Thoughts have a wavelength, a time in which they take to complete. There are the ordinary daily thoughts: “what should I have for lunch?”, “maybe I shouldn’t have said that…”; they proceed to their conclusion (or not) on a time scale of seconds to minutes. Thoughts of this wavelength that can’t reach a conclusion, or seem to reach an unacceptable conclusion, especially if they have a strong emotional charge, may enter a fast repetitive pattern, running nowhere like a hamster on a wheel.
Getting off that hamster wheel when you find yourself on it is an essential life-skill. A thought that can’t conclude over the course of its natural wavelength is literally insane. The only healthy course of action is to abandon it.
A computer routine that does not finish and terminate is said to be in an infinite loop. There is nothing to be done in such a situation but to forcefully shut it down.
We all have insane thoughts occasionally. Thoughts that do not conclude must be abandoned, if you are to regain your balance and not proceed down the path towards actual insanity.
It’s hard to reason about these kind of thoughts by thinking on their own wavelength. But very short wavelength thoughts — seconds to minutes — are not the only kind of thoughts.
The next region of the thought spectrum consists of thoughts that take place on a scale of hours, weeks or months — these are the thoughts associated with the creative process.
It’s a universal experience for people who do creative work or problem solving of any kind: you work very hard on something without arriving at a solution, and finally decide to give it a rest for a while. Then after some time has passed, hours usually, but perhaps days, weeks or months, the answer you were looking for seems to pop out of nowhere. You’re reading something, or talking to someone, or in the shower or out for a walk, and suddenly there it is.
The trick is to know how much time to put into it before letting go. There seems to be a certain requisite effort required before the problem takes on a momentum of its own and can be left to work towards a conclusion while out of your conscious awareness. If you continue working on it beyond this point, no harm is done to the process, but you are wasting energy and needlessly frustrating yourself. If you haven’t reached the attention escape velocity however, your mind will not continue working on the problem in your absence.
What I don’t think is happening is that your “unconscious” is working on the problem. I fact I’d argue that there really isn’t any such thing as “the unconscious,” that the term is a misleading nominalization — a conversion into a noun of something which is properly a verb or phrase. What is meant by “the unconscious” is “that part of our mental process of which we are (usually) unaware.”
Wikipedia defines “the unconscious” in this way: “The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memory, affect, and motivation. The term was coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The concept was developed and popularized by the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.”
Coleridge at least seems to have meant the part of the mind that generates dreams, thus the mind of the sleeper, the “unconscious person’s mind.” But although we normally only become aware of that part of our mental process occasionally upon awakening from sleep, it is always right there and very conscious. In fact it is arguably more conscious of our moment to moment experience during our waking life than “we” are, as evidenced by the fact that dreams often concern themselves with events and connections of which we haven’t yet become consciously aware. I humbly submit that we do a disservice to clear reasoning about this part of ourselves by calling it “the unconscious mind.”
What is easy to discern is that there is a part of the mind that thinks in metaphorical dramas — that is what dreams are.
That there are many different ways of thinking, happening on many different levels of awareness and on many different wavelengths, all simultaneously…
So where were we? You can let a thought go, and if it has sufficient energy it will continue thinking itself to a conclusion, if a conclusion can be found. It does so on many levels using many different modes of representation.
Most of these levels may seem unavailable to conscious introspection —unless you’re willing to let go of the insistence that conscious introspection take place verbally and on a very short wavelength.
Isadora Duncan is quoted as having said when asked what one of her dances meant, “If I could tell you that, I wouldn’t have to dance it.”
Thoughts that take place over hours, weeks or months and intertwined on many different levels, are at the heart of creative expression. But how to be in touch with all these levels? Dance with one, sing with another? No one person, as far as I know, has ever mastered all of the different modes of creative expression, although we certainly have the capacity to relate to and appreciate them all. There must be some kind of fusion that takes place in order for us to each be able to express the conclusion of a thought in a mode that we have mastered, as a painting or a poem, a song or a story.
