relies on a memory network to sustain its distinctly continuous identity, and it is this biotic arrangement that facilitates our free will in regulating our own actions as individual organisms and that necessitates our personal responsibility and societal accountability. Otherwise, we could only blame a program or set of programs operating without our control when we are confronted by liabilities for the severe impacts of our miscalculated decisions or unlawful deeds. And this would likely lead to the collapse of civilization if none of us were answerable for our actions.

The condition of being conscious is obviously not a quality that we can abandon until we die or become fully unconscious. Since consciousness helps illuminate our choices and the consequences of those choices, we cannot escape the inextricable responsibility that comes with our freedom to choose and our power to act. While we may appreciate that having great power demands even greater accountability, we forget that any power comes with some responsibility. This is something we all own even if we choose to do nothing because we know that, unless we are completely incapacitated, we always have the ability to respond to the world no matter how limited our response may be. However, our misunderstanding of responsibility forces a binary choice upon us where we can only blame ourselves or blame others or the world as a whole for any negative event or failure to achieve fulfilment that implies our involvement, despite the complexity of invariable and arbitrary conditions we face. This intensifies when we sense a widening gap and unalterable divide between the life we seek and the life we have, personally or professionally, to the point of emotional instability, paralysis or detachment.

The discrepancy between what we need to be and what we can afford to become is generally obscured because our technologically enabled socioeconomic system acts as a blinding buffer between the convenience of our sustenance and the starkness of the universe. As we progressively convert our environment into consumable resources beyond sustaining life to indulge increasingly and expediently in its pleasures, we unwittingly sever our sacred relationship with the world because we take our basic dependency and survival for granted. And as our societies grow indifferent with the expansion of their mechanized economies, our politicized cultures perpetuate the myth of our autonomous lives that ultimately leads to the collective pathology of the individual ego. This means that we mutually suffer the illusion of independently separable importance as individuals while we collectively assess each other’s worth within a zero-sum game, where we both share and compete with one another for the same pool of limited assets and where the rules restrict what we deem to be valuable.

Putting aside neurological dysfunctions and physical disorders, the pathologies of the mind are mainly pathologies of our culture. When our societal beliefs and practices are inconsistent with our personal experiences and ignore our individual challenges, we can detect fractures in our reality as we bear the dismissal of our needs. And when we are penalized for having conflicting feelings and failing to conform to the values and expectations set and measured by our institutions as well as our families and peer groups, we undergo psychosocial displacement. This feels like we are being removed from our homes after being attacked or rejected for deviating from the person we are taught to be. Behavioural norms can be the most effective means of influence when we strongly fear the possibility of being stigmatized or ostracized for our nonconformance. Hence, as a pre-emptive means of defense, we unconsciously tend to internalize these external demands and inherit them as our own to avoid the shame or contempt we might recall from a traumatized past of suffering and delusion that spans multiple generations. The enslaved ego engages in its own surveillance to conceal its existential insecurity and to secure relatively advantageous positions within our socially tiered systems, where psychosocial imprisonment and economic servitude are the price we pay for our biological amenities.

The inner politics of the mind mirrors the exterior politics of the world from the bedroom to the boardroom and from the playground to the battleground, where we lie to ourselves and to one another with narratives required to endorse our beliefs and excuse our actions. This is intensified by ubiquitous information constantly being disseminated and received in a world where we are exposed to ideas that spread more rapidly than viruses and flood our experiences with contradictions to ultimately starve us of our mental stability and generate an ever-growing need for simplicity. Unfortunately, we respond with false confidence and rationalized behaviour that subject us to a Pandora’s Box of unhinged thoughts and neurotic feelings waiting to rip open the moment everything comes into question.

While some of us at birth or by voyage auspiciously stumbled upon the compassionately thriving enclaves of a crude and merciless world where ulterior motives remain extinct, we all generally feed on the ills and yearnings of others, whether it is by helping them or by profiting from their unfavourable conditions. Many of us also hide our imperfections behind the imperfections of others and redirect any liability away from ourselves. The more we play on the vulnerability of others, the more we reveal that we are trying to conceal our own. Yet, paradoxically, it is from our vulnerability that we derive our strength and without which there would be no need for courage to overcome fear and trauma in life. In addition, we would be mistaken to interpret our sensitivities as weaknesses since our sensitivity or hypersensitivity actually represents our capacity to detect and respond to relevant information that surfaces who we really are and drives us towards an optimal state. However, this is not to be confused with our susceptibility to influence or harm as in danger, disease or deceit that defines our risk of exposure to negative outcomes, whether it is death, dishonour or dysfunction. Hence, while our sensitivities may act as constraints in a multitude of scenarios, they can actually protect us from our susceptibilities if we listen to our inner nature rather than reject what we really are in favour of unfulfillable wishes to be someone else. Knowing our limitations can reduce our risks and discern what and where we need to focus our efforts in order to avoid or push the boundaries that define us.

