An ancient control panel
Playing around with personification to get a handle on feelings and motivation
I felt overwhelmed with anxiety the other night, as I sometimes do for no obvious reason. Of course I try to investigate what it’s about, but at some point you just have to find a way to sleep. This time the way out of this agitated mindspace was through playing with the thought of attributing the feeling to a “spirit” of some vaguely anxious description, and then refusing to listen to that spirit. Locking it out. And it actually worked. It was as if this thought experiment allowed me to split the feeling itself out and direct it to leave the spotlight of my awareness. It was still there, but in the background, grayed out, faintly felt.
This little imaginary story fragment opened a path for me to dis-identify with the feeling. By thinking of it as belonging to a separate entity, I was no longer helplessly mired in it. I could make a rational judgment as to its helpfulness and say “not now”, or even “not my problem”. Lying there in bed, having just spent a good long while having my brain fried in a tub of looping, self-feeding anxiety, I found it remarkably effective: In a matter of seconds, I felt quite calm and comfortable, and not long after I was sound asleep.
A similar mind trick can be done for good things, like trying to be a better person with healthier habits. I've had a kind of behavioral problem where I know what I ought to do to live better, to be healthier and more productive, and yet I can't seem to make myself follow through. It's as if I'm waiting for a kind of inspiration. Like I need to well up inside with motivated feelings to get a move on. Usually, this doesn't happen until I've been so slothful or otherwise failed my ideals that I get angry with myself. That's a form of motivation I can and have relied on, but of course this creates a very dysfunctional, half self-destructive, half productive boom and bust cycle, heavy on the decline side.
So that's the background for what I’m working with. Now, these days, I'm trying to get in shape, but one morning I found myself sitting in the gym feeling less than motivated, really on the fence about maybe calling it a day, even though I had just started. I wasn't feeling it, that “authentic” inner impetus I've dysfunctionally been demanding at some deep level. And I know I’ll feel terrible if I succumb to the lazy option. I’m well aware that that would be a decision that likely will lead me down a spiral. And yet, there I am, still on the fence.
This is when I started playing around with the thought of splitting out the good reasons I had for exercising into a kind of tutelary spirit, a guide and guardian, a spirit that I wanted to invite into my mind—the opposite relation to that of the spirit of unreasonable anxiety from before. This had an interesting effect. I felt like an apprentice to a personification of my own best advice. I wasn't feeling directly internally motivated, but what I did feel was that this wise, trustworthy and gentle monk-like spirit I had invented would be disappointed in me if I didn't keep going. And so I powered through, and ended up having a quite rewarding exercise session. Since then, I’ve kept coming back to this spirit, wary of giving it a too specific expression, just referring to it as the “monk” or “guide”, and it's been quite useful for reinforcing good habits and avoiding bad ones. It helps me give shape to my own best judgment, and serves as an imaginary someone to help me work through my frustrations and doubt.
I feel like I've stumbled on an ancient control panel. All these vague and slippery feelings that have ruled my life, I can wrap them up with light personification and get a handle on them, simply by “socially” relating to these imagined persons in various ways, like refusing or inviting, as in the two cases I've mentioned.
I'm not sure where to go from here. There's a danger of going overboard and making up a whole personal pantheon, trying to cover everything that could possibly be relevant. I think that would be a mistake. I don’t think you can nail down the river of feelings like that, and at some point it would just turn into a world-building game driven by its own internal narrative logic more than freely and flexibly attuning to your actual feelings. For this reason, I think it’s best to keep somewhat ad hoc, making up spirits “on demand”, careful with excessive pattern-seeking and concretization.
The tutelary spirit is different though. It can be useful to more clearly define it, as what it represents is my own ideals. It’s a sort of worship of an imaginary character designed to bring out the best in me, to make it easier for me to live up to my ideals. This personification also allows me to “dialogue” with this “higher self”: I made a journaling notebook on my phone for when I'm in doubt and need reassurance or encouragement from its direction. I don't have a strict dialogue format, as that would feel too stilted. It's just a stream of consciousness thing where I switch between complaining and giving myself advice. And it's often quite effective.
The fact that I attribute the advice to the tutelary spirit means I don't have to feel the weight of the burden of good judgment. I don't need to embody the courage and conviction of healthy decision-making myself, but can simply follow the lead of this imaginary behavioral sherpa. Separating my own good judgment out into an external spirit is a useful workaround for several sides of my executive dysfunction.
