Home - Learning To Live What Cannot Be Represented

Learning To Live What Cannot Be Represented

By Leland Johnston, MD

In Memory of Drs. Leland and Helen Johnston

Preface

Introduction

Chapters

1: Living What Cannot Be Represented

2: Sensory Function and Natural Selection

3: Mentalization of Self and Object

4: Process of Self Differentiated from Fixation on Self as an Entity

5: Survival and Well-Being Through Interconnection

6: Living Interconnection and Individuation

7: Process of Self Choosing Emotional Health

8: Emotional Health Is a Dynamic Process

9: Awareness and Attention

10: Learning To Live the Process of Self Each Moment

Diagram

Glossary

Suggested Reading

Preface

My years of training, clinical practice, and teaching since graduation from medical school in 1978 continue to offer the opportunity to interact and learn with patients. These individuals are the resource and inspiration for this essay, which is not about illness but about emotional health. Although the adage of being able to work and play has been a common way to reference health, the perspective that follows in “Learning To Live What Cannot Be Represented” provides a further reference of emotional health.

The brevity of the essay runs the risk of being too condensed for easy reading. The reduced size, though, is to encourage an initial reading in order to open the topic for further discussion and understanding.

Introduction

Current developmental and clinical research offers insight into how self functions as a process in survival and well-being, but this essay is not intent on proof. Proof would require more research to substantiate what all of us can know about using the process of self through everyday experience. The following pages will provide further distinction to this perspective.

1: Living What Cannot Be Represented

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958

Through any stretch of human imagination, the limits of our powers of observation via all our senses govern the extent to which we have any perception of actual reality. These limits include any tools created to expand the horizon of our senses, such as the electron microscope, the fMRI scanner, the Large Hadron Collider, or the James Webb Space Telescope. A further limit of our ability to know, remember, and use what we sense and perceive is our capacity to represent those observations. How we represent and remember what we observe guides what we further explore and further represent. As we make discoveries with science, we learn more of what we continue to seek to know and represent.

The brain coordinates the neurobiology of experiencing life through coding our sensory experiences and perceptions into memory. This process occurs so rapidly that the observations weave seamlessly together as our reality. Upon further study, we understand that this reality is a construct of the limits of what we can experience through our senses and perceptions and of what we can code into neuronal pathways of instinctual or reflex memory and representational memory. Representational memory includes emotion, language, image, science, philosophy, spirituality, math, art, and all of what we perceive, represent, express, and live through human experience. We represent what we learn through living life.

Although we use language to represent awareness, we all experience simply being aware without any specifics of representation. Awareness cannot be represented by time or space, yet is ever present both consciously and unconsciously. Living through awareness, the human brain codes each sensory and perceptual interaction into memory to inform choice. This is indispensable to human survival. Choices guide the very essence of our living and our adaptation in survival as individuals and as a species. We learn to live what we cannot represent through awareness of what we sense, perceive, remember and choose regarding survival and well-being in each moment.

2: Sensory Function and Natural Selection

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1872

Sensory reflexes and their neurobiological memory are as fundamental to living life as acting upon sensory reflexes of attraction and aversion is for monocellular organisms. These sensory reflexes evolve through interaction with food, procreation, danger, and other elements of the environment determining survival. The success or failure of each of these interactions codes into pathways of memory. Sensory systems of each living species function constantly and evolve over extensive periods of time with an incredible diversity of genetic adaptations through natural selection via procreation. Research, dating back to the 1940’s, began to highlight even further how epigenesis is present in all forms of life, from microorganisms and fungi to plants and animals. Epigenesis performs a fundamental role in regulating gene expression to adapt during a lifetime and then can be transmitted to offspring through reproduction.

Sensory pathways utilize memory to engage reflexively. In many species, senses can collaborate with other sensory pathways. Research in humans reveals the immense collaboration that can exist unconsciously among the various senses. This collaboration establishes a comprehensive rendering of sensory experience and the associated reflexive response to it. This occurs so quickly without our complete understanding of the complexity of the neurobiological process.

