494. Beyond Acting on Our Beliefs

Nothing matters. Everything matters. Both statements are true to equal degree. Clearly, our job as individuals is to pick and choose the engagements that are most meaningful to us. Which puts us in an awkward position because those around us want us to engage in ways that are most meaningful to themselves. 

It is the nature of mindfarers to occupy public spaces where such conflicts are out in the open. The only thing we can do is pay attention to the forces acting on all of us and select the issues we as individuals find most personally meaningful, letting go of the others to be dealt with by those who choose to do so.

We each serve as helmsman of our own ship, correcting our course as we go. The choosing of a course is why we are here, how our ancestors got us to this point by navigating under their own stars. We owe it to them to do the same under the stars that shine most clearly for us.

As to the relation between mind and brain: consciousness is not contained in either our brains or minds but in our engagements as they couple perception to meaningful judgment and on to purposeful action in nature, culture, community, and family. Our minds do not fit neatly into our brains but extend to include our sensory and behavioral engagements as well.

You might expect an octogenarian to issue generalities of that magnitude. But as a unique individual, I am at the core of my own generalities. I am speaking for myself, trying to use fitting, encompassing words to do so.

However you take my words, your unique person is at the core of those same words as they speak to you as you know yourself. I read them my way; you read them your way. The main thing is to maintain our intelligent judgement as we consider our own minds.

Those in the truth-seeking professions—philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, theology, forensics, and law, for example—already know this. Each person is primarily out for himself, and can justify whatever act she commits in the name of private (not public) service.

To simply act on our beliefs is not good enough. We must catch ourselves sharpening, emphasizing, distorting those beliefs for personal advantage. Throughout this blog, I have drawn attention to the self-serving nature of our mental processes. In rounds of self-reflection, it is essential to keep a neutral perspective.

Robert Bly advises us to follow our bliss. Thoreau says to follow our dreams and imagination. I say we should engage as we must the situations we get into as the ones having most to teach us, while remaining somewhat remote as if we were truly impartial, not agents of our own beliefs and opinions. It is that critical faculty that is essential to self-reflection. Without it, we become little more than lobbyists or apologists for our subjective beliefs.

As children we do as we are told because our parents are not only bigger and stronger, but also likely to be wiser than we are. We have neither the strength nor the wit to resist. But as adults, to do as we are told binds us to the will of others who have not lived our lives or thought our thoughts, so are addressing their own motives from their own perspectives, not ours.

Too, those others are likely to be dealing with situations different from those we face at the time. The problems we work on are best answered in the context of our unique repertory of personal options.

To ask what Jesus (Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mohammad, et al.) would do assumes that we understand the situation he was in when he did what he did, and that that situation is the same as the one we are facing today. Which, given the vagaries of time and place, is a highly questionable assumption.

We learn most from situations we analyze and address as our own. When we make mistakes, as we surely will, they are our personal mistakes, leading to our personal learning. The essential thing is to engage our inner selves without subterfuge.

491. Outer World as Personal Reference System

Engagement is not a trade-off, a simple alternation of give-and-take. It is founded on paying attention to input and output simultaneously, all (or much of) the time, so there is no major gap between them, no lull in attention to both self and world.

When we get on a roll, that’s what happens. We are in the moment totally, not separating input from output but seeing both as integral parts of the same state of mind. We are with it, whatever it is. We are mindfarers so fully engaged with our surroundings that we become an integral part of the scene wherever we are.

As mindfarers, we want our companions to win along with us, not go down in defeat. Each needs to win in her own way. If Israelis and Palestinians fight until only one is left standing, they both lose. Neither side can sacrifice its integrity to the other.

Mindfaring (finding our inner way) is a matter of coordinating our lives with our surroundings, as in dancing, as in music, as in a good marriage, as in sports governed by rules. It is being both with ourselves and with the other, not in spite of.

It is a matter of being together with someone or something else. Of being yourself in a scene or setting that is wholly itself at the same time, so your engagement is mutual, both on an equal footing. Each plays her part, not going off on his own. It is an extension of a state of mind that embraces our partner in engagement, whether person, place, or thing.

Such engagements are fundamentally different states of mind than opposing, conflicting, fighting, defeating. There are times when you must run for your life, and times you must run toward your life or it might get away from you. Mindfaring is running toward, not away. It is seeking, not avoiding. Moving ahead, always ahead (seldom in a straight line). In company with respected companions. Along a path that leads to a natural culmination of the going itself.

Mindfaring is powered by the dimensions of intelligence (experience or consciousness) that make up the situation we are in at a particular point in our life engagements. Those dimensions are qualities that, taken collectively, give structure to a particular moment of awareness and experience.

Such dimensions reflect the balance between the affective roilings and turnings-over in our minds or, in neural terms, along the axis between the midbrain reticular formation and the prefrontal cortex via the limbic system (including amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, and septal nuclei)—all in response to the signals derived from our ongoing engagement with our surroundings that spark our intelligence, judgment, and subsequent actions.

Here is a diagram from page 275 of my 1982 dissertation, Metaphor to Mythology, that illustrates neural pathways in the brain that support our engagements with the world.

Sensory pathways in the brain, sensory input on right, motor pathways on left, limbic system lower center, loops of engagement suggested by dotted lines.

In experiential terms, those affective roilings and turnings-over in our mental innards include arousal, memory, expectancy, attention, sensory impressions, recognition, understanding, imagination, meaning, thought, feeling, emotion, biological and cultural values, humor, comparison, polarity, attitude, and judgment, all abetted by our goals, relationships, projects, selection of tools, skills, language skills, speech, gestures, and overt action, among other dimensions that come to the fore in specific situations.

How does this bear on the relationship between mind and brain? We are each born to our respective worlds of nature, culture, community, and family, all of which challenge and feed our minds on a daily basis, so we become part of them, and they part of us as a kind of reference system that, as we engage with it, defines our uniqueness in our particular time and place in our Earthly career.

Our brains process the endless stream of signals resulting from our engagements, but leave nature, culture, community, and family outside of ourselves where we can draw upon them as needed in particular situations.

The situations we find (or put) ourselves in are temporary configurations of the dimensions of our intelligence as affected by the roilings and turnings-over spurred by our ongoing engagements. They morph into subsequent situations as modified by the ever-changing flux of our experience.

We don’t lug all our memories around with us as an accumulating store of baggage, but develop neural networks capable of recognizing familiar patterns of traffic flowing through them. Our brains excel at pattern recognition, nesting ever-finer concepts together on a great many levels of discrimination. Our brains give us a capacity to recognize patterns as having been met before, not to store those patterns in finest detail.

That is, our brains are no bigger than they need to be to process the engagements we set up between our adventurous insides and ever-changing outsides. What is outside stays outside as a facet of nature, culture, community, and family. When we die, we die to them. They stay behind; we don’t take them with us.

The brain is not a filing cabinet or a closet full of old clothes. It is a director of traffic from perception to action via an experienced and intelligent self that serves as a situation evaluator in matching incoming sensory impressions to outgoing gestures, speech, and actions.