To instruct the ignorant:
Callahan, Sidney
TO INSTRUCT THE IGNORANT SIDNEY CALLAHAN WORKS OF MERCY IN A PSYCHOLOGICAL AGE That is ignorance? And what does it have to do with us? Why should we go about correcting it? The essence of...
...To instruct another in the struggle for self-knowledge is much like all instructing, a delicate task filled with paradox...
...There is two-way influence...
...If you already know that you don't know, if you are aware of your own ignorance, you have made the first great leap toward knowledge...
...Why don't we achieve self-knowledge more promptly...
...Go talk to others and you'll stop feeling self-conscious...
...Other investigations of self-deception do not focus on evolutionary strategies but upon the way human consciousness functions day to day...
...Freely willed effort can produce transformations of the unconscious and precon-scious as well...
...The more maladaptive the process becomes and the more we hide from self-knowledge, the more threatened and defensive we become...
...Intense new interest in this ancient human problem has produced a provocative new psychology of self-deception...
...Highly differentiated semi-independent systems are an advantage when it comes to self-correction...
...Evolutionary theorists are just as sure that altruism, cooperation, and learning are also innate, so one finds a curious secular replay of original-sin theories in which human nature is mostly good, but also wounded in its propensity for self-enhancing illusions...
...This article is excerpted from her With All My Heart and Mind to be published this spring by The Crossroad Publishing Company...
...The need for self-discipline, perseverance, and long-term effort is a surprise to them...
...Stop pouting, don't dwell on your troubles, get busy, and you will feel better...
...Our dedication to reality wavers, particularly if self-scrutiny is in order...
...Character means that individuals shape their environment, including their inner environment, as much as the environment shapes them...
...Through effort, love, attention, and discipline those parts of the personality that seem beyond direction, awareness, and control can slowly be changed...
...We cannot see how we look from the back, or be fully conscious of all our unconscious habits and mannerisms, nor can we penetrate our personality all by ourselves...
...Those parents, teachers, therapists, or religious guides who instruct us to know ourselves, and direct ourselves, and achieve disciplined self-control prepare us to be able to cope with life-and to be cheerful while doing so...
...The difficulty of balancing work and family becomes disconcerting if not overwhelming...
...Self-scrutiny and introspection have traditionally been known as painful and difficult enterprises...
...We instruct one another by giving accurate responses and reactions to what is said and done...
...This mind-fulness or sustained attention to inner reality is a painful but necessary discipline for personal change and progress...
...Such strategies worked and still work...
...Many young people in our post-Calvinist culture do not seem prepared to struggle with difficulties...
...When awake we direct our beam of attentive consciousness toward reality, ready to cope with daily life...
...It is possible to learn to think about one's thinking and regularly examine how one feels and functions with other people...
...We resist turning the light inward upon ourselves because of the discomfort and critical function of self-consciousness...
...Sooner or later they pay for the fact that others did not love them enough to tell them what they needed to know or to force them to confront the real consequences of what they do...
...Learn patience, finish what you start, and you'll feel better...
...In this culture women have often been socialized to soothe, charm, lie, and cover up the faults of the men and children in their lives...
...If we are failing to communicate, if we are arrogant or too self-deprecating, someone must tell us...
...Today we see many young adults struggling to come to terms with adulthood, sadly ignorant of many psychological and spiritual truths that could help them...
...Our God, who came to teach us personally and who instructs us from within, enkindles the fire to know and to teach in all hearts...
...one should never be so self-indulgent or so rude as to litter the communal space with surliness or bad feeling...
...Self-discipline was part of the Calvinist American heritage that fused stoic values and good manners...
...The worst thing about ignorance is that one can remain smugly, blissfully unaware of it...
...The situation is far worse if a family is at the same time too ungenerous or meanspirited to affirm an individual's good qualities and potential strengths...
...All psychological therapies or programs for self-knowledge or spiritual disciplines in-sist upon directing consciousness inward in searching self-observation...
...We can learn to keep our attention dimmed or turned outward in habitual defensive strategies that prevent self-knowledge...
...They have been so protected by loving parents and shielded by affluence that they are not ready for the tests of character and personal integration which life brings...
...We become adept at hiding from full self-confrontation, in order to avoid pain, procure pleasure, or block the moral self-censure of guilt or shame...
...Through timidity, mistaken kindness, or inattentiveness, many persons do not get in family life the instruction in self-discipline they need...
...Stand up straight, dress up, clean your room, and you will feel better...
...It is no favor to mislead another out of mistaken efforts at nurturing...
...1988 by Sidney Callahan...
...Each system contributes to a sense of self or identity...
...But it is also possible for systems to become isolated or fail to be integrated properly...
...The essence of ignorance seems to be a failing to notice, and then failing to notice that we fail to notice...
...Ergo, a defensive dimming of attention or outright avoidance becomes the best defense...
...Why are we so ignorant and easily deceived about ourselves...
...are we reading the environment and other persons rationally...
...Although philosophers and mystics have, always said that spiritual progress requires self-knowledge, the task remains incredibly difficult...
...One can overcome ignorance of the self by the ongoing dialogue with the other...
...When we daydream or go to sleep we can feel this beam fading and other levels of functioning taking over...
