"The self-work that you do in silence echoes throughout every part of your life"
-Michel Clark
Have you ever been in a situation where you feel so uneasy that you want to escape and go off to be by yourself? Perhaps you’re watching a couple have a heated argument in front of you while trying to enjoy a meal at a restaurant or you’re in a venue full of crowded people and the decibels just keep getting louder.
We often find ourselves in environments or scenarios that we don’t want to be in and that drain us. Many of us resign ourselves to the notion that external chaos is just part of everyday life and that authentic inner-peace is probably impossible to obtain. I’m telling you outright that this is an absurd fabrication of the mind that mentally lazy people rely on in order to avoid the real graft that comes with mental agility.
Hold on, let me explain.
Your brain runs on many things, but glucose is a really important part of the neurochemical equation. Energy travels to the brain (in the form of glucose) via blood vessels and the more your capillaries dilate (when more mental effort is required) the more glucose is needed. Most people are none the wiser as to how their brain works.
They don’t know that cognitive tasks consume more fuel than usual, so directed thinking can actually be metabolically demanding. Yes, you read that right. The more difficult a mental task is, the more energy (glucose) is required so directed thinking can actually cost you a lot of energy.
Now, let us return to my initial proposition. Many of us resign ourselves to the notion that energy-draining, chaotic experiences are just part of everyday life and that authentic inner-peace is probably impossible to obtain. Why is that? Well, turning the first-person perspective inward in order to direct your own thoughts demands more cognitive effort and mental willpower. Essentially, to build an inner-sanctuary within that you can visit at any time for clarity and stillness is a laborious and mentally-taxing pursuit that warrants years of self-reflective and introspective thinking.
Put simply, to be able to go within, there has to be something worth going inward for.
But, it’s not just that most people aren’t the architects of their own thoughts - rather they haven’t even considered the radical possibility that getting stronger mentally can keep them steady, sharp, stable and able to navigate life.
On a fundamental level, mental agility is not a nice-to-have. It is a non-negotiable necessity in a world filled to the brim with endless distractions, white noise and chaotic experiences that constantly poke and prod at your mind.
Let’s first look at how the mind experiences reality because this will set you up for the concept of building a safe mental sanctury within. According to most cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers, conscious experience is not only an internal construct, but also an extremely selective way of representing information. The self is a result of you mentally representing yourself as a representational system in phenomenological real-time. In case I've lost you, let me explain this in layman's terms.
The ‘self’ does not exist as we know it because all that exists are phenomenal selves that appear in conscious experience. A phenomenal self is not a thing, but an ongoing process. This directly addresses and solves the puzzle of how subjectivity emerges out of objective events in the natural world.
If a phenomenal self is a representation of a self (generated by a self) and embedded into its representation of the world, then your mind is just a vehicle for content. Your brain creates a model of the world from sensory data and is then unable to see this as a model it has created, which makes your brain invisible to itself. In fact, you are only ever in contact with its content. Think of your brain as a permanently running online simulation that you are unable to recognise as something that you have created in your mind.
If the brain was not invisible to itself, we would lose ourselves in the myriad of micro-events taking place in our brains at every second and all that would be left is a mind exploding into endless loops of self-exploration.
The self is thus nothing more than the content of the phenomenological self-model. The first person pronoun "I" doesn't refer to an object like a ball or a car, it just points to the speaker of the current sentence because there is no thing in the brain or outside of the world which is us. We are processes.
The nature and mechanism of conscious processing is arguably one of the most intriguing questions in 21st-century neuroscience. Yet if you look at the properties that information-processing systems must possess in order to become phenomenal representations, then you'll notice that the self is a very special kind of representational content. In a certain sense, you are the content of your phenomenal self, but you neither have nor are a self. Rather, the self is a complex brain state and an integrated process.
With that in mind, why would someone need or want to create a safe mental sanctury within in order to be able to navigate life? Well, I can’t tell you the amount of times that this self-soothing activity has saved me from sustained distress, anxiety or anguish. I’ve consistently relied upon this particular mental technique throughout the span of my life and it’s only ever served me.
You experience the world through the mind so your mental models require constant attention, resets and renewals. You should be feverishly concerned with what types of thoughts are entering your mind and which thoughts you are devoting conscious attention to because the human mind is the site of consciousness. You are your mind, there’s no way around this.
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