But also, on the other hand, via memory, the mind is aware of its own experienced past and, via anticipation, the impending future. On one hand, the moment-to-moment mind is like a parcel of water in the real stream, shifting yet always bounded to its own unique present. How is consciousness like the intricate patterns of flow that swirled around me? If we are streams, we are surely paradoxical ones. Thoughts and feelings glide along smoothly, at other times with roars. It has been in use for more than a hundred years, since William James proclaimed the stream of consciousness to be the primal fact that the science of mind must admit and study. A phrase floats into my mind: “the stream of consciousness.” As I listen to the gurgles, the eddies hypnotize. My eyes are transfixed upon the clear upstream water flowing toward me. Each foot rests upon a small rock of its own. I sit on a rock, surrounded by the riffles of a stream. What follows are my entries for the first three days. I discovered practices that deeply merged the patterns of nature and mind like intertwined lovers. The result: I took ownership of a rare block of time for personal experiment. It was easy to limit human contact-neighborly or electronic-to the bare minimum. And there I lived for fifty days, without companionship, without television or radio. Home was a ten- by forty-foot trailer with a covered porch of the same size. But I usually had writing projects in science and philosophy to start or complete, and I had craved mental breathing space for more personal explorations. I had for many years spent summers in the mountains of Southwestern New Mexico. My physical landscape was a wondrous one in which to wander. It’s followed by my reflections on it later. Each daily entry -only a few sentences here- was recorded in the field. It was akin to freely wandering in a state of discovery across an intricate landscape. What I wanted was the time to follow my thoughts and then pick up on themes and reinforce them in memory. The issue of “want” is a bit problematic, however, because as all beginning meditators quickly note, but also often are shocked to discover, much of thinking is done for us by deeper unconscious mechanisms that continuously roll out a cornucopia of thoughts into consciousness. In my free-form variety, mind-watching is linked to a state of mind-wandering in other words, recording the mind while thinking what you want to think. This stands in contrast to a more narrow, focused introspection, of the kind, say, practiced in versions of Buddhist meditation. Each day I carried a small tape recorder with me and recorded thoughts when they seemed relevant to what had become my overall quest: to think about thinking, to watch the stream of consciousness. The ideas and daily events in this journal took place during fifty days in summer, 2004.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |