Cognitive Liberation

Here's a concept: cognitive liberation: the ability to give yourself up to the subjective emotional present.

Being in the subjective emotional present is a state of flow - albeit, not the type described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - but a type where you're just feeling yourself. In the flow state described by Csikszentmihalyi, you're completely involved in something else. In this flow state, you're involved with your self - with passing emotions, drives and feelings. This state could be described in terms of an absence of self consciousness. Self consciousness is holding yourself as an object of conceptual self awareness. In this state, you hold two things in mind at the same time: your particular feelings - and how you look experiencing those feelings. It's as if you try to give form to the flow of emotion; this is the state we sometimes succumb to when we meet someone new, during an interview, or while public speaking.

Cognitive Liberation is the inner first person awareness of a "giving up" to the flow of emotion. What your giving up - if you're an obsessive or compulsively insecure person - is your temptation, or your interest, in watching yourself in the action of speaking. This sense of cognitive liberation enables the person to give up his egoistic tendencies, the part which wants to experience itself in a socially meaningful context. Cognitive Liberation is like a religious liberation. Just as in the latter, the person gives himself up to "another": to God, and to the elusive motions of the self.

I experienced this feeling just now while speaking to my brother. I find the hardest thing of all is the ability to commit to an embodied state of mind. In order to commit, there must first be cognitive liberation.

Getting into a state of cognitive liberation is subtle - mindbogglingly subtle. It involves planning without your conscious mind being too involved in the planning. It's like farming; you till the soil, plant the seeds: and then go away. Nature will take it from here. You go on your way, back to your house, eat with your family. If you want, you can check up on it - a need if you want to keep everything in order (self regulation), but for the most part, you aren't there watching the plants grow and bear fruit. Similarly, you can only guide yourself, implant an idea into mind, and experience yourself go with the flow. The temptation to be avoided is to watch yourself go in the flow. That is a bottleneck to the flow of emotions; that is enforcing form on the flow - unwittingly guiding yourself toward the source of the temptation (in my case, my insecurity and fear of social; embarrassment).