Brimstone Lark

You consist of a never ending rush of perceptions and reactions. Whether you know it or not, you develop a relationship with your own thoughts and feelings. If you’re like most people, most of your internal subjective experience goes unnoticed – reinforcing a relationship to your own mind which emerges rather than is cultivated.

This relationship is subject to the conditioning of your environment. In my experience, our environment does not automatically cultivate a healthy relationship with our own minds.

Concept 1: Thoughts and Feelings are separate from Perceptions of Thoughts and Feelings.

Concept 2: Perceptions are separate from Reactions to Perceptions.

First Order Reactions are the states of consciousness that immediately follow introspection. Before introspection occurs, thoughts and feelings fly in stealth mode inside your mind and body beneath more immediately pressing stimuli. When you introspect, you perceive this background flow. What follows after you become aware of this background flow, is a First Order Reaction. You can find your First Order Reaction by asking “What am I experiencing right now?” and then observing your internal state without judgement.

Tuning into your experience kicks off a recursive introspection process. This happens so quickly that you might miss it – A) Eye contact with the beautiful woman over there, B) Feeling of anxiety in your stomach, C) Perception of anxiety, D) Reaction to that perception as self-judgment. A is a stimulus. B is a Feeling. C is the perception of the feeling. D) is the First Order Reaction.

First Order Reactions always occur when you tune in because A) unless you’re dead, there is always something to tune into and B) unless you’re in a K-hole, mental reaction to stimulus is automatic.

Most people spend their time believing that First Order Reactions are trustworthy reflections of intellect and use them to determine their self-worth (did you get the answer right on the first try?). Even worse, they may not notice their First Order Reactions at all, and wind up cultivating negative self talk (anxiety from making eye contact again? How shameful...). In reality, these thoughts are nothing more than bias-laden, environment specific, snapshots of a noisy mind.

First Order Reactions can be useful for many reasons, but first let’s discuss the things they are not useful for:

• Arriving at high truth-value conclusions
  • Our minds are okay-but-not-perfect modelers of reality. Dealing with cause and effect on topics any more complex than basic logic requires a level of thinking which is deeper than what your brain does without directed effort. As a simple model, the estimated truth-value of a statement increases with the quantity of pressure testing it faces. Insofar as pressure testing is a function of time, the truth-value of a statement is strictly positively correlated with time.
• Constructing or maintaining a healthy self image
  • You don’t have control over your First Order Reactions. You tune into a stream of stimulus and the first order reaction makes itself known to you almost as quickly as the stimulus itself. When did you have a chance to control them? You didn’t – so you shouldn’t be sorry about their nature, even if they surprise you.
  • We are wired to survive at all costs. Doing so is dirty work. Don’t be surprised by your animalistic thoughts and feelings. If you are in pain, tired, or angry, your sub-conscious flow of thoughts and feelings are going to be negative and your First Order Reaction’s are liable to be negative, discouraging, or outright malicious. You do not have control over these thoughts. You are not responsible for them. If your identity is tied into them, you’re going to wind up believing that you’re a petty or malicious person.

You have no control over the first thing on your mind. You shouldn’t ascribe any weighting in your identity to your First Order Reactions, and you shouldn’t take any credit for them either.

As far as I am concerned, what happens in your brain (when you’re not driving it) is not different than what happens outside of your brain – its all just stimuli. You’re not responsible for your thoughts and feelings, and you’re not responsible for your First Order Reactions. Create enough distance between yourself and your mind so that better, Higher Order Reactions may arise, resulting in better decisions and conclusions.

• Don’t put yourself down when you’re already down.
  • When you’re in a mental or physical state of discomfort or fatigue, your First Order Reactions tend to become negative self talk. If these slip by without detection, you mistake the internal for external, subjectivity for objectivity, lies for truth. You identify with a Reaction and follow it into another negative perception. Break the cycle. Realize that you’re putting yourself down, that your negative self talk is a Reaction which you should give no credence.
• Accept your First Order Reactions
  • Don’t be scared of what happens in your own mind. Don’t repress the internal stimuli, recognize them for what they are and carry on. Don’t be ashamed of your Reactions – you had no control over them anyway. You’re not a bad person if you have a bad thought. Say “Hi” to the thought, and proceed to evaluate it without judgment.
• Second guess your First Order Reactions.
  • Intellectual second guessing is when we try to assess the empirical validity of a thought. For example, if we see a spider we may feel fear – to intellectually second guess that reaction is to rationally evaluate whether the spider is dangerous or benign.
  • Emotional second guessing is when we try to understand the source and implications of a feeling. For example, if you see a painting and get hit with the desire to paint – to emotionally second guess that reaction is to determine if you’re experiencing Authentic Inspiration.
• Use your First Order Reactions for what they’re good for.
  • A first order reaction is a biased laden signal from a very complex computer. These signals are extremely useful information about your current environment, how you’ve been treating yourself, and what you’ve been doing recently.
  • Use them to assess your environment and activities (If you notice your reactions are short, complainy, and frustrated- should you sleep early tonight? Should you take a few deep breaths?). Use them to assess how much to trust your own judgments (Are you sharp right now? Do you need to whiteboard to make progress?)
  • Use them to understand things that System 1 can capture well such as immediate danger from external threats and subtle social dynamics. Use them to read body language. Use them to take a first approximation of the internal state of another person.

When you become skeptical of your own thoughts, feelings, and First Order Reactions, you will realize that other people are not as careful. In conversation they tend to shoot from the hip. For some topics where stakes are low this is fine but generally it is a good idea to become skeptical of what others tell you about how they see themselves and how they’re feeling. In the same way you should not judge yourself, you should not judge others when they have a suboptimal relationship with their own mind. Instead, assist them in creating distance to their own thoughts. Teach them to accept their First Order Reactions for what they are.

Become as honest with yourself as possible about how you feel, then proceed to evaluate your thoughts and feelings with a greater degree of separation and with a more measured temperament.