Although each of us can easily become overly protective and reserved due to cruel or tragic events that we may have experienced from an early age, a likely source of our pervasive cultural pathologies lies in our societal dissuasion from exhibiting our vulnerability. This triggers and reinforces the layering and shifting of superficial personalities and extreme beliefs to defend us against both perceived and misperceived threats but ultimately lead us to lose touch with the true self. As we learn to suppress our natural tendencies present in childhood, we induce a kind of spiritual amnesia where we neglect what is truly important to us. But this is a reminder that some risks are necessary to take if we want to overcome our magnified fears and gain back who we really are. Otherwise, we might censor our indispensable vulnerability at the cost of increasing our adverse susceptibility to delusion and inclination towards suspicion as well as our unheeded suggestibility or blind acceptance of what we are told regardless of the available evidence and our own misgivings based on our experiential intuition. Our ability to move closer to the greater truth about our existence is essentially dependent upon our willingness to question the assimilated identities and beliefs that come to control and redefine us.

In the film The Bourne Identity [17], the predicament of the main character, Jason Bourne, serves as an allegorical reference to the drowning of the true self by the seductive identity we are given or that is drilled into us. Jason Bourne wants to know who he is or who he was, but in the process of his self-discovery is tormented by the person he was solely trained to be. He is haunted by a past that will not leave him alone until he finally confronts it. One part of him does not want to remember out of a deep-seated fear of moral and existential conflict, while the other needs to find peace within himself and with the world outside that is pulling and tearing him into multiple directions. This exemplifies the extent and degree to which we can be programmed to suppress the elements of our inner nature that do not align to the single-minded goals and engineered values ingrained in our unsuspecting minds through our voluntary indoctrination. And this is why many of us spend much of our lives trying to recall and return to the person we truly are or were prior to our cognitive behavioural retraining. We find ourselves fighting unspoken sociopolitical attempts to erase any remnant of nonconforming tendencies by overwriting our neurogenic data and devaluing the ancestral wisdom of our homogenizing cultures that carry the secret codes to accessing who we all really are.

THE EMBEDDED NATURE OF CULTURE

It is customary to think of ourselves as products of our blueprints and our environment. And while the nature versus nurture debate persists over their dominance, that conceptual divide is not as distinct as some of us would like to believe given the incontrovertible role that culture and other external factors play in how we manifest our unique set of physical and personal characteristics. Their contributions are already present even before the first bits of biological material begin to form. However, the ease with which we learn and manifest many of our basic fears and abilities suggests that there is rudimentary information related to our vital continuity encoded in our cellular memory as entangled replication sequences waiting to be initiated. This means we know that we are not born as a blank slate and that nature provides our preliminary limits and possibilities, which together translate to probabilities of what could happen. But this also suggests that our nature starts to settle after our initial development and likely prior to when the self has been fully architected into our consciousness. And since our personalities are contingent upon whether or not expected conditions are in the right place at the correct time, they remain merely predictions until they have solidified as outcomes.

It is clear to us that culture continues to play an expanding role in our evolution and subsistence, especially if we consider the impact that technological innovation has had on our lives in combination with our capacity to communicate and organize on a massive scale. As knowledge and technology are refined to undertake greater risks and exploit more opportunities, we will be increasingly able to alter the manifestation of nature itself. And hence, while nature may be the soil in which culture is planted and from which it is then harvested, culture grows out to be a potent extension of nature by constantly being shaped and reconfigured by the same world it tries to influence. This is the embedded nature of culture, and not surprisingly, it blurs a fundamental distinction we try to make between what we can change and what we cannot. Without that clear demarcation, we seem to have difficulty deciding whether we should bother to surpass seemingly impenetrable boundaries or to attribute responsibility to variables outside of our perceived control. Nevertheless, we know that their integration is what both enables and drives us, which we express through our motivation and morality.

Since we routinely have needs to fulfill and decisions to make, we tend to be more interested in what we want to be true rather than the truth itself. And while we may base what we choose to do on our understanding of how things are, we then use our limited grasp of the truth to conclude quite presumptuously how things should be as well. This occurs regardless of the veracity of our beliefs because we need to shrink our complex and malleable universe of potentiality down to a simple and consistent set of limited choices we can compute. And in the process, we try to find a satisfactory albeit delusional balance between the stability of working in predictable conditions and the freedom to generate unique experiences, and this serves us well until an unanticipated string of events profoundly challenges our version of reality. While we find no shortage of inconsistencies in our hopeful search for regularity, how we respond to the incongruity of life is what sets us apart. Do we try to understand the underlying truth or do we reframe the facts and retreat to our unquestioned beliefs? Unfortunately, we are more likely to accuse the truth of being a lie while promoting our fictions to become our verdicts. As young children, we are normally exposed to a different reality, or we are taught about one that conflicts with what we will face in our adult future. Consequently, this becomes an important basis for our eventual breaks with reality, which can transpire at any point in our journey.

