Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 1

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 1 - The Stream

Mid-summer in the mountains of New Mexico: I sat in a stream on a large rock, surrounded by the riffles of the swift current. Feet rested upon smaller rocks in the flow. With eyes were transfixed upon the clear waters coursing around me, I listened to the gurgles. The eddies hypnotized. A phrase I knew floated upwards into my mind, unbidden, a silently heard thought:

“The stream of consciousness.”

The term has been in use for more than a hundred years, championed by William James, a founder of American psychology. “Consciousness,” as he wrote in chapter 9 of his still renowned Principles of Psychology, “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. . . A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”

In his Talks to Teachers, he emphasized its significance:

“Now the immediate fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. . . The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science."

The metaphor feels right. Our inner being does seem to flow. Thoughts and feelings glide along, sometimes smoothly, at other times with turbulence. Yet I am a stream and that is a primal fact.

As a stream, however, aren’t I, in a sense, paradoxical? On one hand, the moment-to-moment mind is like a parcel of water moving in the real stream, shifting yet always bounded to its own unique present. It’s my flowing ‘now.’ On the other hand, via memory the mind is aware of its own experienced past, and via anticipation of the impending future. Thus unlike the moving parcel of water, the mind lives—is spread—broadly. We are both in the passing stream and also upstream and downstream. We are somewhat like the entire stream. From my perch on the rock, I can look both upstream and downstream. Is it the same with the stream of consciousness?

How can a particular slice of mental time within the ongoing flow know that there is an ongoing flow? A parcel in the moment, the now, seems to sense the larger whole. We might answer, “It’s obvious, we use memory and anticipation.” But these processes are quite mysterious, especially when we use them to provide definition to the self, the “I.” It is one thing to recall my morning’s breakfast. It is altogether another level of abstraction to be able to say, “I am the flow,” as the “I” seems limited to the viewpoint from a mere parcel in the flow. We’re clearly an oddball kind of stream. And what fun we get from this mental ability. We can contemplate the stream of consciousness while within the stream of consciousness.

References:

James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology (Chapter IX, The stream of thought). Sourced from https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/index.htm

James, William. 1899, 1900, 1925 (New York: Henry Holt and Company). Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. Sourced from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16287/pg16287-images.html

(Note: The italics in the quotes are from William James.)

© 2024 Tyler Volk

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