Quotes on the mind watching itself

We all have some level of self-awareness about our own thoughts. On a minimal level, this simply makes us conscious beings.

"I posit two theorems: (1) The mind is all the information in the brain. (2) Consciousness is the brain's awareness of some of that information." - 
J. Allan Hobson.

Beyond that, we face difficulties in maintaining the awareness in a deep way and on an ongoing basis.

"It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself." - Richard Powers

"In observing the operation of his own mind, incidentally, Galton was faced with the 'difficulty of keeping watch without embarrassing the freedom of its action'." - Douwe Draaisma

If we persist, we may be called "intellectuals."

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." - Albert Camus

"Tetlock found that the most important difference between fox thinking and hedgehog thinking is that the fox thinker is more likely to study his own decision-making process. In other words, he thinks about how he thinks..." - Jonah Lehrer

Sources


J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1994. p 203.

Richard Powers. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995. p. 217.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 3.

Albert Camus, quoted in Forbes.com, quoted in The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 17.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 242. See Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, Princeton 2006. Based on Isaiah Berlin's classic essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."

Celibacy as service and as self-development

Some people worry about sexual abstinence as a matter of personal moral purity, but it is a different matter to cast it in the light of a form of service to others. James Hinton wrote: "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made it revolve round Self betrayed the human race." Raquel Isabelle de Alderete wrote, "Instead of worrying about people's 'purity' and how it defines them as a person, worry instead about how you can protect other people's emotions." Relationships – particularly marriage and child-rearing – take a lot of time. Rabbi Ben-Asai, second century CE, explaining why he shouldn't have to marry and procreate, said: "What can I do? My soul clings to the Torah. The world can be maintained by other people." But the people who do that form of world-maintenance will develop knowledge and skills about relationships that can only be imagined by those who do not personally participate in their own instance of such a relationship. In other words, lifelong celibates are not ideally positioned to dole out marriage and family advice. Uta Ranke-Heinemann wrote: "If only the Church's celibates would stop using the confessional to meddle in matters that don't concern them..." The nature of the service enabled by celibacy is to be defined.

Then again, there is a way of understanding celibacy as a focus on the self without having it be narcissistic. Celibacy can be an intentional part of personal development. Barbara Feldon wrote: "Lovers may leave us, husbands and wives may die, friends can move away, but creativity is faithfully ours if we honor our solitude by diving to realms that are deeper, freer and more complete than our surface lives. Once we know the way we can home to it anytime we wish – if we make the first mark." Sometimes that solitude is needed, not to demonstrate superiority to oneself or to others, but simply to grow.

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Sources

James Hinton, unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol. 1, p. 45.

R.I.D (Raquel Isabelle de Alderete). We Don't Have a Compass but I'm Sure We'll Find Home: A Collection of Poems. 2015.

Rabbi Ben-Asai, quoted in the Talmud, bYabmuth 63b, quoted by Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Trans. Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 45.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 198.

Barbara Feldon. Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Single Life. New York: Fireside, 2003. p. 159.

Quotes: Role of psychology in healing the body

Rollo May:

"When I was ill with tuberculosis two and a half decades ago, I found that my inherited "will power" was strangely ineffective. In those days, the only cure was bed rest and carefully graduated exercise. We could not will ourselves to get well, and the "strong-willed," dominating type of person sick with TB generally got worse. But I found that listening to my body was of critical importance in my cure. ... This may seem like a poetic and "mystical" viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it was a hard-rock, empirical issue of whether I would live or die. ... There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is a willing of participation rather than opposition.
"

J. Allan Hobson:

"The best doctor, then, is the self, the only agent who can engineer sound health practices. This view, and its application to our mental and physical health, is something I call 'scientific humanism.'"

Edward Tenner:

"But as yet there is still no reliable technique to establish the existence of suffering. Insurance company lawyers may call automobile whiplash injury a license to steal because no objective imaging procedure or test can diagnose it, but a strained muscle or sprained ligament in the neck is an extremely painful condition that can arise from even a minor collision. As often happens, such injuries may easily be faked. And perhaps there is a borderline region in which honest people, knowing that even minor symptoms are grounds for compensation, subconsciously focus on their pain, amplifying it. Yet the most recent research on whiplash injury suggests that there is no relationship between "neuroticism" and time needed for recovery."