The neurobiological process of self to direct ever present awareness as attention on networks of memory is the conscious process we use to make choices. An understanding of the process of self does not require qualifications about whether awareness is universal, primordial, quantum or derivative of neurobiology. The process of self directs awareness to choose our adaptation to and with both the environment and each other to determine our survival and well being as each individual and as a species.

Fossil records of Cyanobacteria date as far back as 2.7 billion years. The jellyfish appeared 505 million years ago. In comparison, our first human ancestors appeared only between 5 and 7 million years ago. Portraying human evolution as the crown of adaptation in the survival of any species can ignore the risk that the survival of our human species may be extremely brief and responsible for the demise of so many other species and our environment. Choice through attention to self as a fixed entity, rather than self as simply a process, risks the survival and well-being of each of us and our human species, as well as the survival of other species and our environment.

3: Mentalization of Self and Object

Only Homo sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.
—Yuval Noah Harari, TED Talk, 2015

Language as uttered sounds that communicate emerged among various species long before the evolution of the human. Other species have the capacity of language to communicate, but the human species evolved the a further extensive use of language throughout early development to represent self and object in each experience of the infant. Object refers to whatever is the object of attention, be it a thought, a person, an event, an item in the environment, or any other point upon which attention focuses. As the parent uses language to represent each of these self-and-object interactions, the child remembers and learns these representations of self and object.

Representations of self and object gain particular utility in processing the living of life through emotion. In early human infancy, the parent empathically attunes to the child’s physiological experiences of attraction and aversion, and uses language to represent the living of these experiences both as cognition and as emotions. Emotions offer an expanded, more nuanced experience of living both attraction and aversion. This includes all emotions, such as greed, lust, happiness, anger, jealousy, shame, guilt, sadness, fear, hate, and love.

Research specifies this early developmental process as mentalization which uses language, empathy, and play to represent innumerable self-and-object experiences, particularly those imbued with emotion. The human brain uses representations to remember the emotion we live in each experience in order to guide future choices when negotiating adaptation.

Simultaneous to the process of mentalization, the child gains increasing capacity of the executive function pathways of the brain, involving the prefrontal cortex, to direct and hold attention. The memories of self-and-object representation gain increasing distinction and further differentiation throughout life.

This quote from a TED Talk in 2015 by Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (published in 2011), captures the immense evolutionary adaptation offered by the ability to use representations, which he describes as imagination:

Only Homo sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers … .Put 100,000 chimps in Wall Street or Yankee Stadium, and you’ll get chaos. Put 100,000 humans there, and you’ll get trade networks and sports contests.… Cooperation is not always nice, of course. All the terrible things humans have been doing throughout history are also the product of mass cooperation. Prisons, slaughterhouses and concentration camps are also systems of mass cooperation. Chimpanzees don’t have prisons, slaughterhouses or concentration camps.… Yet how come humans alone of all the animals are capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers, be it in order to play, to trade or to slaughter? The answer is our imagination.

During early childhood and throughout life, the representations of self and object are essential to the conscious process of making choices. The neurobiological process of the executive function pathways that direct awareness as attention and hold attention on representational memories of self and object in order to discern choice develops increasing stability and constancy. The constancy is not of an entity of self. This is the constancy of the process of self choosing. Research describes this constancy as a developmental achievement that occurs as early as age three to four, but gains increasing utility throughout life. The experience of this constancy is ever present as the process of self, with the same experience of the process of self now as at any younger age.

