Thoughts & Thinking
The first guidebook I created twenty years ago (see The Progression of Insights in the Guidebook Project) was based on an insight about thinking processes. I found that if I limited my conscious thoughts to open-ended questions that only involve a single idea, then thinking processes that I did not control generated answers. I had been previously constraining my ability to generate original, insightful thoughts without realizing it.
At that time, I envisioned a greater self that involved our entire brain-body system as the generative source of the behavioral sequences we experience as conscious thoughts and perceptions. I had discovered a new way of engaging thinking processes that seemed important, but I wasn’t sure how to articulate something that I only understood intuitively. I began using this method to develop my ideas further, and this led to accepting intuition as my method, following the lead of Henri Bergson. It took years to arrive at the idea of two tiers of consciousness, and it offered a framework for explaining my insight about thinking for the first time.
In recent blog entries, I developed an understanding of the relationship between the two tiers of consciousness and detailed the steps involved in transforming awareness at the core of experience into a conscious version of the world. I described the enormous advantage of gaining anticipatory control over our interactions with the surrounding realities we encounter. If we become overly dependent on recognition strategies, however, we lock ourselves into a static version of the world. Our thinking is then constrained within repetitive sequences of rationality that William Blake called the “same dull round.” Nevertheless, the access that recognition provides, when used sparingly, is central to understanding my early insight into thinking processes.
Recognition gives us anticipatory control, but when we use thoughts selectively, we let go of conscious control and gain access to a broad array of potentially available neuronal networks. Much of the wisdom that resides in our unvoiced, undifferentiated core involves a sense of what we are doing that is not identified in terms of the entities and events we recognize in our conscious version of the world. Visceral processes play a more dominant role in generating responses at the first tier because they direct our actions prior to the recognition of a world of entities and events identified largely through sensory guidance. When single thoughts are used as recognition probes to access the core without controlling the process, visceral connections are free to generate authentically original responses in the form of intuitions and imagined plurabilities.
It is uncomfortable to use thoughts to provoke thinking processes when we are not in conscious control. The original ideas that present themselves emerge from an unvoiced, unknowable place. We send out a probe or pose a question and wait passively for a response from processes that we do not control and can never know. It is necessary to develop trust that these thinking processes, hidden from conscious awareness, will respond. Even after years of relying on this method, each new insight still feels like a gift rather than an achievement of my own. It is passivity in the service of activity. We constrain a desire to maintain conscious control so that unvoiced thinking processes can generate authentically original responses.
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