Thinking Aside
We don't value the subconscious enough - who you are is an iceberg, most of which you will never see.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." William Blake
Today, like most days, I was chugging along on my bike. Near 100% humidity, sweating like a broken hose, so much, could hardly see the road ahead. The air was so thick, it seemed like I was cycling uphill, through a curtain of water.
For your information, training for a long day cycle around Jeju Island - 233kms. I am aiming for 10 hours. Let’s see - I’ll do it on my birthday.
Anyway, I didn’t think I’d make it home. I was complaining about my shorts sticking, rubbing. I was cursing the sweat dripping over my face. I thought and thought to myself …. why am I out here, doing this?
And then it all stopped. My interior babble, negativity, my relationship with my own pain and suffering.
I found myself thinking of a new series to write - “Teachers I have known”. I was going through each and every one, recounting the memories, what I’d write about. An instant later I looked up. An hour had passed and I was home. No sweat (pun intended).
What had happened from the first moment to the next? One minute insufferable effort and the next, zipping along, oblivious of any effort?
It’s a good example of what I call “thinking aside”. Koestler in his Act of Creation has a chapter about this important aspect and role of our subconscious. I’ll also mention a very under-read writer of brillance, Colin Wilson. He calls this process “St. Neot Margin,” - named after a town he was passing through as a hitchiker.
Basically, it is “stepping aside”. You, the self, get out of the way and let your body, the embodied subconscious that you mostly are and which is mostly responsible for you existence, do what it does best.
You do this by “fixation” and fixing your attention on one solitary thing.
Language, learning and using a language is mostly governed by unconscious processes. So much works below the surface of conscious intentionality.
I remember after getting my 15 minutes of fame, setting a world 24 hour running record on the treadmill, always being asked by journalists the question, “What was the toughest part?”
And to tell you the truth, it was the first one or two hours, not the last two. In the first few hours, your conscious mind is active, thinking of so many unnecessary worries (that you already took care of prior). But little by little, it quiets, you tuck it away and focus on the one thing, foot after foot. Then, the body gets on board and says, ok, I guess this is the plan, let’s go!
In creative endeavors, in the realm of scientific discover, it is the same. We work and work at a problem. The writer consciously thinks out and plans on the surface of the mind. The scientist, scribbles formulas and thinks through problems. But only when they “think aside” and get out of the way, does the subconscious rise up and offer up its jewels. We see more clearly and with deep insight and metaphorical power enabled by the depths within us.
Some examples might be; Gutenberg stuck on the process of moveable print until seeing a wine press. Or Einstein and the trolley car in Zurich allowing him to formulate his “gedankenexperiment”, thought experiment and thus hit upon the theory of relativity. Or most famously Poincare and his discovery of Fuchsian functions and series.
In sport, in the creative arts, the process is similar vis a vis thinking aside and allowing the great oceanic force of the subconscious to manifest.
Myself, thinking of the things I’m most proud of writing, I did so almost automatically, as if it weren’t myself there. I was ready and I let myself be a vehicle of the subconscious. This poem, I wrote out in one swell sitting under the statue of Jan Hus in Prague’s Old Town Square. One of a number that were created through the profane frame.
In Zen Buddhism, this process of thinking aside is central. It is zazen, “no-mind” and is part of training for swordsmanship, calligraphy, painting, Judo, archery and aesthetic practice.
What’s crucial in the procedure of unleashing the subconscious within is “forgetting” and putting to bed the conscious mind. “Aside” is the key word.
It’s easiest done through sleep but we forget most and don’t benefit from it. But in the realm of awakened sleep, we see this most powerfully at work. So many of us, even you, have had powerful insights just when awakening, in lucid mind, when the conscious world of “us - them” has yet gotten to work.
Repetitive work, karmayoga, works best to put the conscious mind to rest. Some people use drugs. Some use mediation. But key is to pacify the conscious mind, settle it through repetitive action and looking away, thinking aside.
It’s an interesting process. I first became interested in the topic through the surrealists of the early 20th century. In fact, the role of the subconscious was probably more well known and trusted prior to the rise of science and our “matter of fact”, materialistic, rational, Cartesian fed modern world of post moon race time. Man is not just a pile of on/off switches - we know so little of the energy within our body/mind.
So, if you need to solve a problem, make a Herculean effort at something or just find some peace inside, get in touch with your subconscious and let it rise up. As I’m fond of saying all the time, be filled with grace (just the subconscious at work, our apparent nature turned off), never try - it’s the trying that gets in the way. Or as a Buddhist might put it - “To seek is to suffer (living in consciousness), to seek nothing is bliss (living in the subconscious).”
“Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions. That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot represent.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, putting to rest the notion that conscious thought can know the world.
Thoughts After Reading Gurdjieff Late At Night
A god that is a solution to all things – is a solution to no thing.
What is real can never appear – it only has appearances.
Love is what is left after both entering and exiting desire.
Energy is eternal delight — all that is, has always been.
Sleep is the foundation of all being – like stillness the core of all movement.
Only if we escape from ourselves will we remember ourselves and then become what we really are.
Man is a drop of water that flows in two streams. He is always trying to unite and reconcile the original fall.
All truths are beautiful. Existence knows nothing of randomness, chance and open design.
Passivity is never a way forward unless it is the way forward.
All things come to us. Thoughts come to us – we are but a receiver.
A poem is a claw hold up a mountain with no summit.
Everything in life is in the service of action. Wrong action equals wrong livelihood.
That which ends, never truly began.