34 ■ FLOWby the nervous system? Where does the captain of the ship, the master
of the soul, reside?
As soon as we consider these questions for even a short while, we
realize that the I, or the self as we shall refer to it from now on, is also
one of the contents of consciousness. It is one that never strays very far
from the focus of attention. Of course my own self exists solely in my
own consciousness; in that of others who know me there will be versions
of it, most of them probably unrecognizable likenesses of the “origi
nal”—myself as I see me.
The self is no ordinary piece of information, however. In fact, it
contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the
memories, actions, desires, pleasures, and pains are included in it. And
more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that
we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. The self of the political
activist may become indistinguishable from his ideology, the self of the
banker may become wrapped up in his investments. Of course, ordinar
ily we do not think of our self in this way. At any given time, we are
usually aware of only a tiny part of it, as when we become conscious of
how we look, of what impression we are making, or of what we really
would like to do if we could. We most often associate our self with our
body, though sometimes we extend its boundaries to identify it with a
car, house, or family. Yet however much we are aware of it, the self is
in many ways the most important element of consciousness, for it repre
sents symbolically all of consciousness’s other contents, as well as the
pattern of their interrelations.
The patient reader who has followed the argument so far might
detect at this point a faint trace of circularity. If attention, or psychic
energy, is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of the contents
of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of
consciousness and the goals are the result of different ways of investing
attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with
no clear causes or effects. At one point we are saying that the self directs
attention, at another, that attention determines the self. In fact, both
these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system,
but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self,
and is in turn shaped by it.
An example of this type of causality is the experience of Sam
Browning, one of the adolescents we have followed in our longitudinal
research studies. Sam went to Bermuda for a Christmas holiday with his
father when he was fifteen. At the time, he had no idea of what he
wanted to do with his life; his self was relatively unformed, without an