VARIETIES

Varieties of thought. Begin with two. One I call presence and one I call tunnel thinking.

In presence thought is reflective and self aware, as if between two mirrors reflecting each other. Presence has an aspect of stasis, time is like water flowing around a rock in the stream or like the choppy waves about a buoy of presence. Alternatively, presence is a bit of foam floating in the stream of time, so say some. In pure presence thought may be forgotten and only perceptive. It depends upon your angle of view.

From presence, tunnel thought leads off. In tunnel thought consciousness is fully occupied in rolling along a sequential track of thinking; consciousness knows nothing else but the track of thinking. Tunnel thought concentrates and focuses all of the direct engine power of thinking, all working together, unified, we might call it the thought of Jove. A tunnel of thought leads out of presence and may either return to presence after a more or less connected track of thought or the tunnel may continue with one track after another branching off into other tunnels. What initiates a tunnel out of presence, what causes thought in a tunnel to branch or skip to another track and what ends a tunnel, leading thought to re-emergence into presence?

Tunnel thought reminds me of soliton phenomena. Solitons are wave forms which are so coordinated that instead of dispersing like most waves they keep their coherence while they travel long distances. Solitons were first noticed in an irrigation canal, as a wave form that kept on going as its singular self as far as the rider's horse could follow.

It is true that consciousness may be more or less one or split between multiple thoughts. However the amount of consciousness present is not automatically increased by the number of thoughts, nor by layers of thought simultaneous. The amount of consciousness present may differ from time to time due to health and emotional factors, due to the time of day and the ambience of the environment, but it is generally similar when thought transforms between singular or tunnel thought and multiple or reflective thought, which consequently means that tunnel thought has more of our mental resources absorbed in it than does each of the separate thoughts in multiple or reflective thought. Are tunnels of thought in some sense preset as or before they are initiated in consciousness or does the mind dig them up as it thinks? Here the metaphor of tunnel breaks down because these so called tunnels are not holes dug out of solid being but more akin to the air crossing passageways that connect tall buildings above street level in some northern cities, although again the metaphor is insufficient because it is not buildings which are being connected but the state of consciousness at the beginning and end of an incidence of tunnel thought. Yet I would keep the name tunnel thought because that is what it feels like.

Then there is also thought in presence, which might be called reflective thought, wherein consciousness observes itself and remains conscious of its own processes and can choose or decide which thoughts to think and can watch the occurrence of those thoughts and watch itself watching and while it is watching it also waits and sometimes the waiting opens up a creative space where the whisper of a new idea will sometimes arrive, usually unannounced and just naturally thought and then noticed as it occurs or passes and is rethought and becomes part of the possession of mind. Reflective thought is metastable in that it can continue so long as attention is kept in consciousness but it is always susceptible to a falling off into tunnel thought and yet the reflective mode remains somehow implicitly present, for then after a time it recalls consciousness to itself, exits the tunnel and returns to awareness. It is also possible and sometimes occurs that reflective thought can choose and direct the initiation of a train through tunnel thought and this is a most useful practice.

Thought does generally appear to be metastable. It can be kept in a certain focus or orientation by will and sometimes, as in tunnel thought and dreams, without explicit conscious will, but eventually it changes variety, theme, substance and direction. In this context thought reminds me of the classic metastable system of a pile of sand, approximately conical, to which a steady dribble of additional sand is poured onto the top; for finite periods of time the pile rises with accumulation but eventually the increasing steepness will cause part of the pile to become unstable and a section of the sand pile will collapse in a sudden flow, sometimes leaving a still steeper cliff of sand ready for further collapse, but more broadly lessening the average steepness and increasing the stability of the pile, except that more sand continues to be poured onto the top...

There is another variety of thought between tunnel thought and reflective thought; I call this variety channel thought, the thought of Apollo. In channel thought most attention is focused, as in tunnel thought, upon, or inside, a sequential sequence of thought but there is a thin reflective layer which travels along beside or above the main attention; I shall call this the swift thought for I often find it very fast moving and acute; the thought of Mercury. Swift thought may be reflecting upon the channeled thought or it may be following its own ways and means. One type of occasion wherein I notice channeled thought is while reading, being both absorbed in the content of the reading and reflecting upon the experience, critical or experiential, of the reading.

