Layers of Mind
One of the main benefits of a meditation practice, in my experience, is the way it can allow you to look directly at the operations of your own mind, like a sort of reverse microscope. I recently took an afternoon to contemplate/investigate my subjective conscious experience and thought I’d share some of my findings with you. What I initially found was that I seemed to experience two apparently different modes of mind that I’ll refer to as 1) the self-conscious thinking mind and 2) the experiencing mind.
The self-conscious thinking mind consisted of verbal narrative, essentially talking to myself mostly with regard to plans for the immediate future, reminding myself of things I need or want to do, or just commentary on my current experience (“hmm, my toes feel cold, maybe I should get a blanket… oh yea, I need to get that form signed… what should I get for dinner?”). This is the mind I’m very familiar with and is most closely tied to the ego identity of “Charles.”
On the other hand, I found what you might call the experiencing mind in which I was absorbed in some sensory experience. This was something I would notice only after I had switched back into the self-conscious thinking mind. For example, I was listening to music (D’Angelo’s “Voodoo” album) and seemed to become part of the music for moments at a time, living inside its vibrations with complete loss of the narrative “Charles” during those moments. Once I started commenting upon these experiences, though (“I love this song”… “wow, where was I a moment ago”), it seemed that I had already switched out of experiencing and back into self-conscious thinking (maybe we can’t be fully experiencing something and think about it at the same time?). Throughout the afternoon, my subjective account seemed to bounce back and forth between these two modes of mind, like diving under water and coming up for air.
2 Modes of Mind
As the day progressed and as I took more notes on my experience, it appeared as though this bifurcated model was missing something. There was also a third mode, and I’ll refer to this as the unself-conscious thinking mind. This layer appeared to exist between the other two and consisted of verbal narrative but in a way that was unconcerned with the notion of “Charles,” unconcerned with how others may or may not perceive me or with what I need to do in the future. This thinking mind was using words just for fun, it was exploring things, it was attempting to piece together this model of the mind that I’m currently writing about for no other reason than it being interesting and enjoyable, like a game.
3 Modes of Mind
In the graphic above, I’ve intentionally colored the various modes as red, yellow, and green, as they strike me as increasingly less constricted and more expansive ways of experiencing the world (moving from red-stop to green-go). However, it seems that we can easily become caught up in an existence of only the top red layer, the self-conscious thinking mind. Through this investigative experience, it struck me that a most enjoyable life might be one that exists as a sort of wavelength moving back and forth between the unself-conscious thinking mind and simply experiencing, while minimizing the dominance/tyranny of the self-conscious thinking mind. You could see this as like learning how to swim and how to hold your breath under water versus nearly always staying above the surface or choking on the water when you do go under. Easier said than done? Yes, hah. But my guess is you may have a visceral sense of how to move deeper into the 2nd and 3rd layers if you want to, and I hope this little exploration of my mind can be helpful to you in your own inner contemplation.
Maybe we can’t be fully experiencing something and thinking about it at the same time.