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OK, there’s a cloud cover outside today (well, obviously OUTSIDE!), and it’s a perfect temperature for me to be out there making adobe blocks. I set the 22 I made yesterday on their edges so they can continue to dry evenly. But I am distracted from mud work because I am very busy still thinking about thinking.
The small section of Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle I read this morning led to another suggested pause, so I am being an obedient reader and now I’m processing what Tolle said while on vacation, or recess. His suggestion is to try to get to a ‘place’ where we can watch our self that is doing all this THINKING. I guess this watching self is one step closer to the FREE self who is the BIG self. This BIG self (as I see it) is somehow itself closer to an ‘enlightened one’.
I’m game. I’m usually game for learning something new, and something that might be helpful to increasing my internal state of well-being. But all this thinking about thinking, and the ‘one’ that is doing the thinking and the ‘one’ that watches the ‘one’ doing all the thinking – well, believe it or not, it’s all rather confusing!
So, if I can’t yet pull up anchor on this thinking business, or yet cut the chain that ties me down to all this thinking, or cut the proverbial apron string to my own ‘mind’, or free the inner kite that might be a different sort of ME, I might as well write something.
Writing presents a different kind of thinking for me. It always seems to be a bit more orderly process, putting all these single letters into words as they string themselves into nice left-brain sentences. As I write I know that at least on some sort of level my left and my right brain are at the moment in cooperation with one another.
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I continue to tell myself repeatedly that I didn’t think during the first 18 years of my life about myself in any personal way – that I didn’t know I even WAS a self or HAD a self. In a moment I will include here something from Dr. Daniel Siegel’s book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), about ‘self’ (see link below). But first I want to say something about memories of my thinking self.
I was given a very nice gold-colored very feminine watch by my grandmother on my 14th birthday. I loved my grandmother. I loved the watch. I loved that she loved me enough to give me a watch. I loved wearing the watch. NOW I can say that I loved how wearing the watch made me feel about myself, only I didn’t know THEN that I had a self. But as I think about thinking I think about this:
I walked to and from high school that winter of my 9th grade year. The family (minus my father) spent the year in Tucson, an exotic place for a girl from Alaska. I consciously made the effort every morning and every afternoon during my walk to switch all my school books I was carrying to holding them in my right arm so that I could swing my left arm with my watch on my wrist freely every time I came to a place I had to cross a street.
I remember my thinking: “Everyone sitting there in their car waiting for me to cross this street notices my beautiful watch. They will think, “Look at that beautiful watch. What a special and wonderful girl that is to be wearing such a beautiful watch.””
Looking back I can see that the Theory of Mind I had about the world was – well, ridiculous for a girl of 14. As a severely abused child, I had been given no experience in forming a Theory of Mind that would have allowed me to grow into a world with other people in it in such a way that I could conceive anything about how their minds worked. Neither did I have a Theory of Mind that appropriately or adequately let me understand the workings of my own mind.
There is no possible way that even one single person of all those I walked in front of my 9th grade year ever noticed my watch, let alone THOUGHT what I THOUGHT they were THINKING.
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This leads me to thinking about something else I remember thinking this same year. One morning I had scraped the skin off the entire length of my shin bone while I was hurriedly shaving my legs before school. That afternoon as I was changing into my little blue (required) gym suit before class, a girl glanced at my leg and simply said, “I see you cut yourself shaving.”
No big deal, except that again I see how pitiful, even nonexistent my Theory of Mind was at 14. I was stunned by her observation. How could this girl POSSIBLY know that fact? I had no concept of clairvoyancy, but that was my feeling. This girl obviously possessed amazing magical abilities! There was, to me, no other possible way that she could have known my secret, a secret that was veiled and shrouded in the privacy of my own bathroom at home. I felt naked and exposed in front of this stranger, and I’ve never forgotten this moment, either.
Partly this is true because this wasn’t the only time in my life I had this exact same reaction to something someone observed about me as a truth. When I was 29 and was going through my final session with my therapist before exiting my 7-week inpatient alcoholism treatment program, I was stunned in the same way when my therapist said to me, “I have called a local counseling center and made an appointment for you with a therapist there as a part of your aftercare program. She is a specialist in treating child abuse survivors.”
Child abuse survivor? ME? That was the very first time anyone had ever signaled to me in any way that I had been abused in my childhood. At that time, I wasn’t even remotely, consciously privy to the fact I had been abused. Yet on another level OF COURSE I knew I had been abused. I had just NEVER, EVER had any way to think about this fact.
