The Conscious Purpose & Thought Process Necessary
To Understand Ourselves, Life, and Other People
Perhaps surprisingly, the skills and awareness necessary for mental and emotional development begin with learning how to understand ourselves, life, and other people. This first step is literally, learning how to learn. The problem is that even the best normal education does not teach us how to understand ourselves, life, and other people!
Instead, in normal life we are taught external facts, ideas, and points of view with little or no connection to real-life issues—internal or external—so we learn how to read, write and do arithmetic, but acquire zero understanding of our internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.
As a result, people today are still not able to understand how to create lasting happiness for themselves, build intimacy in long-term romantic relationships, raise children with their self-worth complete, or create satisfaction and meaning in their professional lives. The underlying problem is the normal purpose and thought process makes accurate observations, conscious exploring and discovering, and all real learning impossible.
The normal purpose for life and education is to create success and security, get approval, and acquire pleasant entertainments in a context of luxury. With a normal purpose, we do not want understanding—we want control over our goals. All by itself, a normal purpose insures we will never grow in understanding our internal lives, or other people.
In addition, a normal thought process makes it certain we never learn a single significant thing about our internal needs, potentials, or developmental tasks. One reason is that in normal life we just assume that if we get every external thing we want, then internal fulfillment and happiness will follow—automatically. This is how we can pass through a lifetime and never clearly define or understand a single significant internal reality.
Another aspect of a normal thought process that kills any possibility of understanding, is that we are taught in school to first reduce complex realities to simple conclusions, or judgments—and then we explain and justify our simplistic conclusions and judgments. We learn to apply this constrictive process to every issue in life—external and internal.
One consequence of normal thought is that in reducing the complexity of real-life to fit our simplistic process, we distort and pervert reality, which makes it impossible to even understand the complexity of our external tasks and problems, much less the more subtle internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.
In stark contrast, a conscious purpose and thought process expands our minds, so now we can take-in and understand the complexity of real life—both internal and external. With a conscious purpose we want to understand, rather than control. Even without mastering the conscious thought process, this alone changes everything.
For instance, with a normal purpose to control, we inevitably want to avoid pain and insure pleasantness. By contrast, with a conscious purpose to understand, we want to learn from pain and pleasure. Once we want to learn, we have something to gain from both pain and pleasure, so now we no longer want control—we want understanding.
A conscious purpose, or desire to understand provides the emotional source for all mental and emotional development. A conscious thought process provides the mental tools we need to fulfill this purpose and acquire a deep understanding of ourselves and life.
The heart of a conscious thought process is the same as the scientific method—that is, we first learn how to accurately observe the facts underlying each event, thought, feeling, pain or pleasure. Then, we ask questions to explore the facts to determine what they mean. Finally, we form a hypothesis about what is true and needed and experiment to see if our hypothesis is true, needs to be revised, or just thrown out so we can start over.
Following a conscious thought process we learn to expand our understanding to fit the complexity of real-life, rather than constrict life to fit the narrow funnel created by a normal thought process.
A conscious purpose to understand, backed-up by a conscious thought process, prepares us to acquire the information and develop the skills and awareness necessary to master every need, potential, and developmental task. In the process, we learn how to express love, pursue truth, experience and create beauty, and develop wisdom.
Changing from the normal to a conscious purpose and thought process is just the first step—then we need to work, and sometimes be willing to suffer, to clearly define each and every need, potential and developmental task. Clear definitions that are specific, experiential, and consciously memorized are needed as a foundation for learning how to feed, fulfill, and complete our internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.
Thirty years of experience has taught me that without changing from a normal to conscious purpose and thought process it is impossible to take even one significant step down the road toward mental and emotional development—so this first step is critical.
While this first step is critical—it is still just the first step! Then, we must pursue the truth of ordinary human life, no matter how painful, frightening, happy or sad. To get started—my books, videos, workshops and individual sessions offer a clearly lit path, but each person must walk the path alone, and verify for herself thru daily experience the definitions, insights, skills and awareness that I provide.
It is important to observe that normal life is externally-based. This means the best we can get with a normal purpose and thought process is a materially successful and pleasant life, but we cannot acquire the internal development necessary to create lasting happiness, build intimate long-term romantic relationships, raise a child with a complete self-worth, or create an internally satisfying and meaningful professional life.
It is also important to notice, by simply observing the millions of people who clearly have external success without internal development, that we need to master internal and external needs and potentials if we want to understand life’s mysteries, and become complete within the space provided by one small lifespan.
In these first seven blogs, I offer a true gateway to mental and emotional development. Now, you have enough information to determine if internal development is something that appeals to you, or if you are already all that you need to be, just the way you are! Either choice is fine, it has simply been my job to give you an option that heretofore in human history has not been offered. Take care. PH