Part of the Casswiki article series Fourth Way and Psychology
Self-calming is the process of pushing aside thoughts or emotions that are uncomfortable. This is a pervasive characteristic of the human condition and is found at many levels.
In the most basic sense, self-calming takes place when one rationalizes and self-justifies actions or inactions which one is not comfortable with. This amounts to putting one’s conscience to sleep. This action is opposed to consciousness as well as conscience and is a way of furthering sleep. Systematic self-calming makes buffers.
However, the more complex forms of self-calming go far beyond simply excusing one’s behavior because one was lazy/tired/drunk/in lust/under some other mechanical influence or because everybody does the same thing or because the human is imperfect.
In a spiritual sense, self-calming can take many forms of denying reality. Blind belief in a fundamentalistic deity can be an extremely potent agent of self-calming. It is apt to rationalize murder, genocide, pillage and rape. No human debasement is such that the committed true believer could not do it if the hypnosis of blind belief is potent enough.
A still subtler form of this is found in some practices that seek to induce a state of spiritual bliss as an end in itself. In these practices, self-calming hides behind the noble goal of seeking contact with ‘higher realities.’ A lot of the New Age talk about ‘space brothers’ being here to save us or that all is right with the world or that one only needs to think nice to have a nice world are agents of self-calming.
Much of pop psychology teaches ways of self-calming.
In all its forms, self-calming promotes subjectivity and further divides the personality from reality as well as promotes the further factionalization of little ‘I’s.
Man cannot function in a state of abject horror. Therefore some means of emotional regulation are necessary. The human organism is wired to naturally provide these through mechanisms of dissociation, repressing memories and so forth. These are to a degree necessary for life in the world.
The division between what is self-calming and what is a survival response is not always clear cut. Generally, self-calming is done for comfort and with a degree of deliberateness, even if self-calming itself were rationalized as yet something else, whereas trauma responses are automatic and in real time.