Impressions are your preconscious reactions to the world.
Some things are appealing to you, others are appalling. Your reactions to these things are normally outside your conscious awareness.
They are defined by factors that are usually outside your control like your genetics and environment, and they will define everything about your life, from how you respond to events, to how you interact with people.
But the Stoics had a great insight, that was then confirmed thousands of years later by scientists through the discovery of neuroplasticity. The Stoics told us that we can change our impressions by using our reason.
But before I tell you what they meant by that, let us first look at some definitions that will be important to us. The Stoics had a psychology of conduct that was made up of three parts: Impressions, Assent, Impulse, as described by Epictetus.
Psychology of Action
1) Impression: You have good and bad impressions about things. There are things that you wish to avoid and things that you wish to get.
2) Assent: This when you have an initial impression about something, and you either confirm or deny it. ‘Salesmen are dishonest’ is an impression you can have.
3) Impulse: This is when you emotionally react to your impression and assent. If you perceive someone’s insults towards you as painful, and then you assent that they are true, you will have an impulse towards feeling anger or shame. But if you perceive insults as empty words that are not worth giving any attention to, then your impulse will be to feel nothing when insulted.
The idea is that your preconceived notions of the world determines how you emotionally react to it. If you can change what you assent to, after reflecting on your impressions, then you can change your feelings and behavior. And if you can do this repeatedly, then even your impressions of the world can change. If you were using reason, these impressions become more accurate.
Musashi, swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, but the observing eye is strong. The observing eyes sees simply what is there, while the perceiving eye sees more than there is. The observing eye sees events, clear of distractions and exaggerations. The perceiving eye sees major setbacks and obstacles that cannot be surmounted.
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.
Publius Syrus
It is your perception of the world that determines how you respond to it. If you go through life without revising your preconceived notions, then you will have no sense of control over your destiny. There is an equation in your mind that will determine your perception, and how you respond to things. It is somewhat in your control.
You can rewire your brain because it is plastic. But you may choose to go along with your default wiring and avoid the pain of conducting an internal investigation. Afterall, there is no guarantee that by rewiring your brain, you are doing it for your own good. Unless something traumatic or distressing happens to you, either in your relationships or at work, that forces you to reconsider your presuppositions, why put in the effort?
Yet there is a reward in the activity itself. When you pause to think about your ideas: why you are aversive to this person, why you are attracted to your work, or why you are anxious about that thought, then you will gain insight into your own equation, and by playing close attention, you can gain a glimpse into the answer. You can predict, albeit imperfectly, where your equation is taking you, and if you decide that you are not thrilled about this final location, you have the freedom to make changes. The act of doing so reduces anxiety because it gives you a sense of control.
Attachment to your expectations about the world is your main cause of misery. It is easy, to see these ideas, which were influenced by Buddhism, as a reason to retreat from the world. You may think they are cowardly.
You might say that it is not perception that is the problem, but life itself. In Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, a strong argument is made against the psychiatric profession, and its vague diagnoses of mental diseases (that did not meat scientific medical standards) to patients who are not facing problems in their psychology, but problems in living. Michel Foucault, in “Madness and Civilization”, tells us how the mentally ill are an oppressed group that is being denied the right to resist social control by the medical establishment.
They are either unemployed, or out of shape, or socially isolated, and the solution to their problems is not in rehearsing childhood traumas, but in taking better control of their lives.
The same criticism can be given to the philosophers who preached a different way of seeing the world. Of course, there is no doubt that a better understanding of the world brings peace of mind. David Foster Wallace tells us in This is Water, that the point of education is to give us the ability to choose how to view the world. To know that no matter who we are, our default condition is to only think about the world in selfish terms, of people as things that are either in our way or helping us to our destination.
But with the gift of reason and education, we can transcend our primordial instinct of selfishness, and see reality as it is – a world that is much bigger than our petty inconveniences and needs. The person we were annoyed at for yelling at their child at the supermarket was chronically sleep deprived from her evening shift at the hospital. Being aware of how everyone is going through their own troubles should help us be more empathetic towards others and be more patient with them.
There are real problems in the world that have nothing to do with your perception. This should make you take your perceptions less seriously for two reasons. First, by changing your external environment, you can change your perceptions. By working harder, living a healthier life, being more organized and thoughtful, you can accomplish your goals, and lower your anxiety and fear. Second, your perception is limited to only your own experiences, but the world does not conform to your perceptions, it does not care about them at all.
But this does not mean that your perceptions do not matter. They do, because as the Stoics pointed out, your behavior is affected by your perceptions. It is a two-way causal chain. Your actions affect your perceptions, but your perceptions affect your actions.
Thus, the battle should be waged on two fronts, one is external, while the other is internal. You will find yourself engaged in an endless game of adjusting your behavior and tweaking your impressions. If you slack off in either of these fronts, you will find yourself caught in a ruthless causal chain, falling deeper into illusion (internal thoughts) and disillusionment (bad external outcomes).