“When can our brain’s innate objectivity begin to flourish? Only when our inappropriate self-centered subjectivity begins to dissolve.”
James H. Autist
This one is probably harder to accomplish since you usually don’t see yourself very objectively.
Being objective towards yourself is difficult because your psyche needs to evaluate itself, which isn’t easy.
In practice, it means that you either overestimate or underestimate yourself.
Why is it important to be objective with yourself?
Only if you look at your life objectively enough will you be able to distinguish your virtues from your flaws, your bad habits from good ones, and your successes from your failures.
Distinguishing victory from defeat is significant for your mental health since it influences the quality of future choices you’ll make. Many people don’t admit their defeats but declare them to be victories.
This trait can also become a collective characteristic, where nations declare historical events that were realistically defeats, as victories. They make myths out of them, thus negatively affecting future generations’ consciousness.
Young generations won’t know how to distinguish success from failure and will probably repeat their ancestors’ mistakes continuing the vicious circle of collective self-deception.
Admitting that you have flaws, bad habits and that you make mistakes is crucial to good mental health and makes space for your progress.
And since you have managed to distinguish between the Experiencing Ego and the Observing Ego, it will be much easier for you to admit flaws, bad habits, and defeats because you’ll no longer identify with them.
You’re now aware that you’re the one who’s watching what’s being lived and not the one who’s just experiencing it.
Unfortunately, very few people have the ability of assessing themselves objectively. We’re usually much more objective towards others.
Surely you’re familiar with a situation where you see some flaws in a friend that are obvious to you, but the friend doesn’t have the slightest awareness of them.
Then you wonder: “How is it possible that my friend doesn’t notice that he never lets me finish my thoughts and doesn’t listen to what I’m saying. For him, it’s just important to say what he has to say. He even complains when other people do the same to him!”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that your friend is stupid or rude, but simply that he doesn’t see himself objectively due to activation of some unconscious complexes.
What does the activation of unconscious complexes mean?
This can mean many different things, depending on the person.
One possibility can be that your friend’s parents, or some other authority figure from his childhood, were doing precisely the same thing to him. He couldn’t express his thoughts freely, and his parents were not interested in what he had to say. He just needed to listen to what others were telling him
Then, your friend builds an aversion to such behavior on a conscious level. Still, he identifies with such behavior unconsciously, and we come to a situation where what he consciously despises, he unconsciously does to others.
Because of this unconscious complex that your friend has, he can’t consciously see the modus operandi that everyone else around him sees.
If you draw your friend’s attention to his behavior in a disrespectful way, he may react strongly and deny it. He may even end up being angry with you.
The known maxim that “the poison of insight should be given in small quantities” can be applied here, which means that self-awareness for many people is a kind of “poison” for their consciousness because it can “poison” the opinion that person has about themselves. You must admit that none of us like it.
Here is another typical example of this.
Have you ever been in a situation where you’re in a group of people, and a person’s partner has a secret romance on the side? Everyone knows that, except the one whose partner is doing it.
That person doesn’t see it because they unconsciously don’t want to see it, even though it’s evident to everyone else. And if you draw their attention to that, there’s a high probability that they would deny it by declaring you being jealous of them.
This is a typical case where one’s unconscious complexes are activated – even the most innovative and experienced person looks stupid and naïve. When Carl Jung noticed this human trait, he said: “Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important, is that complexes can have us.”
If you want to be objective towards yourself, you have to start questioning yourself and analyzing your reactions to events.
You could also start listening to the messages in your dreams because they can symbolically show you where you’re wrong. Dreams usually compensate for wrongful conscious attitudes.
However, you need to have a professional and neutral person to help you understand the messages that your unconscious psyche is sending you through your dreams.
During all of these activities, your mind relaxes and cleanses itself of thoughts, emotions, and events so that you can look at your life more objectively.
It also helps to ask for feedback about your life from someone who knows you well and who will be honest with you because others tend to see you more objectively.
Here we come to the next step you should take in growing your mind: Motivation for Changing Bad Habits.