The terms identity, self-esteem, and ego (see glossary) require distinction and differentiation from the process of self operating consciously in each choice. Identity references the various traits, talents, and aptitudes of an individual or group of individuals. Identity has elements, often with genetic and epigenetic influences, that can develop and change over time. Identity is unique to a given individual or group of individuals. Self-esteem is very similar to identity. The healthy use of self-esteem refers to a confidence and trust in various talents or abilities that one develops. The maladaptive use of identity or self-esteem attributes value to an actual entity of self as if the self of an individual has a fixed nature or worth. To differentiate, the process of self discerns conscious choice in each moment and can learn from the maladaptive effects of choice fixed on self and object as actual entities.

4: Process of Self Differentiated from Fixation on Self as an Entity

I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self.… We do not perceive ourselves in order to know ourselves, we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves.
—Anil Seth, Being You, 2021

The human species is unique in using language to represent and remember the living of self-and-object experience through living the vast array of emotions. As mentalization evolves in the human species, representations of emotion offer enhanced degrees of discernment of the specificity, quality, and intensity of interactions between self and object. Cognition further highlights emotional distinctions and offers communication with others. Sharing the predictive experience offered by memory of emotion and cognition provides the opportunity to choose and act in concert with others. This provides immense advantage in human survival.

The process of self coordinates conscious choice in concert with sensory and perceptual pathways and with cognitive and emotional representation, then encodes into memory the outcome of each choice, which serves as scaffolding for further choice. Like the ready response of all sensory and perceptual functions, the process of self is readily available to choose our adaptation in survival and well-being.

To think that a fixed entity of self chooses is a convenience, but it is just as mistaken as the convenience of thinking that the nose smells, the tongue tastes, the ear hears, the eye sees, or the skin touches. In addition to these commonly referenced five senses, we have many more senses and perceptual functions, operating continuously, such as balance, temperature, internal pain, vibration, proprioception, kinesthesia, chemoreception, hunger, and thirst. The neuronal signal from each sensory receptor or perceptual process functions through extensive neurobiological processing in the brain.

Sensory experience evolves to reflexively respond unconsciously without any discernment of a conscious process of self to direct awareness as attention. Memory of experiences of outcome of prior reflexive action simply guides further reflexive action. In January, 2025, researchers at the California Institute of Technology estimated that sensory systems gather and process information unconsciously at an astonishing rate of up to one billion bits per second. Furthermore, estimates suggest that 95% or more of neurobiological processing of the brain occurs outside of conscious experience.

The brain can further process any unconscious sensory experience into perception, which organizes and differentiates sensory signals into conscious experience. For example, sensory is unconscious and detects a sound and may act upon it reflexively. Perception recognizes the sound consciously, for example as music. Perception includes the conscious experience of the life of emotions. The process of self continuously scans perception to consciously discern moments of choice and to coordinate choice based upon memory of past choice. Memory of past experience, whether memory of unconscious reflex or memory of choice made consciously in the past, resides unconsciously until process of self directs awareness as attention to utilize memory of past interactions to direct choice in a present circumstance.

In order to highlight the process of self, it is essential to understand the speed of conscious neurobiological processing. While occurring at a far slower speed than unconscious processing speed, conscious neurobiological processing occurs at the speed of 10 bits per second. Conscious processing distills vast amounts of sensory data into manageable perceptual bits, through the process of self, enabling humans to make decisions. The conscious process of self directs awareness as attention to memories of emotional experience and cognition to discern and predict an optimal choice. Conversation simply conveys information and is somewhat faster at 39 bits per second.

The speed of neurobiological processing, both unconscious and conscious, instills the erroneous perception that self is an actual entity that considers choice and intends action. In everyday discourse, self is often referenced in this manner. However, choice fixed upon self as a fixed entity, rather than self as simply a neurobiological process, jeopardizes adaptation.

Our conscious use of the process of self is vital to the process of choices which we make governing adaptation and flexibility that are so intrinsic to survival and well-being. In contrast, choices made through attention fixed on self as an entity, rather than through self as simply a process, have a detrimental impact on our emotional health, on our relationship to others, and on our relationship to the environment, as well as a detrimental impact on others and the environment.