I find a stream of thought always, or as nearly always as I can determine, occurring between the surface of usually verbal or pictorial thought and the levels of emotive feeling. This stream is often critical and reflective and it is also the level at which emotion coincides with analysis to produce truth; it is fast and sure, it examines, reduces, extends, separates and connects ideas, concepts, words and pictures. It is the true private thought of the mind, for what is nearer to the surface is bounded by its too direct interaction with the external world, warped thereby from true natural thought of truth, deflected therefrom by the presence, demands, threats and the psychology of others within immediate or projected time and space; and what lies deeper in the privacy of personal being is inarticulate feeling, emotion, energy or tiredness, perhaps what might be called the subconscious.

The thin and light but very honest and effective mercurial layer of channel thought is most interesting. It hews closest to truth of any form of thought I know; it is both rudely honest and light enough to be so without blows. It is odd that it cannot be a standalone thought form, which would make it like a sort of well lighted tunnel thought. I could call it Mercurial thought or wave guide thought.

Tunnel thought is a very efficient form of thought, it has all of the engines pulling together, the challenge is to direct and control tunnel thought so that it goes in a desired direction. Perhaps the most effective form of thought would be channel thought with most of the mind power still focused but with the Mercurial guide wave of swift thought finding and showing the direction.

Another form of thought might be called touchstone thought, wherein certain memories or images touched upon briefly or lingeringly leave consciousness refreshed and energized. Among my touchstones are some visual images which it is not an intrusion of privacy to share: sunlight on brick, any sunlight, late afternoon winter sunlight, and then there is the presence of beings such as the rosy finches, jays, and evening grosbeaks that visit a tree outside my window. Might this be called after the thought of Venus?

Changes between one of the thought forms described above and another, particularly the suddenness common to the transformations, brings to recollection the obvious similarities of such thought changes to second order phase changes in physical systems. First order physical phase changes require a gain or loss of energy by the system changing its phase and thus they are entropic and not readily reversible without either degradation to the structure of the system or external input; they do not thus seem very useful in describing the swift transformations and reversals occurring so constantly in thought. Second order phase changes occur without energy loss and thus may be nonentropically reversed and transformed as often as the conditions appropriate to the different phases reappear and thus appear much more like the quick and apparently lossless shifts between one type of thought form and another.

However, the very thought of using the rather obvious superficial similarities between a physical system and mental states in order to better understand thought gives rise to some deeper and interesting questions. Phase changes are known in thought as an aspect of physical science which in turn is dependent upon a great collectivity of thoughts over time and communication of thoughts between individuals; such a structure rises far above the basic appearance of a thought itself in awareness. How do such thought structures arise, how are they built and what do the thoughts to which they give rise signify? That first question may be long and difficult to answer but at least the snake is gliding forward. Another question which arises is yet more subtle, wherein the snake may be biting its own tail. Is the phase change metaphor for thought something more than a metaphor? Thought of phase change is, besides being thought about physical systems and indirectly about mental states, also, and even more directly, a thought or collection of thought occurring in awareness; does this, how does this thought essence in awareness of thought about the structure of thought refract upon the meaning of the comparison? It seems almost as if we have wound a circular thought so tight that the logical gap of circular reasoning, the area, as it were, of the circle, is squeezed down to very little, as, indeed, the area of a circle diminishes as the square of the diminishment of the circumference. While to pretend that language structures thought by thought are thereby structures of thought seems to smack of sympathetic magic we may be excepted from that comparison since the language itself is part of thought.

Let us first ease the constraints and think more generally of thought about thought. (More explicitly in this thoughtext, what I am doing now is writing about thought about thought, WTT.) First the simplicities: thoughts occur whose theme is thought, those thoughts include the thoughts from which are derived, or which arrive from, the words written in this writing. Such thought about thought is, from an external point of view, self referential; however, from an experiential point of view, such thought is still thought, whose theme happens to be thought. Grammatologically, we appear to have triadic referentiallity, inducing various triadic dualisms whose implicit appearance we might make manifest should we wish to write the appropriate words, however obvious they may appear. Let us return towards the source.

Is there any way we can make the self referentiallity of thought about thought useful for understanding thought? That fact of self reference opens a rich purse of mathematical results.

