THE PROBLEM OF WILL
F. Richard Singer III www.conceptualstudy.org
SECTION 0
INTRODUCTION
Perspective: In quiet contemplation I have lamented that life has no purpose. In contrast, I normally live immersed in an ocean of purposes. What shall I make of my lamentations, of my sense of ultimate emptiness? It is not the scarcity of purposes that plagues me, but their overabundance and apparently arbitrary character. My problem of will is not the traditional problem of free will, for I am too often confronted with my potential creative abilities to deny it. For me the problem of will is what to do about my ideals, how to chose my purposes and actions, how to evaluate my creative efforts, what to do about the tendency of my will to collapse. I cannot merely accept the purposes I find in my self. I must be able to evaluate, to look on what I have done, and judge the extent to which it is good in relation to being an origin (see concept below). This paper focuses on this highly personal concern. Only this section focuses on developing concepts. However my action concepts emerged from learning how to live with my personal problem of will, and concepts are acquired primarily by using them. This paper uses concepts for the main purpose that motivated their creation. As such, it is central to my personal understanding of what I do, and it may even provide others with some more appreciation of why I developed a net of concepts for doing. This 2008 edition of this paper is largely the same as when it was initially written circa 1974. It does not give an account of my third collapse of will, which is given in a paper written much later.
A Fundamental Experiential Dichotomy: Monday I placed a dozen eggs in the refrigerator. Tuesday I used one to make pancakes. Later I open the refrigerator and as expected, I see 11 eggs. The next afternoon there are only 5 eggs. I recall that Charmayne baked cookies and assume that she used 6 eggs. I do not consider alternatives such as the refrigerator decided to hide eggs from me or that eggs disappear at random. I think of my ordinary surroundings as stable, as usually changing in an ordinary orderly manner. I tend to think about these changes as having causes. What is happening may seem strange or even chaotic at times, but I usually feel this is due to my lack of understanding, rather than to factors that might introduce singularities in the flow of cause and effect.
My focal awareness is often directed outward, but even then, I am also implicitly aware of me, and I sense that the attitude I am taking toward me is radically different from the attitude I normally take towards my surroundings. I feel that my choices can influence my surroundings and that my choices originate partially in me. Most of the time this feeling is rather ordinary, and I do not articulate it explicitly, even in my thoughts. At other times, it is more pronounced. I seem to be a source of power, a creative disturbance in a largely stable environment, a potential of unlimited options, a singularity where causality is only partial. I feel that I have real options and that because of me the locality around me can become what it might not have become, that I can act in some ways as a causal origin.
The contrast between my feelings about me and my feelings about my surroundings is a ubiquitous feature of my experience. When engaged in activity or absorbed in thinking about my surroundings, this contrast is muted. Even when I deliberate on specific choices, this contrast is usually in the background. It is when I reflect on the fact that I choose, or when I severely question my choices at a deeper level, that I recognize this as the most basic theme running thru my experience. I think of me, I think of will, choice, doing, thinking, understanding, ideals, purposes, options. I also realize that I think of other persons in this way. This is not the theme when I think of the impersonal features of my surroundings. In order to live more effectively I want a
deeper perspective on this dichotomy in my attitude. My purpose for conceptual philosophy is to provide tools for thinking about this dichotomy. While I can think about and do many things without having concepts for thinking about this dichotomy, I cannot gain a broader perspective on such matters without them. I need a conceptual philosophy in order to organize my thinking about what I am doing and to make what I am doing part of a quest to live effectively.
Partitions of Reality: I often think in terms of me and everything else. The problem with this partition is my vague use of the word me. Privately, I think of an immediate-me, a crucial concept rooted in my most intimate personal awareness of me as being me. In public discourse, I use an extended concept of me, one related to an awareness of my interaction with everything else. This extended-me includes what other persons consider as me, along with immediate-me. Extended-me includes an evolving complex of characteristics. Immediate-me seems simple compared to extended-me. The vagueness in the way I use the word me gives rise to vagueness in my concept of everything else.
Altho I still tend to bipartition reality in this vague way, this does not provide the concepts I need for thinking about what I am doing. I prefer a tri-partition, using {my will, my persona, my beyond}. My will is what I experience as immediate-me. My persona is that part of extended-me which does not include immediate-me. He is the rest of me. In contrast to these, I have a concept of a more remote other, which includes everything beyond extended-me, and which I call my beyond. My persona is an intermediate reality between my will and my beyond. This tri-partition of reality provides these three most crucial and ubiquitous reality concepts, which also play this role in my routine net, and which thus permeate all my conceptual nets.
This tri-partition is a way to organize my core reality concepts. Using it is a conceptual decision rather than a reality claim. This tri-partition is by function, not by substance. It provides two convenient bipartions. I can think in terms of me as contrasted to my other, where ‘me’ refers to immediate-me, and ‘my other’ refers to my persona and my beyond. When I think about how to become a more effective origin, this is the bipartition I find most useful. From this perspective I use ‘me’ to refer to immediate-me. It can also be useful to contrast the beyond me to extended-me, say when acting as an origin with my attention directed toward the beyond. From this perspective I often use ‘me’ in a vague manner, ranging between immediate-me and extended-me.
My Will: My immediate-me concept provides an orientation, a point of special identity in the world, a source of action and understanding. I think of me as a single point of will maintaining identity thru time while changing what I am. I think of me as deliberately acting to shape various states that I encounter. Using the term ‘me’ to refer to both immediate-me and extended-me can be ambiguous, so I also use the term ‘my will’ to refer to immediate-me. I use this term because I think of immediate-me as a will, in the sense that this describes the most significant thing I do, namely when I willingly act. Will is a functional concept, so saying that I am a will is an observation about what I do, rather than an ontological claim. It is like saying that I am a logician, except that being a logician is a much less significant part of what I do.
The concept of my will has always been my deepest and least remote concept. It is a stubbornly persistent concept, remaining intact thru a multitude of changes in my conceptual nets. It is a prerequisite for any net I can use. Since it provides the essential reference point I need for a sense of orientation, it is one of my crucial concepts. All my nets are ultimately supported by this concept. I cannot even pretend to imagine the existence for my nets without me. When I try to imagine the world without me (say before I was born or if I cease to exist), I am still aware of me trying to imagine this world. Knowing that I exist is nothing more than an ordinary observation, one that is even more predominant than the observation that I sometimes act as an origin. Unlike Descartes, I feel no need to prove my existence, nor can I imagine what such a proof might entail.
My Persona: While the term ‘the rest of me’ has the connotation I want for this concept, it is awkward, so I use the term ‘my persona’ for it. My persona is the totality of my characteristics, the collection of tools my will can most directly draw on as I act. He is my only known channel for reaching into my beyond, but also the main channel thru which it impinges on my will. I used to think of my persona as part of me, partitioning reality into what I now think of as extended-me as contrasted with my beyond. In ordinary conversation, I still refer to my persona as me, primarily because others tend to identify me with my persona. This is no longer my preferred way of thinking. In private, I am more likely to refer to my persona as he. I want to emphasize that I consider my persona to be more like my beyond than like me. His behavior often seems to be largely determined by what he is and by what he encounters out there. However it is also influenced by the choices I make.
My Beyond: This concept is open and fluid. It points out of me to the known and further out toward the unknown. It has no specific reference, for it points toward much that is beyond my ken. It has been synthesized from everything I encounter or imagine. My immediate-me concept reminds me of my experience of personal power. My beyond is beyond the direct control of my will. This concept is a reminder of my limited will and a call for humility. It reminds me to be skeptical about general claims I might be tempted to make. I am a will to act-experience-understand. My beyond is a challenge, a playing field for my actions and a testing ground for my understanding.
Reflections of My Deepest Crucial concepts: My immediate-me concept is directly experiential. It is clear enough for many of my purposes. However this concept transcends the now in ways that I find extremely fuzzy. It applies to at least one instance of me when I was 3 years old. It does not clearly apply to anything before this time. I do not even know if applies to anything having a continuous existence in the recent past. I seem to wax and wane as an active origin, and I sometimes wonder if in some of those instances I have ceased to exist. Perhaps it is only my sentiment of rationality that demands the continuity of my existence. Thinking about my experience still leaves me uncertain about such matters. Anyone with a more analytic bent might advise me to discard the concept of me because it is too fuzzy to be meaningful. I do not find this to be the case. My difficulties with this concept are minor in comparison to its personal utility.
My understanding of my will is limited by an inability to experience me in greater depth and to understand much of my past and present experience of me. My powers seem best suited to understanding my persona and my beyond. They are less suited to understanding how my will can act as a causal origin, or even in knowing to what extent I am a causal link or origin in most of the events in which I participate. Perhaps this is because the kinds of characteristics that allow for human cognitive competence evolved as a tool for coping with the other. It seems like there are two main ways that I use to understand my will. One is a contemplative and unstructured listening to my goals and ideals. An essential aspect of my will is that I try to shape various states. My main goal is to shape my will, but mainly by interacting thru my persona with my beyond. Another way is to examine my actions from the perspective of my purposes.
My Persona and Me: My persona was shaped thru bio-socio processes in a world of conventions, a world of language. This world was saturated with purposes, often conflicting, often only implicit, often hard to understand. Language provided him an illusion of understanding. Consider ordinary words like food, pencil, chair, flower, weed, car. How could he react to such words unless he could grasp a multitude of purposes? Behind these mundane purposes, he expected other purposes. What was he, if not a highly purposive creature? He searched for a purpose beyond and beneath all the purposes he observed-lived, and he tried to discover some general purpose to human existence. Perhaps it was in this process of the reaching for ultimate purpose that I was born or that I emerged from him. But that is only a passing thought, for I make no pretense to understand how or when I came to be.
I do not know how or why I came to exist. I do not know how I am held in existence. I do not know how I am linked to my persona, to that child of bio-socio processes. Yet I am linked to him, for he has been my only recognized contact with the beyond. I live in him. He lives with me in him. We exist together in an uneasy truce. He is uneasy with me because of my origin quest. I am uneasy with him because he serves other masters. He often seems controlled more by his connection to the beyond than by his link to me. He may not serve me well for I barely understand the processes by which his other masters channel him. He is a member of something beyond me. Altho he is my persona, he does not belong solely to me, for I am only a will to become an effective radical origin.
I do not conceptualize the dichotomy between my persona and my will as a mere fiction. From my experience I know that I am intimately linked to my persona, but that he is not part of me. When I refer to my persona I include my body, my needs, my desires, my character, my personality, my attitudes, my intellect, etc. Will is what is left when my persona is stripped away. In saying this, I accept a communication impasse with many people. Their crucial net allows nothing personal to be left when persona is stripped away. I cannot utilize a net that denies the possibility of the personal residue I experience when I strip away my persona. Beyond my persona I find me, a point like unity of existence, power, cohesion, awareness, creative action.
What is my persona but a changing creature, which as he changes does not remain the same? My will also changes, but even in change remains the same. My will is an indivisible entity, the ultimate atom. My mathematical point concept is not an attempt to understand the beyond. It is an expression of the fact that I am a will. My persona has no sharp boundaries. My body seems like a physical boundary, but not always. Not all of my body is necessarily a part of my persona. My gall bladder was not, at least not as it was about to be removed. In the extreme, I would discard all or part of my body if I could find more useful tools. My emotional and cognitive powers seem closer to me than my body, but they still are not part of me. They are tools I use, yet like my body, they are tools inherited. I have shaped them somewhat, but they are far from being mine. They carry the trademark of their external origin and they serve the purposes of will inadequately. My persona is a creature, belonging, essentially conservative.
My will tends to be radical rather than conservative, because I am more a creator than a creature. I do not know if my will was created. Perhaps will is merely a chance mutation, originating as a lapse in causality. Perhaps it created its own existence. I am distressed by my inability to understand how the particular will that is me came into existence. My ignorance in this matter makes it difficult for me to know me. It makes it difficult for me to understand the separation of will from persona.
From age 20 to 40 this separation process was destructive. I tried to obliterate parts of my persona because he was more a tool of the other than of me. I did not want to be linked to something so pawn-like. That was the act of a weak will, a will unsure of its own freedom, a will afraid that it could not be born. I now accept the separation of will and persona as an accomplished fact, but I do not endorse my former attitude towards of him. I am willing to live within my persona, altho he still serves other masters. I will be tolerant of the fact that my origin quest is a threat to my persona. In the past I did not have the vision to convince him to follow me in that choice. I tried to drag him along, and he drew on his cultural and biological heritage to resist me. I did not know the extent to which he was chained to the beyond. Now I know, and I will be as patient with him as I have been with the persona of others. When I step into chaos I will not reject my persona and leave him behind. I will reassure him when he feels that I am no longer sane because I have chosen the empty chaos of originship. I know that I need him and that he needs me. I hope he can learn that altho we cannot exist forever in chaos, I have the power to endure for as long as necessary. Emptiness and agony are merely facts, and like all facts, they can be accepted for what they are. He can learn that his avoidance needs are far from absolute.
In the past I tried to destroy the emotional components of my persona, because it was his emotions that resisted living in the chaos I needed to explore. I am wiser now, and more powerful. My persona learns slowly, but I will be a patient teacher. When he resists the journeys I choose to take into chaos, I will go more slowly. I am no longer afraid that I can be deterred by external factors. I no longer perceive my persona as a dead weight pulling me irresistibly towards security and belonging. I can now listen to his cry for security, offer him comfort, and tell him of the fantasy world of power and freedom, a world where security is irrelevant and belonging is turned inside out. I will try to learn to take good care of my persona, so he will trust me when I lead him into chaos.
It is not easy for me to establish an appropriate relationship with my persona. I do not know how to obtain control over the reward-punishment mechanisms that have so much impact on him. I have eliminated the power of some of these mechanisms. He no longer has much of a potential for feelings of obligation, guilt, jealousy, gratitude, envy, and even many types of fear. What I have not been able to learn is how to enlist the reinforcement mechanism for the behavior and attitudes I would choose him to have. These mechanisms, now so essentially conservative, are the mechanisms I would like to learn to use in support of my most reckless irresponsible radical ideals.
