where do “our” ideas come from and my pyramid of being

Who is running the show

The vast majority of what we do, think and feel is not under our conscious control.

Part of it is explained by psychology: studies show that 95% of our behaviours are the result of learned habits.

But that’s not the whole story. For the biggest part, we are driven by genetics and, more broadly, by our biological programming. This includes things like our inborn preferences about beauty and feelings of attraction - e.g. being attracted to a specific sex. Those preferences are deeply hardwired and, as such, operate above the deliberation of the conscious mind. While we can reshape some of them - like expanding our sexual preferences – others might be set in stone. For instance, it is very unlikely that we find any animal (other species) attractive in the way we find humans. These are basic evolutionary programmes, burnt far into the brain’s and body’s circuitry in the course of hundreds of thousands of generations. In most cases, consciousness has little access to this giant and precise operating system that runs below.

Incubation of ideas

Despite all this, we still innovate, change the world and even try to bypass or re-programme our own operating system. But here’s the critical thing: when suddenly we have this new, brilliant idea, behind it is an enormous amount of internal work. Our neural circuitry might be working on it for days or years, consolidating information and testing new input. Our conscious mind learns about it last. It’s more like a new idea has been passed on to us rather than being ours.

Scientists have a name for this process: incubation. Just like COVID will incubate in your body for a few days before you get symptoms, ideas incubate in the back of your mind before popping into your awareness as fully formed concepts.

Lantern and spotlight consciousness

Here is another curious fact: novel ideas will often come to us when we least look for them. Taking the shower is one example – being massaged by warm water does a brilliant job at relaxing our minds and lubricating our creative circuits. This is related to two different kinds of consciousness: lantern and spotlight consciousness. Spotlight one is the ability to narrow down our focus and filter out any other input. This is when we perform tasks like reading or fixing something. Lantern consciousness, on the other hand, means being vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. It is the uninhibited receptiveness, and it can come with a peculiar type of exaltation and happiness. It’s exactly what children are like. And well, this type of consciousness narrows as we grow older. We know more but we see less.

Coming back to the shower, it’s the playground for the lantern consciousness. No wonder so many discoveries and good ideas happened in bathrooms. There, our minds relax and start to just wonder (it also helps that the running water partly deprives our senses - seeing and hearing take a back seat). And so, the lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin in a shower. That’s where Agatha Christie and Stephen King were coming up with their books’ ideas. And how about Archimedes “eureka” uttered in a bath?!

Resting mental networks

There is another scientific concept explaining the role of the lantern consciousness. It’s called “resting mental networks” and it shows that - in between activities - people demonstrate synchronicity across various parts of the brain. That’s a true hidden generator of creativity and a general sense of wellness.

This notion was brilliantly captured by Amos Tversky, a psychologist who contributed to the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias. He once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

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These ideas inform how I think about my priorities. One way I look at my life is that it has four layers: stillness, feeling, thinking, and doing. It’s a spectrum where on one extreme (bottom) a new, quality staff is brewing in my mind and on the other (top), there is an auto-pilot mode. The trick is to hang out in the bottom layers of the pyramid as often as possible.

STILLNESS

Stillness is the foundation of my pyramid. 

That’s when I take time to do nothing in particular. I just am and let life flow through me. I let thoughts and feelings pass by like clouds. Or I literally stare at clouds or water.  

I like to frontload my mornings with a good measure of stillness – time with little external stimuli. Then, I can turn my internal antenna into the juiciest directions. It can go both inward and outward - like welcoming dawns which are my biggest turn-on ever!

I also like to find small pockets of stillness all through my day. For instance, allowing for more space between activities. It could mean not jumping to something else right after reading an interesting article but letting it sink in and be processed in a way that unfolds naturally.

It’s also the kind of stillness that Buddhism captures through terms like emptiness and nothingness. Those things, hard as they are to grasp, are the most real thing there is. In the grand scheme of things, everything that exists is a momentary exception from not being. Like a strike of a match in the darkness. It is so impactful when I connect to this still and infinite space, especially when starting the day. It’s like a reboot of a computer. It supercharges my day. 

FEELING

Allowing myself to feel whatever comes already moves me to the terrain of reactivity. But this is fine and it can still provide a lot of growth, healing or sheer fun. Feeling can also have stillness qualities to it.

Listening intentionally to music is one of my favourite ways to feel. And few things compare to the awe I sometimes feel when I have my morning dance by the water.

It’s also nice to feel various sensations when I do a body-scan practise: focusing my attention on different body parts. Where the attention goes, the energy flows.

On the other side of the spectrum is noticing feelings like sadness, anxiety or anger, and allowing them to be and flow through me. Or even letting them wash over me, like a big wave sending me into tumbling. It can be helpful to take a few deep breaths when I get angry. But there are times when it’s a damn relief to shout or hit something (without breaking anything or hurting anyone, including myself).

Feelings involving other humans is a whole different ball game. Especially when there are conflicting or even opposing feelings at the same time. When I get stuck in my head, I look for rescue in Ram Dass quote: “The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.”

And when things get hard emotionally, I try to remember that the only way out is through it. All in all, there is no way around feelings. If we repress them, we only lock them up inside us, where they breed in darkness and often assume caricatured forms. And it takes huge amounts of energy to keep them locked up.

How does “feelings management” fit into a larger picture of lantern consciousness, resting mental networks or incubation period for ideas? Feelings that we haven’t properly processed leave a residue that clouds our mind and spirit. The more repressed residue there is, the more risk we run of becoming both emotionally and cognitively unsound. And this can have a massive effect on how we encode and process our reality (did you know that when we are depressed, we literally see fewer colours?).

THINKING (cognition)

The quality of my thinking is a derivative of stillness and feeling practices. These two fundamental layers of the pyramid are where my edge comes from. The deeper I can dive into them, the more it will reflect on my cognitive abilities like learning and understanding the world around me. 

To me, thinking is an intellectual process of widening my horizons.

It’s understanding better other people’s lives and experiences and learning that there are no “others” or “them”.

It’s benefiting from scientific knowledge so that I can comprehend fuller myself and the world where I live. It’s things like understanding better how exactly the sound works, how old and big the cosmos is, or what common psychological biases we humans succumb to. And the more I learn about all this, the more appreciation, amazement and gratitude I have towards life.

DOING

Everything I do comes from the first three layers in the pyramid. Doing is the most automated and superficial activity. It’s almost entirely an auto-pilot state, or what the French nicely describe as “les carottes sont cuites” - the carrots are cooked. Deals are done. Everything has been shaped in the first three states and here I rip the benefits (or not). And well, for a time being, it’s the place where I hang out the most- it’s performing tasks at work, following to-do lists, talking. Writing this post is also part of the doing. No wonder William Blake once wrote: “I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will”.   

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There are plenty of activities that oscillate between various states. For instance, cooking can be a stressful operation or a meditative activity. Playing with my child can be filled with feelings and a curious mind, or become something mechanical. My movement practice can span across the whole pyramid, and at best times I can still my mind while my body is in motion.

I know I want a life where there is more and more stillness. There aren’t many things more enchanting than to be still when surrounded by nature or even sit by the window and calmly observe the life passing on the other side. It is the best way to nurture my body and my mind – to power it by stillness.

This post flows with the Kills - Monkey 23