Invitation to Insight

Self-understanding is more important than our understanding of machines, even in a technological age. Voices, both secular and religious, are telling us that the way to effective living starts with authentic self-knowledge.

Psychiatrists say that growth towards one’s best follows a personal knowledge of his worst. One of the primary aims of psychiatry is to help people to see themselves. Psychotherapists spend numerous hours over a period of many months in assisting a single person to gain self-knowledge. They know that many of their patients became ill because they could not look at themselves, and they believe that these people must get personal insight in order to recover.

Philosophy has long emphasized the importance of self-knowledge. Socrates gave us the dictum, “Know thyself.” We cannot outlive his words, because they are always contemporary. The philosophers have always emphasized that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Religion calls for self-examination. St. Paul urged the Corinthians to look at themselves in relation to their faith. “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—Unless you indeed fail to meet the test” (2 Cor. 13:5). All Paul’s epistles are portraits of the Christian pattern so that his readers might see themselves in the light of that pattern.

Jesus urged men to look at themselves. His personal interviews were invitations to insight. He helped Nicodemus, who wanted to talk about theology, to see his need of spiritual rebirth. He started the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well on the spiritual quest that ended in personal salvation. His parables were graphic word pictures that dealt with the motives and longings of men. All of his messages were mirrors of truth into which he urged men to look.

Contemporary experience confirms Jesus’ words. A young professional woman, trained in the behavioral sciences, recently said, “I made no progress spiritually until I came to see myself. Before that I was always blaming those about me for my failures.”

Adventuring In Insight

Santayana once said, “Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.” All of us agree. We recall times when we subtly feared to look at our real selves, to look honestly within and observe areas of weakness intermingled with areas of strength.

David found that the adventure of personal insight was more difficult than fighting a battle. After his sin with Bathsheba, he finally carried out the adventure, goaded by the prophet Nathan. Discoveries of his spiritual exploration are recorded in Psalm 51.

Saul of Tarsus, confronted by the risen Lord on the Damascus road, carried on a spiritual adventure of the first magnitude as he examined his arrogant and pharisaical heart. He found the task difficult. He too was goaded: “It is hard to kick against the pricks.” It was a demanding venture because it required a complete life reversal.

The adventure for self-knowledge is not a one-time campaign in life as, for instance, in pre-conversion confession. It is a lifelong pursuit. One needs often to assess the quality of his faith. A man who maintains his religion casually will find it worthless in the hours of stress and need. Such a man in the tumult and anguish of life “looks for his religious faith to cover his nakedness against the tempest, and he finds perhaps some moth-eaten old garment that profits him nothing …” (Josiah Royce, Religious Aspects of Philosophy [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913], p. 13). Royce says further, with a strain of effective sarcasm, that a man with an unexamined faith would find that “any respectable wooden idol would have done him much better service, for then a man could know where and what his idol is” (ibid.).

Wearing Ego Armor

The ego wears psychological armor to protect itself against feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety which result from personal insight. It has a persistent disposition to protect itself against spiritual and mental pain as surely as the organism has a disposition to protect itself against physical pain. The mind has an impulse to maintain self-esteem as surely as the organism has an impulse to maintain life. Perhaps both are rooted in the drive for self-preservation.

The defense processes are largely unconscious. They are not intentionally acquired, and they operate automatically, without voluntary inception or control. Their operation is usually not recognized, or at least not clearly known, to the conscious mind. They often demand a heavy toll of psychic energy, like carrying a heavy armor.

Rationalization constitutes an important part of the ego armor that is worn to protect oneself from unpleasant insights. Rationalization is the process of justifying one’s own behavior in terms of accepted motives. It is to regard one’s acts as the outcome of good intention in combination with events over which he has no control (Bert R. Sappenfield, Personality Dynamics [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954], p. 381). Rationalization is an exercise in self-deception, the giving of plausible but irrelevant and erroneous reasons for behavior. It is a type of compromised reason. It is reason that has surrendered to wishful thinking. It constructs an image of oneself as a virtuous person doing his best against unfavorable odds.

Jesus gave a superbly fine account of rationalization. He told of a group of persons who sought entrance into heaven (Matt. 7:21–23). These people, having given themselves to rationalization, confidently expected to enter heaven when they said, “Lord, Lord.” They argued sincerely for their entrance when they said, “Did we not prophesy in your name, cast out devils in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” (Matt. 7:22). They had rationalized successfully, convinced themselves that they were righteous because of their religious performances. Jesus did not call them hypocrites. Nothing seems clearer in the account than their unaffected surprise when rejected by the Master. A man may be lost and not know it.

Projection is another part of the psychic armor that the ego uses to protect itself against personally disturbing insights. Its operation is largely involuntary and unconscious. One rarely checks himself short by saying, “Aha! I’m projecting.”

Projecting is the process of unknowingly attributing one’s traits and attitudes to others, particularly the unwanted ways and dispositions. Being unwilling to look at the faults in his own soul, he believes he sees them in others.

Projection is an everyday affair. It is found in every aspect of life. The selfish person, inwardly protesting his selfishness, sees his selfish spirit reflected in an exaggerated form in an associate. The vain person, ambivalently desiring humility, magnifies the vanity he sees in another, perhaps a rival or competitor. The ecclesiastically ambitious minister, with a sense of guilt about his secret ambition, believes that he sees an extravagantly ambitious spirit in some of his fellow ministers.

