50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 24 - Three Weird Sisters
When I drove up into Arizona a week ago, I stopped at the quaint town of Springerville, with two good Mexican restaurants and a used bookstore. For a buck I picked up a copy of a book written 1500 years ago, in Latin, late Roman Empire, later translated from Latin to English and reproduced in multitudinous editions, one of which included the old paperback for sale in the cozy shop owned by a dedicated, book-loving woman named Ann.
Ordinarily, I would not have been in the least interested in Augustine’s Confessions, though he was an innovator in the development of early Christianity and author of one of the biggest hits of the Christian Canon. But, right before my road trip, I had read a quote in Karen Armstrong’s A History of God that made me sit up. Referring to the three key properties within the human soul—memory, understanding, and will—Augustine observed:
“I remember that I possess memory and understanding and will; I understand that I understand, will, and remember; I will my own willing and remembering and understanding.”
Just look at that. He has created three meta-levels by applying, in turn, each of the three types of mental activity to the other two, and to itself.
His technique is a clue for how to form meta-levels from any set of cognitive faculties we artfully discern. When the streams of consciousness are braided with each other, they don’t just form a larger whole in their combination. They operate as cognitive functions that operate upon each other, and upon themselves.
If we consider verbal thoughts, imagery, music, math, emotions, body kinesthetics, and the sensory flows as several basic streams of thinking, many combinations are possible. We can create words about images, about emotions, or about words. We can have emotions about music, about imagery, or about emotions. Not all the pairs seem equally frequent or likely. We don’t usually think mathematically about emotions, for instance. And yet, when a decision looms and we weigh the projected emotions, we do at least crudely quantify.
Exploring how the various streams of thinking can be applied to each other might provide new directions for thinking about thinking.
All our streams are crucial. We live as braids.
After breakfast, I hiked up and along the ridge trail toward the Three Weird Sisters, wearing a knee brace, loose white cotton clothing, and a wide-brim straw hat. It’s a huff and puff with vast vistas all around, the higher peaks of Mogollon mountains to the north and those of the Black Range about twenty miles to the east.
From my past visits, I knew that the sisters don’t just look weird. There’s something weird about their setting. So many times I’ve hiked right past them, and then, after concluding I hadn’t hiked far enough, they pop up in my face on the way back.
On the hike to them, I thought over the litany of denials in Augustine’s book. It’s not a matter of just simply “Give up sex and embrace God.” Indeed, he takes on various pleasures in turn, from the physical to the psychological: eating, sex, drinking, each of the senses one by one, and then even our curiosity, our wishes to be feared and loved, and, finally, vanity about self-knowledge itself. Although all are human and to some degree necessary, any single one in excess can serve as a trap. Because of my own partial renunciation in this temporary mountain desert lifestyle, I identified with some of these ideas, which fall into the general category of the via negativa—the way of negation or denial—one traditional practice along the path to enlightenment for Christian and Buddhist mysticism and for asceticism in general.
Finally, in front of me, appeared the Three Weird Sisters. Perhaps they germinated, grew, and ended life in lock step—a gnarly ancient trio of odd skeletons, dead juniper trees who hail the infrequent visitor along the ridge. The sisters seem to hold each other in the company of death, their pure forms visually braided into a branching bare presence much larger than the individuals, a whole both more intensely present and more eternal.
The glory of the external world, from trees in nature to the psychology of friends and loved ones, is that it gives you patterns. But that’s also the problem: the world gives you patterns. It imprints patterns on you without you even being aware of it. Presumably you would want to be truly aware of the patterns absorbed from the culture, from its media, from politicians, newspapers, and educational system.
We are nothing without the imprinted patterns. And yet we know that others (with intentions that vary from best to worst) design and then exude behavioral patterns that entice and make us do things. Some of this design is just an unconscious result of the cultural evolutionary process. What has worked in the past as behavior then spreads and continues to spread.
Though I’d been to the Sisters many times over the years, during my hikes on my chosen times, arriving at their spot on the ridge always makes me feel like a shy intruder into a magic world that is solely theirs.
Countering these concerns about how self gets shaped a lot by the imprint of external patterns is the strong internal urge to create. Augustine might declare creativity as another trap, a distraction. But if seclusion lacked creativity, what would fill the day? Worship of Whatever? For me, I’d rather create. Nature is creative. Humans are the most creative species of all. Repetition is the past. Creation is our future.
Walking back, with songs in my head. No chance of stopping them. Gave up. I felt . . . at ease.
Vultures in the sky, a pair. Creatures, alive, alive like me, achieving feats I look up to in awe. One of the giant black birds glided lower, spying me, carefully eying me. Not today, sweetheart.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
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