Our diversity can also complicate our desire to attain and maintain consistency, and no matter how slight our differences may be, they can come into conflict with one another in the absence of agreement, compromise or obedience to some common standard. There is undeniably a need for basic rules of conduct to coordinate and direct the highly complex traffic of socioeconomic activity, but this is where politics inserts itself in the game of life to determine or influence those rules as it intervenes with culture to manage our nature and regulate the behaviour of the masses through edification and retribution. This occurs on two levels. One level operates publicly and covertly in tandem with the law and exercises the power to change the rules and reposition the advantages and disadvantages within a society for its members, and this authority is backed by the salient threat of violence, imprisonment and other forms of punishment. The other more immediate and intimate level functions within the interpersonal space of our relationships and their interactions, where individual behaviour is directly modified through our physical or virtual exchanges with one another and where the self is most vulnerable to manipulation within families and peer groups through shaming or by boosting the ego.

If we want to manage our influences or to align ourselves to genuine values, we need to openly confront our nature and grasp what we are before letting our inherited culture assign our roles or identities and determine how we should live our lives. Undoubtedly, this is extremely difficult to do because it demands that we dispel with any suppositions regarding the purity of our character and acknowledge realities about ourselves or our lives that we may not want to believe such as our societal irrelevance. But if we can meet these requirements through personal honesty, we will better detect any significant discrepancies between our desires and our beliefs as well as realize a fundamental truth about our disposition already known to us since our infancy. We rediscover that we are preprogrammed to be selfishly motivated as part of our core design to live while we are also equipped with the capacity to share and empathize. As infants, we may be needy and remain so until we die, but we are not inherently greedy. Hence, there is no shame in this, but it is also not something worthy of praise. It is merely a necessity we cannot ignore much like our compassionate and communal inclinations. However, we seem to suppress this awareness when we confuse our celebrated individuality and its great promise of utility with a narrowly focused sociopolitical campaign to achieve self-serving goals and relative status by faithfully meeting the amoral interests of a privileged few at great cost to the rest of society. We need to be cognizant of masked influences that can bend or corrupt what often begins as a necessary part of our nature into a deleterious perversion and disfigurement of our culture.

It is extremely important for all of us to remember that the role of culture is not to warp our perceptions and redirect our efforts, but to navigate our nature towards our optimal development as individuals and as communities. Culture is fertilizer for the seeds of our sentient intelligence that were already sown in our universally shared design before any of us were born. It is vital information we carry and reproduce in the storage networks of our societies and in the memory banks of our minds, where the construction of the self occurs and ultimately permits us to function beyond our subsistence and contribute to the greater story of life. Culture is the primary enabler of our storytelling, which is why we must be wary of its rapid and uncontested alteration that can easily distort the true meaning and overall trajectory of our own viagnostic narratives through the vicissitudes of our lives.

Moreover, culture and society are intertwined with the emergence and development of the psyche, which is the intangible entity that occupies our psychological field and accesses the sentient layer of our existence. Synonymously referred to as the mind, it merges our primitively unalterable nature with our progressively adaptable culture to be highly responsive to a steady world of fluctuating conditions, while being susceptible to the mental turmoil, emotional turbulence and spiritual alienation of the ego and our consciousness. The psyche is a carrier and processor of culture, and it is through societal organization that culture nurtures the mind. And while the mind is enabled by a number of partially specialized biological components that form its neural network, it is essentially an associative learning system that allows memory and reason to come together. This is why we tend to learn and remember things better if they make sense to us or follow a related logic, regardless of their veracity. The power of association is unequivocally fundamental to our experience and our need for meaning in life, and it is critical to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our inner workings so that we can regulate ourselves and potentially overcome the barriers of our original code.

THE DYNAMIC ORGANIZATION OF THE PSYCHE

While we may associate the mind with consciousness, it actually encompasses all levels and degrees of consciousness; this includes our own self-awareness and especially the unconscious or subconscious states that account for much of our mental activity. In addition, the psyche is more than the mind or the brain as a corporeal container of charged ideas and recorded events. It covers the wider field of psychological phenomena that links our biological nature with our moral spirit and treats the biophysical and sociocultural layers of its environment as part of its overall composition. It is the home of our beliefs, perceptions, memories and all of our live thoughts and feelings. And although much of our psyche is fed by experience, it does have embedded in its design a vast arsenal of programs that influence our preferences, propensities and proficiencies and that activate our desires, detections and defenses. Much of what we sense, arrange and do occurs quite automatically and out of necessity because we would not be able to live and think freely if we had to concentrate on everything unfolding around us or consciously directing all of our internal bodily functions, which manage us more than we manage them. And although we can deliberately intervene in our somatic performance, they essentially operate on their own with or without our direct attention. Hence, we generally trust our subliminal minds to notify us through a string of associations when something of interest or concern arises.