My ideal purposes are those that I am willing to accept as central guiding factors in my behavior. I do not know how to root these purposes in more powerful ideals. The crux of my problem is that my strongest motives are not those I would choose as ideals. The ideals I have chosen are weak in comparison to my strongest dispositional motives, namely those rooted in an alliance between ethics and self-interest.
One of my main goals is to destroy this alliance that still forms a basis of the power controlling much of my behavior. There is a risk involved in trying to liberate my persona from his usual motives, especially when this involves liberation from ethics and self-interest. Even the ideals I would choose to retain have drawn much of their motive power from these roots. As I further destroy these roots, I may not be left with the incentives I would choose as ideals, but only with their empty shells.
When I look at those ideals to be presented elsewhere, I feel a vast emptiness. Realizing I would never have sufficient reasons for any choice involving live options, the motive power of these ideals began to disintegrate. Rejecting ethics and self-interest as a foundation for choice, I found nothing to compel me to choose and nothing which could really support such choices. I lost any illusion that there was a resting-place for my choices. Altho I know I shall not have sufficient reason for choice, I still lapse into ways of talking which presuppose that there are such reasons. My persona still tends to feel that his behavior can be explained and justified in a secure comfortable manner, without appeal to anything so mysterious to him as origin acts. Yet I continue to counter-condition him. I challenge his behavior, looking at apparent choices. Most of them I can explain away, at least potentially. On examination they reveal at most a minimal influx of concurrent originship. It is only when I push these explanations that I find major elements of originship involved. Then I find the major decisions which create ideals, the many small decisions that shape the ideals and the way I think. For me the ordinary origin activity that emerges in my active behavior was usually initiated in the quiet times of reflection and anticipation. It is only by removing my persona from active involvement that I can teach him to believe in the existence of the originship that I experience.
I hope to teach my persona to believe that I can act as an origin, but this is not enough. I hope he will also embrace this fact and accept the tentative character of the ideals I use in programming his behavior. I hope I can teach him not to ask for any justification beyond my will. I do not even want him to take pride in the originship in which his behavior is to be rooted. I want him to feel choices; coldly, clearly, without mystical or superstitious support; at least when the need for decisive action is not pressing him.
SECTION 1 MY
FIRST COLLAPSE OF WILL
Some Snapshots: In childhood my purposes emerged in the normal course of living. When conflicting or in needed of examination for any reason, I could draw on ideals I had absorbed from my parents. These told me that my fundamental purposes were those arising from a Christian heritage of selfless love and an American heritage of political freedom. All my desires and needs and all of my purposes should be judged in terms of these ideals. How was I to judge the applicability of my complex heritage? I was to cultivate and use my own intelligence. This rational approach to religion had a tendency to clash with the Calvinistic teachings of the churches we attended. In the summer of 1955, the foundations for my purposes and my behavior which had evolved during my childhood seemed to suddenly collapse. Reflecting on this first collapse of will, I sense a prelude that I can best articulate to myself in terms of some mental snapshots occurring before age 17.
Snapshot 1: I am 7 years old, in a large stone Presbyterian Church. I am in a catechism class, and I know the question and its answer. What is the purpose of man? The purpose of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I feel appalled. How can this be? It is not enough.
Snapshot 2: I am 12, in a Sunday school class, hearing again about the Ten Commandments. I do not take God’s name in vain. Others violate this commandment routinely. My inhibitions against using profanity set me apart from my peers. I wonder how they can be so indifferent to the fate of their immortal souls.
Snapshot 3: I am 14. I will not sing a hymn containing the phrase ‘great God our king’. I am thinking of the Declaration of Independence and wondering how a free people can use the image of a king to think of God.
Snapshot 4: I am playing basketball. My side hurts, and I am always out of breath. Other players smoke but are not so plagued. What is justice?
Snapshot 5: I
am reading
Snapshot 6: I
discover
These snapshots remind me that I was trying to use my intelligence to reconcile my religious heritage with my heritage of political freedom. Intellectually, I had no difficulty in rejecting Calvinistic ideas, and replacing them by a gentle form of Christianity in which God was just and reason was the source of religious knowledge. However I did not eradicate the hold that my Calvinistic conditioning had on my emotional attitudes. My knowledge became inconsistent with felt beliefs. I knew those beliefs were irrational, but I could not totally escape the feeling that I might have chosen a path that would damn me, that God may be as Calvin had described him, and thus an enemy. Later I applauded John Stuart Mill in his refusal to worship an unjust God, but deep inside I could not find the courage to face eternal damnation. I would have preferred to believe in a more rational religion, but the more I reasoned, the more I diverged from the religious beliefs I had been conditioned to hold.
The early reconstruction of my religion towards a gentler version of Christianity took place in a rather narrow intellectual environment. Altho I received little external support for this reconstruction, the only direct external opposition came from people with fundamentalist beliefs. Just before I was 17 in the summer of 1971, my intellectual environment expanded considerably. I found myself in a materialistic, positivistic, humanistic environment of a university philosophy program. I now had to continue reconstructing my religion in the face of a vast array of reasoned hostile ideas.
For about three years, I seemed to surge with confidence as I was shaping a rational freedom oriented deistic religion. While rejecting Christian dogma, I still retained what I thought was the most important element of Christianity, namely the ideal of selfless love. I was rooting both my religious and social ideas in philosophy, while thinking that philosophy could be rooted in epistemology and that the basic premises of epistemology were self-evident truths of a rational universe. I seemed to be comfortable within a mainstream of western thought, with my philosophical roots firmly implanted in a type of Cartesian rationalism. I was challenged by epistemological views coming from positivists and pragmatists, but this helped me develop my ideas. At the time I did not realize how much this undermined their emotional basis. I was comfortable with my deistic religion and did not feel seriously threatened by the current humanism and materialism around me or by the earlier Calvinism of my childhood. I felt I had the key insights into the meaning of human existence. I merely needed to think thru the details. Once this was done, I would have a secure grounding for my own purpose.
My surface confidence screened me from my deeper feelings, from my need for support from others. Rationalism and deism had lost their intellectual respectability. Perhaps I would not have questioned so searchingly if I had found a comfortable niche in some more respectable contemporary way of thinking, for then I could have drawn my intellectual support from the living. The next 3 snapshots occurred during those three university years. They remind me that I felt the need for such support.
Snapshot 7: We have just moved into a faculty member’s house for the summer while he is away. He left his library. I have discovered Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason. Why did I feel vindicated in my deistic beliefs, when I already knew they were correct?
Snapshot 8: I am arguing with a cultural relativist. She finds it quaint that anyone could be a deist and a rationalist, a perspective so out of date. I feel disdain at this irrelevant attack, but it hurts.
Snapshot 9: I have just read my teachers comments on my criticism of A. J. Ayer. How can he dismiss it so lightly? Positivism is easily seen to be incoherent. Yet I am bothered by these positivists. I want them to acknowledge their errors.
Snapshot 8 reminds me of my failures to create the emotional power I needed to support the philosophy I was constructing. A direct attack on ideas means that they are being taken seriously. The most effective attack is to ignore them while giving the impression that only primitive people and children could ever take such things seriously. When those who we take seriously do this, the effect can be devastating, unless we are careful to reflect on what is happening. I have largely learned to trust my cognitive abilities. Often I have held to my perspective in the face of opposition, and later received the support of others. If I was going to single out one factor that seems central to my past distress, it would be that my beliefs so often differed from the beliefs of others. I was once told that maturity involved learning to trust your own beliefs. True, but the sense in which this comment was made seemed naive. It disregarded the extent to which we need non-rational support for our beliefs. In speaking about most matters of common belief William James said:
We see into these
matters with no more inner clearness and probably with much less than any
disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have
some grounds for its conclusions, but for us, not insight, but prestige of the
opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping
magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred ninety nine
cases out of every one thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will
do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by someone else. Our faith is
faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the
case. Our belief in truth itself, what is it but a passionate affirmation of
desire, in which our social system backs us up?
I would expand on this with the following conjecture. Given support, we learn to trust our own beliefs, even those that conflict with the beliefs of others. For most people this trust is extremely limited. They have doubts when no one else either agrees or even admits plausibility.
I can summarize this three years as a period during which my crucial net evolved in such a way that it was no longer integrated with a firmly felt and securely reinforced beliefs. This allowed my first collapse of will, but did not trigger it. It was triggered by an internal conceptual failure. I ask a crucial question, for which I could not even begin to imagine an answer. I recall this in the following snapshot. It is this snapshot that initiates my problem of will. It began with what I thought was a conceptual question, namely the question at the end of the snapshot. It was years before I realized that my problem of will was much deeper, and that thinking is less fundamental than doing. At that time I only had a vague concept of free will. My current radical origin concept was not available. My crucial net was in no way prepared to use such a concept. However I shall refer to my thoughts and attitudes at that time using concepts from my current nets. In particular what I would have then conceptualized as a quest for freedom I now recognize as an early form of my origin quest.
Snapshot 10: I am walking home from the university, thinking about why I should ground my choices in ethics, i.e. in what is right according to correct ethical principles that I can know thru reason. I had previously convinced myself that I have a sufficient reason for this commitment. I had reasoned that my deistic religion is rational, hence correct. It followed that it was in my long-term self-interest to ground my choices in ethics. Without being aware of it, I had previously assumed that this provides a sufficient reason for so grounding my choices. I now make this assumption explicit and question it. I first suppose that something is wrong in the chain of reasoning used to establish my deistic religion, and that instead there was an unreasonable God who would damn me for relying on reason to question his will. Under these conditions my commitment to ground my choices in ethics is an act of futile rebellion, and is against my long-term self-interest. I also find it easy to imagine non-theistic universes in which doing what is right is not in my long-term self-interest. In neither case am I willing to reject this commitment to ground my choices in ethics. I must either admit this commitment is non-rational, or deny that long-term self-interest could supply a sufficient reason for ethical action. I decide on the latter alternative, and ask a question which I will struggle with for years. What can provide sufficient reasons for my commitment to ground my choices in ethical principles?
It was many years later that I decided not to ground my choices in ethics, since even after this episode, I still believed correct ethical principles could be discovered thru reason, even if I could not discover a sufficient reason to choose to be ethical. I was temperamentally inclined to good, and little tempted by anything bad, but this was not sufficient. The correctness of my deistic religion, the existence of God, the objectivity of good and evil, none of these seem relevant to the question of choosing. I could find no sufficient reason for choosing, so I asked myself, why choose. Before that question occurred to me, I could act. Afterwards, finding no answers, I lapsed into a pathological state. I had always considered action and knowledge as inseparable. Now there was a gap between them. I retained a surface confidence in my ability to know, but for several years I would collapse in situations that other people considered a normal part of living. Before this, I had been faced with situations that challenged me to choose and specific choices were sometimes a problem. After this question, choice itself was a problem, aggravating and magnifying every specific problem of choice. In particular the problem of choosing employment seemed overwhelming. I needed income, but being tied to arbitrary regulations by others seemed incredibly onerous. How could I focus on external restrictions when my deepest purposes were in a pathological state?
At that time of my life, I only confronted a few aspects of this problem of choosing. In particular, I faced the problem of how to direct my choices. The threat I felt was that I was challenged to choose, while my will to choose was always in danger of disintegrating. All my previous purposes seemed suspect. It had not yet occurred to me that I could create my own basic purposes in a way that was neither rational nor irrational. I was unable to ground my choices in religion or philosophy. Nor did find the help I needed in psychotherapy. I was unable to relinquish the feeling that my core problem was the question of how action could be rationally grounded in knowing. My therapist regarded this as a symptom, rather than a cause. I don’t think it was possible for him to take mere philosophy seriously. I felt this conflict of judgment, but I wouldn’t trust his judgment over mine. I knew this question was a crucial factor, but even now I have not decided how crucial. I have gone thru a great deal of agony in trying to learn how to live effectively. While I think I have a great deal of insight into this agony, there is a great deal I know about myself that does not feel right in any explanatory framework I can imagine. The explanatory frameworks offered by others, by tradition or by authority have seemed even less satisfactory.
Psychotherapy did not help me answer or escape the question of what could provide sufficient reasons for grounding choices in ethical principles. I returned to a direct confrontation of this question and explore it on the assumption that there was a sufficient reason that I would eventually find. During this time I would behave as if my commitment could be grounded. The next decade involved turmoil and struggle, but I found that I could act with power. Yet I knew that this was a temporary phenomenon and that I would remain insecure until I answered my question. This search finally bore strange fruit. I realized that it was impossible for me to have sufficient reasons to ground my choices in ethical principles. This answer had eluded me because I had not realized that I was asking a vague question. A clarification of this question had to wait on the evolution of my crucial net. In particular I needed a better understanding of my concepts of reason, knowledge, good, choice. At a certain stage these became clear enough for me to see that my vital knowledge of free choice was not the type of thing that was susceptible to any final rational grounding. I had hoped to ground my actions ultimately in knowledge. I realized that no epistemology that I could imagine was suitable for this purpose.
While this was an important conceptual breakthru, it did not solve my problem of how to choose. It was merely a step in my awareness that I had been trying to find a purely conceptual solution to what was essentially a non-conceptual problem. This was painful, much in the same way as was Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. This theorem used techniques of mathematics that I believed sufficient for mathematics to demonstrate that these principles were not sufficient. Once I understood its proof there was no reasonable way I could hold on to my previous philosophy of mathematics. If I had reflected on the full significance of this I should have seen the broader inadequacy of my epistemology. Ultimately the rest of my epistemology broke down much as its mathematical component did.
