The invisible corners of the mind
And the genius of self-mastery
By Yervant Kulbashian. You can support me on Patreon here.
The lion’s share of your conscious experiences bubble up from unknown and unsuspected depths. The question “why did I think that?” frequently admits of no clear answer. There are times when you might wonder if your conscious self is just a spectator along for a ride which is largely out of its control, even its knowledge. And although a sense of being “out of control” can sometimes feel positive or worthwhile, at other times the ungovernable vicissitudes of your psychology make your own mind a source of anxiety, frustration, and uncertainty. A large number of our wounds are self-inflicted, or more accurately inflicted by an unseen shadow of the self.
Many rightly suspect that if they were to clearly understand these deep wellsprings of their own motives and thoughts, their life would be significantly better. They’d be able to control their mind… to an extent. Such control can never of course be total, since reality can still throw you into unforeseen situations. Nor can any system ever understand itself in perfect detail without creating an infinite recursion. Nevertheless, we’ve all observed how greater maturity and skill in addressing one’s psychology leads to tangible benefits, benefits denied to the young and the immature.
Each and every person makes at least some attempt at self-understanding as a means to self-mastery. This generally kicks off when you begin to seek out happiness in and of itself rather than chasing its momentary, incidental causes. Instead of wondering “how can I get the objects I want?” you ask “how can I ensure that I get more of that psychological experience (happiness, joy)?” Alternatively, you may find that you resent the experience of misery and try to definitively avoid it. The moment either of these pursuits takes root, you begin to treat the mind like an external object to be observed, studied, and most importantly conceptualised.
For to understand any “thing”, including the mind, requires that you build conceptual systems through which to frame that understanding. In fact, to even know that there is a “thing” to be studied requires that you can first identify it as a thing. This is especially difficult when you cannot see the subject matter directly, as is the case with most psychological entities. These latter have no substantial presence in sensory experience (e.g. what does the superego or the unconscious look like?), and so they must be actively invented by some searching need — a need that benefits from interpreting the world according to that entity.
Take, for example, how you first came to understand emotions. It began when, as a child, your socially inconvenient outbursts began to draw censure from adults. At the time you may have had no understanding of what, if anything the problem was; you only wanted to deflect their censure. Soon a parent said to you: “you’re feeling those big emotions because you wanted some ice cream”, after which they forgave and comforted you. And so with the help of your caretakers you adopted the term “emotion” as a public explanation or excuse for your transgressions. Only once this initial linguistic foundation was in place could you begin to elaborate on what emotions even were. Until then, you couldn’t study them because you couldn’t even see them.
Emotions would not have been discovered or explored were it not for an underlying motive that searched existence to resolve its issues. They would have remained dormant, or at most latent. Every act of understanding the self must first begin with a desire to know, a problem for which that knowledge is a solution. This highlights the difference between “understanding” and “memorisation”. In the former, the mind is prepared to receive the answer, to frame it as a reply to an inner question; in the latter it is just parroting other people’s words. Your mind cannot “understand” the answer to a question it never cared to ask. What it then grants the mind is a novel tool of control.
Your understanding of introspective concepts like feelings, experiences, memories, desires, likes and dislikes, right and wrong, good and evil are all invented as means of grasping the world so as to work well with it. They are collections of useful affordances. All concepts in your mind are created in the moment they are needed, for the reason they are needed. And, like a hammer or wrench, they take the shape that best suits those needs. Even transcendental concepts like mind, self, and consciousness are affordances — they are to you what they do for you.
For example, the notion of the unconscious was initially invented as an analytic tool — but not to “explain” the source of certain irrational impulses in any pure sense. Instead the intent was to remove them from the analysand in favour of the conscious, rational, and overall pro-social aims of the patient and analyst. This function is embedded in the process of Freudian psychoanalysis, which is to make the unconscious conscious — that is, to erase the unconscious. So the unconscious was explicitly “that part of behaviour we want to erased by making it conscious”. Probing it served as a tool of social self-correction, akin to the priestly confessional. Once again, the originating need and the resulting concept may not be dissociated from one another; the latter is a tool of the former.
The common set of tools by which the layman conceptualises their mind — e.g. emotions, memory, thoughts — may be enough to get most people through life, most of the time. Yet they remain vague, and are often inadequate to fully describe our experiences in detail. In response, a broad range of advanced psychological and philosophical terms have arisen which attempt to clarify remaining ambiguities: e.g. transcendence, empiricism, rationality, reinforcement, sublimation, phenomenology, the Tao, and so on.
And yet the project of exploring the human mind is certainly not complete. There is much about the psyche that remains stubbornly difficult to explain. For example, we have no established theory to explain emotions like humour, sadness or crying, the sublime, or why certain experiences give you goosebumps. For these and many others we have only an array of tentative and often mutually contradictory guesses. Their true causes remain hidden behind a curtain of ignorance.