5: Survival and Well-Being Through Interconnection

Over the course of two weeks, you actually exchange out an equivalent to the entire body mass of your body.… Even the stuff that is seemingly more permanent, like the calcium in your bones, 98% of all of that cycles out within a year.… We are constantly in the state of inner becoming … with the whole earth.… This is not theoretical. This is literally exactly what’s happening. Part of you was these plants a couple of days ago. Part of you tomorrow is going to be them.… And this is how much we are interconnected with our planet.
—Tom Chi, “How Everything Is Connected,” TEDx/Taipei, January 2016

Research into the adaptations of all complex life forms, including animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms, confirms that cooperation is a common adaptation of survival. Cooperation even accounts for the initial emergence of one-celled organisms and the genetic coding within each cell. Such cooperation expresses the interconnection that is considered a biological fact in ecological research, a native wisdom in many indigenous traditions, and a truth or moral code in spiritual traditions.

Humans as a social species have genetic and epigenetic capacities at birth for individuation and social relatedness that have evolved through generations of human survival and natural selection. Many outlines of early child development emphasize the process of individuation from attachment to the parent. The development of regard for the interconnection to the parent and others is integral in the healthy development of individuation. More recent developmental and neurobiological research of the social brain provides further distinction to this interconnection. We humans adapt and survive as a social species through interconnection with each other and our environment. Both the choice of the individual to work and play and the choice to interconnect with each other and the environment are intrinsic to our emotional well-being. This is the human evolution of the process of self choosing interconnection and individuation.

Interconnection and individuation may seem to aim in distinctly separate directions. Interconnection does not reference an emotional state of union; it refers to a process of our inherent reliance upon each other and the environment. Healthy individuation does not reference an emotional state of freedom from others; it refers to the continuous, ever-present process of curiosity, exploration, and innovation unique to each of us. As our process of self chooses, both interconnection and individuation are intrinsic and vital to human adaptation.

6: Living Interconnection and Individuation

When asked if there is a time to use violence or aggression, Marshall Rosenberg answered, “No to violence or aggression but yes to the protective use of force.… There is nothing we human beings like more than to contribute to one another’s well-being.”
—Marshall Rosenberg, “Nonviolent Communication: A Brief Introduction,”YouTube, July 2010

The metaphor of a single calendar year representing the 4.4 billion years of our planet’s age helps us grasp the time interval of the evolution of our human species. The first life on earth appeared in mid-March. By June, the first cells with a nucleus carrying genetic information evolved. Multicellular organisms evolved by November. Human life appeared thirty minutes before midnight on December 31.

Human evolution of using the process of self, specifically using representations of self and object in order to choose through memory and prediction, offers enormous survival advantage. But it comes with the highly precarious risk of choice intent upon self as a fixed entity, without regard for cooperation and interconnection. This risk to each of us and to our species directly impacts our survival and well-being, but also the survival of others and the environment.

This quote from Nichola Raihani’s The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World helps us appreciate the precarious process of human choice:

Within the last sixty seconds, humans have engineered both the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, formed global nation states, waged two horrifying world wars, and presided over wholesale domination and destruction of the natural world.

Competition is inherent to survival and inspires determined, persistent, passionate effort, as we live both individuation and interconnection. The intent to fix upon a self as an entity that gains a win or suffers a loss interferes with an individual’s best effort. We learn from each other’s mistakes and achievements without fixation upon an entity of self as a failure or as a success.

Human law justifies the protective use of force in self-defense. Our survival as a species and the evolution of our health and well-being rely upon choices made through negotiation without violence. In interpersonal dialogue, particularly to resolve conflict, two fundamental tools facilitate discernment and express respect for our individuality as well as our interconnection. The first tool is a thorough discovery, primarily through observations and questions, of one another’s point of view. The second is a genuine empathy for one another’s point of view. This becomes the ground for communication about choice and for strategies to realize choice. This listening through questions and empathy is essential to healthy interpersonal communication in which agreement can emerge naturally, over time or even more immediately, and disagreements can become more clear. Seeking advantage when fixed upon oneself or another as an entity jeopardizes healthy communication. Successful communication relies upon honesty and uses process of self to discern differences and express respect for both our individuality and our interconnection, rather than to regress into aggressive violations of one another.