Gödel prepared me for the destruction of my rationalistic
epistemology, but this was too remote from the problem of choice to have much
of an immediate effect. I had to first clarify what was involved in my search
for an external grounding for my choices. Once this was done, I could no longer
doubt that an external grounding was impossible. Yet at this time I did not
have a net that allowed for an acceptable alternative, nor the personal
strength to use the kind of alternative net I am currently creating. The shock
of my earlier failure to find an external grounding was mild in comparison to
the shock from this realization. My earlier collapse of will had been
localized. I did not seriously question the overall adequacy of my
philosophical perspective. This second shock was more severe, shattering major
strands deep within its subceptual core. It was only a matter of time before I
was paralyzed by what seemed to be a total disintegration of this net. Before
turning to this I examine my attitude toward ethical principles in more
details, since it was the breakdown of this attitude that lead to my second
collapse of will early in 1974.
SECTION 2 MY SECOND COLLAPSE OF WILL
My Goodness Quest: There was a time when my basic ideal was to ally my self with and serve that which was truly good. I thought that this quest for the good provided an external grounding for my values and ideals, and especially my ideals of personal freedom and intelligence. I thought these values and ideals were justified to the extent they were supportive of this quest. At that time, this quest had power. It could easily veto any of my other purposes, whenever I was aware of them. I shaped my self and my life in terms of my understanding of this quest. For a long time, it seemed as if this quest would become my totally dominant purpose. This was prior to the emergence of the problem of will.
One hidden reason I endorsed my goodness quest was because it formed a powerful shield behind which my origin ideal could be safely cultivated without being fully tested or challenged. This shield was also a prison, for behind it I could not cultivate the power to live as a radical origin. Nevertheless this shield-prison may have been necessary for a will lacking internal power, a will demanding external support, a confused will, a will not yet ready to reach for radical originship, a will on the defensive from my beyond. Before 1974 my perspective left my radical origin ideal open to attack on what seemed a conceptual level. I was continually being exposed to ideas having powerful support and the potential to undermine this ideal. Only God’s will is important. Free will is an illusion. Individuality is an illusion. Individuality is evil. The individual good must be subordinate to the good of society. I felt a continual challenge from calvinism, socialism, marxism, positivism, mysticism, materialism. I used my intellect to counterattack, while trying to build my own defenses. Given the weakness of any belief system, an intellectual counter attack was not too difficult. However the counterattack also made me aware of the weaknesses in my own beliefs. While they always seemed more plausible than the alternatives challenging them, they became less plausible than I had supposed before the battle. Furthermore the battle between beliefs is seldom waged solely on the level of intellect. A capacity for belief is often rooted in hidden dispositions with strong emotional components.
Altho I won my intellectual battles, I lost the war in defense of the goodness of my origin ideal. This allowed me to shape a new radical origin ideal, related to my older one, but no longer dependent on my goodness quest. That shield-prison is no longer intact. I am no longer protected in a compulsion to idealize originship. My decision to idealize originship is now primarily a transcendent act. However this decision is only a small step in the subordination of my goodness quest. To accomplish this, it may I recall my previous attitudes towards Good and freedom. This is not easy, since they were linked to a net I no longer find comprehensible. However I can recall some of the things I might have said about Good and freedom at that time.
Good is immutable. Its existence and nature are independent of any being. It exists above and beyond the universe, providing the principles by which everything can be judged and the goals towards which the universe should be shaped. Serving the Good should be the dominant purpose of every person, and it is the only purpose in their long-term self-interest. In any choice situation for P, there is a set of potential options. This set is linearly ordered with respect to the Good-Evil continuum. Exactly one of these options B is the best. This should be a sufficient reason for P to choose B, but due to ignorance or weakness, it is not causally sufficient. Nevertheless, B is also always the option that is in P’s long-term self-interest. Freedom involves having the knowledge and power that would enable one to choose the best option. Freedom is justified on two grounds. Most fundamental is the fact that freedom is Good simply because of the nature of the Good. Less fundamental, but still important, is the fact that freedom when properly used shapes the actual towards the Good.
I suspect that one reason these statements did not seem strange to me was the factor of familiarity. I had heard and read similar statements by people who had nets that allowed such statements to express some meaning. I once must have even had a weak grasp on similar concepts, for I am sure that I found some meaning and truth in statements like these. However once my subconcepts shifted, they lost their capacity to express whatever truth I may once have expressed thru them. They now serve as a reminder that I once thought in ways that now seem confusing. I could once think of there being a fixed class of all possible worlds. I could think of having a true long-term self-interest, in some way independent of the fact that the self was always changing. I could think of self-interest as a sufficient reason for choice and a rational grounding for behavior. I could think in terms of general categories with almost no regard for radical aspects of will. At least I could think of persons as having essentially the same nature, whatever that might have meant and whyever I considered that important. I could think of freedom as selective rather than creative. I could think of maximal freedom as the power to accept the ultimate purpose in human life, the purpose of walking the only true path of Good. I could think in those general terms, in terms of a human purpose somehow binding on me as an individual.
My goodness quest was primarily a result of factors other than my will. By temperament I usually had a greater inclination to be good than bad. I had a much stronger sense of right and wrong than other children, and even most adults. I could not understand how they could so easily do things they know were wrong. I had somehow been conditioned to idealize Good and to both shun Evil and identify it with unreason and ignorance. It was not until I was 19 that I considered as a live option the conjecture that sometimes choosing evil might be in my long-term self-interest. Along with my ethical conditioning, I was conditioned to believe that among the highest good was personal freedom. Unlike children who are discouraged from asking questions, I was encouraged and reinforced for my questioning. Ultimately my tendency to question and my ideal of freedom came in conflict with my goodness quest. However I did not veto these purposes, perhaps because I considered the conflict a logical impossibility, perhaps because my nascent origin quest was already becoming independent of my goodness quest.
My first doubts with regard to purpose were conceived in general terms. I encountered the claim that life was absurd, that human existence had no meaning and no purpose. I now wonder what such a claim can mean either to those who acknowledge it or to those who dispute it. Consider the statement X that life is absurd. I can think of several possible interpretations of X that I find comprehensible.
A. Every human being finds his life absurd.
B. From the perspective of the person who made the statement all life seems absurd.
C. A particular person feels that his own life is absurd.
I doubt that any of these are the intended meaning of X, which not only seems to be vague description of the human condition, but to adopt an attitude toward this description. Moreover X is stated as if we are expected to adopt this attitude because it is the appropriate or correct attitude. This I find incomprehensible. My concepts have shifted and questions about my purpose have been cut loose from a static ontology by my reflections on the fact that I sometimes act as an origin. I now conceptualize me primarily as a personal will and only secondarily as a human. It is my purposes on which I now focus. This seems more real to me than the abstract notion of human purpose. Even if I could discover something general about human purpose this would not solve my problems of creating or selecting and of strengthening my own purposes, and it is these problems which I must solve if I am to become an effective radical origin. This shift in my perspective came slowly. When I first idealized originship, I did not realize the radical implications. I only glimpsed a very limited kind of originship. I thought the major purpose of human existence was already given, and that this adequately grounded the selection of smaller purposes.
I still think the bio-socio purpose of human existence is to live, mature, reproduce, preserve and enhance traditions, modify the world a little in the process, die. Since these are rather barren in relation to my personal purposes, they are purposes in which I have very little stake or interest. My main problem is to create a purpose beyond the purpose given by my biological or my cultural heritage. I no longer justify my origin quest in the Good or in human purpose. Even when I justified my struggle for freedom as part of my goodness quest, there was a tension between them. My first agonizing philosophical conflict and subsequent second collapse of will was intimately related to this tension. My vague questions about why to choose good over evil helped me realize that my origin struggle could not be grounded in ethical considerations. My origin quest was beginning to challenge my goodness quest. At that time, the challenge could only have a negative and disintegrating effect. I did not have the audacity to presume that my ideals could be grounded in my will, nor did I have the capacity to even tentatively articulate my concept of will. However the bondage of my origin ideal to my goodness quest was partially broken as a result of this struggle.
During my first collapse of will, my crucial net remained largely intact, altho it was damaged,. Only my behavior disintegrated. After a few years it returned to its previous course, with my goodness quest again central. I could no longer believe that I had a rational grounding for this quest, because in spite of being convinced that doing good and self-interest were equivalent, I could find no rationally adequate reason for pursuing either. The reason I could function was that I assumed there really was an adequate reason for my goodness quest, but that this reason had eluded my efforts to discover it. During the period that followed, I was active and involved. For years my goodness quest retained most of its older power, but I tended to identify as good whatever seemed to support my ideal of personal freedom. This identification of the Good with freedom allowed my nascent origin quest and my goodness quest to live in an uneasy truce. It also allowed me to channel the motive power of the older quest in support of its emerging successor. This was most easily done when my origin quest was directed beyond my self. For some reason, I had almost no positive power to shape my self, except indirectly when I could relate it to my quest for the Good beyond me.
The Second Collapse: From 1954 to 1969 I was plagued by the question of a rational grounding for my goodness quest. The more I asked why choose Good rather than Evil, the more the motive power of this quest declined. I finally decided that the kind of grounding I wanted was impossible. Altho this was a tremendous shock, it took about 5 years for my productive activity to slowly grind towards a halt. I then plunged into a second collapse of will more severe than my first. In spite of its severity, it was brief. It made me face the fact that altho I could find external causes that were largely responsible for my values and ideals; I would not find the external grounding I had always wanted. My goodness quest had lost its power in this regard. I no longer saw this quest as basic. It was merely a quest in which I had become involved due to temperament, conditioning, habit, and some amount of free choice. My second collapse of will finally terminated my goodness quest.
Altho the destruction of my goodness quest left an almost absolute emptiness, deep within was a small voice of triumph. My origin quest has been liberated from external grounding. If I retain and cultivate this quest, it will no longer be because I think of being an origin as good. I intend to affirm a new quest for good, but one that will be grounded in and supportive of my origin quest. I intend to avoid all temptation to pretend there can be an external grounding for my origin quest. At times it may be accurate to describe my origin quest as contrary to my own self-interest, evil, irrational, sick, immature, etc. At other times, it may be accurate to describe it in terms most people regard positive. I may find knowledge of such matters interesting or useful for a variety of reasons, but given my present crucial net, it is cognitively irrelevant to my choice of this quest.
My second collapse of will came years after the shock initiating it. I admitted that my commitment to reason had never been essentially rational. I also realized that this commitment had enabled me to be active and productive. Yet, somehow this seemed insignificant. Why be productive? Why be anything? How do I behave? How do others behave? I decided to step back and watch. Others seemed to have groundings for their behavior, but these were beyond my comprehension. For 5 years I largely suspended deliberate acts of will. I observed that while my behavior had a tendency to disintegrate, it was also extremely stable. This stability was due to habit. Social conditioning supported these habits. Altho I could find no other grounding for my behavior than habit, that was not the type of grounding I wanted. Awareness that my behavior was now grounded in habit tended to undermine the habits. My behavior became extremely erratic and I went into a period of intense agony. During this period, I was most strongly influenced by two factors, the call of will and a desire to avoid agony. These were opposing factors for I felt that the only way to avoid agony was to destroy or restrict will sufficiently to become normal. I knew that to answer the call of will was to risk chaos. I did not believe I could find the power to go thru the agony that would follow and, I could see no sensible reason to step into that kind of agony. Yet no matter how much I desired liberation from agony and no matter how feeble my powers of will when faced with extreme agony, will would not stay permanently submerged.
Internal Groundings: I know now that I was trying to convince myself that I had no alternative other than to face the call of will. I did not want to risk any form of decision. I wanted to feel that I had been forced into freedom and thus was not responsible for the resulting agony and chaos. That worked as a temporary expedient, but then I began to see that my commitment to freedom and my commitment to act on ethical principles had always been at least partially grounded in will and that my will was beyond rational analysis. I had achieved a new insight into the kind of crucial net I needed, but it felt irrational.
I can never have
sufficient reasons for any transcendent act.
This statement symbolizes, but does not describe, my insight. It is primarily a symbolic statement pointing towards the radical implication of originship. Nothing I have ever said or written comes close to articulating what this means to me, for it indicates the deepest shift I have ever made in my nets. Another brief epigram helps me focus on my attitude towards originship.
In the beginning was the act, rather
than the word.
My cultural heritage provides the background from which this insight emerged. I have been told that I was influenced by the existentialists. Perhaps, but I do not feel close to them. They speak in general terms about the absurd and the human condition. They appear to know that man is finite, heroic, tragic. What do I know of the human condition? How can I know there is no God or that there are no gods? My reliable knowledge about other wills is negligible. For me the human condition is a vague remote notion. The idea of God is vague. I no longer have either beliefs or disbeliefs involving such remote matters, for I do not comprehend them well enough. My knowledge is more about me than about such remote matters.
The realization that I never have sufficient reasons for any transcendent act undermined the subceptual basis of my previous epistemology, and a new orientation began to emerge. A passage from James, which I read and rejected many years earlier, partially expresses the new orientation I had found.
From its first down to its highest actual
attainment, we find that the cognitive faculty,
where it appears to exist at all,
appears but as one element in an organic mental whole,
and as a minister to higher mental
powers - the powers of will.
With this, the gap between knowledge and choice disappeared. The roots of both merged in crucial concepts that I could not articulate, for they were part of me. Without them I could not assert anything. Of these crucial concepts I could only have what Polanyi calls subsidiary awareness. I could not shift them into focal awareness. The distinction between focal awareness is discussed in Polyani’s Personal Knowledge (P55-56). In essence the distinction is this. I am focally aware of ideas as I write. Most of the time I have only subsidiary awareness of the computer I am using, for it functions as an extension of my self. I can become focally aware of the computer, but then I tend to lose my focal awareness of these ideas. Instead I pause and think about or act on the computer, but as this happens, I no longer use it as an extension of myself. My awareness of subconcepts is primarily subsidiary.
My crucial net is still evolving. Powerful new ways of thinking have emerged, but the older ways have not been sufficiently modified to accommodate them. It is difficult to reshape crucial concepts. I must approach them indirectly. Since my enactics is rooted in these concepts, I do not find the approach I learned from academic philosophy useful. I need a new intellectual discipline, one which studies conceptual nets as states of affairs produced by persons. This has become my main intellectual interest, with a special emphasis on the study of my own nets. I now have this as the goal of my philosophy, but my methods and purposes seem alien to both traditional and contemporary philosophy. In many ways it is closer to what I study as a descriptive psychologist and as a non-platonistic mathematician.
