FLOW PSYCHOLOGY

Source: Our Internal Movie

A strange fact about the human condition is that each of us is always watching our own internal movie. Whether that is a vivid, ultra-detailed film, or a misty, shadowy one with chattery commotion going on vaguely in the background, that film is all there is to our experience, no matter where we go or what we do

To use a simple metaphor, our consciousness is like the pointer arrow on the computer monitor. We can move the pointer around on the screen, but we cannot escape it, no matter what we do — not even in our dreams!

Despite all that, you will still only be the roving dot. You are activity happening in a subconscious mind. It cannot be simultaneously aware of everything that exists in the universe, or even of everything that exists in itself or its immediate surroundings.

Consciousness is the transient center of focus, its way of restricting attention to a manageable area. Even emotions and what we call “will” are all “watchable” elements in the subconscious that take place without consciousness actually controlling them. Scientific experiments have shown that your subconscious decides what you will do before “you” are even aware of the decision.

The subconscious conjures its own illusion of a self that is watching the movie, but all the conscious self ever does or ever can do is watch that movie.

We already understand that fact implicitly when we refer to the subconscious as “it” rather than “he” or “she”. And yet, each of us feels that we are truly more substantial than just a bit of activity in the subconscious while it focuses its attention. We feel an inexpressibly profound conviction that not only are we real, we are in fact more real than everything else.

You feel that the world itself could possibly be an illusion, but that you, the Viewer of the Movie, must be utterly real and inextinguishable (“I think, therefore I am”). No wonder many people find themselves believing in an indestructible soul.

The self, created by the subconscious is what turns events in the brain into experience. Like any other part of the physical world, the brain simply exists. Pain and pleasure take place in the subconscious, but it does not experience them. It does not experience anything. The subconscious hears, without hearing what it hears, sees without seeing what it sees. The conscious, on the other hand, is what the brain has created to weave perceptions together to form experience.

Just like an elaborate dream that is woven in response to the sound of water dripping from a rooftop, or to food eaten before bed gurgling in the bowels, the conscious self weaves a web of experience around the sense data flowing into the brain.

The brain simply is. Meanwhile, the conscious self is that which experiences what it is like to have an embodied brain. The self is that which is convinced of its own experience. The self simply experiences. It can do nothing else but evaluate all that happens in terms of experience.

Although the brain has no experience, the subconscious is all that is real. The conscious self feels that it is in command, but that is only its illusion. The self is only a figment or side effect of subconscious activity. Consciousness is simply something the subconscious does,

The weird tautology of the consciousness is that it is convinced of its own substantiality because consciousness is precisely that experiences, and the subject that experiences also experiences itself as substantial. What is it like to be a videogame character?

Could the subconscious ever realize that it is much greater than the movie watcher? That it has itself created the movie watcher? That it is much more intimately connected to the world as a whole, and to the essence of other people, than the conscious self could ever be? Paradoxically, that would be a realization that could not be experienced, although it would be an awakening of some sort.

The self, on the other hand, can discover itself to be a shadow of the silent, unperceiving subconscious beneath. It can discover the subconscious  as that which sees without seeing, hears without hearing, understands without knowing, decides without intention.

Filed under: illusions Tagged: | awareness, brain, imagination, insight, movies, nature, neuroscience, perception, psychology