Doing a helicopter

There are various states of consciousness. Some are parochial and feeble while others are cosmopolitan and expansive. In either case you can feel anxious or at peace.

 That gives four possibilities:

1. Parochial and anxious
2. Parochial and peaceful
3. Cosmopolitan and anxious
4. Cosmopolitan and peaceful

State 1 is very common. The human mindbrain has a built in negativity bias. This involves ongoing anxiety, restlessness and fear which makes you alert to your surroundings and more likely than not to spot an approaching lion.

State 2 is not uncommon. There is less need of the ancestral pessimism in the modern world. There are still dangers but they are of a different and less immediate kind now that we are ‘civilised’? Happiness is being normal! Ignorance is bliss!

State 3 is increasingly common. The rich are getting richer, there is exploitation of people and the environment, and there are problems with waste management and global warming etc. Planet earth is like the Titanic. The fact that you have a first class cabin is small comfort.

State 4 might be becoming more common. Mindfulness brings non-egoic points of view which promote compassion and peace. There is an ongoing appreciation of the extent of time and space and the inevitability of the death of our solar system. But there need not be bad feelings about this. It is unlikely that we are the only instance of self conscious star dust. We are a tiny and ephemeral part of something much grander

‘I’ have a tendency to slip into states 1 and 3. I am pessimistic. There is anxiety, panic and restlessness verging on depression. ‘Reality’ is in a mess at personal, cultural, environmental and global levels. We are all doomed!

But these days I am not as afflicted by such things as I used to be. I am getting better at noticing the blue mood approaching and taking defensive action. This amounts to seeing a big picture eg David Christian’s Big History. There is a variety of ways to think about this.

There is the notion of kicking the mind upstairs so as to get a bird’s eye view or the view from a helicopter or a rocket. There is the notion of expanding horizons and getting things in perspective - metacognition. I can take a cosmic zoom through space, from quantum to cosmos; and through time, from nanoseconds to billions of years.

But it is not always possible to get the mindbrain to change its focus right away. Where there is resistance  attention can be pointed at texts (books or kindle) and at audio and video recordings by some of my favourite cutting edge thinkers eg on TED, Google Talks and many channels on YouTube. There can also be confirmation and inspiration from social networks eg  Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

In terms of process the task is to drop the concepts of ego, space and time so that the mindbrain is concentrated and pays undisturbed attention to the topic at hand. There is then focussed flow which is ‘in the groove’ or ‘in the zone’ and the unconscious can churn out its ‘stuff’. This is equivalent to letting the ‘muse’ speak. She is the mind that has a mind of her own; and she is the result of a mix of the forces of nature, nurture and serendipity.

In terms of product there is the notion of raising the bar for the human condition – of promoting high levels of well being. Martin Seligman labels the mind state ‘Flourishing’. There is an appreciation that reality is mind made and that it can thus be readily changed. You change the mind to change the brain that changes the mind. There is neural plasticity. It is never too late to change your mind.

Mindfulness is a way of taking thought that brings release from the blind and empassioned zealotry of the parochially encultured mindbrain [State 1]. In its place there can be a radical flourishing that gives rise to an open mind, to a fresh beginner’s mind [State 4]. And a first step is to embrace aspects of big history by doing a helicopter.