Interlude: The Lights Are On…Is Anybody Home?

Is it odd that so many body-mind systems have a habit of leaving out the mind? Have we been so terrified by the consequences of western civilization’s rational prejudices that we’ve come to distrust critical thought entirely? Do we remember how to question, or do we simply accept whatever conceptual framework makes us “feel good”?

Hone your critical and analytic abilities by evaluating the following scheme:

Taxonomy of Thought

There are three types of thinker: the cow, the wolf, and the eagle.

Cow:

Ruminator. Thought stream flows as just another biological function, humming away like blocked intestines. At best, the thoughts are inconsequential, based on circumstance, and flow without disruption. If there is a disruption, there may be indigestion: worry, obsession, etc. No conscious or critical reflection. Has thoughts rather than thinks thoughts. Accepts what ideas/beliefs she has been given. Takes everything for granted. Victim of thought.

Wolf:

Consciously recognizes that his thoughts, when pronounced as words, have physical and emotional effects on the other. Uses thought in a predatory fashion to take advantage of the cows (financially, sexually, emotionally). Conscious and critical enough to reflect on and improve his methods, but essentially driven by the biological urges. May or may not be in denial concerning the selfishness of his actions. May have more or less of a cow streak as well. Abandons ideas that don’t “work” – but never questions the motivations that lead to the strategic thinking in the first place. Not interested in truth if it does not serve his ends. Predator of thought.

Eagle:

Conscious and critical enough to recognize the arbitrary and absurd nature of his own ends. Is perfectly capable of predation, but further thought reveals it to be an unworthy pursuit much of the time. Is interested in gaining enough distance and perspective from the objects of his consciousness to strive for truth for its own sake, for the sake of clarity. May have a wolf and/or cow streak as well. Soars and observes. Knows he cannot see or catch what is above him, so strives for greater heights, aware of the unknown. Sometimes predates upon wolves. Thinker of thought.

Analysis: Your Turn

Write out answers to the following questions. Type or handwrite, it doesn’t matter, but it matters that you write it down. Writing is focused thought.

Don’t worry about coming up with a smooth final product. Write to discover and develop ideas.

• Analyze and evaluate: What do you make of this scheme?
• Are you a cow, wolf, or eagle?
• Now, based on how you underwent your analysis and evaluation of this scheme, are you a cow, a wolf, or an eagle?
• Now, based on how you answered the above question, are you a cow, a wolf, or an eagle?
• Just what are you, anyway?

[Correct answers printed upside down on the last page of this pamphlet]

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From Part 3:

Why the Eyes

We use the sense of sight more than any other to interface with our environment; as such, one could think of the eyes as a primary gateway between our internal and external senses of reality. They also play a huge part in how we process mental content: ever since the advent of the printing press, written language seen through the eyes has been a primary mode of communicating ideas in our culture. This remains true in the age of the internet, though the visual element is also largely image and video based.

Now think about how you read text. You are moving your eyes in a very specific way. As an English speaker/reader, you move them left to right, then down a little, back to the left, over to the right, etc.

That is, your eyes move in a line that weaves tightly around the page. (Think of metaphors related to story telling, like spinning a yarn.)

This is a very distinct pattern of muscular movement. Now think of written text in comparison to, say, a tapestry depicting a natural scene. A tapestry is woven in a similarly linear fashion, but once finished, is meant to be experienced as a total piece. The eye can receive an overall impression of the image and then rove over the piece as it sees fit, accepting the images directly if they are representational (scenes from life) and any non-representational patterns on the basis of their aesthetic appeal. It may go on to attribute some symbolic meaning to the images it sees.

But with text based on a phonetic alphabet, the words on the page do not represent things directly; they represent sounds which represent things. That means the information has to be processed through the visual part of the brain, transduced to the auditory part of the brain and then translated into the ideas they represent. What we see on the page or screen is doubly abstracted from its meaning.

(St. Thomas Aquinas used to impress contemporaries by looking at a page in a book, closing the book, and then telling them what it said. They interpreted this as evidence of his sainthood, since reading silently was a relatively recent innovation practiced by few, based on pronouncing the written words not out loud, but silently to oneself.)

So why is all of this important? Well, two reasons, I’d think:

For one thing, this pattern of muscular movement in the eyes is bound up in a total way of experiencing the realm of thought and ideas: a strictly linear, highly abstract mode, which lends itself to a very particular style of thinking and, therefore, constructing and interacting with culture (think freeways, assembly lines, career paths, etc.)

This dominant mode of thinking in Western culture seems so deeply rooted that countless attempts to modify or re-humanize it from within the realm of public discourse have failed miserably. But borrowing the Command Z thesis that all activities of the mind and emotions have their root in the body, could it be that this habit of thinking is bound up in something as mundane as the habitual movement of the eyes over text—something we reinforce every time we read? (Think back to the eyes and face exercises I asked you to perform in the first pamphlet.) So if we undermine the eyes’ habitual movement, can we undermine this compulsive mode of thought?

Also—and this almost seems too obvious to mention (but isn’t it usually the most obvious that is most commonly missed?)—everything that you have read in these pamphlets, including the sections which discuss the effect of written language on thought, you have experienced through the medium of English text. You didn’t read it in Chinese ideograms or Mayan hieroglyphs or have it suddenly transmitted into your mind from mine. You read it in English, and English has an entire universe of particularities that define your experience of accessing information through it.

If you aren’t aware of how your language defines your experience of its content, then your mind is defined by your language’s limitations. It is not free.

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