As living organisms, we reflect our basic nature through a multitude of competing needs and wants, which our bodies carry and express through our gratification, development and continuity. And although the psyche incorporates these desired states into its priorities, our consciousness focuses on novelty and security while building and validating our confidence through consistency, impact and predictability. Our self-assurance needs the world to make sense in some way because the mind inherently seeks congruence in order to process information and respond to reality. Therefore, whether we expect positive or negative outcomes, our lives require a reliable narrative that explains our circumstances and provides a mental map to navigate through our perceived and accessible universe. This does not necessarily mean the psyche embraces the truth, at least not as much as stories it can contrive to alleviate uncertainty by meeting narrow expectations and fulfilling imagined requirements. We can and we do individually and collectively cause, manipulate and distort events to confirm the validity of our predictive models. And since much of this occurs unconsciously, the world can appear to align with our beliefs and to justify our actions despite their veracity and appropriateness, respectively.

Our overall tendency is to set protective boundaries around our sense of reality that are often unbeknownst to our conscious minds. We monitor and manage a constant flow of stimuli we are able to receive by applying filters and executing programs that concurrently redirect our attention and reconstruct patterns that serve whichever version of the truth we are willing to accept. However, our natural need to be in approximating states of congruence and equilibrium runs so deep that we are very reactive to any gap in or deviation from our constructs of our internal and external environments. We are generally dismissive of these discrepancies, but anything that we cannot easily ignore results in a flurry of corporeal and cognitive activities that execute both offensive and defensive strategies to regulate these targeted conditions. Unfortunately, many of these methods only have seemingly immediate benefits with long-term consequences that trap us in unfavourable or addictive states, which is why we need to practice a greater sense of consciousness in our lives that can effectively manage the dynamic organization of the psyche and ultimately tap into our essence to unlock who we really are.

The mind already operates on multiple levels of awareness and governs different types of information pertinent to our overall functioning. This includes our capacity for elevated self-awareness and meta-consciousness, where we are able to think about what we as well as others are thinking and feeling as well as why. We can distinguish from our default mode of thinking where we respond to events relevant to us and attempt to solve problems as part of the normal course of our daily lives. This empowers us to reprogram ourselves to any degree within the adaptive range of our nature and to counter any deliberate or inadvertent influences associated with our culture and broader psychosocial field that may be detrimental to us or to others.

However, expanding our awareness can also expose us to the madness of our reality. While the physical universe may appear orderly, our interactions with others and our shifting conditions can be very chaotic and conflicting, especially when we compare what we say with what we do and notice how quickly we change our opinions and feelings. Our ability to deal with instability in our lives and bring ourselves into alignment with reality, or a perceived version of it, depends on at least four facets of the psyche that work together to maneuver us into an optimal state with our biosocial environment and within ourselves. These essential components are bioharmonics, subcognition, egofractosis and verelevation with each representing a distinct mechanism involving natural and trained adaptations that we are constantly reconfiguring to keep us safe, sane and sincere in nurturing our utility.

Bioharmonics is the system in which the psyche monitors our well-being to ensure we are generally operational and adequately fulfilled. This includes scanning our bodily conditions and emotional states as well as the health of our relationships and socioeconomic security. Although it can be flawed, this monitoring is essential to prevent us from reaching extremes that cannot be reversed. It is our first and last lines of defense in averting or mitigating psychosomatic disturbances. Bioharmonics is the thermostat of life trying to attain and maintain homeostasis that is projected onto the mental plane. It emotionally surfaces any discrepancies that need to be addressed and detects any external conflicts with the rest of the world and internal struggles with our beliefs, values and identities transmitted by the other mechanisms of the psyche. Its goal is to achieve harmony within the psyche through its inborn and acquired detection programs that can trigger responses like our immediate reaction to touching something that is hot or burning our hand.

Subcognition is the portion of the psyche that largely operates below our conscious awareness but accounts for most of our learning and behaviour. As a subconscious set of processes, it passively associates and dissociates information that slips past our active consciousness to build a model of the world. In this sense, subcognition is a passive pattern forming and recognition system that can automatically filter out reality by ignoring, dismissing or forgetting anything irrelevant to the self or relevant if it threatens the self. It simply forms relationships by mere unconscious association, which is susceptible to manipulation by implanting unsuspecting suggestions and prompting involuntary actions. This field of unconscious influence extends to sleep and other altered forms of consciousness where the information is managed outside of our direct, wakeful state. But it also encompasses the flow state we experience when we seem to act effortlessly as if almost without thought or feeling as a result of significant practice. This feeds our other facets of the psyche and includes our intuition, which reflects much of our overall understanding of life when we cannot clearly recall our experiences or articulate information that we may not have consciously assessed.