Moreover, one may project his sins on society. The drinking man, feeling guilt over his alcoholic compulsion, exaggerates the drinking habits of the populace. The unscrupulous man, with a repressed desire to be honest, views society as composed of dishonest people, usually worse than himself. The sexually immoral person, troubled in conscience, sees society as sexually immoral. Perhaps that was one of the reasons the Kinsey reports had wide acceptance!

Furthermore, projection may even be exposed in the “good work” of blaming the devil for his meanness. This is an age-old practice, particularly of the would-be pious. It helps give relief from a sense of responsibility. It offers an explanation for the inconsistencies of “sainthood.”

Repression is another part of the psychic armor. It is “the exclusion of specific psychological activities or contents from conscious awareness by a process of which the individual is not directly aware” (English and English, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological Items [New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1958], p. 458). Repression is a type of “protective forgetting.” It is forgetting on a selective basis. It is a psychic concealment of those experiences that cause mental and spiritual stress.

The human mind welcomes with warm hospitality those thoughts that bring inner peace and self-esteem. On the other hand, it is inhospitable to the recall of experiences that occasion embarrassment, guilt feelings, and anxiety. It is reticent to admit to consciousness such annoyers of inner peace just as a man dislikes to admit into his home an ill-tempered neighbor who calls for the purpose of criticizing him. Psychic annoyers are as unwelcome as cantankerous neighbors.

Not only does the conscious mind thrust the unpleasant thoughts into forgetfulness, but it undertakes to keep them there. This process is usually known as resistance, which is, to be more specific, the unconscious opposition to any effort at recalling the repressed experiences or ideas. The unconscious sets a guard, sometimes called a censor, at the door of consciousness; its purpose is to prevent re-entry of the rejected thoughts.

Psychiatrists report that they often observe the phenomenon of resistance. In such cases their patients are unable to recall rejected experiences without assistance. In the process of recalling these experiences, the patients are often tense and anxious. Sometimes they break off their psychiatric treatments, like a convicted sinner who stops going to church. At other times they become mentally combative, like a spiritually convicted man fighting against the truth of God. The psychological idea of repression throws light on the religious concepts of the hardness of the human heart and resistance to God. The Bible speaks of this condition when it says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9).

To change the figure of speech, repression makes the search for self-knowledge a game of hide-and-seek. Sins, always loving psychic concealment, hide in the dimness of repressed forgetfulness. Only the mind set on finding the truth about itself, assisted by the Spirit of God and, perhaps, a counselor, can succeed in attaining self-knowledge.

Looking At Ourselves As Individuals

Our generation presents some persistent difficulties to the man who undertakes to attain a high degree of self-knowledge.

1. Our way of life makes reflection difficult. We have very little time for thought. Reflection is a habit of the past for most people. We are not really busier than our grandfathers; we are more distracted. As T. S. Eliot has said, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

Our whole life situation is unfavorable to personal reflection. There is little time for introspection in office or shop in a socially complex and technological age. Moreover, our homes become places where there is a great deal of hubbub and distraction. The little despots of modern communication invade our quiet times. The telephone demands immediate attention even though one is reading a great book or thinking a great thought. The newspaper commands us to read about society’s misdeeds and deeds. Radio and television plunder hours with trivia. If a man is what he does with his solitude, as Hocking says, some of us have little chance of doing much with ourselves because we take little time alone.

2. The spirit of the age is unfavorable to insight and personal individuality. Secularism is creating man in its own image. It is producing a new type of person, a “patternized, passive, pressurized product of mass society.” It is producing a “mass man,” conforming him to his own secularized pattern of existentialism and leaving his spiritual potential dormant.

There are many in our generation who have abandoned the arduous task of developing an authentic selfhood. They do not live by “inner direction,” based on personally authenticated principles. They are “other-directed,” in Riesman’s classic words.

3. The Church, sometimes unwittingly, has discouraged personal self-examination indirectly by permitting itself to be regarded by many as “an ark of salvation” that bears all of its passengers to eternal felicity. Large segments of Christendom have permitted their adherents to assume naively that they were Christians when there was little objective evidence in their lives to certify that assumption. The Church has not been sufficiently explicit, as Kierkegaard says, and it is hard to be Christian when everyone thinks himself a Christian.

The Church has also discouraged self-examination inadvertently by permitting a tendency on the part of many to overly rely upon their ministers for the benefit of salvation. There are those who seem to have actually relinquished all personal responsibility for their relationship to God, having confidently committed that matter to their minister.

Insight provides a personal basis for “creative individuality.” It enables a man to be his true self. It fortifies him against contemporary pressures that tend to make him “sanforized, pre-shrunk, and tailored to fit any standardized, uniform group.”

Insight helps a person to maintain a sense of authentic selfhood in an age of easy-going conformity. It protects the feeling of individual integrity from being dulled by the crowd. It keeps alive a sense of personal destiny amid distractions. It makes a man’s eternal spirit alert to the surfeiting influence of sensate pleasures. Insight enables one to maintain a sense of inner personal dignity in the face of theories about human nature that tend to degrade him. It keeps hope and aspiration alive when suffering would narcotize him and anxieties would overwhelm him. A man commits treason against himself and his God when he turns from the pursuit of self-knowledge.—W. C. MAVIS, Professor of Pastoral Care, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

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