This description of choosing both interconnection and individuality may read like a portrayal of an ideal. It is actually a description of a process lived with each choice determining the adaptation of our survival and our well-being. Each of us can realize in any moment that every other human uses the process of self to make choices to survive and adapt. Empathy for each other is natural to this realization.

7: Process of Self Choosing Emotional Health

The interface theory of perception claims that evolution shaped our senses to be a user interface, tailored to the needs of our species. Our interface hides objective reality and guides adaptive behavior in our niche.
—Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, 2019

Life is lived through the continuous process of unconscious reflex using sensory memory, and through the conscious process of self choosing through coordination with our perceptions and memory of past emotional and cognitive experience. The health of our choices toward any endeavor can express the energy and creativity of an individual while attending to our interconnection with each other and the environment. This includes choices in science, business, sports, art, engineering, sales, medicine, or any other endeavor. We experience emotional health as our process of self chooses to engage work, play, or rest in our shared interconnection without fixation onto an entity of self or object.

The process of self continuously makes conscious choices. As we choose in each circumstance involving the environment or each other, we learn and earn trust through repeated experience of our choices for and with each other. Trust is more easily lost than gained, but as trust gains traction, the impulse to fixate on self and object as entities can relax. As trust develops, the shared release of any fixation inspires collaboration of choice and the potential of shared engagement.

The health of the process of self relies on the discernment in each choice of the degree to which any emotion or thought fixes on self as an entity. In everyday activity, the use of reminders helps release any fixation upon oneself or other as an entity and facilitates a return to the process of self simply directing awareness as attention to choice without fixation. Gratitude, forgiveness, humor, respect, kindness, humility, empathy, and compassion are particularly helpful reminders. Each provides a healthy perspective as the process of self chooses our endeavors and our relationships.

Recognizing the deleterious effects of attending to self as a fixed entity is a perspective learned through repeated failure, like learning to walk. Each moment of living — each moment as in “now” — offers a learning opportunity. Although ideals can guide choice like a map, living the effects of any choice is what teaches survival and wellness. The most thorough learning is through the suffering experienced, either immediately or eventually, when the process of self chooses as if self is a fixed entity. Healthy human development learns to release any attention directed to self as a fixed entity. Each successful choice of both individuality and interconnection can further confirm the learning to choose both in survival and wellness. This learning is a process each engages individually throughout a lifetime. The life of any choice can extend interpersonally and affect the well being of both the individual and the other.

Forgiveness is vital to the health of learning the process of self choosing. Forgiveness involves a full acknowledgment to both oneself and another of any fixation upon self as an entity that impacts either oneself or another. Each of us can potentially learn from each mistake and from each other, in each moment.

In certain moments of emergency requiring instant unconscious response, instinct or reflex governs survival. In such moments, there may be no opportunity for conscious choice through directing awareness as attention to representations of self and object. After those moments, review of memory of emotion and thought pertinent to the previous experience provides the opportunity of discernment that is indispensable to similar choices in future moments.

8: Emotional Health Is a Dynamic Process

This is what affects [emotions] are for: they convey which biological things are going well or badly for us, and they arouse us to do something about them … . This brings us full circle, back to the most fundamental feature of affect: its valence. You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behaviour, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behaviour: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
—Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, 2021

To reiterate, we choose consciously through networks of self and object memories, coded with emotions that we live. Our memories of interactions processed personally within ourselves, interpersonally with each other, and interactively with the environment offer the opportunity of choice predicated on these memories. The process of self directs awareness as attention to these networks of memory to discern choice, to live each choice and to record the outcome lived in each choice. We employ the process of self in making innumerable choices each day, determining adaptation. Emotional health is a continual, dynamic process, not passive or fixed, whereby the process of self uses cognition and emotion to choose survival and well-being for each of us.