...one system can check, substitute for, or correct the input of another...
...The most familiar self that we recognize is the alert, awake consciousness or "I" that seems to scan the world without and within like a narrow beam of light...
...Without this truthful response a person can continue in defensive, self-deceptive traps...
...We usually function with several simultaneously interacting systems-with a physiological system, an emotional-affective interpersonal system, and a conscious-rational symbolic system...
...Self-control, or self-mastery, basically seems to be an ability to integrate consciously all of our different systems and levels of personality so that we can choose to act as we would...
...any of us who were educated in an earlier day were taught strategies of self-control in the family...
...Ironically, psychological research has now vindicated the therapeutic value of many of the personal self-management strategies that parents and schools once taught...
...Research studies of attention and self-consciousness have confirmed the fact that when we become self-conscious we usually become self-critical...
...Others must disclose us to ourselves by their response to us...
...The method seems to be to deploy attention, the capacity which gives us freedom and makes self-management possible...
...Because we are so complicated it seems possible that information can be processed but remain isolated from full conscious awareness...
...And few are prepared for the struggles of parenthood in a time when much of the family and community support for child rearing has vanished...
...The natural tendency toward self-deception and defense has to be struggled against by equally strong efforts toward reality and truthful self-confrontation...
...The more self-knowledge and self-awareness, the more freedom of choice...
...Naturally we resist the pain and the effort to overcome ignorance of the self, even while desiring to be free...
...Habitual self-deception is possible because humans have multiple, complex, different levels of functioning and consciousness...
...We imitate the most loving, patient, and attentive of all teachers when we instruct the ignorant.en we instruct the ignorant...
...If we love persons we are forced in charity to tell them truthfully how we respond to them...
...It is possible to learn to feel and act in new ways...
...There will be effort, pain, and joy in this spiritual work of mercy, but love impels us to seek truth and share what we have with others...
...Avoiding pain by not attending to it may be both an innate and learned defensive strategy...
...Do something for others, be cheerful, and you'll feel better...
...Some measure of self-deception has adaptive uses that favor its continued use in the struggle for human survival...
...According to some new theories, self-deception is genetically programmed into the human species...
...We look around us and see such widespread blindness to self-and, of course, we have had enough painful personal experiences of entrapment in illusion and ignorance of self to recognize the condition...
...Reprinted by permission of the publisher and author...
...Through consciousness and effort we can change much of our preconscious and emotional life...
...To instruct another is to collaborate with God, the One who teaches and enlightens...
...But when our coping is not successful or when we are frustrated, we can see defensive maneuvers taking place in consciousness and attention...
...Persons who can successfully fool themselves may look more sincere to others, seem mpre sincere to themselves, and so be able to garner more of the environment's resources: they can rationalize their selfish strategies and provide advantages to their own offspring, who perpetuate the genes...
...In many cases it takes psychological counseling to liberate and free the self from distorted past learning which no longer applies in the present...
...Unfortunately, unless another person cares enough to instruct you, you can remain blind, dumb, and ignorant until you die...
...The self's negative experiences of weakness, failure, and wrongdoing may be particularly painful to confront with full awareness...
...They do not get a proper education in self-knowledge because the human dialogue has been deficient or dishonest...
...None of us can experience ourselves or see ourselves as others do...
...Often those who have been raised by too indulgent parents, or those in positions of great power who are surrounded by sycophants, or those who are greatly pitied or avoided, will not have the truth told to them...
...SIDNEY CALLAHAN is associate professor of psychology at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, and the author of several books, including The Illusion of Eve and Parenting...
...When a person's automatic, heretofore avoided or isolated defensive processes are attended to and brought to full consciousness, a person can be free to choose in new ways what will determine his or her future life...
...As in other instruction, the goal is to induce self-control and ongoing self-guidance...
...There may be physical and psychological trade-offs and adjustments between pain and attention...
...We both seek and resist enlightenment, but without the help of other persons we can never overcome self-deception...
...One was taught to cultivate cheerfulness and self-control as a contribution to the family and social circle...
...If I don't notice something, it hurts less...
...it is easier to avoid a painful reality than to try to change it...
...Pain and the threat to our self-esteem tempt us defensively to change or distort reality in order to be able to protect ourselves from the truth...
...The habitual defensive strategies can begin...
...that one's work and career should take so much dedication and effort is easier to understand, but still something of a shock...
...One must tell the other when that person is failing, while supporting and affirming him or her...
...Our attention is turned inward upon our weaknesses and inadequacies, and we notice our failures to meet our own standards...
...we can make ourselves feel better and change ourselves for the better through strategic efforts at self-control...
...What psychology calls self-management or self-control training, we called "character," the traits which you built through persistent effort...
...Action, thought, and feeling can change if we make enough effort and have enough good and truthful companions to help us overcome our ignorance of ourselves...
...A built-in need for self-deception is posited as emerging from the strong human drive to avoid pain and seek pleasure...
...That marriage takes sacrifice is a surprise...
...We are told to know ourselves so that we can be freed from being driven by hidden forces with which we have colluded in self-protective strategies of self-deception...
Vol. 115 • April 1988 • No. 8
