Sources

It has happened to us all. We are thinking of something else, or sometimes thinking of nothing at all, and an idea pops into our minds, a solution to some challenge or problem we have. For me, this typically happens when I am engaged in something physical, such as hiking and, when my knees used to cooperate, running. Or I can be bending over the pick up a dropped piece of paper, taking a shower, or just walking across a parking lot. My body is active, my mind at rest. I am not trying to avoid thoughts. I just don’t have them, have forgotten to either think or to worry about thinking too much. There is no meditative state being sought. There is just movement. And then, almost as if it is placed inside me by an invisible hand, there is an idea.

That’s your subconscious, you might be thinking. Well, sure, maybe. But using the word “subconscious” to refer to the vast uncertainty and murky experience that lies beneath the level of my awareness is like calling everything under the surface of the earth ‘subterranean’. It is little more than a name for a part of the world, its matter, or its presentation that we want to reference. It tells us nothing about that space or place. I have conscious awareness. And I have stuff beneath or separate to that conscious awareness. While I suppose it is useful to acknowledge that the separate stuff exists, it does not advance my understanding, access to, or leverage of that stuff. It merely frames the subconscious as a proverbial “black box”.

This argument, however, ignores the possibility that you and others have insight into the subterranean world of the mind and ideas. Because I bet you have theories and a set of your own experiences.

You might counter: Mark, your brain, mind, or whatever we want to call it likes to process problems when you aren’t consciously thinking about them. In other words, I am thinking about something when I’m not thinking about it.

Sure, I’m open to that. At work, I sometimes tell colleagues that a particular issue, something that feels serious and weighty but does not need an immediate decision, is a one, two, or three ‘night sleep’. We all identify with this, the occasional need to “sleep on” something. Doing so relieves the pressure of immediate analysis. It can help establish some emotional distance with a situation that, at first glance, does not seem to offer good choices. Or perhaps the options are clear but there is unhappiness or upset associated with them. We want to choose wisely. So we request the gift of time associated with one or more rotations of the earth beneath its sun. For me, particularly thorny issues require seven nights of rest. The extra time buffers the need to choose from the emotions associated with both selecting and then implementing that choice.

You are simply placing the problem into a queue for your mind to address when you aren’t paying it attention.

Uh, well, maybe. If the concept is that the brain processes and “thinks” without my awareness in a directed and intentional way, that sections of the brain work on difficulties with independent agency in the same way that operational components of a large organization tackle and report on assignments they receive, I can accept that such a process is possible yet I must admit to feeling a bit unsettled by it. It conjures to my internal image-making a set of subcontractors at work inside my head, each responsible for different tasks, all addressing those tasks in ways about which I have, and can have, no visibility or oversight. “Here’s a problem”, the main contractor I call my consciousness instructs its subs. “Report back when you have it sorted.” Then I sleep, have dinner, and carry on with the routines of my life while some tiny, immaterial parts of me busily process, sort, reprocess, and finalize.

No, no, you are framing this the wrong way. Those aren’t mini-consciousnesses. You should consider them more as software programs. Your brain is one large supercomputer. You give different parts of it scripts, bits of code, and it runs those code sets through neural networks that, in sum total, we call your mind. There is no conscious or subconscious. There is no mind at all. There is only the physiology of neuroanatomy and its intricately dynamic relationship with immunochemistry through a complex array of electrical and intra-cellular neurotransmitters. What you experience as your mind is none other than the experience of your own unique constellation of connections, synapses, and sub-cellular communications.

Yikes. Who said that? That’s not the direction I intended this blog post to head. I was expecting to share examples of great scientific and philosophic breakthroughs, stories of how individual people pondered, toiled, and set to solve sticky problems who were unable to do so with intention, chalk, or pen only to somewhat miraculously land on solutions when their attention was pre-occupied with daily life. I also thought I’d share my own recent experience of encountering solutions for unsettling circumstances when I have reached up during a stretching pose or massaged my scalp with shampoo while taking a shower. I wanted instead to speak about the immense potential of our innate ability to connect with sources outside of our physical bodies. Could our internal breakthroughs in thought sometimes arise from flickers of inspiration lit by our spiritual selves and how those parts of our being interact non-atomically with the immanence of other spirits, other consciousness, the collective spirit, and even God itself?

My fingers felt the need to rush those last few sentences onto the page, lest the voice or perspective that represents pure physiology establish connection with the keyboard on my lap before the intuition that motivates my imagination got its chance to express itself.

Swiftly though I recall – how I do this I don’t know – that light is both particle and wave, that existence is both solitary and communal, that experience is both explicable and ineffable. And in turn it seems fitting to mention how the German scientist August Kekule reported, in the nineteenth century, that his discovery of the ring structure of benzene was the result of a daydream involving a snake seizing its own tail while he was riding the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus in London. Some lampooned Kekule for sharing what sounded like an outlandish story. All the rest of us identify with the experience of ideas arriving inside our awareness seemingly of their own accord. We aren’t trying, like Kekule, to figure out the chemical structure of the world. We are only trying to sort out the meaning of life and the source of its inspirations. If the answer to that search involves a combination of mental software, physical hardware, and incorporeal engagement with a marvelous essence outside and within the experience I have come to know as “me”, well, I, for one, can’t wait to stop thinking about it.