And to add to the mystery, what is the nature of what’s going on before a thought emerges into some kind of representation? Is there such a thing as a thought, apart from its sensory representation? You have an idea, and you speak it to your friend sitting next to you. The idea came a moment before you spoke it into words. Even if you spoke spontaneously, the idea had to be there first, else how would something in you know how to chose words and structure a sentence to express it? It takes some finite amount of time to string words together into a sentence - like music they unfold from beginning to end. What was the nature of the idea you had, the instant before the words began?
In The Writing Life author Annie Dillard describes a process that starts with a shining vision of what the work of art you’re contemplating will be. But as you start off to bring it into form, you crash headlong into the physicality of the thing. You have to work with the words and grammar that your language makes available, or with the paint and brushes that you have at hand, and with your skill and experience with those tools, such as it may be. “You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page,” says Dillard. “The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.”
A thought has been unfolding over the course of weeks or months, outside of your everyday awareness. It contains memories and fragments of memories, and those memories consist of sights, sounds, smells and tastes, feelings in various parts of your body, words, emotions — all possible sensations, named and unnamed. Somehow, something in you is comparing and contrasting all those fragments, remixing and assembling them to create new meaning.
When the thought has completed — what happens next? As long as it was internal and unexpressed, it could exist as a vast multidimensional… something. Magnificent, inspiring, and just out of your grasp. Now you must try to “tame it to the page.” The page or canvas is not vast and multidimensional.
It’s not even clear whose thought it is. It seems to exist in your mind and body, but we don’t really know, if we are to be honest, where it came from, any more than we know where our own consciousness really came from.
It feels like a gift. Do I have the energy, skill, motivation and patience to be worthy of it? Damn blank canvas. How shall I begin?
Just begin. Make a mark, write a word. Let the idea crash into physicality.
What happens next is the miracle — sometimes. In an infuriatingly unreliable fashion, a give and take begins between the idea in your mind and the physical manifestation that you are producing. Little accidents happen, and you take advantage of them, shamelessly own them as if they were on purpose.
Your words, shapes and colors begin to be in relationship to what you have previously put down, rather than entirely to the original idea. Something begins to unfold, mysterious in the same way as how spontaneous speech gets organized, but spread out over time, so that it’s even harder to grasp with your moment-by-moment mind.
It’s only over the time it takes to gestate and then finish the work that you can experience all the dimensions of the thoughts and feelings that the work has ended up expressing. For the same reason, the mark of a really great work of art is that every time you read/hear/look at it again, you get more from it — it just keeps on unfolding.
I’ll repeat — there are ideas that cannot be thought or grasped in a moment. They can only be thought and understood over some interval of time. Once they have been understood, they still cannot be thought or explained in the present moment, but only by some higher-dimensional part of the mind.
That higher-dimensional part of the mind is experienced by the moment-by-moment mind as a process spread out over some relatively long period of time, as in living with a work of art.
And there are yet even higher-dimensional thoughts, more than can be expressed in a single work of art.
These are the life directing thoughts that takes many years to think. When one of these comes to a conclusion, the likely result is that you realize that you must make some major change in your circumstances or be forever dissatisfied and unfulfilled.
Probably everyone has or will have at least one of these occurrences at some point in their lives. It may seem to be triggered by some event, but I believe that if you reflect on it carefully you’ll realize that it was a thought that was years in the making, and only when it reached a conclusion could the implications of that conclusion become available.
Arguably, living one’s entire life could be considered one long thought — one’s life as an unfolding, as a yet unfinished work of art. At times it flows, and at other times it frustrates, very much like the artistic process. It’s a give and take between your idea of what your life should be and the physical manifestation that you are producing.
Unforeseen events happen in your life, large and small, and wisdom would be to take advantage of them, shamelessly own them as if they were on purpose. Incorporate them into what is unfolding as if some higher-dimensional part of yourself were actually in control of all of this, like an artist.