Cognition x Metacognition = Syncognition

Preamble

i had this theory, which i became more certain as of recent; some people think too much, some people feel too much. Some people become afraid to feel, some people become afraid to think. Some people even confuse their thoughts and feelings. "Mixed feelings", "chaotic thoughts", familiar phrases indicating a dysfunctional or dysregulated nervous system. Part biological, part psychological (this will be its own article some day), entirely a common human experience, no matter who it is. Does one have to exist at the expense of the other? The food for thought, and the fruits of thought, and the cultivation of each, occurs hand in hand with the force of feeling and emotion, the sensory and meaning. There is a false dichotomy between "introverts" and "extroverts", a convenient label vis-a-vis the realities of introspection and extrospection; the background of which is simply what feels safe for an individual, vs. where one is known, seen and heard, faces a disconnect. (How these two separate, that's a subject of past traumas and wounds which we shall not discuss here, or anytime soon). We cannot have a space for one being disconnected from the other in a separate space as it fragments our psyche, where feeling and thinking are internally divorced within ourselves. It forms a fault line where the cracks in our personality will take shape; i traced those lines by the pen in my hand before and found that the light which leaks through is potent, even pure, but the shadows that are projected are equally potent, even if puerile. Neither can nor should be concluded as right or wrong, good or bad, both are equal parts of the true; any conclusion can only be defined by the beginning and ending, much like an elephant right where it stands, is known only after seeing its whole from trunk to tail.

The entire idea of the essay of which this article is a part of was broken into two, mainly about reconciling the philosophical and psychological, between "cognition" and "meta-cognition", in order to break the paralysis of analysis in thought and feeling, and also to examine and recognise what are the forces at play which drove apart thinking and feeling, as if they were two separate parts of one human being. To put it briefly and simply, there is a false dichotomy about human knowledge and the human mind, left-brain/right-brain belongs to the dustbin yesterday.  As science has only begun to catch up, we need to stop and think-AND-feel (recognise) because science is only now discovering and studying that the heart has a little brain of neurons which works within its own network to regulate pulse, emotions and thoughts and even decision making can be influenced, as the heart has its own supply of some hormones (I will not reveal here as this is not an article about biology). A large portion of the communication through the vagus nerve that connects to the brain and the heart, actually comes from the heart itself. This was not news to some of us who believe and recognise that the heart can "think" and "remember" and "see" and "hear". To some others, maybe this redefines new windows or doors to studying consciousness, or even memory, or free will.

But i did not want to rely merely on scientific theories and findings without actually having some real experience collected by myself, following the Goethean way, instead of Newton. Scriptural basis, lived experience and examination, critical thinking and observation, both intellectually and spiritually, all would have to align before I had the courage to write something like this without need to explain and defend. The heart can and does think, in some ways we can't really explain in scientific methods, but is declared in faith according to revelation. Why we don't know and don't rely and use this fact, there are many reasons, there has also to be the root causes.

Until i was sure and certain, this article was left unfinished until i realised what I walked through in two summer moons gave me an eye-opening episode of learning how to give without abandoning oneself, beneath how to sacrifice without losing oneself, lost in search of purpose, or meaning. Hence I walk through the thoughts that gave me the words with which to complete this article which began as a pensive reflection, also as a marked chapter in my life after coming full circle to close the loop. I have decided to include my experiences in rediscovering and reconciling thought and feeling as part of the whole matter in this article as a pre-amble providing some basis and context on my personal study, for whomever may benefit, or risk misuse at their own peril.

Dimensionality gives us a foundation, a structure of thinking of sorts, with which to understand that there will always be more that we do not yet know, compared to what we know, through which we can map our venture from the known into the unknown - which is the very growth curve of knowledge itself - both for things beyond ourselves and within ourselves. The inner meanings and the outer reality, can be even diametrically opposite, from which the matter called the truth of a person, or any matter at all, can be found, or arrived upon. Where feeling and thinking can (or cannot) integrate, there it is found the complete wholeness of a person (broken / fragmented or not). Whether we find both in synchrony will tell us whether we are broken, fragmented, or whole in harmony with ourselves.

The image above is at best a 2-dimensional, flattened perspective, but to look at it in a three-dimensional, even four-dimensional reality will require a vastly more precise yet more subtle understanding of our human condition, but that is another article by itself, relying much more on subjects studied from faith (revealed knowledge) instead of purely, utterly modern, philosophical and psychological language, which only arrives at the doorstep of our mystery.

Between reality and potential, between possibility and plausibility (what is reasonable and probable) there was a denial of the self-truth and self-image i carried within myself. To accommodate another soul, I had basically (at my own ignorance) separated thought from feeling, as it seems to be the way for many people nowadays, to try to understand their realm of being, so to speak, to attempt to walk with them in their shoes, and see if i can trace their footprints in the sands of time. I separated my own analysis of patterns from my experience of the meanings that I uncovered. So engrossed was i in that experience that i nearly abandoned my own identity, because i dived in (deigned) to adapt and comprehend as to what the other was running headlong into, chained to the roots, to save someone drowning by the shore. The more i felt, the more irrational it became, the more i thought, the more illogical it became. Things and words no longer made sense, it became non-sense-ical, in many senses of the word. Rhetoric was broken, the poetic was butchered, nuance was completely lost. All but NOTHING could be understood in that quagmire. What happened to all the analysis and observations I had collected along this path of mine? i chucked it aside and labelled it "EGO", because i thought it was not my identity but my pride that was stopping me from embracing the experience whole. Therein lay the fatal flaw. All the disconnection, essentially between thinking and feeling, became elbow room for gross, wilful misinterpretation, and malignant misunderstanding. It would not necessarily be out of malice, just out of gross incompetence and ineptitude. All levels of abstract thinking and feeling together became jumbled up in one hot chaotic mess that was burning with still-smoldering ash with dark clouds flashing and thundering overhead, threatening obliteration the longer i stayed. I climbed out of it with all my clothes scorched and my skin charred black, my eyes blurred and my head burning in fever, and then shedding them after a hot bath, and then just as quickly clarity returned to my tired eyes, glistening from staring hard through the veils in a torrential rain.

There in that space was where I realised that there was a fragmentation between what I should always have known as the two twin faculties of equal, mutually dependent cognitive processes of knowing and learning as one coherent whole. It was in that space of separating my feelings from my thoughts, my "intuition" from my better judgement, my reasoning from my rational self that I realised, all along whether through self-abandonment and betrayal, whether from beyond or from myself, that I realised at some point in modern life we all have been separating what should have originally and always have been one whole. When i could make neither heads nor tails, squinting through that headache that was when I saw it whole, blurred, but whole, beginning and end, that I stayed as long as i needed to comprehend. I could have cut short the lesson, but the experience would not have been as deep as it got, that i could safely say, when "thought" met "felt", within myself, a sense and meaning I never truly quite grasped returned to me whole. In addition to that, there was a fundamental, almost axiomatic truth which I had kept at a distance which I had learned some time ago; while the ego can only grow (or more like, evolve and transform) by breaking itself and being reborn, like a struggle of breaking out of a cocoon to develop wings that could truly fly, the (core, whole) identity cannot change its base or its position, at least not without the alchemy of fire (and this would be a separate subject altogether) cast within the right crucible or mould, with the hammer of truth on the anvil of the soul. (I am NOT subscribing to Freudian psychological theory although I use similar-sounding words.)

While dimensionality provided structure, of knowing, depth or duration forced us to require and adopt a system, of meaning. It is to combine both when we say, we recognise.

Now then that we have identified that space where both belong, can we begin to explore the core of the matter at hand.