There are many routes to explore in consciousness and one's own mind; each of us can find our own but it may be useful to give just one example among those which have occurred in my own . Beginning near the surface of consciousness turn inward, inward to the wall of the interior, the sloping rocky surface of the interior. Look and find a cave, an opening, a doorway inside. Assume an avatar of the self, one who moves, who explores the inner way. Enter the passageway, go in where the dark becomes light, push on, step in, follow the path, make the road, delve inward, making way, moving the rocks, clearing a stepwalk, going inward, willing inward, looking deeper, onward through the rock lined cavern until space enlarges, opening, widening. When one sees in the dark, when one sees the dark and what resides in the dark, when one sees the dark reflective pool and the rocky ledges that bound its nearer shores, when one sees the rocky ceiling of the cavern and the empty star streaked boundless dark overhead. Go forth upon the pool of inward waters night still and shining, a boat out upon the silent dark, sail upon the windless sea, ride the still currents, enter forth across the gap so wide and narrow, so quiet and alone...

...across the gap, where greylight dawns again on rocky shores the boat comes to rest, avatar steps out and climbs along a narrow path, up among the grey stones lit by night's other sun, climbing a path of stones upward into a converging circle of starlight, a hole unto the upward slopes, emerging with an exterior view of the deep inside, space opening outward, a large space deep inside.

We have made several elementary speculations and descriptions upon the theme of thought but we are mapping the roots in a mangrove swamp, some are above water and reflected from the surface, some are below water and inhabited by the fish and crabs and alligators, reaching down into the dark and buoyant mud. We should look higher and lower. Thought is the formation of all higher speculation and presentation of the sunlight, birds, butterflies and spirit rising into the pure azure sky; thought is what speaks the depths where emotion convinces being to be.

Thinking is an act and experience of consciousness, but thinking, as I know it, is a limited factor of consciousness. Thinking is a sort of rolling focus of mental experience. Thinking is usually the front parlor of consciousness. Thinking is a succession of thoughts, sometimes connected by logical, emotive, or memorial, or other threads. Thinking is very often in words, although it may be in colors, lines, and forms for a painter; sounds, rhythms and harmonies for a musician; something else for mathematicians; in any case, thinking generally implies the focal center of consciousness, often directed and organized.

It is easy and useful to reconnoiter the landscape of thoughts and to describe some of the many forms of thought but we touch a deeper and more serious chord when we begin to investigate the meaning of thought. What are the causes of thought and what are the goals of thought and still more essentially, what is thought about?

Let us consider that last question first. We can respeak it: what does thought mean? By this I am not asking the general meaning of the fact of thinking, that is another topic, but rather what sort of significance can be attached to the content of particular thoughts. Perhaps some simple examples will help us begin.

If I think in words: "Two plus two equals four." we might call that a thought, even naming it A, and ask what it means. It appears to have a reference to a mathematical truth or perhaps we might say an experiential one: that if we have two things and also another two things and if we count the things altogether we arrive at the number four of things. Besides the simple math, we can look at that thought in other aspects. A is a thought in words, a thought suspended in language; I write suspended because it feels to me that if we describe a thought as a thought in words we also imply some other thought matter beneath or around the words. After all, the word thought has at least private meaning to us, at least in such a clear and simple case as A, which words, held abstractly, out of the context of language and the subjective intuitive understanding of language which we possess, would not have. And then again we might say that A is, if not mindless at least short mind repetition of a formula inculcated in us (by what means perhaps Foucault best said) as one of the folk aphorisms of our culture. We have not answered the question of what even such a simple thought as A means but we have pried open somewhat the door of the cell of unknowing.

If, as I suspect, we have only touched upon the simplest and most elementary patterns pertaining to the meaning of A, and much more subtle truth remains unsaid, that casts far our imagination where thoughts of more substantial or complex import are to be considered.

Perceptions, at least so far as they are consciously recognized, can be called thoughts. After a week of December clouds the sky today is so blue that it makes the soul ache. That perception of blue reaches across the consciousness and connects to and brings forth into consciousness a sense of both a pleasure of infinity partly known and a hunger of the soul eye to grasp entirely that boundless depth. A real sense perception can be called a thought but there is no hard boundary between the direct sensation and the meaning and resonance of that sensation in the self.

We can generalize the boundary aspect of thoughts mentioned in the last example. Although thoughts are in some sense individual things they do not in general have hard or sharp boundaries. They do appear to often have fairly distinct beginnings and ends in time but their content of associations is otherwise. A thought as actually experienced in the consciousness, even the simple perception of a color, has entanglements that both enrich the perception and diffuse its limits.