I study my own subconcepts by reflecting on the net I would choose as a foundation for my thinking. My search for any external grounding for my purposes seems to have ended. In the past, these purposes had been partially grounded in my will, but I was not consciously aware of this fact. Now that I am aware of this grounding, I would make it deliberate and complete. I may not feel secure with such an internal grounding, and it may take me a lifetime or more to eradicate my desire and need for an external grounding, but I would not willingly have my purposes grounded except in my will. I reflect on the level of originship that I practice and the level that I would choose. There is a major discrepancy. I have formulated this discrepancy into a problem that I now call the problem of will. Perhaps this encompasses the problem of free will but it goes much deeper.
The Problem of Will: How much of an origin can I become, and how does will expand its scope? What provides the context from which my transcendent acts emerge? How can I preserve and expand my power? How can I increase my options? For what purposes shall I utilize power? What shall I create? How shall I choose? How do I learn to create purpose? What power can I obtain to continue my existence beyond biological death?
I do not find that I am essentially an origin. My originship waxes and wanes. I do not need to answer the call to will, and this call is somewhat muted each time I ignore it. I have seldom deliberately tried to become a pawn, but I often neglect the task of becoming more of an origin. I find that many of my most basic alternatives are not between choices. They are between choosing or drifting with the causal flow. Originship does not seem to be forced upon me. Rather it is a potential I can cultivate if I choose.
For the present, I have chosen my origin ideal as the grounding for all my choices. This is meant to be an internal grounding. I have already commented on the history from which this choice emerged. These comments neither explain this choice to me, nor do they justify it. They are merely considerations that I find relevant to its effective implementation. As long as I continue to reaffirm this choice, it is more fundamental than ethical considerations or considerations of long-term self-interest. It is an act of will, grounded ultimately in me, and nowhere else.
SECTION 3 My Third Collapse
of Will
Prelude: I had to take a series of typhoid shots in the fourth grade. These were given in assembly line fashion. Kids talked about needles breaking off in your arm. I was so tense that I thought this shot was the worst thing that ever could happen to me. From that and other experiences, I developed a phobia in relation to medical procedures such as shots, blood tests, tubes in the nose, catheters, etc. I even passed out once when my teeth were being cleaned. The one thing that I would vividly imagine with dread was to be hospitalized and thus being dependent on the decision of others as to what painful procedures would be in my best interest. I wondered if instead I could just endure being plagued with physical pain and thus avoiding medical attention. I was about fifty years old when I finally begin to face this concern. I had a persistent pain, and while it was finally diagnosed as muscular and corrected by physical therapy, for a time I was suspected that the problem might be gallbladder or some other internal problem. I went thru several kinds of test. One of these was a blood test, something I had refused to take for thirty year because of my phobia for needles. With the help of the doctor who gave me this test, I took it in a way that ended my fear of blood tests and shots. I still wondered how I would face drastic medical procedures.
Confronting My Phobia: On March 10, 1989, I slid from my snowy roof and crushed a vertebra in my back. I landed on my feet and flipped over on my back. I awakened from the fall with the dogs licking my face. I tried to get up but could not. I called for help, but the radio in the front room was playing loudly and David did not here me. I rolled to the back door and pulled myself inside where he could here me. He helped me up into the kitchen and called 911. My reactions to this accident were positive for a while. This was the worst pain I had ever endured, but I had no difficulty with it and no fear. I was even glad that they could not give me anything to alleviate the pain. In the emergency room, my worst pain was in my legs, a pain so bad that for days the weight sheets on my toes was difficult to endure. I recall how upset my son was when I would wince with pain, as those who were working on me would accidentally brush against my feet. In the emergency room, my reaction was that this is just pain and I can merely adopt an attitude of passive endurance. I remember thinking that I had been unconsciously waiting for a challenge that I could use finally to put my phobia to rest. In a way things worked to this end, but not as soon as I expected. I thought I had succeeded, but I soon found that a deeper fear was about to be opened.
The Initial
Collapse: I was alone in a hallway just waiting, not knowing how long, but
my will to endure persisted. In the catscan, I had a feeling of isolation. A
mechanical sounding voice kept saying things that I no longer remember. I was
lying on a board, hands stretched above my head with no support. Holding them
in this position was exhausting and painful. Passive endurance would not
suffice. I needed the will to hold my arms in this position. I kept asking how
much longer. The answer was always the same, “Just a little while”. I hate this
kind of answer. Just tell me in minutes so I can watch the clock. I could have
endured had I known how long, but this open-ended feeling broke my will. I
needed to rest before going on. They let me out. Panic set in at the thought of
trying again. I refused. We finally agreed that I would continue if I could
have support for my arms. Charmayne was given a protective vest and she held my
arms while they completed the process. It was over and a shot obliterated the
pain. However the damage was done. I felt I had prepared for the crucial
battle, confronted my phobia, and lost. I remember telling a friend that my
origin quest was over. My reaction to my failure was severe, not because of
pride, but for much more pragmatic reasons. Without the support of a higher
power, there seemed to me to be only two ways I could endure existence. I could
be lucky enough to avoid overwhelming distress or I could cultivate the kind of
strength that
Coming Back: I woke about 4am. The nurse was not helpful. I decided that I could wait until 6am, and then I would call Charmayne. She came immediately, arranged a private room so she could stay with me every night. For three days, I felt helpless and hopeless, depending almost totally on others. My son took a vacation from work so he could be with me during the day. Brenda came to see me and said she would come every day. On the third night, I decided that however I felt, I would ask for no help during the night. I endured and felt a sense of peace. My will might break again, but I could learn to cultivate the courage rebuild it. I did not need to be prepared in advance for whatever might happen. I had confidence that my origin quest could be renewed, altho I also knew that the effort was just beginning. I did not realize that I was going to enter a four year state of extreme spiritual pathology, and that even after this was over the effect might last indefinitely.
The rest of the stay in the hospital was hard but my attitude was positive. I had more support from others than ever before in my life, but I also I did whatever I could to help myself. I learned to fold a cover, even though it would take 15 minutes to do this simple task, but I had no reason to hurry. I had to stay essentially immobilized, able only to log roll and move my arms. Brenda came to feed me. My bowels became blocked but Charmayne helped me free them. When they came to fit me for a body brace, I could not lift my face. John held my face up so I could breathe. The first day they got me up to walk in my body brace my legs refused to support me. Rick was there to help me learn to walk again. The best support was the amount of time I was able to interact with my friends. Much of the time, my room seemed like an extended seminar. I had in depth one-on-one discussions at other times.
Before my accident, I had been informally involved with Dick for several years discussing Descriptive Psychology. I went to his house once a week. I attended the advance motivation theory seminars he was teaching. When I returned home, he moved his seminar to my house so I could continue to participate. It was during one of these sessions that I experienced my first panic attack. These were to last for some time and were a prelude to a failure of will that took me by surprise. After my second collapse of will, I thought that I would always be able to cope with any non-physical distress. I was wrong.
Overview of My Third Collapse of Will: I was soon able to go back to teaching. Soon there was no apparent problem with my back, but I begin to have an enormous amount of physiological tension. This was accompanied by feeling of existential anxiety that at times seemed so overwhelming that at the beginning of the summer I renounced my origin quest and became obsessed with a desire for my existence to be terminated. I both lacked the will to commit suicide and the assurance that anything so simple as death would accomplish this desire. During 1991, my origin quest reemerged, but I did not have the strength to sustain it. I then spent most of 1992 in a state of extreme spiritual pathology. This pathological state became less severe in 1993. I returned to my origin quest in 1994, but only by focusing on my quest of acting as a resource for others. In 1995, I tried to expand this, but found that a portion of a pathological state remains, and still severely restricted my ability to engage in the kind of deliberate action that might help me become a more effective origin. Until early 1997, this was aggravated by a hip pain that made walking difficult. Then walking stopped being difficult but there are still aspects of existence that make biological existence seem less than desirable. I have at least maintained a limited version of my origin quest. The future of my origin quest remains uncertain, but perhaps this is inherent in such a quest.
I next turn to a more detailed account of my collapse of will and my recovery.
The First Stage: By May 1989, I had lost faith in my own will and placed myself in the hands of professionals. However, I knew that my competence at understanding had not diminished. I understood that my collapse of will was a deep spiritual problem. I knew that I must either find faith in my own will again or faith in a higher power. Altho my first collapse of will had convinced me that psychoanalysis was useless in dealing with such a problem, I knew that psychotherapist had adopted a number of alternative models. None of these seemed relevant to my problem, but being desperate, I went to a therapist who I had been told was outside the norm. While I liked him, his conceptual net and my experience with therapists in the next four years merely reinforced my previous attitudes about the irrelevance of psychotherapeutic models in relation to the type of collapse of will I had encountered.
Since my spiritual heritage was protestant, I decided to try psychotherapist who claimed to take such a perspective. Altho he prayed at the beginning and end of each session, during the session his focus was still on secular therapy. In spite of this, I continued with him for about five months when he finally decided he could not help me. He suggested medications and recommended a psychiatrist to prescribe them. However, I was doubted that medication could do more than mask my despair. I knew that whatever physiological concomitants there were to faith, that pharmacology was not advanced enough to have faith producing pills. Before finally deciding that professional help was useless, I had been placed on about 20 different medications. I also had a number of shock treatments.
Shortly after starting medication, things got much worse. I could not sleep. My anxiety and despair rose to a level so high that I wanted to be hospitalized. Since my psychiatrist did not hospitalize, I changed to a different one who also changed my medication. Except that I was now able to sleep, nothing got better. The open stress ward proved inadequate. I would leave and walk home and then return. Finally, I deliberately smashed a picture with a glass cover. I waved a piece of broken glass at the attendants who came and then walked out. They did not know that there was no danger. The next day I returned and they placed me in a small locked ward with straps on the bed. This place was the shock that initiated the confronting one of my most basic fears. I realized that I was afraid that I would never again function and that because of this I would have no alternative except to be locked up for the rest of my life. My will revived. In spite of the small space, I found a way to walk for exercise. I had Charmayne bring my go board. Within two weeks, I was home. It was near the end of July. I was hospitalized a number of times after that and the same theme had to be played out each time. Despair, hopelessness, revived will, helping others, finding activities, etc.
The rest of that summer was torture. I thought of each day as having 4 periods of 4 hours each. My goal in the first period was just to get thru it. I used part of this time for exercise, taking morning walks with Charmayne. For periods 2 and 3, I used physical activity to kill time. I thought of them as separate because eight hours was too long to imagine. One recurring goal was to see if I could go an hour without thinking about how much time was left. Triumph was to make it half way thru period 2, because then it was noon. I took down our plum tree and used my machete the chop it into mulch. There is a creek area about two blocks from our city home. I had obtained fireplace wood from there for years. I spent many hours in this area clearing weeds, working on the path etc. Summer ended.
The first day of the new semester Andrea and Ed walked and talked with me, helping me gain the confidence that I could function again. I did. That semester was a struggle, but I taught with great success. Morning tension was always high, but many nights I would walk across the bridge and go a secluded resting place I had built in the brush near the creek. I would lie there for hours, finding peace in the cold and solitude, warm in the cover of the brush and leaves, renewed to teach the next day. But all was not well. I would return home lie in bed looking out the window at patterns of the trees, still having difficulty in sleeping. The semester ended. I had a sense of success. We went to a movie with our family. I felt that the struggle was now over. I was not aware that I had exhausted rather than rebuilt my strength.
The Second Stage:
Early in the next semester, I knew that I was in trouble. This time I decided
to consult a psychiatrist connected to the
I went to the day hospital program at
Charmayne did not know what to do with me and I did not
see how I could be at home. Diana came to my rescue. I still felt that the
essence of my problem was spiritual. She found a clinic near
The doctor in charge the clinic took a special interest in me. He decided that until I was off the effects of Prozac, I should not take any medication. I soon began to sleep again. This was the best hospitalization program I have ever observed or encountered. There was group therapy several times a day and the facilities lent themselves to easy interaction. I quickly made friends. After a week, we found that my insurance would not pay. I was forced to leave. However, the program had served its purpose as far as I was concerned. The faith of the staff and all the other patients was calvinistic. This put me in touch with my own religious roots and helped me purge any hope that I could find support in that tradition.
When I was asked to leave the clinic, I got a ride to my
mother’s house, which was in the area. The next day Clifford came and took me
to his house in
My stay in
spot along the creek. My despair was too deep and I could not tolerate remembering the hope that I had felt during that earlier stage of this collapse. However, I did spend hours as before breaking rocks with my sledgehammer to improve the path I had started working on that first summer.
One major problem at this time was difficulty in sleeping. Often I would wake at several hours before anyone else and feel the need to moan and cry. Instead of going to the secluded park, I would go to the new secluded area. I would lie in my seclusion or sit on the rocks nearby and feel the depths of my despair. For a number of years passing close to it would trigger a deep pain and sadness. Now I walk past mostly without recalling those times, but when I do, it is with a kind of wonder that this pain is no longer triggered.
The Third Stage: In the summer of 1990, I started attending a self-help group sponsored by Recovery Inc. The methods and principles of this organization are based on the work of Abraham Low, and in particular on his book Mental Health Through Will Training. There are a number of Recovery groups in the area. Each meets weekly. A Recovery meeting is highly structured and the attitudes and beliefs are somewhat rigid. Each group has a leader. This leader is a group member who has learned Recovery practices by using them. The leader starts the meeting by having members read from one of Dr Low’s books. Neither the leader nor any other member is supposed to discuss our readings. We are not considered qualified to have opinions about his ideas and methods. I found this an amusing limitation. The reading is followed by an example period. Some member P, volunteers to give a brief account of some event that caused him distress. Members of the group then make brief comments using Recovery principles. Someone might remark that P showed a will to bear discomfort, or I might ask P if he spotted that the situation was distressing but not dangerous. The example period is followed by a mutual aid period, in which members talk in pairs or small groups. Finally, there is a socializing period.
