Gifts in the Night
I often develop my thinking further when I am awake in bed in the middle of the night after having worked on my project earlier in the day. It is easier to access structures in the physical core of experience in the absence of competing sensory or visceral inputs. My intuitive connection is more open, and I introduce ideas and pose questions that generate unexpected and often surprising responses. I repeat these intuitive insights over to myself so they will still be available when I wake in the morning. The night before I wrote this entry, my thoughts floated through ideas about the nature of what is experienced in the pre-empirical physical core at the first tier of consciousness.
The physical core of experience is pre-empirical which means that the experiences that take place at the first tier have not been differentiated into the entities and events we subsequently develop at the verbal-symbolic tier. We are guided through the realities we encounter by a continuous stream of sensory and visceral inputs that direct us toward actions that meet our needs. Although we have no conscious awareness at the first tier of what specific needs we might have, visceral processes guide us toward the movements that are needed.
Our awareness of functioning at the first tier of consciousness involves our physical presence in what we are doing but not of the specific movement sequences we initiate. We do not experience what we do, only our physical presence in the doing. Imagine yourself immersed in a demanding physical task to such a degree that you lose track of time and of your surroundings. Only after you stop to rest do you realize how much time has elapsed and how much you have accomplished. You have had an experience similar to first-tier consciousness.
I envision four qualitatively distinct constellations of visceral processes that guide the direction of our movements as we physically navigate through the realities we encounter at the first tier. A generally affirming array of visceral processes accompanies our movements as long as they are serving our needs in accordance with the structural probabilities accumulated in the core of experience. Affirming processes give an inherent sense that we are doing what is right for us. Three corrective constellations of visceral processes arise to modify the direction of our movements whenever they deviate from previously established core guidance. They provoke adjustments to the movements themselves, shifts in direction until a sense of affirmation returns.
The core experiences we accumulate at the first tier of consciousness establish grounding for everything that is later added as we develop our conscious version of the world at the verbal-symbolic tier. The physicality of our involved presence is the basis for our later identification of the conscious self. The three propensities become the seeds from which our personalities grow. The visceral adjustments that guide our movements become differentiated into the feeling states we later identify as emotions. The core experiences that are the seeds for the development of the self, our personalities and our emotions assert a continuing unvoiced presence in the background as we engage our conscious version of the world.
The physicality of our presence and involvement provides a basis for the conscious versions of the self we formulate when we think about and explain who we are. The four constellations of visceral processes become differentiated into feeling states as affirmation is experienced as certainty and the corrective visceral forces as anxiety, disinterest and pain. The corrective visceral processes provide guidance for each of the three propensities: anxiety for sensory guidance, disinterest for visceral guidance and pain for mirroring. The three personal propensities, together with the visceral signals that guide them, establish a pre-empirical basis for the selves that we gradually develop.
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