The integration of knowledge and information yields meaning, and so goes together with the necessity of integration of logic with emotion, thinking and feeling, for understanding and wisdom to live in a human being who has embodied this balance, and is therefore something to do with accountability, with the meaning of oneself, one's raison-d'être. Purpose is something derived from duty and direction, something related to responsibility which we will explore as we traverse this line of thought layer by layer. So it is not about being dogmatic or pragmatic, but to combine both in a state of knowing, or recognising, i.e. an aspect of gnosis. This is touching upon the realm of experienced knowledge interfacing with lived reality, or living knowledge and experienced reality, one could also say, depending on the position one takes as the observer, from outside, or from within. One does not preclude nor negate the other.

In a nutshell, the balance of rights and responsibilities in the duties and due diligences of one's role(s) is what we frequently miss, when we do not have a solid and sound integration within ourselves.

Sometimes we speak with a conclusion at the beginning, sometimes at the end of the sentence, the difference makes whether one would, either way, (mis)construe the food for thought as an explanation, or an argument. Both require different modes of reading, one with patient curiosity, and one through pensive certainty. This is to speak nothing of erudition - it is just a state - existentially; a person who has lost curiosity in exchange for absolute (or stubborn) certainty (well, actually self-confidence), or traded this same brand of certainty for a pathologically insatiable curiosity, locks themselves away from any path towards progressing down intellectual or emotional maturity. The truly erudite know even with both eyes closed in blind faith, the journey of knowledge will never be complete, and is therefore immune to boasting or bragging about knowledge, even if he appears so, to minds of lesser capacity to discuss ideas, only things or people. Actually to this lesser capacity, self-confidence can be mistaken easily for certainty. I know because I have done that mistake before too. It is a common stage, or phase, of all human experience. Denying it does no good for anyone.

Because the thinking process for considering long and short term thinking - considering goals and the patterns and models we rely on to achieve those goals in thinking, BOTH objectively and subjectively - requires us to identify and recognise reality and circumstances at the same time, there is another element here which is the peri-cognitive environment, the framework under which is yoked the process of thinking about something itself.

While careful thinking requires one to carefully think (duh) what is within one's control, and what exactly lies just outside the realm of one's control, conscious thinking necessitates the premise of those thoughts to be critically considered, spatio-temporally. In a saying, "begin with the end in mind" is the only reliable way that the modern world offers this valuable insight into the circumstances of thinking itself. I mean to say, one can do something with care, while also not being critical at the same time. Thinking about feelings is a trap when feeling one's thoughts is not done. Does one come first or second? Chicken-and-egg question. Pointless to a certain extent, as the true answer escapes that mode of black-or-white questioning. Care cannot be sustained without critique, critique cannot survive without care.

Perhaps the answer lies in between the ego and the soul (haha, Faith: 1, Freud: 0), where the heart has to be stabilised first upon truths that at first seem to conflict with our perceived identity (well, id/ego, fine, if i stop bashing Freud a little bit), but really is a conflict between a self-imposed self-limiting identity vs. our self-image and limited self-expression (cue knowledge schema vs. language schema). Thoughts do not begin where feelings end, nor conversely so, and they never have to be that way, but our (modern, capitalistic) world sometimes forces or influences us to pick one or the other. Learning to embrace and integrate both could be a lifetime struggle, but unless we open ourselves up to swim (or drown) in the twin oceans of inner and outer knowledge, we cannot reconcile between the two mental (intellectual) and emotional (well, spiritual) faculties of our being without first letting go of pride which exists within ego, or arrogance which exists within knowledge that rests with its origins in the soul. In other words, what is required here is humility, towards one-self, and no other. Sometimes it's okay to admit that we are the worst of ourselves, that we are the problem, because in that itself is a solution called submission and surrender, that then allows us to intentionally embrace what appears to us as fear, but is really non-acceptance of pain that has not yet happened, in other words, the rejection of a lack of confidence or uncertainty. Survival, the nemesis of Growth. For the uninitiated, this is a trap of perpetual tragedy, where the demons of self-pity and self-sabotage thrive. The problem with the fragmented psyche is this loss of identity, or obscuring of the identity. From there one's role, responsibility (and rights) become vaguely understood, defined,  and recognised. The roles  that we have played, how familiar they have become to us, the capacity and  all things associated with those, tolerances,  biases, become hard-wired into our nervous systems,  creating neural maps across different stages of life, training patterns at different points, and these are always more often than not  incoherent. A child parentified forced to manage the emotions and reactions, behaviours  and outcomes of their elders, a teenager infantilised, gaslighted or manipulated to distrust and doubt, to question and even neglect  one's own reality, without a concrete  model of being to  build their sense of self and identity upon, and eventually an elder youth forced to survive, carries the nervous patternings that  are unsuitable for the  role of an elder, or a functional adult that can carry oneself and lead, all before finding one's true authentic being. From the same problem also lies the true root cause of procrastination according to a businessman: procrastiation happens when the actions that we need to undertake arare misaligned with the beliefs that we have over ourselves, that is to say, we cannot sustain actions which directly conflict with how we see ourselves. This nervous system mismatch is when our body has yet to catch up with our mind that has only begun to alter the patterns we have built our self-image upon.

