THE REFLEXIVE EXECUTIVE

To be the executive of you, of your life, you have to take charge (#52), and to do that you tap into and activate one of the executive functions that is especially designed to enable you to do that. It is this executive function gives you a very special kind of consciousness, one very, very different from animals. It is your self-reflexive consciousness that empowers you to, as it were, step back from yourself and reflect on your experience.

Your self-reflexivity replaces the “instincts” that animals have and give you the power to create your own instincts. By thinking about your thinking, feeling about your feelings, evaluating about your evaluations, creating concepts about concepts, and so on. It is what enables you build up a set of frames for how to interpret what anything means. That’s how a frame functions–- it establishes an “interpretative schema.” It enables you, at a higher level, to make executive choices and decisions about how to live, what to focus on, what values to deem important, etc.

Now while you, like all humans, inevitably do this, most misuse this executive power. Why? In part, it is because they have not been taught how to use the self-reflexivity effectively. Schools certainly do not teach it. Nor do most parents. Even modest self-development programs do not facilitate it and even more pathetically, most therapist do not know how to utilize it.

There are other reasons, for one thing, many have developed some really bad habits with their self-reflexivity. In their upbringing, their schooling, and their experiences, they have learned and practiced to bring negative thoughts-and-feelings to their thinking-and-emoting. As a consequence, whenever they reflect back onto themselves, they apply thoughts of judgment, contempt, dislike, anger, disgust, fear, etc. onto themselves. No wonder they then have become afraid of their own self-reflexivity!

Today there’s a great many people who fear the self-reflection that occurs when they turn inward. If you ask, Why in heaven’s name would they fear a thought about a thought? It is because all of their experience with it has been negative. This is what most people mean when they talk about having a “noisy mind,” with “thinking too much,” with “voices in their heads ‘should-ing’ on them,” etc. The second-thoughts they bring to their first thoughts are all negative and judgmental. Consequently, many of them falsely think that they need to stop thinking! That is a bad choice to a bad choice! What’s wrong is not thinking, but the kind of thinking that they have been doing.

They have an executive mind but it is a cruel and hateful dictator! The CEO that’s running the company of them is a mean bastard who is a hateful tyrant. This is the mis-using of the self- reflexive executive function. Whenever I do “Dragon Slaying and Taming” using Meta-States in

the APG, I always warn people, “Do not bring negative thoughts-and-feelings against yourself, that’s how you create the ‘dragon’ states.” Then to drive that point home, I always ask everyone to raise their right hand and repeat after me. “From this day forward, I will not bring negative thoughts-and-feelings against myself; I will keep those thoughts and feelings at the primary level about the context I’m in.”

To tap into and activate the executive function of self-reflexivity and make it work for you, you may have to clean out and unlearn that bad habit. There’s something else you may need to clean out— some old negative beliefs. Those who end up fearing themselves, their negative judgments about themselves, often develop negative beliefs about human nature and what is inside. They fear that they will find monsters inside or some kind of ugliness. Again, that’s just the misuse of their self-reflexivity.

To be your own best CEO and make the most positive use of your self-reflexivity— set the frame that what’s within is sacred— special, precious, and unique. Their humanity. Their potential for actualizing their highest values and meanings. Their most developed and most mature human responses of love, compassion, courage, contribution, and so on.

have