I found these principles and practices easy to understand, but only of limited utility in helping me with my deeper anxiety. However, this group helped me cope that summer, at least well enough to return to teaching in the fall. Since the meeting that I was attending met at a time that I was scheduled to teach, I begin attending others. Without intending to, I soon became an assistant leader, which meant that I had to run the meeting if the leader was absent or handle the meeting when the leader needed to give an example involving her distress. I used this to help another person develop as an assistant leader, so I could invent a different role for myself. The leader was usually too busy to help new members understand what we were doing, and I enjoyed doing this more than leading a meeting. I also enjoyed being a sounding board for the leader and conferring with her. One leader in particular spent considerable time with me discussing principles and practices. This was enjoyable because she did not consider Dr. Low’s ideas beyond criticism, as did most members. Perhaps the main thing that these groups did for me was to get me involved, altho used with understanding and some flexibility, I think these practices and principles could be useful to almost anyone.
Joe was a therapist who had found Recovery principles so useful in dealing with his own problems that he used them in his practice. He was not a Recovery leader, but he played a major role in several groups and was involved in an effort to broaden the growth of the organization. I began to use him as my therapist. However while I was able to use Recovery principles to help others, they did not reach the core of my distress, so my therapy with Joe did not last. However working with him did help me in my struggle to teach that fall. Furthermore we developed a collegial relation that later got me involved with him in his goals for an institute for the spread of Recovery principles.
Near the semester’s end, I felt so depleted that I did not
see how I would be able to teach the next semester. With misgivings because of
my Prozac experience, I called the psychiatrist that had proscribed it. He
shocked me by saying he thought that he had diagnosed me as obsessive
compulsive and he recommended that I see Elliot Nelson, another psychiatrist
from
I met a young man who had also been hospitalized in relation to suicide. He had been on kidney dialysis since early childhood, and had long felt that his life was too bleak to endure. His case involved a serious suicide attempt. This was my first significant experiential encounter with the phenomena of suicide, and my discussions with this friend reinforced my ideal of having the choice to die be a personal right. Altho I made many friends during my various hospital stays, I lost touch with all of them after leaving. I do not even remember the name of this young man.
The
The first significant experience after I returned from the hospital took place on Christmas night. I was sitting at the table and felt a kiss on the back of my head. Diana was holding Angela behind me and Angela had leaned over and kissed me. She was 21 months old at the time. Before my accident, I had often kissed my grandchildren in that way, and perhaps I had kissed Angela that way. I do not remember, for she was born the day after my accident and I did not feel I would ever develop a relationship with her. I was wrong. I played with her for the rest of the evening. Henceforth, we have had a very significant relationship. In my periods of despair during the next two years, knowing that I would be going into the hospital, feeling I would never function again, I would hold her picture in my arms and cry. However even during these years, I was able do the things with her most of the time. In fact, during all the period of my collapse I retained the power to do things with my grandchildren when not in the hospital.
The next significant experience was a surge of creativity. During my second collapse of will and for some time thereafter I had begun writing conceptual philosophical, but after a few years I turned most of my creative efforts to developing materials for learning mathematics. In January 1991, I returned to a serious effort to revise and expand these writings. A deeper perspective emerged, so intense that I could hardly sleep for about a week. This intensity was accompanied by a state of wellbeing, but I was beginning to feel exhausted. Elliot thought I was in a manic phase and prescribed lithium. My sense of creativity and wellbeing lasted several more weeks. It then suddenly disappeared while attending a memorial service. At that point a feeling of deep distress occurred. The morning tension returned. For several weeks, I struggled just to be able to teach. I wanted to collapse. Elliot said I just had to try harder. Charmayne insisted that something was physiologically wrong. Elliot consented to a blood test. That evening I was rushed to the hospital because the blood test had revealed that my blood sugar was 800. It was at 997 in the emergency room. I was almost unconscious.
I awoke the next morning with insulin being dripped into
my arm. I had a renewed sense of wellbeing. For years, I had needed glasses to
read, but I could now read without them, altho that effect did not last. There
was no morning tension. The stay in the hospital was pleasant. It was also the
beginning of one of my most significant friendships. I knew
After leaving the hospital, I begin to think about my diabetic condition. I recalled my lifetime endurance patterns. I have now and always have had an above average ability for sustained physical activity such as hiking, climbing, chopping wood, spading, etc. Prior to the onset of diabetes, I could also play half court basketball or table tennis for extended periods. I could run faster than average for short distances. However, I was never able to run even an 8-minute mile without extreme fatigue, and playing full court basketball always quickly gave me a side pain that significantly inhibited my ability to play. Could all of this relate to a persistent difficulty in processing blood sugar? No doctor ever thought of this, altho both my father and grandmother had diabetes. At any rate, I felt my diabetes should have been diagnosed earlier, since an earlier report showed elevated blood sugar. I wondered if there was a relation between blood sugar problems and my morning tension. I even suspected that my accident might have been the event triggering my predisposition towards diabetes. However, this extreme elevation in blood sugar occurred after taking lithium. Was that a coincident? Because of these thoughts, because Elliot had to be en oblivious to my fatigue, and also because he had forced me to be hospitalized, I stopped seeing him.
What followed was a continued but less intense period of creativity. My teaching was better than it had ever been. I felt sure my collapse was over, but I overestimated my strength. Because of my enthusiasm for my new conceptual insights, I decided to organize a conference on conceptual study. Altho I had considerable support from others, it was support based on respect for me, rather than on any appreciation or understanding of my ideas. Suddenly the idea of being responsible for a conference seemed overwhelming and I collapsed again. That I even thought of being in charge of a conference is out of character for me. I have always been more interested in creating ideas and materials than in disseminating them. Furthermore when I was inclined to share my work, it has always been more my style to work in small groups or one on one. Working outside my style would have been stressful under any conditions. Dong so under the conditions at that time was beyond my capacity. I also conjecture that another factor in my collapse may have been that my doctor took me off insulin. As I recall, shortly after the morning tension returned, altho I felt no anxiety. I mentioned this at the time, but since my blood sugar was under control, my doctor did not believe there was a connection. In spite of this, my intuitive reflections on my experience kept suggesting that my tension was related to problems in processing blood sugar.
Due to this collapse, I lost my job. I was placed on disability and hospitalized. Since I no longer had a psychiatrist, and in spite of my objections, they assigned me to Elliot. My will soon revived, but he refused to dismiss me from the hospital unless I promised to take lithium. This is the only time in my life that I recall making a promise that I knew I would deliberately break. I decided to not to apply my usual ideals about promises to any I might make under conditions of extreme coercion.
I left the hospital and immediately stopped taking lithium.
I felt I would never be able to return home, that I must discover how to
survive without draining resources from my family. I found temporary places to
stay for the first several weeks, but I could think of no long-range solution
except to live on the street. I experimented with trying to find food from
dumpsters. I was determined to cut myself off from all long established ties.
However, I did not isolate myself. Altho I had only known
Realizing that I was neither prepared to live on the
street, and having no inclination to find a place of my own, I reluctantly
returned home. Morning tension was still a problem, so I consulted a
neurologist. Nothing abnormal was discovered. I found a new psychiatrist. I
only remember his last name,
I was an inpatient taking several treatments each week for about three weeks. This did relieve tension and I recall being inspired again by reading Is Life Worth Living by William James. The stay in the hospital was pleasant, and the treatments did not seem to interfere with my mental capacities. I did experience some mild short-term memory loss at the beginning, but nothing significant. When I left the hospital, I continued as an outpatient, taking one treatment a week. I begin to discover a growing sense of terror at the prospect of each treatment. I dealt with this as something to experience rather than to avoid. When I had one treatment left to go, I discussed this with Richardson, who decided that there was no point in taking the last one we had scheduled. This was fortunate because my insurance coverage had run out several treatments earlier and we were not informed of this fact until we owed several thousand dollars.
It was now fall of 1991, and I was feeling confident and strong, about as I had been before the shock treatment, but now I was no longer feeling tension. I felt that my ordeal was over. I was wrong. Near the end of the year, I begin to feel isolated and tension returned. The usual dosage of klonopin seemed to have no effect. I took more, got relief, but soon no amount seemed to help. The fear of helplessness returned. I had no insurance coverage. I experienced extreme anxiety and hopelessness. In desperation I took thirty sleeping pills. This did not even put me to sleep. Nevertheless, I was hospitalized and my stomach pumped. That was torture. They could not get the tube down my throat and had to go thru my nose. I was told that having tried suicide I had no right to complain or resist. The rights one has are of course irrelevant when one has no strength to assert them.
I was back again in the secure ward at Barnes. I quickly
renewed my friendships with some of the staff from my earlier stay. I adjusted
easily, and was soon helping others. My roommate had severe hallucinations. One
of the staff said he was okay in a world of his own. Not true, altho he never
talked coherently, I knew that some of his hallucinations were frightening. Out
in the main room he fell and could not get up. He refused help from the staff,
indicating he wanted me to help him. I was soon transferred to the open ward,
and after a short stay was released.
The Fifth and Last Stage: After my release, early in 1992, I had one major
concern. I knew that my anxiety had not been conquered, that my collapse might
persist indefinitely, that I no longer had insurance coverage for psychiatric
hospitalization. We now owed the hospital $10000, and I was still afraid that I
would always be in a state of spiritual pathology so severe that I would never
be able to function effectively. I expected that ultimately my only option
would be permanent hospitalization and that this would take all my families
resources. During the year of 1992, and going briefly into 1993, I was able to
work thru that concern. The first major breakthrough came early in the year.
Barnes cut our debt in half because of our financial circumstances. I then
discovered that I could be hospitalized at a rate we could easily afford in a
state institution named Bliss. This soon removed my fear of financial ruin for
my family, leaving only a fear of permanent hospitalization.
After a brief adjustment, my first stay at Bliss was pleasant and brief. As usual, I quickly made friends and was soon helping other people. I came out, but returned within a few days. For the next 12 months, I was in and out too many times to be easily remembered. Someday I may chronicle that year, but mainly it was a repetition of the same general pattern. I would go in a state of abject despair, and sit in a corner and cry for a day or so. Then I would start to figure out how to survive and even renew my will. I would play backgammon with myself, chess with others, etc. I would use the hall for exercise, walking in this limited space at the same rate and for the same distance, just as I would have done on the outside. I would interact with others. As before, they would talk with me more openly that they would talk to their doctors. I also developed a friendship with staff members. One of the aids had studied to engineering and some advanced calculus before dropping out. He would ask me questions, and I judged from these interchanges that his aptitude for mathematics was above average for engineering students. We also talked about many other things. Just before I was released, he told me that he was going to complete his engineering degree.
Often I was released earlier than I wanted, but finally early in 1993 I came out with a strong feeling that my collapse was over. I know that even if my will continued to collapse and I was hospitalized the rest of my life my will was very likely to reemerge. I simply could not hold onto despair long enough to destroy the will that seems to be at the core of what I am. At first, I was tentative about this, but by the end of 1993, I knew that my third collapse of will was over. My power of will was back and stronger than before the collapse. The knowledge that I could function effectively even if hospitalized removed the need to be hospitalized. I had transformed my floating anxiety into fear, faced this fear and decided that there was no danger involved. Can my will ever collapse again? Perhaps, but if so this would probably involve a new fear, and if it happens I will very likely bring that into focus and cultivate the resources I that I need should this occur.
Earlier in this account, I mentioned my association with Recovery self-help groups. My direct involvement with these groups continued until a short time after my third collapse was over. I only mentioned Recovery principles in relation to stage three, but I also practiced them during stage four and stage five. A more adequate account of my third collapse would illustrate this in detail. Furthermore, altho I no longer attend recovery meeting and my personal need for using recovery principles is not pressing, I still use them frequently, and I still help others use them. I said that I found their principles and practices easy to understand, but only of limited utility for my deeper spiritual pathology. This could be misleading. Understanding is complex, and what came easy was an intellectual understanding. It took me several years to expand this to an understanding that I could use effectively. However in a sense it was an understanding of their principles and practice that was central the reemergence of will. Why then did I just now indicate they were of limited utility? Perhaps this is because I needed substantial effort to integrate understanding and doing, but also because I had to use my creative ability to conceptualize them more adequately than they had been presented to me.
The Essence of My Third Collapse of Will Just prior to dawn on the morning after the 1989 accident, I experienced a sense of personal isolation so deep that it seemed as if it would not only persist thruout my life, but thruout eternity. It took eleven years before this emerged as an insight linking so many events. Perhaps this is because thru so much of that time feeling personally isolated manifested itself at first as extreme pathological anxiety and despair. It was not until early in 1993, when I was able to convert a major part of the anxiety into a fear, that I was able to lift myself from this pathology and regain some stable power of will. I could observe that at any time my pathological state would place me in situations where I was personally helpless and that nobody could give me the help I needed when this happened. I was also afraid that my ability to help myself would never return. Once this fear was recognized, I was able to see that my will had always reemerged and then my helplessness began to fade.
Once the power returned, a less severe pathological state of pain and sadness and tension remained. This state did not prevent origin activity, but it did slow it down, making life a grim struggle, sapping the joy from even the most positive experiences. What then was linking insight, and will I be able to build on it in my quest to become an effective radical origin? Before describing and discussing this insight and the events that it linked, I sketch some of the concepts being used. What follows now is purely a description of the conceptualization being used, and altho I have chosen terminology whose ordinary meaning is close to my usage, I am not attempting to be completely faithful to ordinary usage. These concepts are developed in CPCP Fearfulness Concepts. The word ‘state’ is an abbreviation for ‘state of affairs’.
· A distressing state for a person P is one that causes P to experience a high level of discomfort.
· Anguish for P is an emotional state in which P is automatically motivated to alleviate part or all of some state that is distressing for P.
· Harm for P is state which has a significant negative impact to P’s well-being.
· A danger for P is a state that may result in harm for P. A danger may be immediately present or it may be at least somewhat likely to occur in the future.
