As a postrat and a therapist in training, would like to say a bit more about my perspective, that is imo quite common in that world. This is something of an expansion of/reconceptualization of the “altered consciousness attitude” (which is imo a slightly unfortunate name, though I know where the author is coming from: healing one’s alexithymia, and unrepressing one’s emotions/getting more of the subconsciousness into conscious awareness, and achieving “right-brain reintegration” aka recovering one’s creativity and “integrative thinking” capacity, can be effectively pursued by means other than meditation/psychedelics; imo more rationalist types tend to use meditation/psychedelics as healing modalities due to their subconscious aversiveness to real relationships, which are essential to therapy as a healing mode, and which is tragic as healing the capacity for deep relationships is oft exactly what they could’ve benefitted most from.. but I digress).
The key tenets of that perspective, as I see it: 1) most of the brain is unconsciousness, thoughts pop up from there, the quality of what pops up is largely determined by what’s going on “underwater”, the thought “boat” is moved more by the underwater currents than by your conscious steering
2) quality of one’s thought is heavily determined by their level of awareness of their emotions and their self-awareness, aka how much of their unconscious patterns they brought to the light of consciousness; and that awareness is very much amenable to change, not quickly, but in a matter of a few years, by the use of appropriate “healing tools” like meditation and psychodynamic psychotherapy
3) hence, the way towards, not even clear thinking, but simply a good life, is by untangling subconscious knots many of us have, “healing trauma or complex trauma”, making sure the adaptive balance in key unsconscious psychic conflicts every human faces in development (see eg erikson’s stages) is achieved
4) emotional awareness specifically is imo the single biggest non-iq determinant of rational behavior in humans: if you have an active feeling it’s gonna color your thinking heavily, and if it’s repressed/you’re unaware of it, don’t know how to process it and self-regulate, you’re screwed
For those of you familiar with the depression experience that might be an easiest example of all of the above: “can’t logic your way out of the depression”, if you’re in a more depressed mood you’ll find perfectly logical explanations of why it’s all hopeless and you’re bad, next morning if you’re feeling better you’d find all of that logical but not convincing.
As a postrat and a therapist in training, would like to say a bit more about my perspective, that is imo quite common in that world. This is something of an expansion of/reconceptualization of the “altered consciousness attitude” (which is imo a slightly unfortunate name, though I know where the author is coming from: healing one’s alexithymia, and unrepressing one’s emotions/getting more of the subconsciousness into conscious awareness, and achieving “right-brain reintegration” aka recovering one’s creativity and “integrative thinking” capacity, can be effectively pursued by means other than meditation/psychedelics; imo more rationalist types tend to use meditation/psychedelics as healing modalities due to their subconscious aversiveness to real relationships, which are essential to therapy as a healing mode, and which is tragic as healing the capacity for deep relationships is oft exactly what they could’ve benefitted most from.. but I digress).
The key tenets of that perspective, as I see it:
1) most of the brain is unconsciousness, thoughts pop up from there, the quality of what pops up is largely determined by what’s going on “underwater”, the thought “boat” is moved more by the underwater currents than by your conscious steering
2) quality of one’s thought is heavily determined by their level of awareness of their emotions and their self-awareness, aka how much of their unconscious patterns they brought to the light of consciousness; and that awareness is very much amenable to change, not quickly, but in a matter of a few years, by the use of appropriate “healing tools” like meditation and psychodynamic psychotherapy
3) hence, the way towards, not even clear thinking, but simply a good life, is by untangling subconscious knots many of us have, “healing trauma or complex trauma”, making sure the adaptive balance in key unsconscious psychic conflicts every human faces in development (see eg erikson’s stages) is achieved
4) emotional awareness specifically is imo the single biggest non-iq determinant of rational behavior in humans: if you have an active feeling it’s gonna color your thinking heavily, and if it’s repressed/you’re unaware of it, don’t know how to process it and self-regulate, you’re screwed
For those of you familiar with the depression experience that might be an easiest example of all of the above: “can’t logic your way out of the depression”, if you’re in a more depressed mood you’ll find perfectly logical explanations of why it’s all hopeless and you’re bad, next morning if you’re feeling better you’d find all of that logical but not convincing.