Br8 THE WAY WE THINK

Incomplete Relationship between Brain and Mind

The writer claims to be an expert on the human mind, not because he has a string of degrees after his name but because he hasn't. At the age of four he made a vow to discover the truth about people and the world. Ever since, quite apart from the everyday matter of managing to live in the world, his mind has had optimum free space and encouragement independently to work towards this discovery, with the minimum of interference (but maximum discouragement) from formal disciplines of learning imposed from outside, learning that falls short of truth because it comes from an open process of conscious reason that is subject to will, and not from the closed process of independent postconscious reason (optimum reason of this upper mind - see below) that is subject only to truth.

Our Potential - the Fulfilment of Intelligence

We, the human race, are a people endowed with a great power of intelligence. Although our intelligence falls short of fulfilment, its capacity and potential couldn't be greater. Yet, looking at our worldwide infrastructure and collective behaviour, we see a very unintelligent society. Recognition that we've got it all wrong might be expected to lead to the conclusion that we should set about putting it right. That we do not seriously set about this obviously vital job of putting our world right is because we don't yet see the obvious. This leads me to examine the way we think, a way which causes us gullibly to accept the world's insanity.

Thinking is a process of progressive connection occurring within the brain between neurons by way of axons, dendrites and synapses and exploration of the consequent networks. Loosely speaking, the process of organising and testing, correlating and memorising this thinking constitutes the mind. The mind depends for its effective expression on the self.

The self doesn't really think. It is a mobile mirror formed of the genetic instructions and basic convictions of its conditioning. This mirror, its form adjustable, is the focul-point of awareness that reflects the different shifting events of actuality, and the continuously responding interests and concerns of that part of the mind which surrounds the self. These events, interests and concerns are brought to the attention of this focal point of the aware self which then responds with appropriate action, and/or wilfully chooses, either permanently or temporarily, mostly according to its established conditioning and advantage but occasionally not, to adopt certain stances and to identify with certain constructions or trains of thought. That part of the mind which the self wilfully uses in this way I call the conscious mind - the sphere of our usual thinking, which contains the self and our present concept of reality and explains why currently so many different beliefs and opinions are held with conviction. But it does not explain truth, or morality, or conscience.

To explain truth, morality and conscience we have to understand the history of the human mind. The mind resulted from a mutation which gave to humans the opportunity to pass beyond being mainly motivated and guided by instinct. By fulfilling the new faculty of intellect, provided by that mutation, we could follow a different path - that of optimum reason. To appreciate the significance of this it is necessary to understand the formation of the upper human mind, and its function.

Instinct is a behaviour pattern for survival which develops in step with the generally slow process of natural selection. The human brain mutation must have happened suddenly. It had to, because if we were to make survival decisions contrary to the well-tried ways of instinct they must be wise decisions or we'd be in trouble. But there was no time for testing to make sure. Therefore the new brain had to be capable of infinite reason, in order to take account of every possible eventuality in its decision-making processes. This dramatic step, of stupendous potential complexity, was simply achieved by producing a new faculty filled with huge quantities of connectable neurons, giving the new brain an astronomical number of possible inter-connections. We now come to a crucial point. Here was the human race, endowed with a supreme faculty of mind and faced with the problem of surviving. But we already had a conscious mind (now much enhanced by that mutation) which contained, and was ruled by, the self, the id, the ego, the instinctive will.

Consider the significance of the supreme mind, the intellect, capable of all possible reason. Its only reasonable ultimate function can be to discover and realise truth - in all the possible meanings of that word. For such a mind to be devoted to anything else - to getting things wrong or to consistently reaching false conclusions with inevitably disastrous consequences - doesn't make sense at all. The apparent, urgent priority for humans at this formative stage was immediately to seize upon new and more effective ways of surviving and prospering. Potential ultimate reasoning of the whole new mind opened up limitless but unpredictable and time-taking prospective avenues of thought towards truth which didn't help to solve immediate problems. As far as limited consciousness could see in those early days, far from being helpful these mind-wanderings weakened resolve and actually threatened survival prospects.

So the very first decision of the new human race was a far-reaching and disastrous one. We decided to close off the greater part of the new faculty on the grounds that it would lead us into an airy-fairy zone of indecision, whereas what we thought we needed was strong, decisive and seemingly vital action. The self remained confined to the conscious mind whose powers it applied to drives which should have become redundant, the competitive drives of instinct. In other words, we continued the behaviour-pattern of our primate ancestors. But our conscious capacity was much enlarged, giving it increased thinking-power. The human being became the most dangerous and successful competitor in nature's struggle for survival.

This is what we have done ever since - pursued the drives of instinct. At first, while our conscious thinking was slowly developing we were able to strike a benign balance. Some hunter-gatherers and others achieved both peaceable and successful ways of living which did not unduly disturb the rest of nature. The Ancient Greeks came nearer than any, perhaps, to building an intelligent society. But, as we increased and multiplied, our conscious thinking developed, our instinctive ambitions expanded, our technical inventiveness accelerated and we began to change the face of Earth and its biosphere. By way of limited intellect applied to instinct we have built a sophisticated artificial framework of living which, in truth, has served us ill - the Machine.

As a result of confining our thinking and awareness to the conscious sphere and ignoring the rest we have not benefited from the main extension of our brains,the upper, or postconscious mind, our chief faculty whose function is truth - that part of the brain which is unique, on planet Earth, to humans - possibly situated in the outer layers of the neocortex or in the prefrontal cortex. The conscious mind, though of enormous capacity, is unable to penetrate to truth, presumably because it is not suitably structured but certainly also due to the fact that it contains the self which wilfully determines or curtails thinking to suit its own predetermined or chosen aims.

The postconscious, on the other hand, is entirely independent, as it must be in order to perform its function of truth. Its one and only direct contact with consciousness, which the conscious self cannot block, is the still small voice of conscience which, however, the self can choose either to heed or ignore, as it likes.

It is sobering to recognise, then, that the whole of our reality is conducted within the limited conscious sphere in which, as our experience of the world daily reminds us, anything conceivable is possible. Virtually the same human beings can be any character from self-sacrificing, gentle and loving saint to bloodthirsty mutilator of men women and little children. The path which the ordinary, average person follows is neither wholly true nor fully false, but a passive and relatively stable compromise between extremes.

There are two explanations of human behaviour, and they are interlinked. The first explanation is that we live in a world of violent competitive inequality because our thinking is dominated by conscious instinctive will rather than guided by supraconsciousness of humantruth. The second explanation is that our thinking is dominated by conscious instinctive will rather than guided by supraconsciousness of humantruth because we live in a world of violent competitive inequality. Consider the first explanation. As we have seen, early humans, given the faculty of supreme intelligence, decided to commandeer as much of that faculty of mind as was willing to submit to being wilfully manipulated and, excepting for the phenomenon of conscience, closed the rest off from consciousness. They applied this malleable thinking faculty, the conscious mind, chiefly to that main motivation of nature, the pursuit of the instinctive drives.

By this means a reality has been created which is the expression of every possible emotion by every conceivable practice, restrained only to the extent that conscience, supported by limited conscious reason, can inhibit it. And this gives us the second explanation. Having established a false reality by way of limited thinking, we are forced to think in the same limited way in order to understand and cope with this reality. Even our major disciplines - philosophy, science, politics, religion - are confined to this limited thinking and related to this false reality.

Nature competes - red in tooth and claw - in order to secure the survival of the fittest. Humans compete, even to the point of killing millions of their own kind, for no good reason. At the same time they go to enormous effort to mend injuries and cure diseases in order to save lives. They create inequality, to the point that while many people are well served by the system many others exist in desperate poverty. At the same time the more advanced of the fortunate ones feel it incumbent on them to put welfare schemes in place to relieve some of that poverty. It is considered meritorious to manipulate the system and become rich in money, and then considered generous to give some proportion of that money to charitable causes.

All this is not seen as illogical and inhuman, because our limited thinking convinces us that what exists is inevitable. A feature of this existing reality is its system of incentives. As a result of this system we make the mistake of assuming, from experience, that humans are incapable of doing society's necessary work excepting for the sake of self-interest. We make this mistake because our experience is of a Machine-reality founded upon the principle of pursuit of self-interest. Given a humanly true society of course individuals would be willing to work in the common interest.

In the light of truth much of this present society's work is unnecessary. While the business of gathering the world's harvest, processing it as necessary, and distributing it to the world's people could be reduced to a stable, equable and relatively simple routine, our present practice is to use a system which is very far from being stable, simple or equable. This is the incentive system of money-management which is supposed to serve humanity but which is a false economy, serving its own financial interests. For example, take the case of a hospital ward which, though necessary to its local community, is closed because the limited number of patients makes it financially non-viable. Or take the case of a new motorway, cutting a swathe through ancient and beautiful woodland, brought about by a huge increase in the numbers of motor cars due to the insatiable but irresponsible requirements of car drivers, to the revered but truly irrelevant profit motives of car manufacturers, and to the demands of workers for artificial jobs.

Many voluntary hands could make light work of producing and distributing basic human needs. At present, large numbers of people are employed to service this process, in the financial interests of the Machine as it succeeds in terms of its own objectives but fails humanity at large. Remember the world's starving. But also think of the masses of paperwork produced and billions of words and figures printed for sub-systems which are not truly needed and don't make sense - the stock exchange, institutions of banking, insurance, social security, income tax, customs and excise.

Many more people complicate the issue by demanding ever more lavish and complex goods and services, for want of anything better to do. The technical standard of manufacture, convenience and presentation of these goods and services becomes ever more elaborate and, let's face it, attractive, for the sake of sales.

Half of us have become, and the rest aim to become a 'consumer society', ie a society whose chief reason for existence is to manufacture and provide ever increasing quantities of ever more attractive goods and services for its own consumption. This process is controlled by money influenced by the profit motive. As a result, provided the money is there, similar goods and services are transported in opposite directions to all parts of the globe by road, sea and air. The unnecessary process is stimulated by elaborate and widespread advertising, and serviced by financial houses, insurance companies, road networks, airfields, seaports, and by postal, telephone, radio and computer systems, also by packaging and printing facilities, of ever increasing complexity and sophistication. These things are not only a burden on Earth's resources but also on the minds of humans who, in various capacities, must themselves conform to and service the consumer process.

It is clear that this reality does govern our state of conscious mind, and out of that comes our thinking. We are obliged to think according to our interests and duties in this reality - to put these first. But we are in competition with others. Sooner or later this brings us into conflict. Such conflict breeds hatred, the cause of further bitter conflict. That which is commercial success to one company, or nation, may represent financial and social disaster to another.

All this conscious thinking goes contrary to our own true but muffled postconscious, whose basic, simplified conclusions are brought to our concerned notice by its still small voice of conscience. This disturbs us. We become indignant with frustration through a variety of causes. When some traumatic event occurs, our tolerance may be strained to the point where angry frustration spills over into blind and ungovernable violence which is quite in character with our conscious self and Machine-society - it must be, since it happens so often - but is out of character with our true, supraconscious self.

The conscious mind, then, is filled with information - from lessons of upbringing and education, from direct experience of living in the Machine, from newspapers, television programmes both factual and fictional, from books and conversations. The conscious mind processes this information to greater or lesser extent, trying to make sense of it; taking this or that approach; arriving at one set of conclusions or another. Having formed its ill-sorted conclusions - ie its opinions and beliefs - it approaches, interprets and judges all further incoming information from the viewpoint of those conclusions, ie according to its prejudices. The conscious mind puts aside and 'forgets' incoming information which its preferred construction of thought judges to be irrelevant, accepts and adds to that construction information which comfortably fits and is therefore judged to be true, takes in and records with distaste that information which contradicts its own preferred construction of thought, in order to condemn it as false.

We know that this way of thinking is the norm and that it results in all manner of disagreement. Because the conscious mind presently represents us, contains and directs our reality, and is influenced by emotion as well as instinctive egoistic will, our disagreements do turn to all kinds of conflict, from heated arguments to full-scale wars. The result is chaos, and man's inhumanity to man.

The seat of human morality is the postconscious mind but, with the exception of conscience, we remain closed to the postconscious - it has failed to become our primary motivation. Instead we are still represented by the conscious mind, aware of conscience but not bound by it. The postconscious, to a greater or lesser extent depending on our encouragement of it, strives constantly towards humantruth and, eventually, ultimate truth. Only when our conscious submits to the postconscious, as is our true nature, shall we become supraconscious.

Our present nature, by contrast, is to confine our thinking, our understanding of life and concept of reality, to the conscious sphere and the actuality of the Machine. Because the conscious mind is not equipped to penetrate to truth, humanity is ignorant of humantruth. But the conscious does think, of course, and to a vast and complex degree, following paths of selected reason which end in conclusions that are specific to a particular field and are partially or relatively true, but not wholly true because they don't embrace the whole of knowledge and correlated reason. Such fields are represented by the separated disciplines of thought, some of which I have already mentioned, all of which are limited to their terms of reference; disciplines which themselves obscure the true path.

When individual selves are identified with the conscious mind, denying the postconscious, subject to the influence of instinctive ego and emotion and to Machine-pressures, they are capable of anything. Given a reasonably comfortable and secure personal situation, perhaps supported by a religion, such individuals can give regard to their conscience and be peaceable and harmless. But humanity in general is subject to a reality that is itself capable of anything. Human individuals can find themselves deprived to the point of miserable starvation; cheated and dispossessed; discarded and rejected; wrongly accused, unemployed, threatened, abused, tortured. They may find themselves sleeping rough, alcoholic, drug-addicted, begging, and rubbish-raking.

Such are the things that can be done to us by the Machine, and we can react in similar ways. We can vandalise, rob, joyride in cars, ram-raid, riot, mug, rape, wife-beat, child-abuse, fire-raise, murder, or maybe massacre, torture and mutilate.

All these things which are being done to humans, and which human individuals are doing to each other, are done because our conscious minds can be so manipulated as to give reason for such things, and because our present reality gives cause for and makes room for them. But not one of us who perpetrates these evils regards himself or herself as evil. We know ourselves to be fundamentally, potentially good and true because we have a postconscious mind, known to us, if vaguely and perhaps as some kind of god, through conscience. But we are overwhelmed and dehumanised by the Machine, believing it to be inescapable.

This is not the way for a highly intelligent, i.e. intellectual race to behave. This reality has its supporters, who cherish its colourful and exciting unpredictability, but they are not to be found among the many who are condemned to inequality and uncertainty, insecurity and fear, frustration and misery. The fact is that we are missing our great opportunity, for the gift of intellect should open the door to worldwide happy contentment.

That we are overall unhappy and discontented - an unsuccessful race - is entirely due to our failure to fulfil our intellect and thus to think truly; to our virtual confinement to the false processes of the conscious mind and its many and various contradictions. Only one thing can successfully guide any race endowed with intellect, and that is truth, in our case humantruth. By truth I mean not only that which is true in fact, provable by evidence and conscious argument. Truth embraces all that exists, past or present, whether or not known; all possibility, as well as that which is unquestionably so. It means that which is level and plumb; straight as an arrow; perfectly honest; also that which is true in concept or spirit. Above all I take it to mean utterly complete reasoning of all that is knowable; a state of being that is dissatisfied with anything less than truth, that is devoted to pure reason and accepts responsibility for conducting its physical existence accordingly; the source of right, honest and good morality on which that state of being is founded.

Remember, the conscious mind is incapable of truth because it works on one level which means that it is not able to reason wholly and completely. Not only that but it is dominated and influenced by egoistic, instinctive self-will. We normally see our selves as the whole being, the whole mind, but in fact we are presently the focal-point of the conscious mind's thought, of ego and of instinct as these are brought to consciousness and subject to its will, cut off from the true essence of our being, the postconscious.

In our existing reality, all the disciplines of thinking are entrusted to the conscious mind, in which thinking is not only subject to self-will but also, through the will, to the rules and regulations of those thinking disciplines with the aim that all who subscribe to them shall be thinking in the same terms and along the same lines - but false terms and lines.

The postconscious mind is another matter altogether. As I have mentioned already it is entirely independent in its thinking, free of outside control by government or restrictive rules and laws. Whereas the conscious mind is a thinking part of the brain that is both subject to and controller of instinctive emotions and motor functions of the body, the postconscious is solely a faculty of pure reason whose function is truth or, I repeat, humantruth. It can be, and usually is ignored or disregarded, but it cannot be interfered with, manipulated or wilfully subjected to outside influences. The postconscious receives all the information that the conscious gets, and it understands, though it doesn't experience, the individual's emotions and actions. Instead of placing this information in appropriate compartments geared to particular objectives, it feeds all information into an enormous, whole and total process of reason in which everything plays a part in establishing truth.

In the conscious sphere an activity has the right to be simply because it is. In the supraconscious sphere that activity shall be judged according to humantruth - whether or not it should be.

This brings me to an obstacle which conscious convention puts in the way of recognition of truth. It says that a proposition cannot be accepted as true unless it can be proved by evidence and argument. This means conscious evidence and argument which has the advantage that we can see and weight it, but the utter disadvantage that the conscious mind which produces and judges it is incapable of truth, as we have seen. This is the reason why academic philosophy describes intricate spirals of reason which are never wholly resolved but endlessly proliferate. The fact is that truth can be discovered and proven within the postconscious but the proof and evidence is not available to conscious examination. If the conscious mind, along with the wilful self, were able to enter the postconscious the result would be total confusion. Conscious evidence and argument can never penetrate to absolute truth. However, by the honest and painstaking interchange of every single strand of thought, postconscious reason can eventually prevail against all doubts, questions and criticisms of the conscious, against its pride and prejudice, and against the would-be overwhelming power of the false Machine.

This brings me, in turn, to another obstacle to the discovery and realisation of human truth. The Machine is in overall control and its affairs are administered by human hierarchies of knowledge and power. Those at the top of these hierarchies must be strongly conscious-minded in order to have risen to, and to sustain, success in the competitive Machine. But these are the people who direct the institutions which are integral supports of the Machine, including those of formal education and the media. As a consequence those institutions reflect Machine-reality. This is particularly true of the media, which range from academic learning to current affairs, to business, crime and sport. By nature the media exclude seriously well-reasoned opposition to the Machine which nurtures them, and reject alternative proposals, scornfully branding them Utopian. So whilst the true view is of a world that is insanely preposterous, the established view is of a reality that is necessarily hard because, although most are reasonable and law-abiding the majority of people are intent on their own concerns and advantages; many are ruthless, feckless, irresponsible or dishonest; others are violently unpredictable; so that collectively the population have to be treated as they deserve, from privileged to deprived according to merit, and controlled by the authority of an elevated minority.

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