Emotions mark our experience of living and offer the ground upon which choices are made. Emotions are not bad or good. As an example, anger can be very adaptive in the context of reacting to mistreatment or abuse. The issue concerns what is the most adaptive way to process and express the anger. On the other hand, anger driven by a distorted perspective intent upon a fixed entity of self is entirely maladaptive for all concerned.

The use of the emotional words love or happiness as a primal motive to live life is inspirational in that it captures so much of the essence of what we experience. The urge to seek love or happiness is very natural. Attempts to represent interconnection through the emotion of love between self and object can idealize love as a state to seek. Love, like all emotion expressing the experience of living self in interaction with object, has many variations of expression and meaning. For example, these variations stretch from any maladaptive craving of love fixed on an object with relentless insistence or coercion, to a more adaptive use such as deep caring for an object without fixation.

For purposes of representing the full dynamics of survival and adaptation, love or happiness is emotion guiding choice. No emotion can be achieved by an entity of self as a fixed state. Attention fixed on self as an entity in any emotional state, including states of love or happiness, can obscure or neglect the release to the process of self simply choosing without intent to attach to an emotional state. What determines the value of any emotion in survival and wellness is whether the emotion lives in a healthy choice of both individuality and interconnection or a deterioration in health and adaptation when fixed on self as an entity.

The current predominance of the human species emerged through the development of mentalization during prolonged infancy and toddlerhood to acquire the process of self choosing through both cognition and an extensive repertoire of emotional representation. On the surface, it would seem straightforward to remember self as a process and to release any tendency to fix upon self as an entity. This mentalization of self and object challenges the learning of self as a process, very specifically distinct from self as a fixed entity. In fact, remembering this perspective presents a persistent challenge. All of us, even coming from the most favorable of past emotional development or in the most optimal of current circumstance, are vulnerable to varying degrees of maladaptive fixation of emotion onto self as an entity. The most persistent fixations onto self as an entity are intense states of internal emotional conflict or trauma. Intense fixations can even lead to the wish to suicide. These fixations may be triggered in varying degrees at varying points in time. The extent to which we release such fixations, with a return to a process of self simply choosing both individuation and interconnection expresses the degree of flexibility and adaptation intrinsic to our emotional health.

Illnesses, including traumas and accidents, emerge over the span of life from birth to death beyond determinants of choice. These include illnesses of every sort, such as infectious, metabolic, psychiatric, congenital, autoimmune, carcinogenic, traumatic, iatrogenic, or cardiovascular illnesses. Adaptation in recovery or in living with the illness or pain can involve intense emotional moments. The vulnerability to fixate on self as an entity can increase during debilitating illness or trauma accompanied by overwhelming emotions. In such states, the process of self can learn to release from intense fixation on self as an entity. Reminders of releasing to peace of ever present awareness and to choices living the emotional health of individuality and interconnection are essential.

9: Awareness and Attention

Being aware of being aware is not a focusing of our attention on something. It is more like a relaxation of our attention, a falling back of attention into its source … to rest in and as the aware being that we inherently are.
—Rupert Spira, 2021

To understand the process of self, awareness and directing awareness as attention deserve further distinction. Awareness cannot be represented with the duality of self and object inherent to language. Awareness is always present without qualifications of space, time, action, thought, fantasy, emotion, or any other conceptual reference. Our process of self is indispensable in directing awareness as conscious attention to choose moments of living, whether we realize it or not.

An analogy for our process of self is a prism that can separate white light as a metaphor for awareness into its constituent spectrum of colors. (see Diagram). Light, in this analogy, is the continuous awareness we live but cannot represent. The prism is the conscious life of emotion and the healthy process of self choosing through both cognitive representation and emotional representation. Choices of interconnection and individuality are intrinsic to human adaptation and live in the expression of the colors. Any fixation onto self as an entity blocks the full spectrum of colors that are essential to healthy choices we make to live life.