Sources

Rollo May, Love and Will, New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. p 239-240.

J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. (Originally 1994). p 225.

Edward Tenner. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. p. 213.

Nature or nurture?: Embracing choice

James Hormel wrote, "As a young boy growing up in Austin, Minnesota, teachers forced pens into my right hand in the futile hope of correcting my left-handedness. If they had known I was gay, they might have tried to fix that, too. They would have failed."

And why do we try to change each other? Whether we can succeed at changing someone else's personality, character and drive seems a secondary question to why we would want to do so in the first place. Instead of trying to control each other, could we try to protect each other from injury?

Simon LeVay wrote: ”The true moral issue in the area of sexuality is not to establish or refute 'naturalness' – a slippery concept if there ever was one – but to make difficult decisions that balance respect for individual freedom against protection from interpersonal or societal harm.”

Meanwhile, in exercising our individual freedom, we can elevate our behavior from unconscious impulse to conscious choice. Nicholas Fearn wrote: ”If we take a repressed homosexual as our thesis, the antithesis is when he or she realizes that sexual desire can be suppressed by will-power. The clash between desire and self-control leads to a synthesis, since with the power to control oneself comes also the ability to liberate oneself – to express desire deliberately rather than as a response to instinct. All being well, the result is new self-respect in which sexual preferences can be acted on without shame. This is probably not what Hegel had in mind when he conceived of the dialectic, but his method is nothing if not flexible.” Kate Bornstein described a similar process in coming to accept one's gender: "There's a myth in our culture that defines transsexuality as rare, and transsexuals as oddities. But nearly everyone has some sort of bone to pick with their own gender status...We're most of us – whether "transsexual" or not – dissatisfied. Some of us have less tolerance for the dissatisfaction, that's all. I accept the label transsexual as meaning only that I was dissatisfied with my given gender, and I acted to change it. I am transsexual by choice, not by pathology." In both cases, moving past the assumption of fatalism and embracing the idea of choice leads to a new self-respect.

Sources

"Being gay is not a choice." James Hormel. Special to CNN. Nov. 16, 2011.

Simon LeVay, in his book review, "'Evolution's Rainbow' by Joan Roughgarden." Accessed February 24, 2004.

Nicholas Fearn, How to Think Like a Philosopher. New York: Grove Press, 2001. p 120.

Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. NY: Vintage Books, 1994. p 118.

Humor as a response to the human condition

Ford Madox Ford:

"Why, I remember on that afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its horns under the stomach of a black and white animal and the black and white one was thrown right into the middle of a narrow stream. I burst out laughing. ... Because it does look very funny you know to see a black and white cow land on its back in the middle of a stream. It is just so exactly what one doesn’t expect of a cow.
"

Wendy Plump:

"I think my angel is drunk. That would explain everything."

Sherwin T. Wine:

”Life has an absurdity to it. It sometimes traps us in existential stairwells with no exit. We cannot figure out why we are there. And we cannot change what has happened. There are three alternatives. We can resign ourselves piously to the situation and pray, knowing that in some mysterious way getting stuck in a stairwell is for our own good. We can cry, wail and scream, hoping that some rescue force will hear our cry, take pity on us and save us. Or we can laugh.

Laughter is neither friendly nor reverent nor resigned. In the story of evolution it started out as turned away anger. Displaying teeth is not usually a friendly gesture. It is a prelude to biting. But instead of biting, laughers open their mouths and howl. There is always an edge of hostility to laughing. ‘Biting’ humor and mockery are always on the edge of even the kindest joke. When we hear laughter we are never sure whether they are laughing with us or at us.

Traditional religion and laughter are opposite ways of responding to the human condition. The heart of religion is worship, a recurrent surrender to the will of God. Worship rests on the profound conviction that all is well with the world even though the world appears to be sick. God is loving, just and orderly, even though we do not seem to be experiencing a lot of love, justice and moral order. From the human perspective the world is crazy. From the divine perspective the world, with all its supernatural rewards and punishments, is a wonderful place.