Egofractosis is the network within the mind that constantly defines and redefines the self in relation to the world by engaging in self-examination and self-expression. It is here where we create, save and reconcile our identities. And although there is a single fabric that constitutes the self, it is composed of many threads that need to be stitched together to secure a stable core identity. Hence, our all-encompassing and continuous sense of self can fragment into many specific identities that include familial or societal roles, group affiliations and evaluative assessments of our knowledge, skills, qualities and performance. While most identities are relational, others can be orphaned and never integrate with the rest of the self. Sometimes, one part of our identity may try to dominate or establish a hierarchical consciousness while denying, repressing or subjugating the others. This occurs when there is undeniable incongruence between facts and beliefs or among contradictory statements that are left unresolved. It also happens when extreme conditions incite monstrous behaviour such as when we succumb to foolish demands with impossible expectations or misperceive threats stirred by real traumatic experiences. Egofractosis can strengthen the self by breaking us down meaningfully to elicit our integration, but it can also weaken us into isolation by constructing layers of defenses. These fortifications may appear as a dominant or arrogant persona or as a rotation of fictitious identities, any of which can and will confuse who we really are but primarily serve to either conceal our insecurity or express our vulnerability.

Verelevation is the capacity of the mind to direct our attention and actively recognize patterns and relationships, including perceived linkages that may not exist. It aligns us to goals and yet questions them based on feedback from the core components of the psyche. Verelevation contains our conscious assumptions and views about life, and it is designed to detect consistent associations and seek out any evidence that confirms our beliefs and inferences by sorting and selecting information that enhances our understanding of the world, others and our own selves. it also determines the degree to which we can trust the tendencies of our environment and the people within it as well as our own proclivities and impacts that define and appraise us in terms of our utility. Verelevation involves identifying or recollecting something relevant to the self that is of interest or value to us. And although it is initiated and influenced by the bioharmonics, subcognition or egofractosis of the psyche that account for many of our biases and judgments, it can apply meditation and metacognition to heighten or amplify our awareness of these inclinations and potentially dissolve our illusions of reality and of ourselves.

However, consciousness can direct us to enslavement as much as it can to enlightenment. For instance, our self-awareness can trap us in our illusory separation from the universe where we are of primary importance and everything else revolves around our unique existence. While our egocentric consciousness, at a very basic level, is vital to our functioning and interaction within our competitive biosocial sphere, it can also confine and disturb the focus of our attention that can fluctuate between the preoccupation of single-minded convictions and the distraction of unmanageable vagaries. Many of us occasionally find ourselves consumed by a tidal wave of incoherent beliefs and overpowering feelings that may include paralyzing fear or ostracizing shame. Such experiences may easily cause us to collapse back into our egos with greed or arrogance while we look to the future through the narrow lens of our pasts instead of through our boundless present. However, as we practice the expansion of our consciousness, we can transcend divisions to reach a nondual state of oneness when we realize our inherent bond with the world is seamless and our meaningful purpose in life extends beyond us.

THE SPIRIT OF A GREATER GOOD

The function of the psyche in conjunction with culture is to represent reality in order to traverse the unforgiving terrain of life, and it relies on society to feed it information that it could never acquire solely through its own experience. A significant part of that representation includes our constructs of ourselves as individually distinguished entities, which we unknowingly graft onto the psyche. This makes the ego a key fixture of the mind as a segregated notion of the self from its environment, which ascends to the foreground of our consciousness and ethos when we encounter self-relevant information. However, just as the psyche and culture interdependently form the associative memory system of our working knowledge and belief system, the self and its society forge an inextricable relationship that would otherwise render our sentient existence meaningless. Their integration is necessary for each of us to develop mentally and morally since our identities, roles and stories can only evolve from our interactions with one another through the mutual recognition of our awareness and responsibility.

All lifeforms demonstrate responsibility in that they can respond and adapt to their respective environments. But for sentient beings belonging to a community where their identities are fashioned, this elevates to a moral sense of social accountability as a consequence of being able to deliberately make decisions that affect others. And since accountability is part of the interpersonal agreements we negotiate with one another as well as the sociopolitical contract we collectively accept with or without our direct consent, we cannot shirk our personal responsibilities and civic duties as individuals if we wish to benefit from the vital resources organized and provided by our society. Hence, all of us have to find a place in which to partake in the socioeconomic domain of existence and endeavour to gain from its wealth. And while some of us try to abuse the system or rig it for its exploitation, far more of us are denied access to its bounty and left to fend for ourselves in a wilderness that is now unknown even to our ancestors. As for the rest of us, we are faced with choosing a path in life that depends on the degree of affiliation we want to have with our own societies. Do we contribute more to compensate for the ills of our community, or do we minimize our involvement in the hope of reducing our direct and immediate risks? We have a choice between exercising our powers to influence society for our overall betterment and competing aggressively to secure a comfortable life solely for ourselves or for our families. And while all of these paths can be easily rationalized, they are equally difficult to defend because we neither live autonomously from the rest of civilization nor endorse a system that is too corrupt to sustain.