· A threat for P is a state that P feels is a danger for P. A threat may or may not actually be a danger.
· Fearfulness is an emotional state in which P feels as if there is some threat and is automatically motivated to escape from it. P’s awareness of the threat may vary from very vague to extremely clear.
Being destructive to P’s wellbeing means that this state inflicts
on P distress beyond that which P can tolerate and still function effectively.
An extreme threat is one that potentially could result in a pathological state
for P. A pathological state is one in which P is no longer able to engage in at
least one ordinary activity in a normal manner? A pathological state can be
emotional, such as extended grief. It can be spiritual as in being plagued by a
sense of sin. A pathological state may be temporary, such as a broken leg that
heals. However a state that briefly interferes with normal activity, such as
being unable to tolerate normal sunlight for a few hours after having ones eyes
dilated, is not pathological.
Fearfulness is of two main types, fear and anxiety. Both are related to feeling endangered but they differ in terms of how the threat is identified.
· Fear is an emotional state in which P feels like some specific state is a threat and P could describe the danger and potential harm if asked to do so.
· Anxiety is an emotional state in which P feels threatened, but is unable to bring the danger implicit in the threat into sharp focus, because the danger isn’t immediate or because no danger stands out.
Further General Discussion of the Concepts: Anxiety and fear can occur together or separately. Floating anxiety is anxiety without fear, i.e. no threat can be identified. Anxiety can occur in connection with fear, i.e. when a threat can be identified. However to have anxiety conceptually implies that the danger and potential harm is at most vaguely understood. Since fear and anxiety relate to feeling that there is danger, fearfulness may occur when there is a threat but there is no danger. Altho anxiety is akin to fear in feeling threatened, unlike fear, the implicit harm cannot be clearly identified. This can make anxiety much more difficult to manage, especially floating anxiety.
Example 1: Ray reacts fearfully when confronted with a harmless snake. Ray says that he is afraid of being bitten, thus identifying a threat. I say that being bitten may be unpleasant, but hardly dangerous, showing him that this snake has no teeth. A bite from a snake without teeth cannot even cause minor pain; much less an infection, and certainly you cannot be poisoned. Even if totally convinced, Ray may still be fearful, retaining a feeling of anxiety when trying to hold the snake but unable to identify any danger or describe what harm could possibly occur.
Dealing with Fearfulness: The direct way to deal with fear is to escape from the threat. This can also work with situational anxiety. Just take the snake away and do not ask Ray to hold it. Escape may not always be possible. Another alternative can be to see that the threat is not really a danger because no harm is likely. When this can be, done fear can be replaced by some other state such as dread or distaste or indifference or interest. A wasp flies close, I feel fear, recall being stung, classify this as a minor pain, my fear vanishes. Having replaced fear by distaste, I still avoid the wasp but feel no need to escape.
Another way to deal with fear is by acting with courage. Ray decides to hold the snake and risk whatever unknown harm might occur. When no harm is possible, he sees that the risk was only apparent. However, he still acted courageously, altho once a firm belief that no harm will occur is established, holding such a snake will no longer require courage.
When harm is possible and is so recognized, risk taking will involve courage. At one extreme harm can be a major disaster, but most harm is a state that can be reversed. Minor risk taking involves accepting the possibility of incurring a harm that one believes can be reversed. And one purpose of minor risk taking can be to cultivate the trait of being courageous. This can actually reduce the possibility of harm, since the ability to act with courage in the face of a threat can be the most effective way to deal with it.
The most extreme form of risk taking is by deliberately
taking an unnecessary risk when the possible harm would be a major disaster.
Doing this, but great care taken to make this unlikely, may be useful for some
purposes. For example jumping a motor cycle over the
Converting Anxiety into Fear: To convert anxiety into fear involves bringing the feeling of being threatened into clear enough focus so that all the danger and potential harm is in focus. This can be extremely difficult, especially when the anxiety exists along with other negative feelings and when the danger involved is in not in the present or near future and when intellectually a person knows that even then the danger is not likely to occur.
Example 2: Pat is feeling anxiety about an exam but cannot spot that the main harm implicit in this threat relates to never being able to find a good job or to losing confidence in herself rather than to getting a bad grade. Regardless of how unpleasant failing an exam might be, this in itself is not harmful. Never being able to get a good job or losing confidence in oneself could qualify as harmful. Pat tries to escape this threat without converting her anxiety into fear, by asking the instructor to allow a take-home exam. Since this does not work, Pat considers why the threat of failing the exam is a danger and spots that the harm is that a failure will undermine her self-esteem. She is almost convinced that this is the only real danger. Altho anxiety remains for Pat, it is at least lessened to some extent.
My Insight: One aspect of my insight into my pathological state of anxiety was a recognition that I was not aware that I had not converted the most significant component of my anxiety into fear, and thus some significant floating anxiety remained. The level of this anxiety was pervasive but low because the fearfulness, unlike the fear of helplessness, did not involve an impending sense of an immediate danger. Strange as it might seem, altho I knew that I could not endure unending personal isolation, it was only on the night of the accident that I explicitly spotted this as my deepest fear. There were at least two more reasons why it was so hard to spot this again.
(1) The anxiety was intertwined with a pathological state of pain and sadness and tension.
(2) Shortly after recognizing my fear of unending isolation, I intellectually decided that the likelihood of a state of unending isolation was nil.
Terminology: I am using the word ‘unending’ in a specialized sense. It is intended not as a synonym for ‘eternal’ but as ‘without any end that I feel that I can expect’. To think of something as unending is thus more emotional than intellectual, since intellectually I could always say that if only X would occur then this state would end. I may feel my struggle with diabetes is unending since I do not expect it to end anywhere in the foreseeable future. This does not mean that I believe it will continue after my bio-death. Nor does it mean that I must deny the possibility that a cure could be found at any time. With respect to my fear of unending personal isolation, the idea of unending extends for a period far beyond my ability clearly to imagine.
It is my attitude towards death that has played the most crucial role in relation to my basic sense of wellbeing. Before age 15, I was basically secure and happy, merely accepting that death was a transition to an even better life in heaven. Before I began to question my religious heritage, I do not recall having any concerns about dying. Even in situations that were threatening, any fearfulness seemed linked to dangers that might merely involve more discomfort than I felt I could tolerate. When I rejected my religious heritage, I spent considerable intellectual effort in trying to ground a belief in personal immortality in deistic beliefs that seemed more reasonable. Later as I tried to cultivate a deistic faith, the phenomena of death became extremely significant to me, both in relation to fear of damnation and because of my distaste for oblivion.
According to my religious heritage, my deistic beliefs and the attitudes in which they were rooted would condemn me to damnation. Intellectually this only helped to convince me that the beliefs I had acquired from my religious conditioning were wrong. However regardless of how implausible these beliefs might be, and no matter how well I can reason, I am fallible. The mere existence of a heritage that endorsed such infinite harm was a threat to my emotional wellbeing. I had a far better than average ability to relate to Pascal’s wager, and could easily see why extremely unlikely infinite consequences would obviously outweigh all finite considerations. I just never understood how it was possible to choose to believe.
While attempting to formulate a deistic ontology, I was majoring in philosophy at a secular university. I had considerable confidence in my conceptual ability to see the weakness and biases of the prevalent physicalistic cosmic versions I was expected to accept. Still the fact that the mainstream of contemporary philosophy did not even consider deism worth arguing against also had a negative emotional impact. On the one hand, there was a religious tradition that said my death would result in eternal torment, while on the other was a philosophical tradition that said it would result in oblivion. My early struggles with these traditions were at least partially instrumental in my first collapse of will. An account of this can be found in A Personal Approach to Conceptual Philosophy. The eventual failure of this struggle was the primary factor in my second collapse of will. The recovery from this second collapse was directly related to what
at the time was a radically new attitude, also is presented in that book. This attitude was closely linked to the sense of power and joy that permeated my life for about 15 years, altho it was being eroded even before 1989 when it was shattered by my accident.
I think it was some time in early morning after my accident that I had the most disturbing explicit thought of my life. What if I had died and found that I was alone and helpless, there being no persons who had ever survived bio-death and no supernatural persons? This was the danger involved in my deepest anxiety. This would have been the kind of harm that I could not endure. It was not that the damnation my religious heritage had conditioned me to expect. Nor was it the oblivion that my physicalistic tradition conditioned me to find inevitable. A belief that this could happen would not have been a live option before had I so radically questioned everything I had read or been told about what might happen after bio‑death. I realized that my understanding of what I am is related to function rather than to substance. The uncertainty about death that this opened for me was staggering.
Both my religious and philosophical traditions were rooted in beliefs about what is, and it is such beliefs that imply what happens when a human dies. My religious heritage says that God is a spiritual being, and that man is made in his image, that my essence is a soul, which is an indivisible immortal spiritual substance. While I can state this belief, I no longer feel I understand it, mostly because I find the underlying concept of substance far too vague. My philosophical heritage says that a human is a highly organized complex physical system. I could interpret this as one perspective for thinking about many aspects of what a human does. The conclusion that is drawn is that when this system breaks down I will cease to exist. This conclusion seems to be linked to a very strong ontological belief, namely that everything is physical. I suspect that this involves a way of thinking that involves the somewhat sophisticated idea of physical taken from modern physics, rather than the older notion of a material substance, but still it seems that the thinking relates to what a human is rather than to what a human does.
My concept of a human is that taken from PNDP, namely a human is a person who is a member of the Homo sapiens species. To be a person is to have a history of deliberate action, and thus this concept has as a central focus what a person does. Moreover, the concept of a species is biological rather than physical, and while biology may utilize the notion of a physical system, it focuses on behavior. Having no preeminent cosmic version and lacking sufficient relevant information, I have no preferred conjecture about what might happen to a person after bio‑death. None or some or all may continue to exist. My perspective on this is developed in the last Chapter of the book mentioned earlier. For now, I merely reflect on the extent of my uncertainty and spot how it relates to the floating anxiety that still lingers from my third collapse of will.
The explicit insight that my most fundamental fear was of unending isolation disappeared shortly after its first explicit occurrence in 1989. It did not return until just before I began this paper, circa 2000. Unlike my fear of eternal damnation, it was not something I had been conditioned to believe. Thus, even its emotional plausibility faded easily. This was especially the case due to what soon followed. My accident occurred at the beginning of spring break. For a while, I had more intensive interesting human interaction than at any other time of my life. During that time, I did not seem to have any anxiety. About six weeks later the anxiety returned suddenly and with intensity, but I did not recall my insight. One of the trigger events was reading a book entitled Who Dies. While I cannot recall much about the content, I do recall being terrified of the possibility of reincarnation. It was not so much that reincarnation seemed plausible, it was just that even if barely plausible it seemed so onerous. For some reason this also seemed to trigger my most poignant childhood memories of isolation and helplessness. This further aggravated my anxiety.
As I understand it reincarnation seems linked to a belief in some spiritual essence, call it a soul, whose existence is independent of a particular embodiment. It is this soul, rather than the body, that is the person. Death is only a loss of the particular characteristic of its last reincarnation. The spiritual changes from the reincarnation are carried over into the next. Whatever those who believe in reincarnation might feel about its desirability, my reaction is highly negative. Having no ontological commitment to some underlying soul, it is these characteristics that I value as my spiritual achievements. To me spiritual characteristics relate to my will, and I conceptualize my will in terms of function rather than substance. Thus to talk of myself as a will is to talk about what I do, and this makes neither a positive nor a negative ontological commitment to some soul that may survive the death of my body. If there is such a soul, the thought of it returning without the characteristics acquired thru so much effort, and without even a memory linking to them, seems like a horrible kind of isolation. It feels like an isolation of the will that is now me, from the will that was me and the will that might latter be me.
In the sixth grade, my father was transferred to
Another childhood memory that I recall was in connection with a story about the last person on earth. On various occasions, I have imagined myself as that person. What would I do? As a child, I simply felt a kind of quiet hopelessness, but then I at least believed that after I died I would definitely be in heaven and no longer alone. The last time I imagined this theme, I thought about trying to learn how to clone myself or some other human cell if I could find one. However remote my chances, this would at least keep some minimal hope alive.
There are also some less intense childhood memories that
relate to feelings about potential isolation. It was only with my current
insight that I related these events to a threat of unending isolation. The
other factor I spotted as being related was a recurring type of dream whose
central theme involves isolation. One of my simplest such dreams is being on
In one recurring dream, I realize that I am dead. I find myself alone in an unending hallway. I walk forward, but no end or way out appears. This is my worst nightmare. The relation to my fear of isolation seems obvious. In another recurring dream, I am in a room with no window, but there is a door. I go thru the door into another room, also with no windows but with another door. This continues. Once I finally came out, but was at the mouth of a cave looking out over an abyss. I was no longer closed in, but I was still alone and with no place to go. I realized I was dreaming. I decide that I could jump without harm. This still took courage, but I jumped and landed without harm in a lovely forest.
Unending isolation is clearly the greatest harm that I fear. Keeping this in focus removes most of my floating anxiety. Realizing this, I can focus on the fear and even remove part of the feeling that unending isolation is a danger. Minor anxiety remains. The threat is too remote to keep in focus. Perhaps if I continue bringing it into focus I can transform even more of the anxiety into fear. The harm will then seem even less likely to occur. This worked in my return from my second collapse of will, and the threat there was eternal damnation. After all, my concept of unending relates to expectation rather than to some actual state that is permanent, and the very idea of there being a state that can never change is a conjecture that I find highly implausible.
My Wellbeing Pyramid: One result of my third collapse of will was a new heuristic way to visualize the state of my wellbeing, namely as a triangular pyramid.
Vertex A: I picture my spiritual power as the apex A of a pyramid with a triangular base. This point lies within the will that is the core of what I am. The base vertices of this pyramid are part of my person characteristics and my relationship to world beyond me. There is a biological vertex B, a cultural vertex C, a direct relationship vertex D. If apex A had enough power, it could energize all these other vertices regardless of external factors. This is not the case currently. Perhaps it never can be. My will needs to build power in concert with power being developed in the other vertices.