What would a full and comprehensive self-understanding even look like? To some that question itself feels like sacrilege, like we’re asking for too much or trying to peer into what should remain hidden. Such people have made peace with our ignorance of ourselves as an inevitability, and even advise against pulling at those threads. Perhaps, they suspect, the full truth would be uncomfortable, or the journey too strenuous.
Nevertheless, to those for whom the self is a larger concern or of greater interest these questions continue to needle their brains. They ask: “could we ever look at the soul the way we look at a thoroughly-understood piece of software?” What sort of mind could fully encompass itself? Is this even possible, or would it be a paradox, like a snake eating its tail? Perhaps there is an insurmountable boundary somewhere that cannot be crossed, a sheer cliff of logical impossibility preventing full self-understanding. Such a conclusion would place any dream of complete self-knowledge — and consequently self-mastery — infinitely out of reach. It would at least explain why every such project hitherto has met with only partial success.
And the project is not without hindrances. Since, as described, any act of self-understanding is always guided by the needs that prompted it, that very system can backfire and obstruct the searcher. There are many uncomfortable, suppressed corners of the psyche that we would prefer not to dig up, and to face the full reality of the mind may be more than most people can bear. Your mind can contain ecstatic and joyful experiences, but also every variety of anguish and insanity. What person could confront their entire self; that is, the entirety of what they could become, every agonising struggle and joy of their past and also their future, and consider that cumulative sum in one single moment, in one single theory? It would feel like compressing the universe into your skull, and it would take titanic efforts just to keep the thought in front of you. On the other hand, the human mind can seemingly adapt to anything, and even this effort could, in time, become routine if the circumstances are right.
Or perhaps an alternative: perhaps the only person who could face the entirety of their mind is the person who had already done so before embarking on the quest. As should be clear by now, the moment when a new idea or understanding “clicks” must have been prepared for and set in motion by an earlier tectonic shift in your needs. What your mind sees, and how much it sees, reflects the height and breadth of the desire that calls that knowledge to its aid¹. Your theories about yourself will only uncover as much as you dare to dig up; they end where your fear or apathy begins. To see the greatest, most complete self therefore requires the greatest mental fortitude.
There is much that escapes the notice of the indolent. Just as you aren’t aware of many things in the external world you don’t attend to, there is every reason to suspect there are thoughts that flit through your mind which you simply don’t register, because you have no conceptual structures by which to “catch” them. A shadow or “second man” lives inside your head, playing out an alternate life of which you may never become aware. To see more, you must attend to more; to the most that one can attend. And the greatest attention can only be elicited by the greatest need.
When he said: “I will travel further,” many said:
“This man lies, for the road ends here.”
— Time and the Gods, The Sorrow of the Search, by Lord Dunsany
Like Shaun in Dunsany’s Time and the Gods the genius of self-mastery must be one who remains stubbornly unsatisfied. He turns away every offered dish and goes hungry until the more delectable one is brought. He delves further and further into dark caves, even when all his companions have set up camp long ago, and he finds himself without help and with only his own torch to light the way. For who, if he turns back when he sees something unpleasant, could honestly claim to be a thorough investigator?
Nor do the caves have any end or final resting state. The human mind, pushed by necessity, always hungrily reaches beyond itself, to reinvent its perception of the world through more and more profound insights. With each transformation desires the mind now attends to experiences it hitherto had no interest in, and structures them according to its new priorities and perspective. It gains a new paintbrush with which to paint a new reality, a new philosophy of life.
For example, in youth, a newfound desire for financial success restructures your understanding of hard work; the need for love proliferates varied notions of attractiveness; the experience of physical harm attunes your mind to safety and danger; the yearning for peer esteem generates your every tool for maintaining social appearances; your frustrations with mob mentality urge you towards the self-discipline of critical thinking; the impending fear of death refocuses your concerns and your meaning in life. Looking into every corner of the mind, then, the keen investigator observes this movement of self-creation and recreation, as what you value in life changes with the recurring round of personal growth. These shifts in values are the underlying engine through which the mind is forced into a new epistemic configuration.
Given the importance of the subject, the reader will perhaps forgive a brief digression into the specifics of how new values are formed. The confrontation and subsequent adjustment of the mind to reality is characterised by two opposing forces: anguished despair which creates new negative values, or aversions; and cathartic insights which give birth to new positive values, or aspirations. In the first case — despair — one experiences an irreconcilable, irrational, and insurmountable weight of reality that crushes one like the finger of God, and to which they must atone (at-one), as a new, painful truth they have hitherto tried to push aside; the heavy burden of a truth the mind can not longer run from. In the case of insight, one experiences a shining moment of cleansing revelation that sweeps aside all mental clutter like a bulldozer, and which cannot, will not be doubted; as it lifts up the mind to a new set of callings — to new goals. Despair and insight are therefore not passing emotions, they both reflect moments when your values change — usually for the rest of your life.