If the purpose of life was confined to the singular logic of self-preservation, self-indulgence or self-importance, we would likely cease to exist. There are clearly forces at play that extend beyond the direct self-interest of individual organisms. The organism is a means to an end, and not the end itself. While life generally seems to focus on a tolerable means of survival to ensure its continuity, sentient beings complicate our basic understanding of motivation by making personal sacrifices on the basis of principle or by committing suicide as a result of life becoming unbearable. These acts generally reflect our deeper need for meaning in our lives, which we intuitively know is something more significant than our own subsistence. And while many of us may sometimes overly attach ourselves to transient concerns unworthy of our commitment or to fleeting experiences we want to repeat or prolong, we are searching for something beyond ourselves even when it involves inflating our egos.

Whether we ponder on the greater question of existence itself or distract ourselves from such contemplations, our goal is to fasten our self-interest to something greater however delusional it may be. It is to be or try to become who we really are and channel that into some expression of utility in the world. And when we can link that utility to the bigger picture that approximates the universal truth, we find that our actions begin to align and our energy concentrates on a way of being that produces the right outcomes or, at the very least, minimizes the frequency and impact of unfortunate ones. This is when we sense or realize that we have tapped into the spirit of a greater good.

The notion of a greater good is not restricted to our community or to any community. It can include any principle that extends beyond our pure corporeal self-interest, but proving that it serves something greater than our own lives is difficult to demonstrate. It requires a degree of faith that is always subject to scrutiny, especially when we mistakenly assume that making sacrifices signals a higher cause at all times and in all cases. We should always question both the intent and benefit of engaging in sacrificial behaviour. For instance, how do we interpret the actions of someone who committed a suicidal mass murder? Depending on our perspective, the same actions and outcomes can lead us to label that person as a terrorist or a martyr. When we have moral conviction, we live by example regardless of the cost to ourselves, which includes others perceiving our actions as immoral deeds. On the other hand, we also use our self-righteous beliefs that cloud our choices and judgments to conceal our true underlying motives or suppress their origins, which often reveal a life of shame and trauma that arises from alienation, degradation or instability. Hence, when we unconsciously obscure our less-than-altruistic intentions with cogent arguments derived from distorted facts, we may cause much more unsettling things to occur than the good we ostensibly aim to achieve.

It is nonetheless a noble deed to make sacrifices or to give one’s life to prevent others from being killed or severely injured. It is in those moments when we see the life of another as more valuable than our own, and such actions are bound to our true values or to our trained response to specific scenarios that we may encounter. To give freely requires us to feel secure in our purpose or in our nature and to trust others as well as life itself. But as long as we confine ourselves to an egocentric existence and ignore the sensitivities that make us who we are, we will remain blind to what it all means and never unleash the spirit within us onto the world that made it all possible in the first place. In order to decode the meaning embedded in our stories, we need to dissolve the ego adequately enough to recognize the patterns, influences and obsessions in our thinking that negatively affect our emotional state and behaviour, and which underpin our acquired insecurities and yearnings.

The ego is an inherent construction of the mind that we market as a natural product of society to assess for promotional value or to recall for possible reintegration into our consumer culture where choice, however trivial, is paramount to our liberation and where charitable deeds alleviate the guilt of our addiction. The ego primarily serves as the self-evaluative layer of our sentient existence as well as the guardian of the falsified self, which activates both ego-proactive strategies to fulfill our desires and ego-defensive responses to threats to our perceived needs that may or may not align with reality. It is not necessarily selfish, but it is always evaluating events and things including people and relationships in terms of their relevance to itself. However, given our general aversion to uncertainty, we augment our ego-oriented approach to life with black-or-white thinking where we are obstinate in seeking to be definitive and irreducible about everything, especially when we feel the trepidation of an emotional tsunami always ready to engulf us.

Although our binary framing of the world is quite pervasive across diverse societies, we are undeniably aware of the fuzziness that depicts many of our experiences and weighs down on our decisions. This awareness forces us to contemplate what is true and what is just in the historic clash between individual and collective concerns as we determine our values and work successfully towards our utility. Unfortunately, we still tend to operate in a strictly closed system, where we cannot be something more until someone or something else is less. It is here that the ego stands between our own sense of reality and reality itself. Hence, to approach the truth, both as the observed and the principled, we have to pass through the ego, and let its conflicts illuminate the moral ambiguity of life.

THE CONFLICTED SELF AS THE CONSCIENCE OF SOCIETY

Our frame of mind naturally shifts with our internal view of ourselves, which normally matches the current and persistent view we have of the world. If the universe is perceived as unstable in that it is not only perpetually changing but also haunted by inconsistencies and contradictions, then this might be accompanied by an insecure sense of identity and a propensity to partition the self in order to maintain multiple versions of reality and incompatible moral codes. It is clear that there is a relationship between the individual psyche and our collective neural network, where the internal order and chaos of the community inside our minds mimic the external stability and disorder of our societies and associated cultures. And this suggests that in order to actualize the experience of being a unified community within the self, we need a community outside of ourselves to integrate the one inside us all. Our well-being and ongoing development depend greatly on the health and advancement of our culture in enabling us to harmonize our fractured identities and retain our sanity. Thus, if we need the support of a village to nurture the self, then we must be equally committed to preserving it.