Vertex B: My personal observations suggest that most animal activity seems to focus on food and reproduction. This is reinforced by reading a book like The Selfish Gene and by TV nature programs. The main exception is the play and learning activities observed in some mammals, but even this can be easily accounted for as preparation for survival. My thoughts about this biological vertex primarily involve some reflections on the hedonic biological aspects of existence. A multitude of minor negatives include occasional bouts with a sore throat or with gum problems, chiggers and horseflies with which to contend, the mildly unpleasant sensation in the finger I sliced open several years ago, etc.
Since my accident, the pleasurable biological aspects have diminished significantly and the unpleasant ones increased. The exception is that I take more pleasure in muscular activity (now available because of having my country home Barbin Hollow) than I would have ever imagined. Contrasted to this is an extended list of states that have sapped power from this vertex. Most are probably a result of some combination of my accident and aging. My physical activity and my ability to walk for exercise were inhibited first by several years of hip pain and later by an injury to my Achilles tendon. However, during that time I found ways to continue muscular activity in ways that were still satisfying. While not currently a problem, the possibility of similar limitations cast some gloom about the future. The only noteworthy negative muscular phenomenon that I now encounter is that each morning it takes a while to become flexible and that by evening I often have some muscular discomfort.
One of my main aggravations was the physiological tension that emerged after my accident. For 4 years, I could not escape this tension and I felt that I could not live the rest of my life with it. I still had this tension each morning until about 6 years ago However while somewhat debilitating it did not produce anxiety. It became easy to manage because I knew I could choose to act productively in spite of it. I also know resources that when available will make the tension disappear.
I can still enjoy tactile pleasure (the sun on my face,
the feel of the creek water running over me). I also enjoy having my feet
rubbed, a body massage, etc. However, the most intense form of tactile pleasure
is no longer available to me. After being diagnosed with diabetes, my ability
to function sexually waned and disappeared. This may have been due to the
medication that psychiatrists had given me or to some other factor. Whatever
the reason this lack has even diminished some of the pleasure involved in other
forms of touching and being touched, especially with anyone who might arouse my
sexual feelings.
The effects of diabetes are my worst biological aggravation. Most of my life I
merely cultivated reasonable tastes in food and drink, along with some general
health guidelines. I stayed active, never smoked, never used alcohol, never drank
coffee, avoided desserts except on special occasions, etc. Now food intake has
become a concern in ways that interfere with just eating. Having to think about
the details (how many carbohydrates in a glass of milk or in a banana) has
considerably diminished my pleasure in eating and drinking. I do not want to
have to think about whether I should I eat a peanut butter and honey
sandwiches, have some fruit juices, etc.
Due to diabetes, there is the minor discomfort of blood sugar testing and insulin shots a day. There is the strange feeling in my feet. While I have considerable stamina, my capacity for sustained rapid use of energy has been considerably diminished. Not long ago I climbed a tree in order to retrieve a rope on a branch that was about 20 feet high. The trunk was too large to scale so I use a branch that was hanging down and begin climbing it like a rope. In the past, I would have held on from beneath and climbed without resting until I had almost reached the rope. This time I soon felt a weakness in my muscles and had to change to the more awkward tactic of climbing from the top side of the branch. I also had to rest about every 6 feet.
Vertex C: This vertex involves the impact that my culture has on me and the impact that I have on my culture. The impact that the traditions and institutions of my culture have had on me has been mixed, but overall I am grateful for my cultural heritage. The most negative aspect was the impact of cosmic versions on my own spiritual quest, and in particular, the impact of calvinism and physicalism that culminated in my second collapse of will. However, out of this collapse there emerged radical insights into my own net for crucial concepts. My greatest disappointment is that my culture has not provided allies in my deepest quest. My educational allies have never fully embraced my educational ideals and they have never felt the passion I have towards the purpose of creating alternatives to formal education. I discuss these ideals in My Net for Understanding Education. Likewise, I have no allies in working towards my community family ideal or in creating other alternative social institutions. Of course, as a radical explorer, I do not expect direct support from my culture in creative endeavors that challenge the conservative nature of social institutions. Perhaps I should be thankful that I live at a time that ignores rather than punishes me for my explorations. Perhaps not.
As to my impact on my culture, I have felt it locally. I know that because of my radical origin quest I have had a more positive impact on many people than I otherwise could have had. I have touched people in ways that has encouraged them to think and act more imaginatively. This has sown some seeds for the kind of comprehensive paradigm shift that I would like to see emerge and which I would like to help bring about. Have I been more than just locally effective? There is no way to tell, for even a clear indication that my ideal of a paradigm shift is emerging is not likely to occur anywhere in the foreseeable future. However since the core of my cultural ideal involves a radical shift towards the importance of personal institutions and away from the importance of hierarchical and impersonal ones, it is appropriate that the major task on which I should focus are highly personal ones.
Should I be more than locally effective? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer is probably not. I believe that a culture cannot be strong unless it is highly conservative, that its strength resides in traditions and institutions whose workings are so complex that conceptual analysis seldom provides any workable alternative. Social reformers seldom see that the mechanisms they think have evil consequences may be linked in a complex manner to others supportive of values essential to the existence of the society. Of course, there may be better ways to enhance social purposes than those which tradition has evolved. However most of the time deliberate change based on reasoning and idealistic projections probably will
not produce the results intended. Fortunately, most attempted modifications produce almost no results. When they do so in a revolutionary manner, this is more likely to lead to social confusion than to utopia. A strong culture is like a massive gyroscope that is likely to maintain its stability and return close to its normal motion in spite of the shocks it receives. Only a few portions of the ideas of those who are trying to modify a culture in a radical manner are likely flourish.
Major comprehensive paradigm shifts are rare (see CPCP Comprehensive Paradigms). So I should remind myself that my conjecture that comprehensive paradigm shift is in its early stages may be wrong. Even if this conjecture is correct, my ideals for a paradigm shift are not likely to be the ones on its cutting edge. My awareness of this saps power from vertex C. I can partially counter this by focusing on the interaction of individuals as modifiers and the conservative function of culture. No person can expect to be on the cutting edge of any workable radical modification of a culture. However if a culture is to change radically, perhaps some must live as if they might be.
Vertex D: This vertex involves the impact that direct contact with other persons has on me and the impact that I have on them culture. There are some major weaknesses in this vertex. Most people do not have as much time for recreation as they have than for other matters. Nor is it easy to find allies for the types of recreation I enjoy the most. More important is that I have found no allies in my radical origin quest. I have found some interest and encouragement, but no one who shares my passion.
Central to this vertex is an observation about being human. It is a difficult task to be a human. To be human is to be born helpless, to remain highly dependent for years, to be always somewhat dependent. Whatever competence a human may achieve, outrageous fortune can intrude. Furthermore not only is this the condition of human existence, each person is always at least implicitly aware of this vulnerability. To be human is to have a nervous system capable of taking in a vast amount of information. This provides a capacity not only for joy but also for great suffering. The conjecture guiding me is that most relationship problems are rooted in the basic insecurity involved in being human.
The essence of my relationships strategy is to place the wellbeing of every other person on a par with my own wellbeing. This means to favor neither over the other, but given a natural tendency to automatically focus on my own interests, it is often best to place somewhat more emphasis on the wellbeing of others, at least as long as doing so is not pseudo-sacrificial. The best way to keep a balanced strategy is to find ways in which my wellbeing and that of others are mutually supportive. The tactics relating to my strategy depend on the type of relationship involved.
One way I think of direct personal relationships is in terms of classes such as enemies, friends, strangers, acquaintances, family, allies, etc. These classes are not intended as disjoint. In particular, all members of my family are either friends or acquaintances, as have been all my allies. The main parameter I use to think about such relationships is significance. A relationship is significant to me to the extent that it has an impact on my most basic values. A particular relationship can have such an impact for various reasons.
Allies are those who work together to implement a common purpose. Charmayne and I have always been warm and loving allies in relation to many common purposes such as raising our children, shaping our ideals, working on social service projects, getting exercise, sharing ideas, etc. Family and friends have been allies in the shared purpose of finding and engaging in recreational activities. I have had a number of educational alliances with colleagues and students. Judged from most perspectives, these were highly effective. However, I have never found an ally for whom the creation of radical educational alternatives has had the priority that is has for me.
Family and friends provide the main positive power for D.
They enrich my life because we do so many things together. They allow me to give
warmth, affection, love, and various forms of support. From them I have always
felt love, respect, acceptance, emotional support. A significant number of them
have let me know that I have had a major influence on their lives. Many of the
ideals that I hold for relationships involving family and friends are
continually being realized at a level I find extremely satisfying. However my
most important ideal of family and friendship is not shared. This is my family
community ideal. This ideal is somewhat vague because I do not have experience
in putting it into practice. Its essence involves thinking of all close friends
as family and living in close proximity with some portion of them. It also
involves a fuller sharing, much as is now practiced in a nuclear family.
The set of my recognized enemies is and has usually been the empty class. The significance of this is my deliberate decision to keep it this way. This decision is not hard to maintain. Conflict with others is not relevant to my life. I cannot imagine any possible gain I could achieve thru conflict. Moreover, except for the possibility of physical violence, no attack on me can be very effective. I simply have no fears about other person’s attitudes toward me. Most significant, I have never experienced any instance of a transcendent act that is an attack on me. I think that the extent to which persons have live options is highly overrated. Acts that others often interpret as freely chosen I often judge as being reactive. This applies even to deliberate attacks that persons make on others, since I have yet to know of such an act that did not to seem to be rooted largely in some type of insecurity.
Strangers include persons that I have encountered occasionally or not at all. Relationships with both strangers and acquaintances play only a minor role in my life. Still the composite of such relationships has some significance. The pleasant contact in casual relationships and the knowledge that I am easily liked add a mild positive power to D. My direct relationship strategy is simple. Just regard strangers as persons, be considerate, have minimal expectations. I see a person stuck in the snow. I offer to help. A man comes to check on the efficiency of our furnace.. He doesn’t seem to know his job very well. I am not judgmental and accept this as merely inconvenient. I write to a commentator with a suggestion about his television program. I expect only a polite reply, and probably no action. Some years ago, we had a secretary that our department shared with several other departments. I saw her often, but only in this context. She was somewhat slow and not always very accurate. Other faculty made negative remarks about this. I merely got work to her early enough so there was no rush. She appreciated the fact that I was patient and considerate.
Vertex Interactions: A powerful vertex A would clearly add power to itself and to all the other vertices of my wellbeing pyramid. However part of the power of A is in shaping the other vertices in an interaction of my will the world beyond me. Thus, part of the state of these other vertices is due to factors in that world, and the power they can supply to A depends on factors over which I have no control. The most I can do is to act in certain ways to understand and influence their impact on these vertices. To be an effective radical origin, my origin activity itself should be capable of supplying the power to sustain the wellbeing of A. This is still not the case. I need power to flow from these other vertices to A. The partially pathological state of these other vertices saps my spiritual wellbeing and thus my will to act. I wish this were not so. I wish my will could become sufficient to overcome the negatives from these other vertices.
A and D: I suspect that for most humans it is the state of their direct relations that have the greatest influence on their spiritual wellbeing. I know that for me, my wellbeing in D has the most impact on A.
That I have no enemies is an aspect of D that is supportive of A. The ability to transcend fear is one factor that gives power to the spiritual component of being a person. The direct relationship between strangers and friends and family also supports A. All these the positive aspect of D contrasts to my disappointment in not finding spiritual allies, and this contrast saps power from A. In general the interaction between D and A is extremely asymmetric. A empowers D, but for many years D has given almost no power to A. There is a crucial element missing in D. I have no allies who share the more radical aspects of my ideals. Closely related to this is the fact that I have no allies in the pursuit of the purposes rooted in my radical origin ideal. My origin ideal is the integrating ideal for all my other ideals. Of these ideals, it is my educational ideals for which I have expected and had my best allies. However, one of my greatest reasons for feeling isolated is the limited nature of the alliances I was able to find. It is this sense of isolation in vertex D that infiltrates an even deeper sense of isolation into A.
A and C: It appears that along with direct relationship, most humans need to feel that they have a sufficient social status to feel a sense of self worth. By a social status, I mean a place within or in relation to the human community or at least the part of this community with which they identify themselves. In this regard, I think of myself as primarily an explorer and secondarily as a teacher. This is a dual status from which I can draw some internal power. However I explore radical originship and other regions for which I have found no cultural support. I do not draw power from my cultural heritage for such explorations.
The main power that could possibly flow from C to A would
occur if I believed that I could have a major impact in shaping a comprehensive
paradigm shift. I should not expect to be more than locally effective in my
impact on my culture. C is unlikely to provide adequate support to my origin
quest unless I can have some hope that the work I am doing to bring about my
cultural ideals will at least sow some seeds that will help bring about some
type of paradigm shift . It need not be the one I currently idealize, since my
current ideal is limited by my limited vision. I would be delighted if any of
my efforts helped bring about a shift that I would endorse from a more expanded
perspective.
A and B: Among animals it is only in humans that we observe considerable activity that does not appear to be motivated directly by biological needs. Yet the biological aspect of existence interacts significantly with its spiritual aspects. I feel that unless I have sufficient biological wellbeing, my spiritual wellbeing is less likely to be pursued and will be much more difficult to obtain. I suspect that this may also be true for others. In the last 15 years my biological pleasures have diminished and my physiological aggravations increased. However it is not so much the impact of the biological states affecting me directly, but my awareness of those of others that makes me aware of just how unpleasant physiological discomfort can become. This began many years ago, visiting relatives in the hospital, watching the decline so many people suffer with old age, thinking about the use of biological vulnerability for torture, etc. This is what makes the conjecture that all personal existence may be ultimately dependent on biological existence at times seem so highly plausible. And it is the feeling that my personal existence may be a temporary phenomenon that is the main factor within my persona that saps power from A.
