more unconscious

In the last few blogs ‘I’ have been trying to develop a subjective impression of what the unconscious is good for.

The first idea is to drop ego or self-consciousness and thus to let the unconscious have a free hand to continuously churn.

The second idea is that sometimes the churn is channelled into tangible conscious outputs that derive from such thoughts, feelings and moods as are routed to the attention centre.

‘My’ creative outputs have taken various forms through the years. The underlying process is usually driven by a mix of egoic (conscious) and non-egoic (unconscious) factors. The best results arrive when the ego is quiet and the unconscious ‘muse’ is thus better able to let the ‘inner voice’ be heard through commandeering the attention centre. The outputs are:

• Doodles
• Six word stories
• Brande flows (formal flows of consciousness)
• Daily diary entries (informal bits and pieces since the 1960s)
• One-pagers – recent ones posted on the blog; earlier ones at http://www.toonloon.bizland.com/nutshell/
• Poems (mainly from adolescence)
• Songs (two albums online) http://naesaebad.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-music.html
• Tunes (75 tunes also online) http://naesaebad.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-music.html
• Websites for many of the above
• Social Network stuff
• Photos

Dictionary definitions for conscious, self-conscious, sub-conscious and un-conscious and their ‘nesses’ tend to be long because of the difficulties of dealing with the different shades of meaning that exist. My continually evolving thoughts on the subject are captured in the following list:

• A thing is conscious if it is able to sense and react appropriately to changes in the environment. This is a basic factor in being alive and includes plants and single celled animals
• If there is consciousness there must be that which is conscious – therefore self or ego consciousness as a product of the mindbrain.
• A thing is self conscious if it is aware that it is able to sense and react appropriately to changes in the environment. Conscious of consciousness.
• When a person is in ‘flow’ they are in a state of non-egoic non-self consciousness which, by definition, must be the unconscious.
• If a thing is not aware that it is able to sense and react appropriately to changes in the environment then the sensing and reacting are said to take place unconsciously ie in the unconscious.
• Of all the mental activity taking place in a human being the vast majority is in the unconscious.
• Most of what appears to the self conscious is a pale reflection of what had previously been happening in the unconscious. The (conscious) mind has an (unconscious) mind of its own.

 
There are cases of the muse spilling out word perfect stories that do not need editing. The author is then like a copy typist. In other cases there is an interplay between the muse and the self conscious intellect of the author. (Ref – the Judith Spelman interviews https://www.writers-online.co.uk/ )

My muse comes and goes and is sometimes more or less in control. The present spate of doodles are close to 100% unconscious but they are about visual patterns rather than about words and ideas.

As far as I remember the tunes and songs in the 1970s and 1990s were mainly non-egoic. The present set of blog posts are usually sparked by the unconscious but they usually need some rational editing.

SO –there is a feeling of getting something for nothing. Just drop the ego illusion and go with the flow. No self, no problem.

But there is a guilty feeling. ‘I’ do not have to work hard. But no pain, no gain, and the devil finds work for idle hands.

Then there is the gateless gate. It seems enormous and impenetrable as you approach it but once through and looking back it does not exist.

Then there is crossing the river on a raft. Once across you no longer need the raft. So you can lay down those illusory burdens of space, time and ego.

And it all comes to pass if you just sit.