This spirit-making trick is quite powerful, but it hasn’t been a panacea for me, because I often mindlessly forget, or a part of me resists tuning into this whole self-mentoring mindset, but every now and then it works wonders for me. I’m fascinated by just how effective it can be when it does. It makes me wonder if I should add reminders to myself in the form of images or little statues perhaps. Or if that is already taking it too far toward world-building. I’m not sure yet where to strike this balance.
Spirit-making has obviously been very widely used all throughout history, with varying degrees of consciousness, but then we took a turn into our rational modern age and sort of forgot about it, or put it aside. The amazing innovation of mathematical world-modeling took center stage instead, and that changed us, making us more literal-minded, something which had an undressing effect on religion. It started to look absurd in the stark light of literalism. Like a wrinkly old embarrassment. And yet, the religious felt it as more intolerable to drop literal belief in favor of non-literal immersion. Like that would be to throw down one’s weapon in this metaphysical showdown. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, literalism is always misplaced, even for the scienciest parts of science. Various forms of non-literal immersion is the best we’ve got, whether we’re modeling the universe with math or coming to terms with how to live our lives with storytelling. In the context of metaphorical realism, science and religion do not have to fight to the death—a big topic I’ll return to in a future post.
It would be completely absurd to think of the spirits I started out talking about as literally real, independent entities out there in the world. They’re just invented characters in a certain format of creative expression that you can “tune” so that they resonate with elusive things like feelings.
I think this is the truth about all kinds of spirits: gods and devils, genii and ghosts, faeries and muses and trolls—all of them are projected personifications of feelings or concepts. Some religions have had more emotional, psychological uses for their spirit menus (aka pantheons), like the ancient Greeks perhaps—others have been more conceptual, with Neoplatonism as the most extreme example I can think of. Christian theology also leans conceptual, and maybe the ancient Egyptians too, in their own very peculiar way.
In general, spirit-making is a way for us to get a human handle on elusive things, whether from the murky, vague and ambiguous world of feeling or from the cold and crystalline, alien world of abstract concepts. They can serve as a way of talking about things to give them some emotional punch, or as a way to interact with our own inner lives, or as a way to achieve some degree of social synchronization, and much more. It’s a tool with a huge number of uses, some of which may be rather obsolete, but certainly not all. In the harsh metaphysical light of our scientific age we tend to misunderstand it, as if all talk of spirits needs to pick out entities floating about in space in order for it to be any useful or meaningful. As if a more psychological interpretation would take the air out of it and render it pointless. I believe it’s entirely psychological, but very far from pointless. We’re fully submerged in our own psychologies—here is a way to swim.
What more is worship, really, than inviting some feeling or quality to stay and inform our thoughts and behavior? That’s a beautiful thing. It seems like something that would be a valuable technique to relearn, if it can be clearly and carefully reframed in terms of fictionalist, non-literal immersion, to avoid the mistakes of the past.
There’s a lot to be said for more defined versions of non-literal polytheism and monotheism too. Social synchronization is important for all sorts of reasons. But given metaphorical realism, the spiritual playing field is completely wide open. You can mix and match, reinvent or appropriate religious ideas as you please—which makes it too complicated a topic to deal with in brief. If I can ever land on a personal preference in this area, I’ll write something up to try to convert you—because of course I’ll be evangelizing, it’s a core part of my personality.
absolutely love this. “non-literal immersion” as an alternative to literalism is fantastic. also, loved the bit about how myths/stories/metaphors help us get a grip on _both_ the internal world of feelings and the abstract world of concepts (and your use of the words “murky” and “crystalline” to contrast the two 🔥). excited to try out this spirit-making myself!
Is this spirit-making, or a recognition of the spirits already within us? Carl Jung wrote extensively about archetypes - our instincts so refined as to be autonomous personalities operating within. The Greeks identified them as Gods, and surely these are the root of so much world mythology.
Do we 'invent' them? Do they exist beyond us? Perhaps this doesn't matter, if it is the same influence. The spirit within me, guiding me to project the ideal woman onto a potential mate, we can call Aphrodite, which will exert the same influence on you.
Reading Jung really opened up a new world for me.