Cause and effect at the level of consciousness - the collision of ideals and reality
Consciousness is difficult to define, probably equivalent to what we say in our daily life knows in our hearts. Research on consciousness began thousands of years ago, but people have not made much progress because consciousness is too chaotic and there seems to be no rules to follow. Every day, our brains are like rivers flowing endlessly, and all kinds of things appear constantly, even in dreams, so people vividly call it the stream of consciousness. But consciousness is so important that people have to take it seriously. According to the philosopher's debate, the research of later psychologists, and the daily experience of us ordinary people, we roughly turn conscious behavior into several parts: perceptual , goal, knowledge, evaluation and plan, emotions and behavior.
Through self-reflection, people find that the most important part of consciousness is the goal. Goals, broadly speaking, include what we often call purpose, ideal, motivation, desire, standard, and these things seem to dominate our lives. For example, starting from kindergarten, your life trajectory has been formulated: study hard, get into a good university, and find a good job. In the next twenty years of life, many behaviors will be centered around this goal. Another important part of
is emotions. Joy, anger, sorrow and happiness are all emotions. People often compare emotions to colors. We can imagine that a person without emotional changes is equivalent to the world losing color.
The effect of emotions is not only to enrich our conscious experience, but more importantly, it can predict our behavior. When facing an angry person, you must be careful, deal with others, and be sure to pay attention to the emotional changes of this person.
Although we don’t know a person’s emotional experience, there are still some external manifestations of emotions, such as their expression changes and body movements, which reveal some key information about emotions. From this perspective, a person’s emotions partially overlap with a person’s external behavior.
Why does the emotions change? Psychologists believe that emotions are closely related to goals. If the information provided by the current perception is evaluated and we think it is far from the current goal, then we will develop a negative emotion, disappointment, anxiety, and pain. On the contrary, if we think we are close to or reaching the goal, we will develop positive emotions, happy, happy, and excited. If we think we are in danger, we will be afraid, and conversely, if we think we are safe, we will relax.
Of course, this evaluation cannot be separated from our knowledge, and also requires a certain ability to reason and judge. A child who is not aware of safety is unable to assess the dangers of intersections. Evaluation not only causes emotional changes, it also leads to the planning of behavior. When we feel danger at a chaotic intersection without traffic lights, while our emotions change, we will also use our knowledge and experience to make a plan, such as following a slow-moving truck to pass this intersection safely and avoid danger.
This is the general composition of consciousness and the main causal relationship between them.
reflects and studies more deeply, and people have found that emotions not only affect behavior, but also our perceptions, our assessments and plans, and even knowledge and goals. Of course, goals will also affect our knowledge, evaluation and planning, and conduct evaluation. In turn, behavior will affect the previous links. So to be more precise, these parts of the consciousness level affect each other, forming a causal network.
Take Teacher Zhou’s psychological treatment process to analyze. The client comes to consult. The impression of the client and the materials obtained from inquiry are Teacher Zhou’s perception of this matter. His knowledge is of course his professional knowledge and some experience he has accumulated. His goal at this time is obviously very simple, which is to cure the client’s psychological disorders. Under the guidance of this goal, Teacher Zhou uses his knowledge to analyze the specific situation of the client, and then chooses the treatment method based on this. This is evaluation and planning. With evaluation and planning, Teacher Zhou can start to perform specific psychological treatment, which is behavior.
Teacher Zhou is a very calm and rational therapist. His emotional performance is not obvious, but it is not completely gone. For example, in the last case, Teacher Zhou had emotional fluctuations. He was in a bad mood during the first consultation, so he ended the consultation in advance and missed the steps to collect specific information about his suicide. Finally, Teacher Zhou reflected: Tong Haiming and his wife left. Looking at their left backs, I felt a sense of guilt, and this guilt was preserved for a long time. Why does this feeling of guilt appear? Because after evaluation, Teacher Zhou believes that this is a basically invalid consultation case. Although there are indeed reasons objectively, such as Tong Haiming’s personality problems, a considerable part of the responsibility lies in me. Since my cultivation has not been achieved and my personal "complex" has not been handled well, the consultation has basically failed to play a role. From this we can see that emotions have an impact on Teacher Zhou’s behavior, cognition, evaluation and planning.
The reason I use Teacher Zhou as an example is because it is more real and complete. In real life, our consciousness always acts in a messy and messy way. Many consciousness links do not appear so obviously in our minds. Some have appeared in the past, but they are not in our consciousness now. Some need to be paid attention to before they appear. The consciousness is so messy, so although ordinary people do not do research like scientists, in order to understand our own consciousness, we often reflect on ourselves, and sometimes even use words and charts to do self-analysis, such as writing our ambitions on the title page of a notebook, recording our thoughts with diaries, etc.
Despite this, these links at the psychological level do not appear so completely and clearly, and the causal relationship between them is not that clear. For example, in the second case, when Chen Leiran heard her husband cheating, it seemed as if the whole world had collapsed in front of her eyes. She trembled all over, her throat was dry, and she had difficulty speaking. There is no link in the target evaluation here, and a violent emotional reaction occurs at the level of consciousness. How should this be explained? At the end of
, Chen Lei did not want to go back, but he couldn't find a suitable reason and was in a low mood. Teacher Zhou told her that if she couldn't find a reason, she didn't have to look for it. She obviously misunderstood. She said that if she didn't go to her husband's parents' house for the New Year without a suitable reason, she would just tell them that there was something wrong with her marriage. How could this work? Teacher Zhou unexpectedly told her that she meant that if she couldn't find a reason, she should not find any more reasons and went back to celebrate the Spring Festival just like in previous years. Chen Leiran flatly denied that she would never go back!
Teacher Zhou still said calmly: "The reason why you don't want anyone to know about the matter between you is because you hope to never want anyone to know. The deep reason is that you are waiting for yourself to forgive your husband! Isn't it?"
Chen Leiran looked at him blankly after hearing Teacher Zhou's analysis, and then she suddenly covered her face with her hands, buried her head and cried. While shaking her head, crying, she said loudly: "I don't want to get a divorce! I don't want to get a divorce!"
Did this idea of not wanting to get a divorce clearly appear in her consciousness before? There shouldn't be, otherwise she wouldn't be stunned or had such a strong emotional reaction. Teacher Zhou also believed that this was her deep motivation and she didn't realize it. How should these unaware goals be understood?
To explain this, some people proposed the concept of preconsciousness, that is, some conscious content needs to be recalled and paid attention to before it can be presented; there is also the concept of subconscious , which believes that some things are inconscious, but since they are not aware, they can no longer be counted as links at the consciousness level. According to my requirements, only things that appear in consciousness, or appear in consciousness before can be counted as links at the consciousness level, and the subconscious cannot be counted as a concept at the consciousness level.But if we do not use the subconscious mind, the process of some behaviors and emotions will not be in line with the causal relationship we mentioned earlier. How to deal with this?
Some people in life know that spiders will not cause any harm, but they are still very scared. What is the reason? Emotions have such a great impact on our thinking and behavior, how do we control our emotions?
answers to these questions should be found in several other levels.
