Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Introduction

The present difficulty with understanding the mind can be compared to the late-19th century attempts to understand what is inside the atom. Nowadays when we learn physics, we are presented with a simple model of the atom. This was not the case with the early explorers. There were many competing ideas about the atom, and especially about the nature of the electron. The confusion was only resolved by outstanding experimenters like Ernest Rutherford and J J Thomson. To thinkers like Thomson the intellectual challenge presented by the nature of the atom was enormous.

Today the investigation of the mind is also an enormous intellectual challenge. The mind cannot be understood simply by observing the behaviours of other people or by looking at neurological maps of the brain. The uniqueness of the mind means that it can only be understood by a thinker analysing his or her own mind. The person has to analyse why he thinks the way that he does. No one else can do this analysis for him.

This book is mainly based on the results of my explorations of my mind. Most of this analysis was done in the 1990s, when I was in my 50s, and represented the dreariest period of my life. It was a time when everything went wrong for me. Out of my despair I discovered some ways by which the hidden aspects of the mind function.

Our childhood sets the major social themes of our Earth life. The problems that we face in childhood create the significant problems that we have to face and surmount when we are an adult. The ways in which we respond to these problems shapes, even creates, our character, needs, beliefs and attitudes.

We may think that a happy childhood is the best possible childhood, since it usually enables us to be successful in our adult life, in terms of family, friends and employment. However, a life of happiness steers us away from most human experience, since most experience creates distress in us. Therefore a happy life narrows our understanding of human reality. Whereas a distressful childhood will continually confront us with our failures, even when we have become an adult. Distress steers us into areas of experience that we normally prefer to avoid. Thus it can broaden our understanding of human reality.

The nature of reality is that there is an endless rhythmic flow of positive and negative feelings. This rhythm means that we can never avoid negative emotions. Normally when we experience a negative emotion, we get distressed for a short time and then return to normal when the emotion fades away. Whilst some negative emotions are difficult to handle in an harmonious way, it is the intensity of them that may really cause us problems. Sometimes during our life the intensity of a negative emotion may rise to a level that we can no longer handle, and the emotion overwhelms us and engulfs us. This can be disastrous, leading to long-term effects: depending on what the emotion was, we may find that we have to avoid some kinds of relationships, or some kinds of responsibilities. In the extreme, we may even be submerged into some form of mental disorder.

The experience of being overwhelmed by negative emotion makes a person fragile in that aspect of consciousness that was overwhelmed. For example, if a male child was severely emotionally hurt by his mother, then once he has become an adult he may function quite adequately in all spheres of life, with one exception. He is likely to be wary of being emotionally involved with any woman.

Normally our core beliefs define our place in life and our expectancy of what we can achieve in life. These core beliefs are about ourself, about the society we live in, about the nature of reality. The experience of being overwhelmed and engulfed by a negative wave of emotion indicates that some of these core beliefs are inadequate or faulty in some way (since they failed to help us surmount that wave of emotion), and hence are no longer relevant as an acceptable basis of our life. Our beliefs are undermined by our distress, and perhaps may even fade away. As we begin to see another side to ourself, we may realise that we are not the person we thought we were.

When some core beliefs are destroyed or abandoned, we may lose hope, lose the hope that life may become better for us in some way.  The loss of hope can lead to the entrapment in meaninglessness. We become drifters, meandering aimlessly down the road of life. We do not struggle against our fate since there is no longer any meaning in struggle. When struggle becomes meaningless, then apathy reigns. At this point, normality and madness may not differ very much in importance, since they are both felt to be meaningless. My way out of this dreadful state  was to analyse my mind, over a time scale of roughly 35 years, on and off.

At the present time I have attained emotional balance, and I delight in the joy of being human.
But its taken me a long time to achieve this state.
But then again, time has little meaning since we are all eternal.

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
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