Here was this woman, who even though I had spent hours with her in addiction-related therapy sessions over a 7-week period of time, still considered her a stranger. I was just as stunned at her words as I was when the magical girl had known the secret of my leg scrape. How could this woman possibly know I had been abused? I certainly hadn’t told either one of these people my secrets! This therapist was, obviously, a magical clairvoyant, too.
I had no place in my warped, distorted, tiny, unsubstantial and uniformed Theory of Mind to understand that other people can EASILY tell all kinds of things about other people. Again, I felt exposed, vulnerable, and very confused. Walking around in a world filled with other people, how was I supposed to ever know what they knew about me?
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It wasn’t until about six years ago when I began my own research in an effort to more fully understand what my mother’s 18 years of abuse of me had ACTUALLY done to me that I discovered the very real concept of Theory of Mind. Even then, it took me another two years after I discovered this concept for me to realize how my trauma-influenced formation of my own (very limited) Theory of Mind meant that not only did I not understand how other people were able to know what they know about me and others, but in return I am equally limited in my understanding of other people’s minds.
Having an adequately formed Theory of Mind built through secure-enough early attachment experiences means that in most human-to-human interactions people do not have to stop and THINK about what is going on. These patterns of interaction have their roots in the early-forming right, social, limbic, emotional brain. When trauma and abuse changes the way this part of the brain develops, human interactions and the operation of Theory of Mind will never (in my opinion) be automatic and normal.
This all comes into my thinking about thinking today in regard to Tolle’s writing because I know that our Theory of Mind doesn’t only concern itself with other people. It also informs all of our thinking about our relationship with the most important person we know: our own SELF. Tolle’s writing seems to be in part about discovering a different layer of our self, one that exists in a much bigger way than does our ‘thinking self’.
This is all fine and good, but our physiological construction, I believe, always guides everything in our life as long as we are alive in a body. The Theory of Mind that we use in our THINKING is directly tied in all of its aspects to our body through our nervous system. Our early-forming right brain is meant to be the foremost expert at being able to read all the extremely rapid-firing nerve-based expressions other people send about their inner states through the sound of their voice, the extremely rapid signals of their facial muscles, their body language – in essence, all the nonverbal information that is always included in our interactions with other people in real-place, real-time.
These most important nonverbal signals are received by our brain on its fundamental levels, and the regions of our brain that receive them are directly tied to our autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve responses. In fact, our vagus nerve system and our facial signaling processes are connected in their earliest evolution to the nerve structures of primitive jawless fish and are connected to both our stress and our calm and connection response systems.
I don’t believe that we can disconnect, or dis-associate our THINKING that Tolle is suggesting we begin to watch from these very ancient and very real present-day physiological structures within our body. Thinking that we can witness above the surface, or consciously pay attention to, is the tip of our physiological iceberg that happens BECAUSE we have some version of a Theory of Mind.
The ‘place’ where our Theory of Mind operates within us is, to me, like a Ground Zero for what we actually can know consciously both about our self and about others: Our Theory of Mind in-forms our thinking. While we are not perhaps used to thinking about our thinking this way, I believe that our entire being thinks. We think with our body because we live within our body.
Certainly what we actually know is much larger that what reaches our conscious awareness at any given instant of time. I suspect that our Theory of Mind acts like a two-way filtering system. It not only influences and in-forms both our unconscious (implicit) and our conscious (explicit) reactions, it also determines which is which, and colors our self-reflective abilities and processes!
I believe that as long as we are alive we experience a changing Theory of Mind, and that we have the power to influence these changes. This is what I THINK Tolle is talking about when he states:
“The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patters, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
“When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.” (pages 18-19)
Perhaps I simply have a differing definitions of ‘thought’, ‘mind’ and ‘self’ than Tolle might. In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey author Jill Bolte Taylor describes a very similar pattern as Tolle does, one based on her stroke experience of ‘losing’ access to her left-brain hemisphere action, Taylor describes this ‘thoughtless state’ in terms of being able to access our right-brain hemisphere’s reality without words.
Our ‘thinking self’ is not the enemy. Having the ability to think is a gift. Having a mind is a gift to be thankful for (see word family-definitions below). Having a flexible, adaptive, resilient, changeable Theory of Mind allows us to make the best use possible of both of these gifts – and more. If I accept that Tolle is using his own thinking about thinking in his particular way, and that what he is trying to say is that he found a way to improve upon the experience of being a conscious non-word-based thinker, I am curious enough about his thoughts to read more about what he has to say.