A syncognitive state where thinking (and feeling) and being able to observe and be aware of both the logic and emotions behind them, essentially a cognitive + metacognitive balance cannot  be  adopted  or entered unless one of two things happen, which may be in due order or independent of each other.  The state where the ego is free from its own shackles, where  one is  in  a state of non-fear yet non-courage either,  where everything just  is,  where identity does not influence actions towards results, where one can just be, that  flow  state can come from  switching off the ego and all its noise, and then subsequently  performance excels without effort as  everything is made to happen in the moment as it unfolds, even as mistakes or obstacles come through, whatever may be adjusted or controlled (or rather influenced,  to various extents  utilised, manoeuvred or manipulated) will be responded to appropriately and adequately, aptly. Alternatively, this  "flow" state can be transformed and  evolved into a mode that can be entered or exited at will, as long as one learns how to shift into that mode by aligning  thoughts, feelings, being, all together as one triad.  At this point, the phrase  "Mind, Body and Soul" may come across as the familiar thing to say, but we are not yet talking about action, but rather the  pre-requisite  internal-external alignment that makes excellent  action possible in the first place, and that is when the heart is able to hold both the ego and the soul as equal entities each in their own positive feedback loops to  illuminate and enlighten and polish each other mutually. This sounds simple like some technique to be applied as easily as to how a muscle would work, and be done with it. 

But that's the biggest illusion we can cast upon ourselves, because this requires a level of inner knowledge and awareness, consciousness of so much vulnerability and intimacy unto one's own true self and identity, that most people chicken out of the rigorous demands of such cultivation, whether at the start or even halfway through. If it were only that easy, there would be lesser conflicts (maybe wars, haha but nope, that's a matter of alignment within natural ally-enemy contrasts and therefore a totally different story or article on its own) and almost no infighting as the taming of self-interests and harmonisation of which would be far easier and more widespread. Or maybe it is already happening at some levels, limited in scope or expanded across shared awareness or consciousness, but the reader (and writer) who might be here who is fighting against their inner turmoil and internal conflicts is just finding their way to truly reach or join the ranks of their respective circles like such that each effort brings one towards progress, elevation and a much better state than before, and perpetually so finds more imperfections and endless difficulty in continually facing themselves and rising above and against. So let one such as i not be fooled into thinking to have already done the inner work, for the moment you think you have done it, you fall into a trap created by your own ego, as i have observed many who stall and fell on their personal journeys before and still, and have paid different prices, often at the cost of themselves or someone else, or both, and  many too who managed to break that trap and continue forward doing the inner work.

The grass is not greener on the other side.

The grass is greener where you water it.

I thank the humble reader for making it up to this point. Well done.