Laughing starts with the absurdity of life. Life is frustrating. The world is not fair. The good are punished more than they ought to be. The wicked are rewarded more than they ought to be. Kindness gets you rejection. Cruelty gets you power. Laughter is rarely welcome in religious institutions.

Laughter is a safe expression of anger and discomfort with the way life goes. It helps to drain our anger and keeps us from both apoplexy and going crazy.

Realists love laughter. It is one of their best strategies for survival. They resist resignation and avoid waiting. When the absurdity of the universe traps hem in the stairwell, they throw their heads back and laugh."

Brené Brown:

"1. Why are laughter, song, and dance so important to us?

2. Is there some transformational element that they have in common?

These were complicated questions to answer because, yes, we yearn to laugh and sing and dance when we feel joy, but we also turn to these forms of expression when we feel lonely, sad, excited, in love, heartbroken, afraid, ashamed, confident, certain, doubtful, brave, grief, and ecstasy (just to name a few). I’m convinced that there’s a song, a dance, and a path to laughter for every human emotion.

After a couple of years of analyzing my data, here’s what I learned:

Laughter, song, and dance create emotional and spiritual connection; they remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration, or healing: We are not alone.

Ironically, I learned the most about laughter during the eight years that I was studying shame. Shame resilience requires laughter. In I Thought It Was Just Me, I refer to the kind of laughter that helps us heal as knowing laughter. Laughter is a spiritual form of communing; without words we can say to one another, “I’m with you. I get it.”

True laughter is not the use of humor as self-deprecation or deflection; it’s not the kind of painful laughter we sometimes hide behind. Knowing laughter embodies the relief and connection we experience when we realize the power of sharing our stories—we’re not laughing at each other but with each other.

* * *

I know how much courage it takes to let people hear our hearts speak, but life is way too precious to spend it pretending like we’re super-cool and totally in control when we could be laughing, singing, and dancing."

Parker J. Palmer:

“Silence in a circle of trust differs from laughter in one important way, besides the fact that it is less noisy. The laughter that deepens our relationships is not a planned practice but a spontaneous response to shared experience. It is not the kind of laughter evoked by a skilled comedian. It is the kind that comes naturally as we spot – and throw the spotlight on – the comedy inherent in everyday life.”

Sources

Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. Originally 1915. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. p 35.

Wendy Plump. Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs). New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Sherwin T. Wine. Staying Sane in a Crazy World: A Guide to Rational Living. Birmingham, Mich.: The Center for New Thinking, 1995. pp. 182-183.

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

Parker J. Palmer. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004. p. 157.

Quotes on the drive for a romantic relationship

Abigail Heyman:

"In spite of what I've experienced and observed, I still cling to the image of a relationship between a man and a woman in which each can function better, and grow further, and love more because of the other. Sometimes all this has seemed so close that I believe it's possible.

But always, as those relationships became more intimate, I felt instead how they limited my growth, how the compromises required to keep the relationship alive were deadening important parts of me, and I decided that my wholeness was more important than the love. But I miss that kind of love a lot.

And I still wonder what's so radically wrong with me, so absolutely unlovable about me, that no man has ever loved me in a way that I can now respect as love.

How then do I want to love again? How then do I want to be loved? I only know I don't want to be loved in the irresponsible way that I could only respect when I didn't love myself. Or in the possessive way that seemed right when I saw myself as a dependent person. Or in the adoring way that I could eagerly accept only when that love was the only thing I wanted in life."

Victor Hugo:

"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved."

Simon Blackburn:

”In Shakespeare's view, erotic love is a kind of overlay or varnish onto lust, and what it adds is not itself very much to do with good things like truth and trust. Love is more associated with unreasonable dotings, fiction, madness, bubbles, blindness, and illusion.”