We safeguard our beliefs that are encoded in our shared cultures by disseminating them throughout our respective societies. But when those beliefs do not logically fit together or when our alleged values are misaligned with our actions and their outcomes, our faith in life weakens and our confidence in who we are declines while we become more susceptible to delusion. We compensate for our fragility by fabricating reality and engaging in dissociation to relieve the stress of mental discord that arises from contrasting experiences, such as when we may have passionately mixed feelings of love and hate towards the same person. This emotional polarization occurs particularly towards those who abuse or abused us when they were supposedly committed to care for us. Sometimes, we purposely create conflict to stir up those familiar emotions in unsuspecting others so that we ourselves can feel normal about our own inner conflict. While some of us will briefly feel superior in our apathy, we more likely do this to feel that we matter to someone after witnessing an emotionally painful response to our hurtful actions. In addition, we tend to discount the significance of specific events or individuals to protect ourselves from suffering or from exposure to any information that may trigger a state of incongruence. Some of us will temporarily sever our ties to others or permanently banish people from our lives simply to avoid dealing with our chaotic minds.

All of these tactics make us more vulnerable to outside influences as we actively seek persuasive substitutes for stability and logic, however illusory or flawed they may be. These influences contribute to the set of psychological defenses we acquire over time to offset or evade the dissonance in our thinking, and these shields become part of a repertoire of practices and justifications used to cope with difficult life scenarios and personal interactions. This inevitably results in a fragmented self, where we splinter into multiple identities with irreconcilable differences that separate us by role or by the specific types of relationships that we have with others as they mirror the function or dysfunction of those relationships in our adopted village.

A relatively harmonized self, on the other hand, merely reflects a more orderly and predictable life and is consequently less troubled by fluctuations since we swiftly return to our apparently normal and adequately pleasant states. We feel a degree of serenity when the events we observe seem to align with the beliefs we hold and the assuring reality we expect, and any discrepancies we might discern do not surpass our cognitive tolerances. But this is due in part to living in a community that is stable or that shelters us sufficiently to sense that we live in an agreeable environment, where most of us ideally want to be. However, this state can be easily disrupted by intolerable negative experiences that are intense and prolonged. Any of us can instantly be robbed of our precarious harmony if the world were to become stubbornly uncooperative and horrifyingly volatile. Even the most faithful and resilient among us can be driven to madness no matter how comfortable we are with the uncertainty of an unclear and impermanent existence. Hence, we can only achieve and sustain a balanced self by inviting imbalance or disparity into our lives so that we can come to appreciate a fundamentally stable universe filled with meaning to unearth through the progression of our narratives.

Naturally, the challenge of reaching and retaining mental equilibrium may be insurmountable, given that the complexity of existence guarantees our doubts about being right and our fears of being wrong. But we tend to confuse our propensity to seek truth with the desire of the insecure ego to know life in absolute terms, which leads us to build false confidence and declare what is true and what is right. This can be difficult for those of us who have suffered much in our youth fighting for our security and soundness of mind, whether it was in response to unremitting terror, abuse or neglect or in dealing with the inability of our significant others to cope with their own slanted accounts of reality. These experiences can traumatize us to the point of retreating from the world and exhausting our trust in others or in ourselves. However, the severity of the struggles we face can also surface our moral questions and intuitions to discover our conscience.

A world without problems is a world that does not require morality or a conscience. A blissful existence eradicates any need for moral contemplation. And while unmanaged desire and moralized discipline may lead to suffering, our inherent morality emerges from agony. There is no good or bad without our awareness of distress and its intent, and there can be no tragedy without the presence of life to afflict with pain. Our conscience is that awareness, and it is a level of consciousness we possess to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Like an internal adjudicator, it assesses all actions and tells us to continue or to stop them, or to correct something or prevent it from occurring when we have the power to do so. This applies not only to circumstances where we might be abusing others or overindulging at their expense, but also to conditions where we know we need to be saved because we are the ones being abused.

Our conflict lies in the choices we have to make, and for many of us, it is much simpler to adopt a philosophy or religion that dictates or vindicates our actions because it removes the stress of making doubtful decisions as well as defends what we already want to do. But while we may use our acquired moral code to hide our conflict, it is our own conscience that ultimately creates this inner struggle and positions the conflicted self as the conscience of society. To eliminate the pain of this internal fight is to erase all awareness of the true battle between good and evil, which is less about altering the balance of power as it is about aligning our own self-interests with the interests of others. Although serving the good of others depends on trusting how it will affect our own good or the greater good of the community, our moral field of concern expands and contracts based on how well we harmonize the differing principles and values of our inner life. And finding harmony requires that we fulfill our intrinsic need for meaning by achieving a satisfactory sense of utility, which is tied to our relations with others and everything that brought us into the world. However, the extent to which we can elevate the moral consciousness of our society is contingent upon our profound awareness of ourselves in one another.

