A Human Experience is a thinking one...
(decisions, decisions, and more decisions)
We are all unique. We each walk our own walk, and talk our own talk, even if we have borrowed them. Yet all human beings are faced with the same predicament. We need to make it through the day. We need to survive.
Survival for a human being is not merely a physical issue. Our human bodies are not so different from those of animals. Except for our brains. The sophistication and size of the human cortex gives us possibilities and problems other forms of life don’t have. We can do more, but we need more.
As a human being, you need more than just to survive. You need to thrive. You need to be able to fullfil the needs of your soul, heart and mind as well as those of your body. You need company as well as clothes. You need understanding as well as shelter. You need love as much as you need warmth. You need trust as much as you need comfort. You need to express yourself as much as you need to be fed.
It is not so simple to be human. Every day we need so much. To get it we need to use our brains, our cortex. We are not like other animals. We are not born with our behavioural mechanisms hardwired into our nervous system. As human beings we can not rely on instinct to get us through the day. We need to think.
It is in our nature to think. We have been thinking all of our lives. We will never stop. Most of our thinking is not conscious. It goes on below the threshold of awareness, almost continuously. In sleep it takes the form of dreams. When awake we catch only some of it.
We use our capacity for thought in many ways. We use it as much for entertainment and diversion as we do for work and survival. It serves many ends equally well. In service of our needs, whether physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual or social, thought relies on one special faculty. One that is probably unique to humans, at least in its significance.
As human beings we need to make decisions, constantly. Many of these decisions are made unconsciously, by both body and mind. Day in, day out we are making decisions: conscious and unconscious. We choose what to wear, what to eat, what to do, what to say. We make these choices on the basis of the available options: not necessarily on the basis of what we would most like.
Most of the time this is not a problem. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it can be disastrous. How many of our decisions have given us cause for regret? How many of our choices have led to feelings of shame or guilt? How many things would we rather not have done. These are the weights that hang heaviest on our shoulders: regrets over the things we chose to do. This is a much heavier burden than the regret we have about situations and events over which we clearly had no control. We are always more troubled by a mess of our own making, than by one that is forced upon us.
If there is one single thing that would be the most useful for us as human beings it would be the ability to always make the right choice, the right decision. The problem is that we don’t have enough information: there are always too many unpredictables, too many unknowns. Yet as long as we need to take action, we need to make decisions. No matter how poorly informed we may be. We cant hide from life for long.
Most of our decisions are made by the unconscious: by and in our bodies. They decide when we need to eat: despite the fact that our mind may choose, even if unconsciously, to ignore that decision. Your bladder decides when you need to go to the toilet. It may well be that your mind kicks in and recognises that need, recognising it in terminology that lays claim to the decision: but this is not really true. Your body has the information and the intelligence to make its own decisions: and it does so, no matter how much the mind, in its ignorance of somatic information, may argue otherwise.
The needs of your body are often neither recognised, nor recognisable, by the mind, until they have already generated an action designed to satisfy that need. It is in recognising that action that the conscious mind lays claim to the decision of the body with a thought that pretends to be that decision. This all happens so fast that it is easy to be mistaken about it. It happens so often that we have become confused about the relationship between mind and body.
We have allowed the immediacy and transparency of conscious thought to prioritise itself over the subtlety and opacity of the somatic events that, to a great extent, drive them. We have allowed our conscious minds to dominate our body. Even though our conscious mind is and must be totally ignorant of most somatic events.
We are all capable of experiencing our breathing. We are all capable of increasing our oxygen intake. We can all take a deep breath. Yet we can never, ever, actually know exactly how much oxygen we need: because we can never, ever know how much oxygen there is in our blood. Yet our body does: all of the time. The changing relationship between oxygen and carbon-dioxide is constantly being monitored in the brainstem. The strength and regularity of our respiratory rhythm is determined by that information: which is totally unavailable to the conscious mind.
Our conscious mind has not only claimed false authority over the body, but, thereby, over the unconscious too. However, our reactions and actions are, in fact, much more significantly shaped by the unconscious than by the conscious. Conscious beings that we may be, we are far more unconscious than we realise. When we choose a course of action there is more at work than what we think about it. Our thoughts are shaped, even driven, by our subconscious feelings and hopes, our unconscious assumptions and beliefs.
Yet it is our cortex that we use to make our conscious decisions. We use its discriminative power to select the available pertinent information. We then use its analytical power to organise that information so that it makes as much sense as possible. We then use its evaluative power to asses that information on the basis of our priorities and preferences. Then we make our decision. Or so it seems.
This is not necessarily a good idea. We know this because so many of our decisions have been so disastrous. As a result of our own decisions we carry the dragging burdens of regret, shame and guilt with us. The past dragging us down and making us anxious about the future. While the present, in all of is potential glory, is only too easily and often sidelined as a result.
How rare it is for us to escape the clutches of past and future. How rare it is for us to fully enjoy the delights of the present moment. How easily we are deflected from what is actually happening by what could be happening, what might happen, what should have happened. So rarely are we present to what is actually happening that we have lost the thread of our own lives even as they pass us by. We no longer know what it means to be present: to feel deeply, to see clearly, to know directly. We are lost in the disembodying currents and tides of our disembodied minds.