Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 30

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 30 A Second Night of Meta-I

It’s no wonder I awoke again in night’s final hours when I should have been in deep dreams. Nature’s curtain of darkness drops at eight o’clock, and after an hour at the campfire in the chilling air I’m ready at nine for sleep.

Again, I became the total stream of awareness. The major feeder streams ran along as equals: river rush, song in head, tooth pain, inner voice, body feelings. Breathing might count on its own as a stream; the neuroscientists can quibble about how to parse the sensations. The song this night was different, one from the Allman Brothers Band. I was aware of all these streams of subjective experience and was aware, continually, that I was having the subjective experience of being aware. Interesting. It’s the ole’ conundrum of the stream observing the stream. Awareness, but also awareness of awareness.

I was able to get some ideas directly down on the tape recorder, and thus I’ll switch to the present tense of my thoughts.

When I say I’m going camping, it’s not clear what the I refers to. Obviously, there’s a body, as a body, but also there’s an experiencer. Take the straightforward sentence, “I cut myself.” (That did happen yesterday.) The sentence refers to the body as myself. But also implied is the experiencer of the cut, the linguistic I of that sentence. Evidently the I is not simple.

We start using language when we are wee things. It then develops as we develop. Language . . . it’s so complex and allows reference to I and other aspects of the self, and feelings, memories, at this instant and then at the next one, in various contexts, so that by the time we are old enough to really wonder at the state of the entire wondrous situation and ask questions about who we are and what is awareness and what is thought . . . well, we can’t really plumb the true depths . . . we are already too embedded and formed . . . we are too complex. It’s the limit Augustine reached.

The tooth pain, the water rush, the facts of the inner music and inner voice are difficult to change. But I can change some contents. It doesn’t take too much effort, for example, to switch the song. I could go back to Beethoven if I wanted. Here the topic of will comes up. Suppose I say that I can change the contents of the music stream. That’s a willful I. But what is this I? Is it awareness? Can we meaningfully speak of awareness making judgments? And of what? Of itself? Sure, I am awareness. And there is an awareness of awareness. In a way the situation is analogous to the cottonwood tree at Lyman Lake. Awareness can be enhanced by being aware of it.

The awareness of the multiple streams takes place in three-dimensional space. My body, of course, is extended in a shape-filling nerve network. My inner voice is tickling my throat a bit. High up in my head is the music, from a spot above my ears. There’s a sense of location to the various streams of thought. The music is not happening in my big toe.

You are a . . . you are a meta-I. You have many I’s. The I of the body. The I of autobiography. Of likes and dislikes. Of memory. Of analytical thinking. You get through the day. You are not locked up. Therefore you are a whole system. You are a meta-I. The biggest I is like a tree, the other I’s are like the acorns. The world library of temptations: these books—read me, read me, read me! Pain, music, they all have their functions. Including the voice, by which I express experience, and . . . manipulate, and tell stories, entertain, explore ideas . . . all.

The next morning I continued in my notebook to reflect on the experience. With regard to the contents of the inner voice, it seems that sequences do not feed gradually and continuously from the unconscious into consciousness. Gradually would be like the streaming of a movie or the steady emergence of a long train from a tunnel. Rather, the situation seems like cavorting on a dance floor with colored tiles that can individually light up. You step on one and it goes off, filling the room of consciousness with a fixed sequence of language. Sequences seem to erupt, like pimples bursting. Who is doing the dancing? A drunkard? Perhaps the spontaneous manner in which they appear to go off is just that: appearance. Perhaps underneath, down in the neural dynamics, the eruptions or pimples of thought we witness are winners in some kind of competition among contenders for consciousness. There’s something that feels right about the eruption metaphor—like geysers building up steam and then popping off in a stream with a beginning and an ending, then followed by another eruption from someplace else in that borderland between the unconscious and consciousness.

There are two basic possibilities. In one, using a metaphor of pores between the unconscious and consciousness, the sequences are already in the unconscious and merely pass into consciousness through the pores. In the other, the eruption metaphor, the sequences are only there as inchoate energy, and the actual forms, the contents of the sequences are only created at the moment they erupt in the field of awareness itself. It’s like a geyser. The pressure is there in the unconscious. But the actual form of the geyser is only born in the atmosphere of consciousness.

In terms of the question of how to establish an evaluator, the two metaphors result in different goals. In the pore metaphor, the goal would be to alter the structure and dynamics of the pores, for example, their sizes and controls on their openings and closings. In the eruption metaphor, the goal would be to alter the context of consciousness, since that context will affect the pattern of the eruption when it happens. Here the field of awareness can affect the contents of the sequences. That’s hopeful. Of course, the two metaphors are not mutually exclusive. Both are potential ways to think about the structure of thinking.

The inner voice was only one component of the total stream, albeit with a special function, to give voice (usually to be “me” in the default assumption). In addition to most this night’s streams, which otherwise were the same as those on the previous night’s awakening, I drifted into visualization, which was intriguing, because the previous night did not include imagery as a stream. On this night occurred a series of image flows too fast to even capture on a taped description in real time: I analyzed high-level political insanity, as if talking in person to the neighbors or to my father. Then I went into a vacation memory with my lover, probably Pennsylvania a summer earlier. Then I imagined teaching in coming fall, the very first class session of my large biosphere course, and my trying to save Fridays for myself, dreading too many scheduled meetings (Where was my evaluator!!! I had said no job thoughts).

Yes, where was the evaluator? During the first few moments of imagery I said “remarkable,” and just let the images play as my inner voice commented on this new component, feeder stream of the total awareness field of flow (“New player!”). But then the images took over—engaging vignettes, as if I were letting fantasies run as raw ideas for a film (“So that’s how directors create!”). Eventually I must have entered a state that was more dreaming than awake, yet just awake enough to be aware of the vignettes and to know that numerous ones were happening but not able to recall them except for the few already noted. Some were sexy. Some were abstract, almost fictional in quality (“Wow, to be a fiction writer and live in a whole another world!”). This experience is similar to what is called lucid dreaming, in which during the dream you are aware that you are dreaming. But the experience also had all the other feeder streams, at least initially, as equal braids.

Finally, the sky lightened in early dawn. During what seemed a clearest moment, just before the imagery began, I had sensed that awareness was integral with a function of control. There was will somewhere there in the free-flowing field of awareness.

Following a breakfast of grape-nuts cereal, raisins, powdered milk, and water, I lingered in packing up camp, but by late morning I, all of me, was headed out of the wilderness and toward home.


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