The fundamental prerequisite for a good conscience is to know thyself. Although our essence, like the universal truth, remains a mystery to drive us towards it, we can nevertheless begin by acknowledging our tendencies, perceptions and beliefs, and eventually our lies, delusions and errors in judgment. We can also pay attention to our negative reactions to the behaviour of others because they frequently remind us of the vulnerabilities and deficiencies concealed in the blatant prejudices and undesirable qualities we ignore in ourselves but project onto others who may epitomize those attributes or who may not demonstrate them at all. This awareness can be very liberating because as we stop expending too many resources on denying who and what we are, we free our conscience to focus on what really matters. In addition, if we can find the courage to confront our shortcomings with the nonjudgmental support of others, then we will be able to redirect our energy to transform our weaknesses into strengths and convert what is bad into something good.

However, doing good things does not necessarily mean we are good people. Whether we are inclined towards personal gain or a higher purpose, evil can seduce us by hiding behind success, progress and benevolence to justify increasingly more disturbing behaviour for the good of the self or the welfare of our society. In global cultures where profit reigns as the egregiously supreme value that defines our freedom and importance among populations born into servitude and imposed status, it is not difficult to surrender our unspoken inner disorder and frailty to an outwardly unforgiving ideology of false stability and illusory social mobility. Hence, in order to enhance our immunity to this wicked deception, we have to question ourselves and especially our motives. We have to routinely monitor our lives so that we are not tempted and trapped by the evasive distractions of the insignificant. And given the frequency with which mistakes in interpretation and action occur, we need to learn to reserve unnecessary judgment and resist drawing hasty conclusions, especially when we decree to possess the absolute proof to do so. When we are prone to suspicion and paranoia, we will unabashedly accuse or attack others who have done nothing wrong or nothing worthy of condemnation. And when this begins to appear as a societal norm, it marks the end or the devolution of our humanity.

When we combine our concealed insecurity and open mistrust as residual effects of our past traumas with our biosocial programming to form impressions and make quick decisions, we permit our unnerving impatience to confine our overconfident discernment in recognizing the full context of any matter. And being deemed highly intelligent only exacerbates our general tendency to falsely see ourselves as objective, which plays against us when we find evidence to buttress any of our judgments. But striving to be good is fundamentally striving to widen our understanding of the world and ourselves that meaningfully informs our way of life, and only its sincere attempt will lead us all to be good.

We cannot fight our base nature. We are naturally and justly designed to be selfish. We need to be concerned with ourselves in order to contribute back to the same universe that made our existence possible. Self-interest is a necessary part of our survival, and our subsistence is essential to our active participation in the world. We must be selfish even when we help others, which we can easily exemplify in the scenario where we are rescuing someone from drowning by ensuring we do not drown trying to do so. We cannot save or protect the life of another if we are incapacitated or dead. And since being a martyr merely offers us one last selfless deed, we can only care for others through our basic concern for our own lives. Our first order of business is to take care of ourselves. The more we suppress this, the more we struggle in life to be good. By being both self-serving and self-sacrificing, we can avoid exclusively egocentric or altruistic behaviour that causes imbalance in ourselves and in our respective societies.

We need to remember that our self-interested disposition comes with the capacity to see and act beyond a very narrow definition of the self. It is not by excluding or disregarding ourselves, but by expanding the scope of what we are that can allow us to be good. We may distinguish ourselves as individuals from our community, but we forget that we are also collectively its manifestation. We are both self and society, which are interdependent and inseparable because they innately require one another to emerge and to flourish. This makes the real struggle that lies within us far more relevant and arduous to resolve as we try to find tranquillity in the unruly communities of our minds, where we can neither discern nor confront the unpalatable truth we harbour within us about the world. But if we gradually manage to examine our motives that hide behind what and how we think things should be, we will come to realize that the good and evil we once thought set us all apart are so smoothly blended in all of our actions. Although this revelation should be liberating as we surface the obscure experiences that have shaped the contents of our psyche, it equally shakes the very foundation of what we know to be right or wrong. We discover that the more we question life, the more clearly we see how ambiguous it really is that we need our moral compass to guide us through our lives in search of the universal truth.

To know and live by way of the truth is the existential challenge of being viagnostic, and it requires us to learn how to differentiate the truth from what we want it to be. If we want to transcend the uncertainties of life, we have to integrate the scientific realm of what it is, how it is and why it is with the moral realm of what or how it should be and why it should be as distinct facets of the universal truth, which includes our inescapable yet necessary subjectivity. And it is within and through the psyche that all layers of the truth intersect and where we find the channel to our essence as our potential utility that awaits its meaningful expression on the great stage of life. While we may each be one of many, all of us together are many embodied in one. We need one another to partake in the shared narratives of our sentient existence and to find the opportunity to insert our part of the story that is projected onto the screen of our own consciousness, where we will see the community that inhabits each of our minds being reflected back in the whole of society. We will tap into and contribute back the wisdom we carry biologically and technologically through our cultures as recordings of noteworthy events, and we will discover our morality in the vessel of our spirit that perseveres through the impermanence of life.