These sometimes clear beginnings and ends of thoughts in time are intriguing. If we could write that the mind thought a linear succession of thoughts, one thought beginning when another one ended, we would have a fine tool for arranging thoughts at least in their order of temporal experience. It would not even be much of a complication to include intervals of unconscious thoughtlessness, sleep perhaps or thought void, as gaps in the linear sequence. This model could, if our aim was a graph of thought, the set of thoughts, serve practicably as a first approximation. For many years I used to enjoy ordering all genera of experience in linear or specific nonlinear relations; almost every time I found a new sequence, a rational pattern, whether of philosophy, history, society, nature, time, experience or pure mathematics, I would write it down in a notebook and feel joy. These were pleasant and perhaps educational exercises but such is not the primary goal, aim, focus or intent of this writing which is rather more ambitious and quite likely also more diffuse.

We have noticed, particularly in our discussion of perception, that actual thoughts are usually a complex association of subjective media; what might be called a thought or an interval of internal experience would be likely to include several of the following forms, such as sense perception, the memory or imagination of sense perception, words and word structures, proprioception or the interiority of proprioception, memories of other thoughts, a sense of being, emotion, and something which we might call a logical sense which would include an attitude of truth or, when appropriate, of questioning. All or any of these, as well as other forms which I have forgotten to write down or do not know, collected along a pole of awareness or charged by a current of awareness or we could say enveloped in the flux of awareness, form a sort of substance of thought. The actual occurrence of such a composition during an interval of time could be almost be called a thought, what is still missing is the synthetic meaning, intent or focus which gives the collection unity.

Consider the thought: "What is thought?" Compared to A this new example, which we might name B, seems at first unfathomably deep and shadowed with circular reflections. When a gear is almost but not quite worn down to smooth there still remains the last tooth which might with luck finally catch and start the engine of thought. B as written above has been a thought in words. Thus it shares with simple A the foundation of language, a rather large sharing. B is however a question but that is another story.

If the simplest mode of defining a thought is as the consciousness during an interval of time, that definition is still subject to further discriminations; we might assume external clock time and measure the thought interval accordingly; it would however seems intrinsically more coherent to specify the duration of thought as experienced connected cohesion of consciousness; a thought as element is individuated from the thought stream as set or flux by the thinker's intuition of that thought's unity. The unity of a thought so known is not absolute; thoughts are complex entities in the mind and in consciousness.

The thought stream is an ongoing flux of consciousness including sense perceptions, ratiocinations, words, memories, emotions and whatever else occurs. It does seem that there also occur intervals during which there is a predominate or intended focus, not necessarily exactly so, but recognizably. The scope of influence of the central concept marks off a thought. So broadly defined, we see that thoughts overlap; it is like looking at a pile of semitransparent paramecium through a microscope; the dark refractions of the boundaries of the lively squiggling bodies can only with difficulty be separated but still one can identify an individual animal and watch it wriggling (except that one suffers for the struggling paramecium, should one also regret the passing thought?).

All of this geography is so easy to understand and describe, easy because it has not engaged the vital issue, the meaning of that central concept which unifies, even if imperfectly, and makes meaningful a thought, a string of thoughts, a strand out of the flux of thinking, whatever is set off as in itself or in relationship coherent. Meaning, value, intent, the why rather than the how, where we go from the simple and clear, the direct and explicit, into the real and effective, that is the pull, the pole, the pole star, the polar essence, the flagpole upon which our as yet unseamed sign is to wave, a central challenge, target possibly targetless , aim of foundation, Venus and Jupiter floating in the blacklight of the moon, chalice of the morning sun, pink clouds floating over continents wide and broad, something to write home about.

So we march from form toward meaning.

I find thought this morning like a heavier than air machine, a sort of glider with a small engine on the nose that goes on and off. The airfoil catches random currents of suggestions, memories, family concerns; it turns and glides and sinks towards obscurity; then the motor turns on and the propellor pushes into the updraft of thinking about thought. The blades will pull but sooner or later a random current changes the yawl and pitch of thought and then, as if the motor was sensitive to the changed direction, it turns off and lets the machine of mind slide around and down gliding through thickening strata but by doing so our craft thereby gains speed and with a new rush of wind the engine reignites and starts pulling back up into the realm of thought.

Frederick Joseph Staley