Mind minding

There are those who reckon human nature to be fundamentally benign. But much of what happens in the world is far from nice. Happenings include the physical (eg beautiful sunsets and massive volcanoes) and the social (feeding the hungry and large scale genocides). This calls to mind the pragmatics of the serenity prayer:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference”

Serenity and suffering are mind-made by nature, nurture and serendipity. These are not cast in stone. There is neural plasticity. We are getting better at taking thought and changing minds - especially at being non-egoic.

The lists that follow were generated non-egoically: they deal with ‘I’ and mind.

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Sometimes ‘I’ am thoroughly enmeshed by thought, feelings, and moods (TFM) such that ‘I’ operate like a zombie on auto-pilot. Typically, there is an unfocussed stream of short lived topics

Sometimes ‘I’ take a few minutes to just sit and witness the TFM that pass through the attention centre. It is then obvious that the mind has a mind of its own.

Sometimes ‘I’ take a few minutes to sit still and count breaths from one to ten. But the mind usually goes off at a tangent.

Sometimes ‘I’ am minded to mind the minding process. This follows the ancient Greek notion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Sometimes ‘I’ operate in a state of non-egoic flow. Excellent work gets done but ‘I’ am not present eg an athlete in the zone, a musician in the groove, a dish washer in the kitchen. Me when writing blogposts and when doodling.

Sometimes ‘I’ follow Dogen’s advice to just sit and drop off body and mind. This is another way of being non-egoic and blissful.

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The mind is gigantic and is made up of interacting modules that come hard wired from nature and more flexibly from nurture. Most of the interactions are in the unconscious.

The mind creates stories by relating past memories to present stimuli with a view to approaching, avoiding or ignoring them. A few of the stories pass into the self-conscious.

The mind can change. It is influenced by its immediate environment. Feed it good stuff and it will be positive, feed it bad stuff and it will be negative.

The mind appears very different when closely examined in social psychology experiments. (eg nudging, sunk cost, confirmation bias etc).

The mind is unpredictable. To which ‘I’ does it belong? Who or what pulls its strings from moment to moment?

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Natural selection does not take account of morality, not even of karma. Belligerent, war mongering cultures tend to populate the future. I am minded of the preamble to the UNESCO constitution: "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed".