Crack the Code!

You have needs, which is probably not a newsflash. You may also be aware of what your needs are, for the most part. Survival needs, social needs, spiritual needs, and that set of subjective needs that come with being a self-conscious ego – your need to feel safe, loved, capable and worthy.

That last set is a little tricky given how easily your feelings can lose touch with what’s really going on (i.e., with Reality).

One of the most common types of unhappiness is known as disappointment, which registers the degree in which Reality fails to match up to your expectations. Have you ever been disappointed? Of course you have. You’re human.

If humans could crack the code of disappointment, there would be a lot less unhappiness in the world. Less regret, less depression, less suffering. Less resentment and hostility, too, since these are a common fallout when others and the world around us don’t fall in line with our expectations. So we could expect a decrease in interpersonal, intertribal, and international conflict as well.

The above window offers some insight into cracking the code of disappointment, and therefore also a way to authentic happiness.

Vertical lines divide the window into the three conventional frames of time: past, present, and future. A slanting line makes another division, distinguishing fields of things of which we are generally not conscious (unconscious) from what we have some consciousness of (conscious-ish). The image of a slingshot occupies the frame of present time, as a reminder that both happiness and unhappiness are created in the moment.

Let’s start there.

Anchored in the ground as the fulcrum of creative change, our slingshot is grounded in need. As newborn infants, our dominant needs concerned physical survival and to some extent connection and belonging. In Mentallurgy terms, our lower braintract was busy establishing a nervous state and emotional mood that mapped adaptively on the Reality of our early environment. Provident taller powers and a well-resourced environment trained our nervous system into a calm and coherent state, one that enabled us to let go and open up to Reality in a posture of basic trust.

More likely, however, our taller powers and early environment were not perfectly provident and fully sufficient to our needs. We didn’t always get what we needed when we needed it. This discrepancy between the demand of our needs and the provision of Reality prompted our lower braintract (in Mentallurgy LifeChange called “the Alchemist”) to mix an electrochemical and emotional concoction of anxiety – predisposing us in some degree to insecurity, uneasiness, and vigilance over whether Reality was all we needed it to be.

However it happened to go for us, our internal state was set somewhere between faith and anxiety, and this has continued as our default state ever since.

We can do things and take things and get distracted with other things that calm us down when we feel stressed, but it’s this baseline default internal state of our nervous system that we are seeking to adjust. It’s out of this internal state that our desire arises.

Desire is the appetitive energy that motivates us toward what we expect will satisfy a need. In the window above, expectation is correlated to the frame of future time, looking out (ex-specting) with anticipation to its fulfillment. Absent a drive to reach or move out in pursuit of what we need, we would likely suffer or even die without it.

So far, the code is pretty straightforward. We have needs which arouse the desire to satisfy those needs, along with an expectation of where, when, how and by what our satisfaction will come. Evolution has developed this program from need, through desire, and to satisfaction with a high level of efficiency across countless species over many millions of years.

With the arrival of our own species, this very efficient code in animal survival, adaptation, and fulfillment got complicated.

Typically we are conscious (-ish) of our desires and of what we expect will fulfill them. We don’t always get it right, though. Honestly, we hardly ever get it right. If we could record all of the expectations that we project into the future during the span of just a single day, we’d find only a small percentage of them actually “coming true.”

Most of the time we are having to manage our desires, modify our goals, adjust our aim, and update our expectations – or deal with the disappointment.

To really crack the code of disappointment we have to go below the threshold of conscious awareness. Otherwise we will just continue faulting Reality and blaming other people for falling short of our expectations – and that could go on for a long, long time. In a sense, the decisive “breakthrough” in cracking the code involves breaking through this threshold separating the field of what we are conscious (-ish) of, from what lies below and behind our conscious awareness.

So let’s come back to what was said about our needs, specifically those deeper survival and social needs that determined so much of our infantile experience. Because our taller powers weren’t perfect and those early conditions weren’t ideal, our Alchemist set the emotional tone of our internal nervous state to just off, or farther away from, the composure of inner calm. The mismatch between our need for safety, nourishment, intimacy and belonging and a Reality that did not provide for these needs prompted an “anxious adaptation.”

Part of this anxious adaptation was an emerging worldview or mental picture of Reality that corresponded to our experience. Our world, then, was – and to a large extent still is – the objective counterpart to our internal state and the satisfaction (or frustration) of needs that it registers. As Mentallurgy LifeChange frequently reminds us, our worldview is not a detailed and clear facsimile of Reality but is rather our impression of it as gathered and constructed from experience.

Our world is a construct of beliefs. Better yet, because most of it stands behind rather than in front of our conscious awareness and operates unconsciously, it is a construct of assumptions – beliefs that are built into our perspective and basically invisible to us.

Assumptions filter and shape our perception of what’s out there, like a pair of eyeglasses on our nose or contact lenses on our eyeballs.

When need arouses the desire that motivates our pursuit of what we expect will satisfy us, the particular trajectory and intended aim of our expectation is already set by certain assumptions we unconsciously hold – or do they hold us? In addition to representing Reality to fit our experience, assumptions often carry an ultimatum imperative that, if we could pull them up into the light of awareness like blind fish from the ocean depths, would sound something like, “I can’t (or won’t) be happy (or satisfied) unless (or until) this happens or that is true.”

And that is how so many of us suffer disappointment in life, occasionally or chronically unhappy over the sense that Reality has, yet again, let us down.