What is it that Keeps Us from ‘Effective’ Reasoning?

2015-01-11

Over the last few days we’ve talked about the reasoning process from a number of different perspectives. And in answer to the question above we could cite several explanations such as not having much experience with ‘real’ reasoning, mistaking our ordinary thinking process for ‘real’ reasoning, lack of courage, lack of support from our environment, and so on. However, probably the main obstacle for many of us is that we just flat don’t want to do it.

Occasionally we are forced by life into a substantial reasoning process, and what we see is that “when forced” we can often do a credible job of reasoning. So the fact that we don’t apply this remarkable technique when it’s a matter of choice suggests a certain inner resistance.

We can, of course, apply the technique of reasoning to this resistance, and what we find is interesting indeed. In my own case I immediately see a willful contraction of my ‘present moment’… the span of space/time that my will can hold as a reality in my awareness.    

[Slight digression about ‘present moment] It’s well worth our time to understand this term, “present moment”, because it has a significant impact on reasoning. Think of it as a “bubble of understanding” extending forward and backward in time.  What’s inside that bubble is real for me, and what’s outside simply isn’t.

Here’s a personal example. In my early days I occasionally drank a bit too much. Ok, occasionally way too much. Technically speaking I was aware of the hangover waiting for me the next morning, but frankly that part of the process wasn’t real for me while drinking. It was outside of my immediate experience, my present moment. But then, something shifted in me. My present moment expanded to include the potential hangover next day… for real, while I was still drinking. I haven’t had a hangover since. 

The crucial piece here is seeing the difference between knowing and understanding. Knowing is a function of my intellectual center. Understanding is a power of will… and it confers the ability to ‘do’. When I only ‘knew’ that a hangover was waiting for me, I didn’t stop drinking. When my present moment expanded to include the experience of the hangover the next day, while I was drinking, it gave me the ability to stop.

So much for the self-congratulations. When it comes to reasoning, as I started to say, I can observe a willful process of shortening my present moment to avoid effectively including something that is quite obvious.  In other words, I may technically still see something. I can think about it, talk about it, and fool myself that I’m still considering something. But in reality, it’s not ‘effectively’ entering into the reasoning process because it’s outside of my present moment, outside of my understanding and immediate experience.  

More on this tomorrow.

Comments

KenD's picture

Submitted by KenD on Mon, 2015-01-12 06:01.

John, these recent posts in your blog are very thought provoking.  This current post suggests to me an obvious starting point for a response - that we humans are quite limited in the range in time and space of what we can know through our usual ways of knowing.  There may be a habitual time span we use in creating and sustaining our habitual framework for understanding experiences in our world – our worldview.  One example might be the four-year span of a US presidency which sets limits on what the incumbent will attempt to accomplish as well as the means by which to try and accomplish it.  Winning the hearts and minds Somalis or Iraqis may be a 20-50 year project done with digging wells, building schools and providing consistent medical care, but no single president would be able to lay claim to the accomplishment even within a double term.  So the quicker solution requires more violent means, and the resulting counter-productive consequences.  I know these situations are far more complex, but the short time span of consideration is certainly one relevant factor in the failure of planning.  Similarly, humans can react to consequences related to their actions or inactions such as running out of gas because they planned to fill up but then promptly forgot their plan when distracted.  But they can’t perceive their own effects on consequences that take centuries to accumulate, such as the human role in climate change, or even the effect on world hunger of having a large family because every generation of my family in my village has had at least six children, and so on. 

The intriguing part is that we don’t have to be trapped by the habitual span of time and space we typically consider in our experiential frame of reference, but we do have to exert the intent to be different.  A good use of imagination could be to project memory forward in time to include past consequences as imagined future consequences, as you did in the hangover example.  An example of a larger (tribal) time span frame of reference is the Iroquois principle of seven generation thinking, that decisions should take into consideration the effect of the decision on people and Nature seven generations from that time.   That this is do-able seems apparent.  That this is not done sufficiently is obvious.  The reasons are complex, as Robert Gifford discusses in The Dragons of Inaction.  http://web.uvic.ca/~esplab/sites/default/files/2011%20Climate%20Change%20in%20AP%20Dragons%20.pdf

I wonder if there isn’t an energy issue at work here as well.  It takes a certain amount of a certain kind of energy to imagine a bigger time bubble of reference for an action and reasoning through to its consequences, as well as moving the reference point from which we act to do it differently.  Energetically, I find it difficult to stretch the diameter of my own time bubble of reference to include anticipated outcomes and change my current actions to accommodate appropriately.  I experience that difficulty as an effort for which I don’t feel the strength to accomplish, somewhat like lifting a heavier weight than I am capable of lifting or running past the point of aerobic depletion.  An alternate attribution might be that I am too lazy to do it, or that there is a devious adversary inside me whom I must defeat in order to progress toward my goals.  However, I want to be careful about framing the issue as one in which I am divided within and must declare war on another part of myself.  That seems to be a losing proposition.  Despite the praises of competition sung in the relatively short time span of our capitalist era, we survived as a species through cooperation.  Competition serves the egos of those likely to benefit from winning the competition.  On the other hand, the most elegant changes in psychotherapy come through finding ways to elicit the internal cooperation of parts working in concert for the benefit of the whole rather than turning against unwanted parts, a kind of intra-psychic scapegoating.  I can’t help but think that this cooperation principle could be used with effect in expanding the diameter of my time bubble of reference as a way to further transformation.  Developing the application strategies for doing so is less clear, but seems to be the next step.  Actually, the next step is that I have to wash the rest of the dishes before bedtime or they will still be there in the morning ... and that will be ugly.  Cheers!

Submitted by John Hutcherson on Mon, 2015-01-12 06:16.

Excellent comments. It's true that it takes both a strong intention and sufficient energy to expand and maintain a large (long) present moment. Fortunately Gurdjieff has provided us with an inner exercise called "The Expanded Present Moment" that directly addresses this situation.  Perhaps I picked up on your thought form, because at the moment you were writing this post it suddenly occurred to me that we should begin working with this exercise, which we will over the next few weeks.

The Bennett lecture on the future of humanity talks about the present moment of the higher powers being measured in centuries or even millennia. We may not be able to stretch that far, but we can certainly get beyond the next 30 seconds, which is often our usual present moment.