The Brilliant Unconscious Few people question the existence of the "unconscious mind" anymore. That part of us that solves problems while we're soaking in the steam of a hot shower; the part that issues forth whole complex ideas while we walk through the woods. The part that reveals our lies by making us rub our nose while we talk. But these demonstrations of a mind below the surface fly in the face of where the idea of the subconscious came from - that it's the sealed container of repressed desires, fears, animalistic urges. We seem to be of two minds about our unconscious - on the one hand it's stupid, brutal, childish, utterly sexual and depraved, and full of thoughts we dare not have, and on the other, it's brilliant, solving our toughest most complex problems while we suntan, and the source of ideas we wish we could tap into more readily. So which is the real unconscious?Of course, it could be both, but even that suggests we don't have wretched thoughts and fantasies in our normal thoughts (or am I the only one incapable of repressing them all successfully?), that sexual thoughts don't dominate our wakeful minds, etc. So, maybe the unconscious is really just more of the same, a seamless extension of what our supposedly conscious mind is?What is an unconscious mind anyway? Something that thinks without self-awareness? I think therefore ... nothing. Just content to think and think and think without any I whatsoever? Thinking without being. To think without self-awareness seems a lot like what a computer does, really. If there's a big part of our minds cranking away solving our problems without either our awareness nor its own doesn't that make for a strange division between "us" and "it"? If "it" is unreflective thinking that goes on whether we will it or not, what is the "us"? Maybe we are just focused attention. Our working mind is large, thinking many thoughts all the time, but our ability to focus attention is small and narrow, so from our perspective, the conscious mind is small and there appears to be a large unconscious beneath it, but really, the unconscious is all around, and we are only able to perceive it through a kind of tunnel vision. It moves and ideas spring up from nowhere. The tunnel moves, and we feel we are exercising free will and directed thought. But maybe in reality, our directed thought is very small indeed, and limited to changing the focus of our attention.But then, it sure feels as though focusing attention on something affects our ability to reason about it. After all, we can all drive a car without even being aware of what we are doing - but how often do we find ourselves driving off to work when we snap out of our reverie and remember we were trying to go somewhere else? So attention is either capable of some feats the whole mind-thing can't do, or else attention provides something that let's the mind do something it normally can't on its own.Not that any of this is new, but I don't think it's the normal way we think about ourselves. The normal way seems to be to consider "I" to be a conscious mind, saddles with an unconscious mind "below" it, and running a body that (most of the time) does our bidding. What if instead we thought of ourselves as a mind machine that solves problems like a computer (though vastly complex, flexible, and reprogrammable) and an attention director, able to view the mind computer through tiny windows and maybe focus some extra computing power on certain things? How would that change how we lived?Well, I don't know, it just seemed sensible to ask the question at that point in my ramblings. Maybe we'd consider increasing our powers of attention as important to our ongoing efforts at self-improvement as more "purposeful" learning. And maybe that's what meditation is? Working on powers of attention. Learning to pay attention to things we rarely do. Learning to not get caught up paying attention to everything that passes by the narrow window. Maybe even learning to increase the size of that window. I don't know, I didn't start out this blog intending to talk about meditation - but guess maybe my subconsious did.

Few people question the existence of the "unconscious mind" anymore. That part of us that solves problems while we're soaking in the steam of a hot shower; the part that issues forth whole complex ideas while we walk through the woods. The part that reveals our lies by making us rub our nose while we talk.

But these demonstrations of a mind below the surface fly in the face of where the idea of the subconscious came from - that it's the sealed container of repressed desires, fears, animalistic urges. We seem to be of two minds about our unconscious - on the one hand it's stupid, brutal, childish, utterly sexual and depraved, and full of thoughts we dare not have, and on the other, it's brilliant, solving our toughest most complex problems while we suntan, and the source of ideas we wish we could tap into more readily. So which is the real unconscious?

Of course, it could be both, but even that suggests we don't have wretched thoughts and fantasies in our normal thoughts (or am I the only one incapable of repressing them all successfully?), that sexual thoughts don't dominate our wakeful minds, etc. So, maybe the unconscious is really just more of the same, a seamless extension of what our supposedly conscious mind is?

What is an unconscious mind anyway? Something that thinks without self-awareness? I think therefore ... nothing. Just content to think and think and think without any I whatsoever? Thinking without being. To think without self-awareness seems a lot like what a computer does, really. If there's a big part of our minds cranking away solving our problems without either our awareness nor its own doesn't that make for a strange division between "us" and "it"?

If "it" is unreflective thinking that goes on whether we will it or not, what is the "us"? Maybe we are just focused attention. Our working mind is large, thinking many thoughts all the time, but our ability to focus attention is small and narrow, so from our perspective, the conscious mind is small and there appears to be a large unconscious beneath it, but really, the unconscious is all around, and we are only able to perceive it through a kind of tunnel vision. It moves and ideas spring up from nowhere. The tunnel moves, and we feel we are exercising free will and directed thought. But maybe in reality, our directed thought is very small indeed, and limited to changing the focus of our attention.

But then, it sure feels as though focusing attention on something affects our ability to reason about it. After all, we can all drive a car without even being aware of what we are doing - but how often do we find ourselves driving off to work when we snap out of our reverie and remember we were trying to go somewhere else? So attention is either capable of some feats the whole mind-thing can't do, or else attention provides something that let's the mind do something it normally can't on its own.

Not that any of this is new, but I don't think it's the normal way we think about ourselves. The normal way seems to be to consider "I" to be a conscious mind, saddles with an unconscious mind "below" it, and running a body that (most of the time) does our bidding. What if instead we thought of ourselves as a mind machine that solves problems like a computer (though vastly complex, flexible, and reprogrammable) and an attention director, able to view the mind computer through tiny windows and maybe focus some extra computing power on certain things? How would that change how we lived?

Well, I don't know, it just seemed sensible to ask the question at that point in my ramblings. Maybe we'd consider increasing our powers of attention as important to our ongoing efforts at self-improvement as more "purposeful" learning. And maybe that's what meditation is? Working on powers of attention. Learning to pay attention to things we rarely do. Learning to not get caught up paying attention to everything that passes by the narrow window. Maybe even learning to increase the size of that window. I don't know, I didn't start out this blog intending to talk about meditation - but guess maybe my subconsious did.