Gary T. Boswell:

”Relationships are murdered in the pursuit to define love. Love is sibling to faith, as they are both natural responses to a mystery. We have captured love and now we can buy and sell it, we can withhold it to be punitive; we even write books instructing us how to feel it. It is no more enough just to love; now people want this love to give them something. To validate themselves, to give a sense of worth to their lives, in this way love becomes currency, we barther with this love, that began as an inspiration; and all too often becomes a means to manipulate a price from another, I love you therefore you owe me this...”

Gabrielle Zevin:

"They do agree on a passage from The Late Bloomer to be read at the service by one of Amelia’s college friends.

'It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,' the passage goes, 'but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.'”

Stephen Batchelor:

“In encountering another, one is confronted not with an immutable fact but a pathway of possible intimacy. One speaks of someone being ‘closed’ or ‘open,’ of ‘getting through’ to them, of finding the ‘chinks in his armor.’ A person is like a path: a space whose trajectory we may or may not be invited to share. We long to trust others enough to dismantle the boundaries we initially want them to respect. To be intimate with another is to be allowed inside their life and to let them enter yours. As we embark on the seemingly endless quest of mutual understanding, we become a chapter in each other’s story, figures in each other’s dreams, creators of each other’s self. To know another intimately is not achieved by dissolving the differences between us but by allowing the space to draw them out. Such differentiation is realized through probing and being probed by the otherness of the other.”

Anaïs Nin:

”Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, a human being with flaws.”

Sources

Abigail Heyman. Growing up female: a personal photojournal. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974.

Simon Blackburn. Lust. Oxford University Press, 2004. p 79.

Gary T. Boswell. "Faith." White Crane Journal. Issue #54, Fall 2002. p 17.

Gabrielle Zevin. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2014.

Stephen Batchelor. Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. New York: Riverhead, 2004. pp. 133-134.

Anaïs Nin, November 1941. Quoted on Brainpickings.org.

Image by 2023852 on Pixabay

Rats and other fearsome things

Tara Brach:

”Who doesn’t know the experience of fear? Fear is waking up in the night, like Barbara, terrified that we can’t go on. Fear is the jittery feeling in our stomach, the soreness and pressure around our heart, the strangling tightness in our throat. Fear is the loud pounding of our heart, the racing of our pulse. Fear constricts our breathing, making it rapid and shallow. Fear tells us we are in danger, and then urgently drives our mind to make sense of what is happening and figure out what to do. Fear takes over our mind with stories about what will go wrong. Fear tells us we will lose our body, lose our mind, lose our friends, our family, the earth itself. Fear is the anticipation of future pain.”

Stephen Batchelor:

“Disease, ageing, and death are forms of an internal violence that afflicts all creatures; whereas natural disasters, viral infections, and terrorist attacks are examples of an external violence that threatens to break out anywhere. The globalized, interconnected world has become a body that is prone to these outbursts without warning. In a way that Baudelaire could not have imagined, we are capable of feeling the instability and vulnerability of the living system of which we are a part and on which we depend. Whether it be the appearance of a virus, a hole in the ozone layer, or a hijacked plane, such events are rapidly and vividly made known through the electronic media. They do not have to impinge on our personal existence or occur very often to frighten us. Mara’s most effective weapon is sustaining a climate of fear.”

George Orwell:

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." * * * "The worst thing in the world," said O'Brien," varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal." * * * "In your case," said O'Brien, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."

Dean Koontz:

"Here but a step from the bathroom threshold, Erika experienced another kind of fear: of the unknown.

That which is abnormal to nature is a monster, even if it might be beautiful in its own way. Erika, created not by nature but by the hand of man, was a lovely monster but a monster nonetheless.

She supposed that monsters should not fear the unknown because, by any reasonable definition, they were part of it. Yet a tingle of apprehension traced the contours of her spine.

Instinct told her that the rat was not a rat, that instead it was a thing unknown."

Sources

Tara Brach. Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. Chapter 7, "Opening Our Heart in the Face of Fear." pp. 165-166.

Stephen Batchelor. Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. New York: Riverhead, 2004. p. 45.

George Orwell. 1984. (Originally published 1949.) New York: The New American Library, 1961. p. 233.

Dean Koontz. Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (#1 of 5 in the Frankenstein series) (2005) Bantam, 2007.