SECTION 4THE
PROBLEM OF BELIEF
Note from 2006: This section has not been substantively changed from its original version, which was finished before 1980. I have left it that way because it indicates my perspective during the time I was first shaping a net for conceptual philosophy. It differs mostly in changes in terminology, such as ‘origin quest’ rather than ‘quest for freedom’. It also includes some information about dates to remind me of when events were happening.
Knowing and Believing: In the past knowledge was so crucial in my strategy for living that I often neglected the development supplementary sources of power, and in particular the power of believing. I thought of knowledge as an external source of power that I could tap in spite of my limited personal power. This is why I wanted choice to be grounded in a knowledge of what is right according to reason. Choosing would have seemed unproblematic if I could have kept it securely rooted in knowing. My first collapse of will introduced an unbridgeable gap between knowing and choosing.
As I began to develop a new crucial net, I decided to discard my previous philosophic concept of knowledge, replacing it by a more personal and less honorific concept abstracted from my knowing concept. Knowing is a process that involves learning and a significant amount of choosing. My concept of informational knowledge now includes whatever information I have acquired thru this process of knowing. I want my alleged knowledge to be true to reality, but I can no more think of a secure external grounding for it than I can think of such grounding for my choices. Knowing has become just as problematic as choosing. Choice is no longer a sub-problem of knowing. Knowing has now become a sub-problem of the problem of will. I know X to the extent that I would on sound reflection deliberately choose to rely without reservation on X in situations where X might be important. I believe X to the extent that I uncritically and repeatedly act as if X were true. Conceptually it is possible to believe X and not-X at the same time, but is not possible to know both. My knowing is a creative act, often a transcendent one. As such it is extremely fallible. Some of my alleged knowledge may be essentially wrong. Little is more than partially true. The most I can hope for is that most of it is true enough for my current purposes. This presents me with the following problem of belief.
The Problem of Belief: How can I believe in the alleged knowledge I create and also cope with tendencies to believe without knowing, especially when these beliefs interfere with my origin quest? My inability to believe important aspects of what I allegedly know can be a practical problem. When belief sinks too low it is hard to act decisively. Other than my basic reliable knowledge, I cannot firmly believe anything that I examine, and I have a strong tendency to examine any belief that I am explicitly aware is important to me. This can transform a secure belief into knowledge or it can destroy it or drive it underground. A secure belief tends to stabilize my behavior, while deliberate knowledge tends to make me question it. Even when a secure belief gets transformed into knowledge that becomes firmly integrated into my cognitive resources, it loses some of its security and becomes subject to doubt. For example, before I questioned my belief in my originship powers it was a pervasive attitude in which I placed a naive unlimited trust. This attitude set a tone for my behavior that vanished once I began to examine this belief. Altho no other knowledge is more firmly integrated into the core of my understanding, this does not shield me from serious doubts. The knowledge of my originship is now subject to the doubts drawing me toward total skepticism, doubts rooted in my feeling that my whole crucial net is somehow flawed in ways that I have not been able to imagine. Being linked to a persona having strong belief tendencies that are largely independent of my knowledge is a serious practical problem, especially when it concerns matters about which I have decided to remain skeptical. When such matters are important to me, I often find that in spite of this decision, I have underlying tendencies to hold contradictory beliefs that wax and wane according to my emotional moods. This can have a pronounced effect on what I do.
Example (inserted
in 1998): In August of 1995, I was walking when suddenly my hip started
hurting. I had to limp home. Shortly thereafter, I found that I could not walk
in a natural gait and was thus unable to walk for exercise. After about more
than a year of doctors and physical therapy, I finally went to a chiropractor.
She gave me treatments that enabled walk in my natural gait. Several weeks
later the pain went away. When I fell three months the pain returned. While I
can still walk in my natural gait and do other activities without pain, I wake
up every morning with pain that my doctor says is arthritis. Medication does
not currently help. Altho I know that there is a good chance that medical
science may discover a way to reduce this discomfort, I believe that I will
have hip pain every day for the rest of my life. Believing this, I often treat
the day as an ordeal to endure instead of an opportunity to pursue my origin quest.
(Note from 2006: My 1998 belief was wrong. The pain stopped about a year after
this example was written).
I find it difficult to come to grips with the essence of my problem of belief, however the following statements summarize many of its main features.
¨ In my struggle to protect myself from false beliefs, I have undercut my ability to have true beliefs.
¨ I have destroyed my ability to hold strong beliefs with respect to many things I find important, but I have not been able to destroy underlying belief tendencies.
¨ Lack of strong beliefs tends to undermine my ability to act, and I have not yet been able to find an adequate substitute for strong beliefs.
¨ I probably still have many strong beliefs that I do not recognize.
¨ My inconsistent belief tendencies tend to cause me to behave erratically.
¨ I would like to have strong tentative beliefs supporting my knowledge, but I don’t know how to create such beliefs.
Most important to me is a specific problem of belief, namely my belief tendencies with regard to my continuing existence. This problem is both illustrative of and central to my general problem of belief. It is also of central importance to my problem of will. (Note from 2006: Perhaps it is the only problem of belief that has had a major persistent impact on my origin quest and which is significant even now.)
Until recently (before 1975) it had never occurred to me that my own continuing existence depends in any way on my choice. I always assumed one of the following must be true.
(C) It is already determined that my existence continues after my biological death.
(T) It is already determined that my existence terminates with my biological death.
My attitude toward my own continuing existence has always had a major impact on my behavior, but before I was 17 the impact appeared to be primarily positive. I had an unquestioned belief in (C) that was coupled with definite attitudes about the road to salvation. Immortality never seemed like a threat. Given the magnitude of difference in ultimate outcome, it did not seem very hard to make the correct current choices. I was too practical to sacrifice eternity for only finite interests. Furthermore belief in (C) not only helped me regulate my behavior, it helped me channel it in positive and productive ways. It supported my childhood and teenage idealism. The only negative impact of this belief was that on reflection heaven seemed empty and barren. I could never feel at ease when I thought of an eternity with no challenging problems.
By the time I was 17 my attitude toward (C) had shifted. I still believed without question, but underneath I could not shake the feeling that (C) meant my own personal damnation. I had followed my own lines of thought in examining the religion that I had acquired. I knew that if this religion was correct then I did not approve of the God to which my belief in (C) had always been coupled. I tried to adopt a religion patterned after 18th century Deism. While I found it easy to conceptualize a reasonable religion of this type, I was unable to create the emotional grounding for belief.
My deistic belief did not last long. It never became the ally that my childhood religion had been before it came into conflict with my ideals of reason and justice. Deism became a weak form of alleged knowledge with no firm emotional grounding, while my childhood beliefs fragmented and submerged. Their strength on this level did not diminish, but remained to plague me. The most destructive attitude was the underlying feeling that (C) was true, for this had now become a feeling that I had to either sacrifice my soul or sacrifice my ideals of reason and justice.
I never had time to replace my childhood religion. In the next few years, I was in an environment in which belief in existence after death was not considered intellectually respectable. To even consider such a belief was to mark you as not being intellectually in the 20th century. Physicalists found (T) obvious and most of the thought I encountered implicitly presupposed a physicalistic ontology. My worst enemies were positivists. They talked as if the questions I was most concerned with were meaningless. However I always felt that they implicitly assumed answers to these questions and that in particular they behaved as if (T) were true. I had too much faith in my own cognitive powers to either revert to calvinism or to embrace some intellectually respectable 20th century outlook. About this time I began to struggle with the philosophic grounding of my commitment to ethical action and as I probed deeply my own philosophy collapsed. Even with this collapse, I did not accept any of the alternatives I felt were being pressed on me. Cognitively I was able to maintain a reasonable outlook. My epistemology remained unchanged. I decided that I did not know enough to make any ontological claims, especially about anything so beyond my comprehension as the existence of God, so I became agnostic.
I retained my ethics, but only tentatively, because I knew it to be ungrounded. I still felt I had sufficient reason to maintain (C) so it would have been unreasonable for me to reject it at that time. It would have been appropriate for me to cultivate some serious doubts about (C), but emotional barriers made this difficult. My agnosticism was only an intellectual alternative to deism. Emotionally I had a strong tendency towards atheism because the only God I had been taught to believe in had attributes that I considered contradictory. This also gave me an emotional tendency to believe in the existence of God, since I felt my own agony was essentially unreasonable and so an unjust God must exist. My agony in conjunction with my emotional vacillation between atheism and grim theism reinforced my emotional belief in (C). Everything seemed so insane and my pessimism was so deep I could not believe that I could escape all of this by a means so simple as biological death. Furthermore in spite of my agony, I wanted to exist for a while longer, and I was unconsciously afraid that if I lost my belief in (C), I would have removed the main effective barrier against suicide.
After several years I settled down to an unhappy, but not agonizing existence. It was during this period that I developed a growing unconscious tendency to believe that my existence would terminate with my biological death. This seemed to fit my quiet pessimism better than (C). I still knew that (C) was true, but my tendency to really believe (C) was confined to rare moods of extreme pessimism or to rare moods in which I could still be moved by a passion for freedom. However belief in (C) had lost the motive power it had in my youth, and belief in (T) now set the tone for my life.
All this shifted when I decided to give up on psychotherapy and return to an active critique of my philosophic perspective and an active involvement in shaping reality. During this productive 10 year period (of the 1960’s), I decided that I did not know which of (C) or (T) was true and I was determined to believe in neither. However I did not succeed in destroying either belief. I merely drove them underground. Prior to my realization that no philosophy I could imagine was going to help me establish my commitments to act, these underground beliefs appeared not to be too disruptive to my behavior. On reflection, I am sure that both beliefs had a tendency to sap my energy.
In the following 5 year passive period (from about 1969 to 1974), my tendency to believe (T) was dominant. My tendency to believe (C) had little effect until the end of this period when I plunged deeply into an agony of my second collapse of will. It was during this period that I first articulated the problem of belief and realized that mere intellectual skepticism was of little help to me in facing this problem. Belief in (C) and (T) had each undermined my origin quest in their own distinctive fashion.
My attitude towards existing has been ambiguous. Most of the time I have both desired and dreaded it. I was never ready to terminate my existence, but then neither was I ready to commit myself to an unending existence. I would have preferred to have existence on a trial basis. In my pessimistic moods, I had difficulty resisting my tendency to believe (C). When I was especially weak, the effect was a chaotic despair that I can recall, but cannot adequately describe. Usually I retained enough strength to face this belief, but the effect was to divert my origin quest into a compulsive and grim struggle. At such times, I became extremely ineffective, for I was motivated by a very narrow purpose and by one slim hope. The purpose was to obtain the power to endure eternal agony. The hope was to obtain the power to escape.
Most of the time I was at least willing to exist on a trial basis, and my pessimism expressed itself in a milder form as a tendency to believe in (T). In contrast to belief in (C), this was somewhat liberating. It removed the main sting from negative reinforcement. My main difficulty in coping with pain always came when I began to feel that it was a sample of unending agony. This was the only way in which negative reinforcement placed more than temporary constraints on my behavior. The more I believed in (T), the more I was liberated from these constraints. However while this belief tended to liberate me, it also undermined my origin quest. The only purposes that I ever deliberately cultivated were extremely personal. They were also of unlimited scope. If I could not even begin to realize such purposes then I would not feel any personal stake in my choices. This undercut my will to act as an origin.
To cope with belief in (C) I tried to cultivate a positive attitude towards personal immortality and a strong commitment to personal goals involving an unlimited quest. To cope with belief in (T) I would focus on my own lack of purpose and cultivate a lack of concern with anything other than avoidance of personal agony. My behavior might have stabilized had either belief disappeared, but both had their hold on me. I would vacillate between them, depending on my emotional mood at the time. This was more demoralizing than uncritical acceptance of either (C) or (T). I might have learned to cope with either one of them alone.
While I still face the problem of coping with (C) and (T), I am now better able to fight a battle on more than one front. Moreover, I have been able to create at least one live option to them (see Chapter 6). This has helped me to cultivate attitudes that transform my intellectual skepticism into a positive emotional belief in uncertainty. I am now explicitly aware of some of the ways in which my tendencies to believe either (C) or (T) undermines my origin quest. I understand that it is not merely knowledge that is relevant, but also belief. My struggle against my tendency to believe (C) or (T) has now become a part of a more general struggle to liberate myself from unintelligent beliefs. Others may have good reasons for belief in (C) or (T), but my tendency to believe one or the other is primarily an expression of a need to have things settled. It is a throwback to a desire for determinism.
Ideally, I would like my knowledge and beliefs to be mutually supportive. In practice, I find that I believe without knowledge, and I have knowledge that is poorly supported by my network of beliefs. As should be evident, some of my knowledge is even opposed by certain of my belief tendencies. I have not learned how to create a belief network supportive of the knowledge I create. Most of my beliefs have been shaped thru processes which I understand only superficially and do not know how to control. The main power I have been able to bring to bear on my beliefs is a destructive power. Even this power is incomplete. I know how to weaken beliefs that I find in myself, but if they satisfy some strong need then I cannot seem to completely eradicate them. This is especially the case when I deliberately decide to remain skeptical about something, but even positive knowledge cannot give me the security of a belief.
This knowledge about the different effects of my knowledge and my beliefs make me doubt my previous naive faith in the power of knowledge. I often wonder if I have constructed an essentially incoherent net for understanding. One core element of this net is the decision that I must create my own knowledge, and yet that part of this knowledge must be about my beyond. I claim that my knowledge is both subjective and objective. Any alternative seems absurd, and yet I sometimes have doubts. My support for this claim is my interpretation of my experience, but my experience so often reveals that my claims to understand are presumptuous. I am aware of past errors and so my experience itself gives rise to radical doubts. While I have cultivated doubt as a possible step toward more adequate understanding, I am also threatened by the fact that doubts also lead me toward total skepticism. This is a serious emotional alternative to the claim that I am capable of understanding. It is not a claim that I can rationally formulate. In the words of William James,
Skepticism is one possible fruit of
philosophizing, namely the residual alternative
to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would be philosopher
who may give up the quest discouraged
and renounce his original aim.