References to selflessness, expressed here as no fixation upon self as an entity, accompany descriptions of altered states, such as kundalini experiences, hallucinogenic states, out-of-body experiences, flow states, or blissful states. Accounts of these states are inspirational and are the subject of ongoing research, both scientific and contemplative. Altered states have immense appeal. In spiritual traditions, the term “dark night of the soul” refers to the anguished states of emotion desperately fixed to self as an entity and might even herald moments of epiphany when releasing that fixation.

By definition, the experiences of any state, including altered states, happen in intervals of time. Being aware is not a state to achieve, but present in our every moment of living. The attempt to achieve any degree of fixation on self as an entity in any of these states risks a loss of perspective regarding the indispensable use of our process of self to choose our survival, adaptability, and emotional well-being in each moment.

Cognitive and emotional representations of self and object are intrinsic to our survival. Representations can only reference or guide like a map but cannot actually live life. We live through all of our senses and perceptions and through the process of self choosing in regard to memory of prior experience. Representations offered by philosophy, spirituality, art and scientific research can be invaluable reminders of living individuality and interconnection but at the risk of seeking any reminder as a fixed entity. Current theories of awareness as quantum field; or of interconnection as quantum entanglement; or of memory as morphic resonance functioning like a field beyond the neurobiology of the brain are subjects of much research, but any proof still functions as a representation. We live our survival and wellness through actually living each choice. As we live each choice, we represent the memory of the outcome of each choice. We can learn from these representations to serve as a map to help guide further choices.

Differentiating representations, which function like a map, from the actual living of each choice is particularly pertinent to speculations about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). AI processes information through representations that function like a map, even like a map with the potential of predictive pertinence. The direct experience of attraction and aversion, including the direct experience of emotion as much more distinct differentiation of attraction and aversion, is the living of life and not a representation. Living life is living survival and wellness through unconscious reflex or through the conscious process of self choosing to live the adaptive experience of individuation and interconnection. Living the actual suffering, when process of self makes a maladaptive choice to fix on self as an entity, offers the opportunity to learn. Living life can release from any self and object representation to be simple awareness. To state it again emphatically, representations, including AI, can guide like a map, but cannot live life.

10: Learning To Live the Process of Self Each Moment

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

—Carl Sagan, 1995

These current times, as have all previous times, present the opportunity to live health in each moment of choice through the process of self. Although the letting go of fixation upon self as an entity references health, the full expression of health occurs through living our choices.

Faith in living health and wellness develops as we learn to live our process of self choosing individuality and interconnection with each other and the environment, and releasing self as a fixed entity. Belief is simply an intellectual position which may or may not be useful. Faith develops through actually living each experience. Although the word faith usually references spirituality, faith references what we can learn as an essential reminder during any moment of choice that risks choosing self as a fixed entity. Our recall of learning through past experience engenders faith in the health and well-being of choosing individuality and interconnection rather than suffer choices fixed upon self and object as entities.

Like the unfathomable speed of our senses and reflexive response, the conscious process by which self directs awareness as attention can happen in indistinguishable fractions of a second. The process of self directs attention to one of these four following conscious processes but can quickly shift from one to the other, at times even frequently during a brief interval of time.

Engage: The process of self directs awareness as attention to choose and engage individuality and interconnection.

Fix upon self as an entity: The process of self directs awareness as attention to self as a fixed entity with accompanying risk of maladaptive choices. This includes fixation upon memories of past trauma and emotional conflict.

Scan: The process of self continually scans, like any other sensory modality. Scanning perceives potential choice. The drift of attention to fix upon self as an entity is very susceptible during scanning.

Release: The process of self releases attention fixed upon self-and-object representation. This release is to choice engaging individuality and interconnection or to the peace of simply being aware.

