• Includes those specific items in the physical world, home, possessions, friends and family.

The Social Self

• We have as many different selves as we have individual relationships
• James said the proper coarse of action is to pick a self that seems admirable and to act
  like that self in as many situations as possible.

The Spiritual Self

• The spiritual self is the persona inner and subjective being
• One expression of this self is exemplified in religious experiences

Consciousness

Personal Consciousness

• Every thought is personal
• Later he would maintain that there was no such thing as consciousness, by which he
  meant, no disembodied consciousness independent of someone's experiences somewhere.

Changes in consciousness

• We can never have exactly the same thought twice
• What we may believe to be a repeat thought is actually a changing series of thoughts.

Streams of consciousness

• Each thought affects the one that follows it
• Each emerging thought takes part of it's force, focus, content and direction from
  proceeding thought
• Streams of consciousness - a method of spontaneous writing that attempts to mimic the
  flow and jumble of thought arose in part from James teachings

How consciousness selects

• The fringe- James suggested a different way to explain how it is that thoughts and
  feelings move continually in and out of awareness.
• Awareness has two aspects: the definite portion and the vague portion or the nucleus
  and the fringe
• What we attend to is what we are aware of at any particular moment, "tip of my tongue",
  "On the right track".

Intellect and the sentiment of Rationality

• There are two levels of knowing; knowing through direct experience and knowing
  through abstract reasoning
• Knowledge of acquaintance - 1st level, it is sensory, intuitive, poetic and emotional
• Knowledge about - it is intellectual, focused, relational, it is objective and unemotional
• Sentiment of rationality - before a person will accept a theory two separate sets of
  needs must be satisfied. First, the theory must be intellectually palatable, consistent,
  logical and so on. Second it must be emotionally palatable, it must encourage us to think
  or act in ways that we find personally acceptable and gratifying.

Habit

The Biological self

• Habits are actions or thoughts that are seemingly automatic responses to a given
  experience. They differ from instincts in that habits can be created, modified, or eliminated
  by conscious direction.
• Habits of Learning - A new habit is formed in 3 stages. 1st - the individual must have a
  need or a desire, 2nd - the individual requires information, 3rd simple repetition.
• Bad Habits - Those forces that retard our development and limit our happiness; we
  even have the bad habit of overlooking our ignoring our other bad habits

Will

• Every thought is personal
• Acts of will cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct of what these acts are,
  and deliberate mental focus, must precede the act

• Every thought is personal
• Acts of will cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct of what these acts are,
  and deliberate mental focus, must precede the act

Strengthening the Will

• He suggests that a simple and readily available method to achieve this end is to perform a useless task everyday

Surrendering the will

• On rare occasions, the individual, rather than strengthening his or her will, must surrender
  it, must allow it to be overwhelmed by inner experiences

Emotions

• An emotion depends on feedback from one’s own body
• James says that we perceive a situation in which an instinctual physical reaction occurs,
  and then we are aware of an emotion.

Emotional excitement

• Emotional upset is one means by which long-standing habits can be disrupted; it
  frees people to try new behavior or to explore new areas of awareness.

Healthy mindedness

• Means that if an individual acts as though things were well, they would be.

Pragmatism

• Originally developed by James and Charles Pierce to clarify or eliminate
  unnecessary considerations about issues in one’s life or one’s thought, became a school
  of philosophy.
• Pragmatic definition of truth- "true ideas are those we can assimilate, validate,
  corroborate and verify

Obstacles to growth

• Unexpressed emotions
• Errors of excess - ex. An excess of love becomes possessiveness, etc.
• Personal Blindness - the inability of people to understand one another, our failure to
  be aware of this blindness is a major source of unhappiness.

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