The model: Thought is, in the first place, central, unified; this unity has various media associated with it; the relative proportions of these media change; the media have content, which varies.
In personal experience thought continues during the hours awake; if there are intervals of thought then those intervals are the space between sleep; we could call sleep, either dreamless or dreaming, intervals of either non thought or of thought transformed out of our waking forms. Leaving that somewhat arbitrary decision aside we find that thought in its normal enduring is in many ways more like one thing dancing than a sequence of separated thoughts. While we are able to distinguish packets of thought by predominant themes which differ among such packets, it is often not all media which change between one thought and the next, emotion, for example, may change more slowly than language and watching may continue across highly divergent themes, as sometime may the general order of perception, as when walking along a country pathway one may continue to observe the trees and the light, the sounds and odors of the forest, while focusing upon a succession of highly divergent linguistic or logical themes.
"In personal experience thought continues during the hours awake" but does it? How far should we extend thought into those intervals, usually dominated by bodily action, wherein thought proceeds, if we should call it thought, unnoticed, unexamined, unthought of, times, to use the common expression, when we do not reflect but rather just are: moving about, doing, acting, feeling, perceiving, but here we are falling back into the genera we have previously called thought. It is easy to just write that there is no clear demarcation between what we call thought and otherwise; otherwise being some sort of thoughtless being, but we have called thought too broadly to consider being thoughtless. This may be metaphysically simple; we introduce another species of thought, of the same genus as tunnel and reflective thought, a form of low reflectivity and connected more by external events than by internal focus; my most present example involves coaching a team of boys in basketball, although a certain thoughtfulness is predesigned, while the actual event of a practice session occurs the stimuli requiring reaction appear so fast that the predesigned pattern serves, only but sufficiently, as a backboard from which to bounce time into a reasonably useful pattern.
We have pushed thought into scattered realms of being, or rather time places where being is functioning quite coordinately with thought subdued into low reflectivity, and yet even in these places we have found thought not only present but useful, so wide extends the sway of thought in our lives. Language, being, and thought, all encompassed by awareness, so defined by our intent; where is the unity?
The unity of thought encloses its self encompassing universality. Thought is open to experience not obviously derived from thought itself; both perception and action have the appearance of entering and leaving the real experience of thought from and to some external effect. Yet perception, whatever its source, is perceived in thought, encompassed in thought, part of thought. Action, bodily motion impelled from thought, at least such motion as is not mere nervous pilfering of time, has its source and significant meaning from the evaluation and intent of thought.
All encompassing thought is much more complex than the surface of the sea where the waves rise and fall intermingling resonances that reflect the mirror shattered sun and wherein play the little shadowlets of ripples riling across the water surface, that secondary pattern of wavelets upon the waves, of light refracted from green depths encountering ever changing patterns of repetition; for not only is such sea form known only by thought and thus part of thought and thus less than the fullness of thought but it is also mainly composed of the medium of perception, whereas thought includes many media.
Thought is self abrasive. I recall rubbing two chunks of sandstone, one against another, grinding away their protuberances and smoothing out their roughness, until they each approached forms of their own natural curvature and smoothness, and quitting before their substance was worn too thin. It felt much as if at least some partial aspect of the final form was implicit in the original rough and broken piece of rock. Thought is more unitary, it contains both stones in itself and erodes itself towards its natural completion of form.
As well as wearing off its own rough edges, thought is self forming, self sculpting: thought changes and shapes itself. This is in part to say that thought acts upon itself, that thought is both an active agent shaping thought and a passive recipient of such shaping.
Thought is an ever playing rainbow fountain so richly full of form that we can best start by listing some of the primary media so strikingly different from each other, spreading out below to balance thought on the ground of being, although that name of being merits further discussion, and tied together near the top where thought assumes the form of an overarching tepee wherein we live the home like parts of our lives within the covering skin of awareness.
It seems natural, although not necessary, to name perception first among the media of thought, perception which is almost always present in the background and often also in the foreground of thought, perception whose light and sound and touch and smell and taste fulfill the richness of our desires and provide five or more poles for the tepee of thought. Proprioception might be called a sixth sense and then there are evidences of other, psychic, senses.
Structure, flow and form organize the patterns of our thoughts, both in the intricacy of the immediate present and in the transformations so subtle and yet so complete along the changing dance of thought.
Memory is the safe house wherein we store our accumulation of experience. Memory is the storehouse from which we draw; often memory produces images and scenes that swim naturally in the ambient water of thought; other times we seek with conscious intent through our more or less ordered personal stacks of information; sometimes I look for a theorem or its proof in a branch of mathematics which I have not thought about for months or years and it then takes some investigation to uncover it, to find it there in memory saved in substance and in form, sometimes even in visual image of its written statement, more often in a complex sensation of its essential whatever and of the connections to other mathematics through which it assumes meaning and use, value and truth. Other times memory pulls forth rabbits from a hat or jacks from a box to surprise us, deflecting our intended thought, paying us our due to recompense the depth of personal experience, challenge our self comfort: "Why did I do such a foolish thing?" And yet memory has another realm both different and more essential than these last raised interjections into thought; memory stores basic fiber of our mind: the words and usages of our automatically accepted vocabulary and grammar, the optic learning of recognizable shapes and forms, of squares and alphabet, of faces and smells, without which mind would not be and thought would be a gibbering beast.
Watching and reflection, mutual reflections which become watching, connect us most directly to awareness. Mind is the mirror of mind; one can watch oneself thinking and watch the watching and so on; I recall holding seven levels of such reflection in simultaneous awareness. While reflection upon reflection is an interesting and pleasant experience some authors have mistaken such reflection for the essence of consciousness itself, unable to recognize the direct experience of awareness. Such a fundamental mistake or is it a blindness? soon leads into deep confusion.
Attitude, emotion and will give bodily meaning to our thought. Sweet and sour, metallic hardness and the softness of feathery tendrils visit the house of reason sometimes as shy guests and other times as jealous owners. Sometimes antithetical to reason's structures they do provide an engine that pulls thought into new and unexplored realms.
Expansion and imagination stretch out each localized moment of thought into unbounded fields of potential experience. If we were to retain our tepee play these would be slightly longer poles sticking upward into the blue and gray skies.
Direction and choice are our tools of guidance, selecting, discriminating, posting signboards for our travel through the time like changes which thought endures, encapsulates, envisions and then enters. It appears to me that there is an essential direction or choice which is almost weightless compared to attitude or imagination, slighter than perception and more swift footed than logic, an independent choice or, as the agent Director, a free chooser which in its very thinness and lightness has formidable power.
Language records what we can intentionally record of thought but also leads thought both by its formal structure of vocabulary, phrase, sentence and style and even more powerfully by a creative unveiling, an opening field of illuminated word paths, which the writer sees or hears flowing on before, which can be followed by writing those words, which will often reveal new trails, almost as if pregiven, which may then be recorded ad continuum.
The ratio and proportions of the media certainly vary. We may be watching the brightening colors of a winter sunrise, colors of unnameable beauty, beyond peach, beyond gold and scarlet, a blue so blue that it pulls vison into unforgettable transcendence, where just a few twists and transformations before we were writing or reading stories of logic in the predawn dark.
The content of the media is extended through the expansion of imagination. Winter snow softens the articulated fractals of old landscape, where narrow moonlight scarps the open forest into secret knives cutting vision into invisible blackness, rarely uncovering sharp edged grasses dead with cold, new ice suddenly frozen pyramidal, shadows too sharply etched for form in the moonlit moonscape at 30 degrees F below zero ( 34.4C), watching in a warm coat, not quite warm enough, so that the gradually penetrating cold gathers the watcher into private folds of love and paranoia: this beauty so great, these shadows so profound, this cold so deadly: What resides beyond these real experiences? What bears are watching from the shadows?
