I am retired without
wife or kids and have cut back on busy-ness. So I have lots of time
to call my own. What do I do with it? The bare necessities involve
domestic chores in the house and garden. And there is some media
distraction and social interaction. Other than that, I read, write,
doodle and dose by way of unveiling the unconscious.
The reading is
non-fiction and focuses on the process of changing minds – mine and
other people's. I also listen to key thinkers promoting their ideas
online. Themes covered include evolution, neurology, the various
social sciences, linguistics and mindfulness. I
spend many hours one-pointedly assimilating ideas. Absorption. A
multitude of stimuli come knocking at the sense doors. Conscious
inputs are few while unconscious ones are many.
The writing is about
what I have been reading and experiencing. I no longer feel obliged
to write objectively in the passive voice. Herds of tenured academics
do that much better than me. And there is Wikipedia! The self
appointed task is to tell my subjective stories stylishly, and to
blog them. The prose emerges in flow and usually needs to be
consciously edited. The muse is not perfect but she is good enough.
There are now several
hundred doodles and there are two or three new ones each day. They
are produced in about thirty minutes of flow. I am not aware of their
meaning. It is as if they draw themselves. They are evidence of the
unconscious churn. The products remain mysterious but I greatly
appreciate the non-egoic mind state which controls the process.
The dosing includes
slivering and sometimes sleep. I am late to bed and early to rise. I
presumably have dreams but I don't remember them. Sometimes I settle
for a dose which might become a sleep. At other times what looks like
a dose from the outside is in fact a session of mindfulness.
It is difficult to talk
about mindfulness because sentences demand a subject, verb and
object. An agent. A personal pronoun. Language perverts 'reality'.
(The reality that can be described is not the real reality – Lao
Tzu)
In an earlier blogpost
I named my mental states. (see below). Two of them are relevant at
the moment.
Zorba the Zombie says
“I want xxx.”
William the witness
asks “who is the 'I' that wants?” and then
“Who is the 'I' that
asks who is the 'I' that wants?”
Zorba the Zombie (aka
Monkey Mind) is drip fed from the unconscious with a never ending
stream of thoughts, feelings and moods. These cause Zorba (aka the
self) to believe in a real reality when, in fact, they are only
mind-made re-presentations based on hard wiring and sensory inputs.
William the witness
comes and goes. He gives the impression of calmly witnessing the
emotional cavalcade that is Zorba. He is a cool dude. He can be
called upon at any time to help still the storms created by the
Zombie on auto-pilot.
These days more of my
time is spent as even keel William than as roller coaster Zorba.
There is procrastination about washing the dishes till the mood is
right and then the work gets done with grace rather than with a
grudge.
Richard Nisbett is a
respected Social Psychologist who thinks about thinking and is
gradually classifying the types of thought and feeling used by the
conscious and unconscious aspects of human mentation. He offers
these words of wisdom for unveiling the unconscious:
- Don't assume that you know why you think what you think or do what you do.
- Don't assume that other people's accounts of their reasons or motives are any more likely to be right than are your accounts of your own reasons or motives.
- You have to let the unconscious help you.
- You should never fail to take advantage of the free labour of the unconscious mind.
- If you're not making progress on a problem, drop it and turn to something else.
Yoh!
No comments:
Post a Comment