Perhaps my own Theory of Mind will change in positive ways as a result of this process of learning. I always appreciate learning how to bring new ways of being myself into the playing field of my Theory of Mind. Meanwhile, now that this post is completed I will go outdoors before today’s big winds show up and ‘think with my body-mind’ as I play with the mud making more adobes!
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For some thought provoking information from Dr. Siegel’s writings about states of mind (and states of being) in regard to the organization of the SELF, follow this link (might be a little slow on the page loading!):
**Dr. Siegel on organization-reorganization of the SELF
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THINK
Inflected Form(s): thought \ˈthȯt\; think·ing
Etymology: Middle English thenken, from Old English thencan; akin to Old High German denken to think, Latin tongēre to know — more at thanks
Date: before 12th century
transitive verb 1 : to form or have in the mind
2 : to have as an intention <thought to return early>
3 a : to have as an opinion <think it’s so> b : to regard as : consider <think the rule unfair>
4 a : to reflect on : ponder <think the matter over> b : to determine by reflecting <think what to do next>
5 : to call to mind : remember <he never thinks to ask how we do>
6 : to devise by thinking —usually used with up <thought up a plan to escape>
7 : to have as an expectation : anticipate <we didn’t think we’d have any trouble>
8 a : to center one’s thoughts on <talks and thinks business> b : to form a mental picture of
9 : to subject to the processes of logical thought <think things out>intransitive verb 1 a : to exercise the powers of judgment, conception, or inference : reason b : to have in the mind or call to mind a thought
2 a : to have the mind engaged in reflection : meditate b : to consider the suitability <thought of her for president>
3 : to have a view or opinion <thinks of himself as a poet>
4 : to have concern —usually used with of <a man must think first of his family>
5 : to consider something likely : suspect <may happen sooner than you think>
— think·er noun
— think better of : to reconsider and make a wiser decision
— think much of : to view with satisfaction : approve —usually used in negative constructions <I didn’t think much of the new car>
synonyms think, conceive, imagine, fancy, realize, envisage, envision mean to form an idea of. think implies the entrance of an idea into one’s mind with or without deliberate consideration or reflection <I just thought of a good joke>. conceive suggests the forming and bringing forth and usually developing of an idea, plan, or design <conceived of a new marketing approach>. imagine stresses a visualization <imagine you’re at the beach>. fancy suggests an imagining often unrestrained by reality but spurred by desires <fancied himself a super athlete>. realize stresses a grasping of the significance of what is conceived or imagined <realized the enormity of the task ahead>. envisage and envision imply a conceiving or imagining that is especially clear or detailed <envisaged a totally computerized operation> <envisioned a cure for the disease>.
synonyms think, cogitate, reflect, reason, speculate, deliberate mean to use one’s powers of conception, judgment, or inference. think is general and may apply to any mental activity, but used alone often suggests attainment of clear ideas or conclusions <teaches students how to think>. cogitate implies deep or intent thinking <cogitated on the mysteries of nature>. reflect suggests unhurried consideration of something recalled to the mind <reflecting on fifty years of married life>. reason stresses consecutive logical thinking <able to reason brilliantly in debate>. speculate implies reasoning about things theoretical or problematic <speculated on the fate of the lost explorers>. deliberate suggests slow or careful reasoning before forming an opinion or reaching a conclusion or decision <the jury deliberated for five hours>.
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THANKS
Etymology: plural of Middle English thank, from Old English thanc thought, gratitude; akin to Old High German dank gratitude, Latin tongēre to know
Date: before 12th century
1 : kindly or grateful thoughts : gratitude
2 : an expression of gratitude <return thanks before the meal> —often used in an utterance containing no verb and serving as a courteous and somewhat informal expression of gratitude <many thanks>
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MIND
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English gemynd; akin to Old High German gimunt memory, Latin ment-, mens mind, monēre to remind, warn, Greek menos spirit, mnasthai, mimnēskesthai to remember
Date: before 12th century
1 : recollection, memory <keep that in mind> <time out of mind>
2 a : the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons b : the conscious mental events and capabilities in an organism c : the organized conscious and unconscious adaptive mental activity of an organism
3 : intention, desire <I changed my mind>
4 : the normal or healthy condition of the mental faculties
5 : opinion, view
6 : disposition, mood
7 a : a person or group embodying mental qualities <the public mind> b : intellectual ability
8 capitalized Christian Science : god 1b
9 : a conscious substratum or factor in the universe
10 : attention <pay him no mind>
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Stop the Storm 