Meditations on the mind

[saurab]

Had a series of insights about the mind a few weeks and a few months back and also yesterday that I like so I am sharing it with you.

But before I talk about the mind, I would like to say something about the sense organs. Seeing, hearing, etc is based on awareness and interpretation (which includes naming). Prior to learning the names of objects in childhood, there are object awareness markers which merge with the names as soon as the names are learnt. One could be tempted to think that classification of objects and phenomena are also done by the sense organs like seeing a snake and immediately becoming defensive. But if you think about it, when you lose the fear of death, the visual instrument does not classify the appearance of the snake as dangerous, and so it is with other phenomena. So, classification of phenomena is always done by the UNCONSCIOUS mind (which term is a very bad and misleading name for that functional aspect of the mind, namely the unconscious which you will see when I talk more about it).

How exactly is the mind structured and what are some of it's functions ? What exactly, is the conscious mind ? The conscious mind is the experiencer and that is it's only function. Each relatively independent sense organ registers incoming sensory data. But how do you correlate sound with light (the eyes with the ears) ? How do you experience the totality of an experience ? That is the function of the conscious mind. It correlates different sensory inputs and presents it to the organism as one cohesive whole. So, the experiencer is ONLY the conscious mind and none of the other deeper layers of the mind.

The next layer of the mind is not the subconscious, unlike what most people think. It is the unconscious. The unconscious is the interpreter, the summarizer, the generalizer, the discriminator between good and evil, the censor and the classifier. It is particularly interesting to consider the summarizing capabilities of the unconscious as linked to the discriminating capabilities of the unconscious. When we see someone doing something, first the summary of the phenomena is created by the unconscious and simultaneously, the knowingness in us (that comes from the Higher Self) becomes the censor, and then the phenomena together with the censoring activity is filed away in the subconscious. So, the next time you witness something similar the classifier comes into action immediately. This is sometimes called "knee jerk reaction" to what you feel is good or evil. And to really change a person, you need to change this very thing.

The next layer of the mind is the deeper unconscious. The function of this is to create summaries of related summaries.

The last layer of the mind is the subconscious mind. It does not interpret experience. It just records, so it is intimately associated with memory. All past life experiences are recorded and stored in this layer. Memory is not only of thought but also visual and auditory and tactile etc. So how is this memory stored ? It is stored as video frames. When you have memory related dreams then these video frames are what becomes conscious. The other type of dream (the symbolic, meaning-related) comes from the unconscious. Now the question is why we can remember past incidents of the present life but not of previous lifetimes.... This is because there are mental membranes that separate not only each lifetime but major events in each lifetime. When a past life regressionist takes you back to events in some past lifetime he is allowed to help retreive scenes from those past lives that are not harmful for the mental health and stability of the person. Because it may shock a person to know and SEE himself killing someone in some past life. So, who does the releasing of what memories can come to the surface ? It is the Higher Self who is in TOTAL control of the entire regression. THis is the reason why some people are good subjects for regression and some are not. Those who are weak mentally may not be allowed to access painful or traumatic or violent memories of past lifetimes. So the whole show is run by the Higher Self.

Now the next question is: how does the recording of memory take place in the subconscious ? There is a band of passageway that links the conscious mind with the subconscious mind and sequentially, one video frame at a time experiences are recorded and stored in the subconscious as video templates, many millions of them every hour or so. IN Alzheimer's disease or other memory related diseases there is "data loss or packet loss" (A term that I have borrowed from computer networking). Some of the memory packets or video frames become hazy or unclear (because of the physics concept of "noise" distorting the signal) or are dropped entirely and once you forget a link in the chain of a unitary experience you forget the entire experience or it becomes hazy or the causal succession is disrupted.

I hope you found this interesting.

Love,
Saurab

[iamthat]

Thanks, Saurab.

Since no-one else has responded I will just throw in the observation that it is difficult to comment because we may all have different understandings of terms such as subconscious mind and unconscious mind.

And there is also the idea of the superconscious mind, that higher aspect of mind which is above the threshold of the conscious mind. Which some may liken to spiritual intuition.

There is also the question of how does the individual conscious/subconscious/unconscious/superconscious tie in with the collective
conscious/subconscious/unconscious/superconscious of Humanity as a whole?

All of which makes it difficult to come to a consensus of what these terms mean and how they manifest in our lives.

Peace

[saurab]

Originally Posted by iamthat

It is difficult to comment because we may all have different understandings of terms such as subconscious mind and unconscious mind.

I understand. These are different functions of the mind, but I used the term subconscious and unconscious because these terms are in vogue. But the term "unconscious mind" is a misnomer because the interpretation and classification of experience is something that happens all the time because the so-mislabeled unconscious mind is always available. You dont have to "dig deep" as it is erroneously thought to get at the missing information hidden in the mind. It is always accessible in the nuances of thoughts, perception and the way you look at things, hiding some information from yourself and exaggerating the importance of other information, if you really observe carefully and intelligently.