50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 44 Proud of Breathing
In the early evening I took my regular bicycle trip to the cliff dwellings and back, after a long, rare day in town. Had some overall anxiety about getting ready for New York and the hubbub that will soon engulf me, had to make a decision about a writing assignment, and ran miles of errands in town, including sending a shipment of boxes back East . . . I don’t know . . . how quickly I lose my sense of spaciousness. So I just said to myself: timelessness. On the bike ride I stopped to visit an ancient Mogollon handprint on a rock face. Timelessness!
It can be either intrusive or quite helpful to mentally carry a little reminder, such as “Timelessness!”—like those little stickers people put up on their refrigerators “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” “Tomorrow is the next day of the rest of your life.” We might chuckle at their simplicity, but they are overview thoughts, nevertheless, in a sense thinking about thinking, aspects of the evaluator. Such reminders might be considered as lifelines, thrown to a seeker swirling around, perhaps even close to drowning, in a whirlpool. After all, the loss of awareness of awareness when caught up in automatic programs is a kind of drowning, overcome by the water, the traditional symbol for the unconscious.
Look—there’s no guarantee that thinking about thinking is the answer to the Big Problem of free will. Nonetheless—I say go for it—because, as remarked several times earlier, thinking about thinking is a form of consciousness that develops later in life, a capability that starts off weak and can continually deepen with practice, and there is more of a chance (whatever expressing this as a probability means) that the level of consciousness called thinking about thinking is less something automatic (and thus less robotic) and more something closer to what you want to call “you.”
A benefit of developing larger periods of silence and more inner observation is the ability to discern useful from useless thinking. But you know, you know . . . jeesh . . . a lot of what I might conclude to be useless cognitive stuff comes from inner dynamics that were formed by the time I was three years old, from my childhood personality . . . yeah, and so that stuff is me, like my heart is me; it’s all very important, I don’t want to get rid of it. I don’t want to get rid of my mental patterns that developed before three years old or I’d collapse, in the way that I’d collapse without a heart. The heart, wondrous and all, is a given, I didn’t do anything about it and can’t now, except try and keep it healthy with proper eating, most of the time. Similarly, even though my childhood cognitive patterns cannot be regarded as a highest level of being and a more profound state to which I consciously evolve, they are givens.
These inner programs run (and run and run) to deal with the various anxieties that we take on, often related to desires, and are imposed on us from society, by circumstances that we fell into by certain decisions at certain times, creating self-shaping, deep-rooted trees that then produce acorns, which spin as little whirlpools that are themselves usually much larger in span than we foresaw when we began to form them or let them form. Often we make a decision about something in life when we are sixteen, or twenty-two, or thirty-four, anticipating that the path from that decision will lead to a place that is often better than where we in fact did end up. And there are pleasant surprises. Whatever our retrospective judgments about the outcomes, we don’t anticipate how many ongoing automatisms we are going to be bound to by choosing certain life courses.
The more abstract level sought—perhaps going so far as three levels: thinking about the thinking about thinking, which is about the design the evaluator—can be done, now, at any age. It’s a level that we will be able to look back on and be proud of.
Pride is one of those so-called ‘social emotions’ that involve relationships and which develop later than the more basic, ‘primary emotions’ such as anger and fear. But still we learn pride fairly young. Trained by praise, we feel proud about certain dispositions, talents, and accomplishments that we had when we were young . . . Oh, this is a really generous child, this is a child who is smart at words, or math, or oh how athletic this girl is at six, look how well she already swims. People praise us and we respond with an emotion that we did not have to work hard to feel; we clearly have a biological disposition to feel pride. We can be trained to it, just like we are trained to language.
Are you proud that you read English? If so and a native speaker, that’s being very generous to yourself. You’re then probably a highly optimistic person, more optimistic than I am most of the time. But I myself can’t take great pride at having learned English. It was just a reaction of my brain from having been set down by the genetic roulette into American society in the later half of the 20th century. I learned English.
If at this life stage if I pick up a book on essay writing and improve myself as a result of my own conscious decision to write better, obviously I can be more proud at that. (We learn to praise ourselves!) It’s the glass-is-half-full kind of person who is proud at any little thing that happens—“I’m really proud that my lungs are exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen.” Maybe that’s the way to go, maybe that’s a highly developed kind of person. But I think if we really examine it, and especially if we want to become a stream that gives itself pride, which could be a goal for thinking about thinking, then our focus should be on life’s later, most recent times and the higher levels of introspection.
© 2025 by Tyler Volk
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