Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 2

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

by Tyler Volk

Day 2 - The Mesh

In the freest moments during my experiments with seclusion, usually my mind was not like a real stream with a simple direction. I stood under a towering a Ponderosa pine and gazed down at the bed of dried pine needles. They had fallen from the tree over time and built into a thick carpet. The pattern of needles struck me as relevant to my investigation. An inner voice proclaimed, “This is me!”

Unlike water, the web of needles exhibits no steady flow along a single path.  Each long needle could be an individual line of thought, perhaps a mini-stream. But if traveling along a needle, if that corresponds to the flow of a thought, you  reach the end and perhaps start along a different needle. The needles as a network are entangled, akin to the loopy nets of neurons in the human brain. But I’m interested in the needles as a metaphor for patterns of conscious thinking. 

From a short coherent path of consciousness various angles of other possibilities splay off in disconnected segments that can lead to new regions of thought. You can even and often do go backwards to revisit previous thoughts. The mini-you on a needle can crawl along the same needle again, to re-run the same thought again, to feel the same anxiety or thrill again.  

Here, as in the case of the stream, the shape of consciousness can be sensed as a pattern, created by memory. Some needles might be seen as the previous day’s experiences, scattered on the ground, set in place. Some needles are dug in deep from prior years or decades. Some are anticipated scenes yet to come. All are parts of the networks of self. This needle I am looking right at, detached from any explicitly retrieved memories or future projections, is my presence in the here and now, which can include the following thought: “The mind is a mesh of pine needles.”  

We usually know only a limited range of a few needles at any point in our self-monitoring. A lot of the mesh is unconscious at any time. We lurch in and out of moods, of scenes, songs, memories, and projected hopes, of replays of the past and fantastic imaginings into the future. We can, at times, get stuck, caught on a sharp needle tip, unable to move either ahead or back.

The outstanding enigma that I see coming from all this prickly meandering is, surprise surprise, the act of observation. The observation of the mind’s patterns is itself a mental pattern, perhaps on a higher level. We are both in the mesh in some particular detail and, in a sense, above it. We cannot be exclusively “above,” because, paradoxically, when we observe our self in time, that takes place in the present moment, just like anything else that comes to attention, whether white cloud, singing bird, or morning’s hearty breakfast. Nonetheless, when we do the special observing that leads to metaphoric maps of the mind, such as streams or needles, we necessarily hover in a lofty, abstract “above,” by virtue of memory and anticipation. 

These two cognitive processes—the detailed within and lofty above—somehow weave our moments together (another mapping I just made). In the moment, we can enjoy a vision of the whole mesh at that same instant in which we are confined to a needle within the mesh. Therefore, we can be global within the local. 

To say it again, that might seem paradoxical. For now, I’m content merely to say it’s better to be paradoxical than simple. There is a saying that if the mind were simple enough to be easily figured out, then it wouldn’t be a mind. 

Reference 

About that final sentence: I remembered the saying as referring to the mind. But checking for a reference to place here, it was about the brain. A web site traces the earliest attribution and subsequent citations of this cool observation: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” To me, saying “mind,” rather than “brain,” is just as good. 

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