Starting with disclaimers, I am not a trained psychiatrist, not a therapist or even a teacher/counselor of any sort. I am just someone who is really interested in how our brains react to enhanced emotional states. I have devoted a lot of time and energy to understanding and bettering myself. I only have a little bit of familiarity with the literature on some of these topics but others are more qualified to speak on these things in an academic way.
Over the past 8 years, I have done some therapy and have meditated regularly. Through this, I have made a lot of progress towards being well and my understanding of my own internal life. With these qualifications, I hope to still be able to write something both useful and true, that might inform others who may be in need, or just simply browsing and curious.
Part 1 - The central problem
The main obstacle to true mastery of self is that a large part of our inner workings and motivations are completely hidden from our conscious mind. It is both a quirk of our evolutionary history and the reasons why every individual human being is unique. The subconscious mind is mostly a black box, even to the most astute practitioners of mindfulness techniques. You can want to be well, and optimize for things that should help you achieve this goal but you will always have a subconscious mind that is sometimes completely unaligned from these aims. Its motivations and drives are opaque, and so all you can do is carry on with your own conscious planning — Not a master but also not fully a servant either.
Part 2 - Qualities of the mind
Part of why it is so hard to “improve” your subconscious is that a lot of it is based on "priors” i.e. things that you needed to assume were true to minimize cognitive dissonance. Having a flaw in your priors can lead to serious trouble and limit your development towards being well.
Here is an explanation of this process proposed by two scientists in the field, Karl Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris:
Consistent with hierarchical predictive processing, we maintain that the highest level of the brain’s functional architecture ordinarily exerts an important constraining and compressing influence on perception, cognition, and emotion, so that perceptual anomalies and ambiguities—as well as dissonance and incongruence— are easily and effortlessly explained away via the invocation of broad, domain-general compressive narratives.
What this implies is that our subconscious mind is run by broad, compressive narratives that dissect our sensory inputs into clean categories of experiences from which we then derive our emotional states or as some call it “valence”.
Strong priors create strong subconscious narratives that become the inner life of all perception. This creates a unique “close-mindedness” familiar to all human beings who achieve a certain threshold of individuation or selfhood. Simply put, achieving selfhood denies any possibility of true open-mindedness outside of a set of previously-held priors that determine baseline conscious state of mind. However, research has shown that a few exceptions to this rule exist, such as psychedelics or dissociative states.
Strong priors direct our emotional and cognitive life. We increasingly seek inputs that confirm our subconscious beliefs and ignore the ones that don’t. Over time, these dominant narratives grow in internal predictive strength and become harder to overturn via new evidence in the outside world. These feedback loops can become so strong that only through dramatic means can they be “relaxed” via resetting i.e. psychedelics, intense traumatic experiences etc. Here is a splendid example of this phenomenon from slatestarcodex.
For example, imagine a person who formed a strong prior around “I am a failure” at an early age, then later went on to achieve great things. Because their prior was so strong, they might think of each of their accomplishments as a special case, or interpret them as less impressive than they were. If they could somehow relax this subconscious prior and reexamine the evidence unbiased by their existing beliefs, they might determine that their accomplishments were impressive enough to count as successes. With repetition, they might even abandon the “I am a failure” prior.
This framework helps explain why it is so hard to make meaningful changes to self as an individual. Even minor changes in our conscious actions can take an entire decade to orchestrate. Now imagine how hard it is to fix maladaptive psychological patterns (mental health) or embody more positive states of mind once you’re stuck in a feedback loop of {negative prior e.g. I am a failure and outside circumstantial evidence (recent job loss)}. For those who know this place well, it is hell to live in this state of being for any extended amount of time (given that some amount of time in this state is inevitable).
Is there a way out?
The next part of this essay will be about my proposition of things that can help relax unhelpful priors and allow for more input corrections to the system, and thus increase well-being (or at the very least decrease feedback loops of negative valence).
Part 2 - Therapy and Meditation
At the core of it, therapy tries to make the subconscious mind less opaque for the individual. In this methodical unravelling, patients can learn and (hopefully) over time vocalize their priors in a non-judgmental way. The hope is that once people become aware of the unique subconscious narrative that colour their interaction with the world, they are equiped to minimize the maladaptive patterns that can arise as a result. In addition to this, therapy can help one learn valuable coping skills if it is impossible or impractical to get rid of a stongly-held prior and some of the emotional states associated.
This is an immensely powerful tool for being well and was my personal starting point on this journey. I was able to gain conscious insight into the things that I subconsciously believed and through this, exposed the narratives that were creating blind spots for me. In this way, engaging in therapy can change your fundamental understanding of yourself and improve your ability to experience positive valence states.
Part 2b - Meditation
Meditation and mindfulness techniques in general have a similar mode of action. At the core of all successful, consistent meditation practices is the ability to make the subconscious mind more conscious. Through seeking states of “no-mind” or “thoughtlessness”, one can identify very subtle patterns in the way that their minds work and through this deduce what their own priors are. The lack of external stimuli (i.e. thoughtlessness) is critical for this process because all external stimuli increase the noise in the system making it very unlikely that this type of insight can be achieved in a sustainable way.
By taking all stimuli away, and just watching the random flow of attention and awareness, you can start to pick out your most common mind states and the valence states associated with it. You discover how you attach a lot of significance to certain events of your life and less to others as you build and strengthen narratives. You hopefully also realize that much of these processes are out of your conscious everyday control so there is no need to be overly guilty or self-judgemental. When done right, these series of realizations can help the individual “relax” their priors and be more present in their life, interacting with life itself, and not with a meta-narrative.
Of course, I am using generalizations here and there are many types of meditation practices but this is only meant as a starting point.
Closing thoughts.
I dwell in Possibility— A fairer House than Prose— More numerous of Windows— Superior— for Doors— Of Chambers as the Cedars— Impregnable of Eye— And for an Everlasting Roof. The Gambrels of the Sky— Of Visitors—the fairest— For Occupation—This— The spreading wide of narrow Hands. To gather Paradise—
―Emily Dickinson
Life brings a lot of ups and downs and no one can really escape some amount suffering as long as they live. And so wellness to me, is simply the ability to be always be in harmony with the unfolding of life, no matter the circumstances, good or bad.
To spend as little time as possible within our own subconscious narratives and pre-concieved notions. Being courageous, spending more time exploring with our senses and through this finding valence in unfamiliar places.
Every day feeling utterly new and every sunset better than the last,
This is the way.