Humanity’s default conditions can be considered sleepwalking, as the Fourth Way suggests. Another way of looking at it is that the Gift of Set acts as a complex series of systems designed to function on autopilot. Our problems, more often than not, come from this autopilot system having never been appropriately programmed despite its brilliant capacity to handle complexity. What we seek to do via a formula like “Awaken-See-Act” is to reprogram that autopilot so that it supports our Work rather than send us in the wrong direction or crash us entirely. To do this, we need some sense of the systems that underlie our Conscious Awareness to learn how they shape our actions.
While a simplification, the triune brain model can provide an excellent first-level look at the systems operating within us. In this model, the brain is divided into three sections. The fundamental level is the reptilian brain, which currently handles fight-or-flight survival issues. The next level is the mammalian brain, which handles issues of emotions such as love, fear, happiness, and sadness. Finally, we have the intellectual brain that is reason and symbol-oriented. Each of these systems works reasonably well to cover its domain. Still, they develop by happenstance, taking in impressions from the environment and forming imprints that, once taken on, are very difficult to change. Because this imprinting process comes from happenstance, the imprints of the reptilian, mammalian, and intellectual brains can work at odds with one another, creating deep personal conflicts.
The three brains can be seen as internal structures of the self-complex. Like plumbing, they shape all of what flows through them. The things flowing through the structures can be considered processes. Of the two processes, they are easier to change with minor impact. In contrast, changes to the structure are more challenging and have a far more significant impact in the long term. This distinction between structures and processes also applies to external factors, a topic to be addressed later.
Biologically and psychologically, biases develop within your perception as you develop in space-time. These biases work to minimize energy output in decision-making. As is often the case, this is useful at the moment but does not consider the long-term effects of the rapid decisions being made.
A simple “towards and away” bias is one of the first to develop. The things that your biology likes you will move more towards, and the things it does not, you will move away from. This often begins with survival topics but can extend to emotional states, moving towards “good” feelings and away from “bad,” and logical states, moving towards things that are congruent with your understanding and away from things that conflict with it. This bias tends to be “weighted” as well, with most people being motivated twice as much by “away” reactions than they are “towards” sometimes.
Our biology also has a bias towards instant gratification. Because resources were rare, our biology developed to take them in as soon as they are found and with as much quantity as possible. This quality scales through our other levels as well. We seek to feel good now without calculating the real impact of our actions.
As our psychology develops, we start making a simple model of the world to make sense of it, which leads to another common bias in our thinking toward cause and effect. While forms of causation exist, much of our perception of cause and effect is flawed and under-informed. We simply take two events arising together as one causing the other. If you see a given person while you feel bad often enough, you will start to believe that the person causes you to feel bad. Similarly, if you touch the same object whenever it rains, you may come to believe that touching that object makes it rain. Unexamined, this bias underlies much of what made up the more superstitious schools of white magic. Additionally, this bias treats roughly similar things as being the same. If we encounter one dog, for example, we will treat all dogs roughly the same way.
Our emotional brain, too, produces its own biases. We are biased toward how we think a given event or occurrence will make us feel in the future and use that estimated emotional state to plan our actions. When we think about the future, we check our emotions and then use our emotions to decide what will arise. We find ourselves shocked to discover that reality did not consult our emotions regarding what actually arises.
Our intellectual brain has its own biases as well. The most glaring and confounding is a bias toward interpreting events to conform with and validate our assumptions. When we reflect upon things, we arrange our understanding to feel like we were right all along.
These biases can be overcome through practice. Learning to awaken to these biases as they occur forms the first step. This should be done gently, with the simple question to yourself, “What are you doing?” when you see the bias at play. Try to think of your highest possibilities in asking this question and start making changes to your behavior from this vantage point. As you practice doing this, it will first change your processes around these biases and may, in time, affect your structures related to them as well. This will allow you to become increasingly sophisticated in how you interact with a growing complex world.
Setemheb 