Nonstop chatter.
Why does it feel sometimes that listening to my own mind is like I am trapped in a room with another person who won’t shut up?
And why is this mind of mine attached to me anyway? Can I get rid of it? Can I turn it off? Can I just get some quiet around here?
And where does this mind come from? Where did it originate? Why is it attached to me? Why is this mind my mind? Can I trade it in for a different one?
Theories
I have heard some theories about that thing we all individually call my mind. Are they true? I have no idea.
One concept is one I find fascinating. The point is that each person’s mind is not unique.
Namely, according to this idea, there is only one mind in the world. And each of us accesses a small part of it, and that there are separations or buffers in that mind so we are not fully cognizant of its shared state; we don’t know it is shared, so we think our part is unique and individual.
I have no idea if this is true. And maybe it does not make any difference. Because if we share parts of the universal mind, we can influence and are influenced by how and what others think.
And the reality is, we are influenced by others, and we do influence others.
So, let’s assume for moment this is true. If this is true, it is possible that discomfort and turmoil for some affects others. The affected may not know why or how they are affected, but they are. It would explain how chaos seemingly propagates, seemingly randomly, like Brownian motion.
Result
On the one hand it is kind of scary to conceive that my mind is a part of a shared entity, that I share with just about all other humans. The philosophical implications are stunning. The separateness that I perceive myself to be as an independent human, different from all others, is therefore likely an illusion.
The illusoriness of a separate self is something touched on by some philosophies and spiritual traditions. Yet, the “independent self” hypothesis has taken hold ever so strongly in our culture, in our society, in our world, so much so that thinking about it being an illusion seems simply a thought experiment, a illusion itself.
How do you control your thinking mind? Or do you? Let me know here.
The illustration by Maxfield Parrish was used in “Italian Villas and their Gardens” (1904) by Edith Wharton. Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library,of the Smithsonian Institution.
The post Is My Mind Mine? appeared first in Smile If You Dare.