The variations of thought shift both cuspoidally and flowingly; sharp changes salt gradual evolution; attention shifts from one medium to another; this is a relative thing and not absolute; to play a game with numbers we might say that at a given moment 70% of attention is focused on a verbal process of composition, 15% upon visual perception, 5% on hearing, and 10% upon expectation of upcoming events an extremely oversimplified model and each of these proportions of attention is in continuous flux between the amount of attention given to the various media and of course in terms of the content of the media themselves. There is an apt explanation of this feature of consciousness in some physicalist notions of thought; if the forms of thought are either created or reduced by synaptic action then since the rate of synaptic action in the brain must fluctuate in a limited range to avoid either catastrophic meltdown or slowdown each synaptic occurrence, including whatever is its counterpart in awareness, is replaced by, on the average, one other synapse, thus by the same amount of generation or restriction.
Thought very largely defines time. Time abstracts the subjective experience of the changeable aspects of thought. If thought did not change it would not be what we call thought, perhaps it would have boundless depth of Godlike reflection, perhaps it would be nothing at all, but thought as we experience it in our human limitation does vary both in its proportion of different media subsuming attention and in the contents of the media. The continuous transformation of thought forming and reforming is intrinsic to the very process of thought itself, which is to say that it is prior to any idea of external mapping of thought as occupying successive locations along some imagined line of time. What is time but a ghost of present awareness?
The concept of thought media provides a useful cross sectional view of the fibrous structure of thought but we can also change our viewpoint and specify some of the major thematic branches of thought in forms more closely related to traditional categories of subject matter. Among these themes we have a spacious diversity among which to choose and my choice depends upon personal interest and familiarity more than upon any ranking of supposed importance. Among those I would like to address are mathematics, reason and logic, questioning and affirmation, mechanics both practical and theoretical, art, poetry, nature and the senses of unity and difference. We will introduce each of these themes according to its own phenomenology. Recall that the theme and subject of this writing is thought; when we discuss mathematics, for example, it is not mathematics itself as related to its own content which is the intended theme but more the thinking of mathematics, the forms in thought which mathematics occasions, the evidences and implications of mathematics for an understanding of thought, and so it is for the other thematic emblems of traditional thought.
Mathematics contains a large variety of thought patterns, in the subject matter, in the depth and focus of concentration, and, as always, the unknowable differences between individual thinkers.
Reason is such a large lumbering beast and logic is such a sure footed but little animal that it seems strange to compare them in the same genus, yet the similarity that does exist resides in a congruence between the thought sensations which they both induce.
Questioning and affirmation are complementary opposites, each one mirroring the inverse reflection of the other that, although we may question the meaning of each theme separately, we can seek a better understanding affirming their connubial relationship.
Mechanics is a very specialized theme of thought forms, much narrower in scope than mathematics, reason or questioning, but also or thereby capable of a fine grained focus. Mechanics has also a pleasant duality; it is a body of intellectually cohesive knowledge based upon the most careful experimental reflections and mathematical analysis; it is also a practical reservoir of knowledge and experience which we use to drive our productive work in the most confident way yet uncovered.
Art counterpoints all of the themes so far mentioned, perhaps it counterpoints thought itself, although the Renaissance painters with their measurements and observations of nature and development of mathematical perspective as well as the modern artists of the fractured plane do seem to belie that claim. I would tend to call art a bodily expression, in especial reference to perception, of thought, specialized perhaps, but also rather full.
Poetry could be called art in the medium of language which is an expressive appellation of limited accuracy, but then accuracy is of questionable necessity for poetry. Presently we are besieged with musical and especially rhythmical constructions of variety and multiplicity nearly as astounding as the music of the rain dropping off of trees and rooftops. Some of us, not being especially musicians but neither being deaf, can only imbibe that rhythmical reality implicitly in our writing; snowflakes otherwise angularly falling are sometimes caught in the giant winter bare ash outside my window; they stoop up, catch a swirl, float a while, singular, before rejoining their communal destiny.
Nature...that which escapes human control but not always human perception, that which we are morally requisite in our time to imagine as having its own inner form and teleos and being outside of human destiny.
Unity is one that I recall, difference includes gray light from a wintry window reflecting upon the black metal framework of my chair.
Frederick Joseph Staley