Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 34

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 34 -- Learning Contentment

The physical task of the day was painting the porch floor. It needed a double coat for protection. Taking advantage of the opportunity I changed the color from the old battleship gray to a new juniper green.  

How much do I want or expect consciousness to do? After all, as many researchers have shown, consciousness is very limited in its capacity to actively hold concepts or objects. Loading up the limited capacity of consciousness can weaken one’s will power, as experiments have revealed. 

For example, in one, subjects were given a list of numbers to memorize and then told to go down a hall to another room for a test, remembering, of course, the list. Others were given no list but were also sent down the hall. Along the hall, they passed a table with two kind of desserts, chocolate cake and fresh fruit salad, and were asked to choose one to take along to the room. A larger percent of list-memorizers chose the chocolate cake. The explanation given by the social psychologists who ran the experiment is that most people have long term goals of health and thinness and they know that the fruit salad is the healthier choice, especially during the middle of the day. But the cognitive load from carrying a memorized list of numbers in their heads weakened their ability to resist the immediate temptation of the chocolate cake. Stress leads to comfort eating. I’ve been there.

Though consciousness has its weak points doesn’t mean we should throw all trust to the unconscious. After all, the unconscious can be blamed for choosing the chocolate cake. And what about trusting our murderous urges, avarice, gluttony? Or trusting wanton sexual drives? Yet, in daily life, for everything from recognizing that a tree is a tree to having what turn out to be good gut intuitions about life decisions, we have to rely on help from the vast cognitive processing capabilities of our unconscious. Four weeks ago, when caught in the lightning storm, my unconscious recognized that the lightning storm was over before I did consciously. When returning from Dittert site, my unconscious tossed up the memory of the ranger telling me I could use binoculars, though in that case the memory was too late to help me. 

How to harmonize the benefits of consciousness with those of the unconscious? On one hand, it seems that we should struggle full speed ahead with the quest to make consciousness stronger and more developed. On the other hand, we also need to sometimes surrender to the fact that consciousness has limitations. This proposed balancing might take different forms, perhaps, as one example, a stance as simple as giving up on the possibility of encompassing it all, of reaching a final answer to many of these largest questions I’ve been exploring. In other words, we can admit one might miss something large about life’s potential range, about getting to the bottom in thinking about thinking, or about awareness of awareness of the braided streams in all their permutations. The complexity of the whirlpools and the question of who is it that goes into them might be eternally perplexing, as well. Humbly do as much as one can.  

Ryoanji Temple, in Kyoto, possesses one of the most famous Zen rock gardens, with fifteen rocks set in a sea of raked white gravel. Its tea room is graced by a circular stone wash basin, which has a central square well for water, scooped up with a bamboo ladle. Around the basin’s upper surface an inscription is carved in four characters: “I learn only to be contented.” 

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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