The release to simply being aware is a release to peace without distinctions of self and object. Being aware is ever present to each of us. Love, wonder, beauty, and joy are words that typically describe self-and-object interactions. Any such use of emotional or cognitive language of self and object can risk the creation of idealizations to seek, as if to become the emotional or cognitive experience of a fixed entity of self now or in the future. Varying degrees of the experience of those words may emerge in the peace of being aware without engaging self and object as fixed entities. The vital distinction is that being aware and the peace of awareness are ever present now, to which release is effortless.

The peace of simply being aware

Lives always in all of us.

The process of self directs awareness

As attention to make choice.

Through sensory and perceptual experience

And the memory of prior choice,

The process of self can learn to choose

The adaptability of both individuation and interconnection.

We can learn through the suffering of any intent

Upon self and object as fixed entity.

Forgiveness of self and any other is vital

To the full experience of this learning.

We can release any directing of awareness

To the peace of simply being aware.

Diagram

Glossary

Attention: Attention is the directing of awareness.

Awareness: Awareness is ever present, both conscious and unconscious, without qualifications of time, space, or any other conceptual distinctions.

Consciousness: Brain function is preponderantly unconscious. Consciousness occurs with the directing of awareness.

Ego: Although ego has an extensive history as a term in psychological theory, the common usage of ego is synonymous with fixation upon self as an entity.

Emotion: In early human infancy, the parent empathically attunes to the child’s natural experiences of attraction and aversion, and uses language to represent the perception of these experiences as specific emotions. Emotions offer an expanded, more nuanced experience of living attraction and aversion.

Equanimity: Equanimity is present as the process of self directs attention to engage work and play in our shared interconnection without fixation onto an entity of self.

Identity: Identity references the various capacities, talents, and attributes of an individual or group of individuals.

Individuality: Individuality refers to the continuous, ever-present process of curiosity, exploration, and innovation.

Interconnection: Humans adapt and survive as a social species through interconnection with other humans and our environment. Interconnection refers to our inherent reliance upon each other and the environment.

Mentalization: Mentalization is the developmental process using language to mentally represent and record in memory innumerable self-and-object experiences, particularly those imbued with emotion.

Object: Object refers to whatever is the object of attention, be it a thought, a person, an event, an emotion, or an item in the environment.

Perception: Neurobiology which organizes and differentiates sensory signals into conscious experience. Sensation is the process of detecting raw input of physical stimuli through sensory organs such as seeing, smelling. touching, tasting or hearing. Perception is the neurobiology of interpretation and organization of sensory stimuli.

Process of self: Through neurobiological collaboration with other senses, the process of self is a process of directing attention on networks of memory to discern choice, and of recording in memory the outcome of self and object lived in each choice. We employ the process of self in making innumerable choices each day, thus determining adaptation.

Self: In order to define a process of self, it is essential to appreciate the speed of neurobiological processing. This speed instills the erroneous perception that self is an actual entity that considers choice and intends action. In everyday discourse, there is no issue with referring to self in this manner. The matter at issue is that adaptation is at risk to the degree that the process of self chooses as if self is a fixed entity.

Self-and-object constancy: The neurobiological process of the executive function pathways to hold attention on representational memories of self and object in order to discern choice develops increasing stability and constancy. This is the constancy of the process of self choosing. The constancy is not of a fixed entity of self. Research describes this constancy as a developmental achievement by age three to four that gains increasing utility throughout life.

Self-esteem: Self-esteem refers to the confidence and trust in various attributes or skills that one develops.

Sensory pathways: Sensory reflexes evolve through interaction with food, procreation, danger, and other elements of the environment determining survival. The success or failure of each of these interactions codes into neurobiological pathways of memory. Research reveals the immense collaboration among the various senses. Reflexive action predicated upon prior sensory experience does not involve a conscious process, but is unconscious action born of memory of prior experience.