Beneath it all is an unending, ever-renewing, and barely concealed state of terror driving the mind forward through its transitory existence. Despite any feeble attempts to delay such transitions, there is no chance that the machinery of the mind would ever countenance a fixed or final standpoint of values. It must always be ready to reinvent them as required, to wipe its moral slate clean a hundred thousand times, to destroy old idols and obsolete gods, and to even laugh the divine laughter each time it does.
For some investigators of the human condition, this may be one of the more unsettling truths they stumble upon in the dark caves — as they realise that the naked mind, as it truly is, can never finally settle on a static set of values. This undermines any reliable, comfortable, and above all rational ideal of human psychology; every evil or good that you can conceive of — and others that you cannot conceive of — are all possible in your mind if the circumstances are right.
The moralising ego even attempts to hide this ugly fact from itself, so as to create a veneer of respectability and stability². Yet that ego, living in the light world, is itself a fiction of constancy that serves your immediate purposes; a fiction that is easily shattered with the onset of the next crisis or calamity. Outside the small workspace of the rational, self-secure intellect there still remains the continual cycle of death and rebirth, whose roots go deeper and are more profound than even your most cherished childhood memories or youthful aspirations; and they can shatter these with a single glance.
As consolation, the unending cycle of self-reinvention, rolling through the mind, also brings with it many rewards. Every human skill, enlightened perspective, or envied stroke of genius is guarded behind such exceptional moments, during which the individual willingly accepted and chose to live with the truth of some despair, and consequently reaped its rewards as novel insights. Neither skills nor genius can be gained for free; the path to wisdom only comes through a phoenix-like cycle of rebirth. To embrace what you normally run away from is the only path, the only route that leads to new levels of mastery over the world and the self.
The truth about the self is indeed unsettling — and that is the point. To see the invisible places of the mind you must, through innumerable acts of will, break through the surface illusion of a stable, rational patina, in whose creation you and society have been co-conspirators, and accept the discomfort of a stormy ocean of psychological instability. Without such ego-sacrifice no amount of timid armchair exploration can avail. You cannot discover what is in the dark if you stay comfortably in the light.
The fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it — so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of “truth” it could endure — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The genius of self-mastery is well-guarded behind a thousand such gates of trial and transformation. Stepping through each he finds a new tool, a new perspective, a new handle on his experiences; a new idea. He absorbs deeply lessons which to others are only word-sounds. He gains “understanding”; that is, a battery of affordances with which to grasp the world, and which others cannot see, since they do not care to see them.
To combine all the above threads into one principle no doubt baffles the intellect. To see in a single moment how to tie together all parts of conscious and unconscious cognition requires Herculean effort. There is so much for the mind to process at once, and the investigating intellect itself occupies an ephemeral presence in the same, larger machine that it is investigating; so a recursive pattern is a necessary concession. Moreover, as was made clear this self-reflexive function evolves continuously with changes in needs and values. Most who encounter such a daunting array of challenges prefer to regress to an easier, more stable standpoint, content to ignore the confusing paradoxes inherent in the search. They continue to look for their keys “under the light”, so to speak.
On the other hand, a mind that has through self-will brought itself to encompass the entirety in a single moment gains an almost superhuman perspective on the dark corners of the mind. The whole is illuminated as though with a light-switch. The fog dissipates, and a level-headed, equanimous understanding — like gazing at a simple machine — settles on the mind. Every necessary structure or tool of self-understanding is then generated automatically; the mind attends to everything it needs to, in exactly the way that it needs to. This is the promised outcome of the trail through the caves of the psyche. But the journey and the destination cannot be detached; you cannot see unless you first build up the will to see.
¹ Some may deem this an unnecessary requirement. It is tempting to try to push personal motives out of any scientific endeavour, to presume that the facts regarding human psychology can be accepted as impartially as facts about the chemical structure of rocks. On the other hand, not just anyone studies a subject; certain personality types tend to be drawn to certain fields of research. Nor are profound understanding, insight, or genius sprinkled evenly across practitioners in a field. Many a principled misunderstanding between practitioners arises from a fundamental lack of concern or attention about some matter, which is simply an unwillingness to delve more deeply than one already has.
² The term “morality” itself reflects an evaluation of the shifting landscape of values from the perspective of a single, fixed set of values. The tension inherent in “morality” arises from the inevitable contradiction of trying to “evaluate values”.
