4.3: Meta-Cognitive Awareness

Crises have both predisposing and precipitating causes ─ a predisposing cause of World War One was the complex set of military alliances among European powers, while the precipitating cause was the assassination of Prince Ferdinand. Likewise, relapses are triggered by specific precipitating events at times when predisposing circumstances render the individual vulnerable to them. This chapter describes a cognitive strategy that permits you to conserve the resources required to perform well during crises, and thereby gives you more control over the predisposing causes; the next chapter describes several cognitive strategies to manage crises and other precipitating events.

We learned how to think when we were children, and most of the time we still think that way. Some schools of thought distinguish between the primitive mentality of childhood and more advanced cognitive strategies. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience, including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings, is merely a temporary, state dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind. The objective world is populated with events; it is only in our subjective experience that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical name for this realization is: Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

It is often easier to see the solution to another person's problems than to your own, because subjective reality is biased by our local fears and desires. It is easier to appreciate the big picture and put things in a realistic perspective when we are detached from temporary emotional states. Meta-cognitive awareness involves dissociating from local experience so you can observe it dispassionately. The awareness that your thoughts and emotional reactions are merely passing experiences ─ not necessarily unbiased reflections of objective truth ─ can free you from the Soul Illusion!

A child may label mental events, for instance thoughts and feelings, according to some judgmental scheme such as good or bad. The evaluation crystallizes these experiential phenomena into "things" that have an independent reality. For example: “It is terrible that my team lost” rather than “I feel terrible that my team lost.” From the perspective of Meta-Cognitive Awareness, thoughts and feelings are viewed like sounds ─ simply passing events in the mind that arise, become objects of awareness, and then pass away.

Mindfulness is a discipline that promotes Meta-Cognitive Awareness and is defined as: Awareness of present experience with acceptance [non-judgment]. Much of our behavior occurs autonomously while we are “asleep at the wheel.” As we go about our daily lives, we are typically preoccupied with the past or future while our actions in the present mindlessly follow the path of least resistance. In contrast, mindfulness involves keeping attention in the present moment without judging it as good or bad - to calmly and consciously observe and accept whatever is happening in the here and now.

Thought Experiment: Mindfulness Meditation ─ Focus your attention on the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don't analyze it or judge it, and return your attention to the breathing. Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape through this exercise). As you follow your breath you will notice that all sorts of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness to which you will react. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and, rather, to experience the here and now directly without filtering it in any way.

Awareness of the continual shifting of emotional state from moment to moment and from situation to situation gives you the opportunity to develop the skill to disengage from bad trances and intentionally change your perspective. Developing Meta-Cognitive Awareness is effortful because it requires that you pay attention, rather than drift in the direction of least resistance, asleep at the wheel.

Acquiring Meta-Cognitive Awareness permits mindful behavior, which is an alternative to the kinds of behavior patterns that promote relapse:
o Autonomous behavior
o Behavior driven by passing emotional states.
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Autonomous Behavior
The consequence of repeatedly engaging the addictive activity is that the sequences of events that produce the addictive experience become autonomous. Once that happens, whenever you are not intentionally controlling your actions you may be on a default path that leads to relapse.

Consider a time when you were driving your vehicle along a familiar route, and you were so absorbed in your thoughts ─ planning some future activity or ruminating on a current concern ─ that you didn't notice passing a certain landmark along the way, or the music from the vehicle's sound system, or the feel of the steering wheel in your hands. And even though the conscious mind was so completely preoccupied that you didn't notice all these things, a part of you was driving the vehicle and operating it perfectly safely.

Since your conscious mind was preoccupied with its thoughts, who was operating the vehicle? It must be a part of you of which you are not conscious. The unconscious, experiential processing system is capable of guiding complex performance while making little demand on your finite conscious resources. Indeed, most of the time you are not consciously operating the bio-psycho-social vehicle you inhabit, because your attention is focused elsewhere, or not at all.

By contrast, "mindful" driving means being fully present in each moment, consciously aware of sights, sounds, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise ─ being awake so you can respond intentionally rather than follow the path of least resistance. When mindful, you can act in accord with your interests and principles despite the influence of local stressors and temptations that would promote relapse.

Buddha means "awake." When asked, "Are you a god?" Gautama, the person who became the Buddha replied, "No." "Then what are you?" he was asked again. Gautama's answer was, "I am awake."

Relapse often occurs when you are “asleep at the wheel,” and an autonomous behavioral sequence unfolds along the path of least resistance. Developing more advanced cognitive strategies can enable you to perform mindfully ─ an eye opening experience.

For those who have been asleep at the wheel, the Buddha suggests awakening from the mindless trance. Maintaining mindfulness is critical during periods of intentional habit change. Early detection of relapse-related patterns of thinking and feeling can help you nip a relapse in the bud. In other words, the mindful recognition of an early warning sign can wake you up so that you intentionally interrupt the autonomous sequence before it develops momentum toward relapse. This topic is discussed in detail in the next section.
Fear, Desire and the Mentality of Childhood
Up to now, the text has focused on incentive motivation, which results from repeated exposures to a payoff – the incentive. The other source of motivation, drive, comes from within and seeks to remove the discomfort caused by a perceived need. Hunger motivates the search for food, thirst motivates search for water, and pain motivates one to seek relief. The greater the discomfort, the greater the drive for relief.

A predisposing cause of internal discomfort is, the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. When the child is angry, then Mommy is bad, and, in the child’s state-dependent world, she always has been and always will be. The dispassionate observer can see that the child is in the midst of a tantrum, which will pass;. later the child will be in a different state of mind, and then everything will appear differently.

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children. Provoking a relapse during a high risk state is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

Accepting state-dependent beliefs and perceptions as objectively valid can cause you to fall into a recursive sequence of anxiety, depression, or anger. These are painful experiences that can drive you to seek the temporary relief the incentive offers. Moreover, the emotional states can be exhausting and deplete the cognitive resources that would otherwise enable you to cope with the difficulty and act in accord with your interests and values.

Meta-cognitive awareness - that subjective reality is continually morphing from situation to situation - can enable you to wake yourself out of recursive traps. Mindfulness, awareness of present experience with acceptance, is practical method to detach from a transient state and observe it