I'm back. Thanks for being patient.
The psyche, on the surface, certainly seems to act like a place. It appears that things "happen" there. Thoughts arrive, vanish, linger... So there's probably a location where psychic contents are presented, right? We certainly talk about it like this. Something's been "in" our head for weeks; that thought just "left" my mind...
Well - as I've alluded to in earlier posts - I don't think it's quite that simple. The psyche continues moving, at all times, but it's not quite as easy as imagining some conveyor belt bringing psychic contents, one after another, "into" the space of the mind.
However, there must be some orienting factor. There must be something that gives us the impression that a thought is happening "now." It will be the task of this post to see whether we can come up with an idea about what this might be. What "shows" a thought? In an earlier post I referred to the psychic "eye," and it is to this topic that I would like to return.
When I refer to the "psychic eye," I am not in the least comparing it to the physical eye. For the time being we must put aside all our materially-grounded conceptions of eyes. The psychic eye does, however, seem to be able to "see" psychic contents. So we might say that it is the quality or "part" of the psyche that enables us to witness what happens there. This observational faculty is not a thought. See for yourself. If you are still, you can observe psychic contents unobtrusively. Actually, all it takes is the knowledge that you have thoughts to know there is some sort of observer. Even that phrase - "you have thoughts" - bears witness to the dichotomy.
So the "eye," we have decided, is distinct from the contents. It is not an object in the psyche (i.e. a thought, image, or emotion), but an attribute of the psyche. It stands apart because it does not "happen"; it does not participate in the movement of psychic contents.
But what is it? How can we begin to describe such a thing? And if all it does is watches, then what is the point of talking about it?
Well, we might decide that it is important to know what this "eye" is because it seems to be connected with consciousness. Ahh, consciousness. That strange, elusive something that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Somehow, we know we know. We have the gift of reflection. But what is that something? Well, isn't that the quesiton. Scientists have searched for some physical correllate to the "observing faculty", but their efforts have proven unsuccessful. The "ghost in the machine" is nowhere to be found. It is not in the brain, the eyes, the heart - nothing!
The discussion of consciousness seldom ends without a peep from the bio- and neurochemistry crowd, so it might be good to take a momentary detour.
There are of course physical substrates to the phenomenon of thought. Neuroscientists have revealed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that some of the brain's electrical impulses correspond closely to the psychological phenomenon of thought. Accordingly, materialists would have us believe that the thought is the electrical impulse. They may also be inclined to argue in favor of the view that memories are "stored" at the cellular level, and that neuropeptides are the biological basis of emotion. If they characterized these findings as the physical aspect of psychic contents, no conflict would arise. But to suggest that neurochemical phenomena explains psychological phenomena reveals a materialist bias.
We don't know anything more about the true nature of memory by virtue of the fact that we have located cellular correllates to the process of memory retrieval. We may say that the memory is "in" the cell, but by no means are we any closer to a real picture of what memory it is, what it comes from, what its substantive underpinnings are. Similarly, we are no closer to identifying the substance of thought in light of the fact that we have correlated it with an electric neurological impulse. Thoughts are still fleeting, and any attempt to materialize them into a process we can understand intellectually is fruitless. They, like all of existence, must remain a mystery. We can only infer their nature by their activity. There is no scientific technique for analyzing, dissecting a thought. We cannot, in the last analysis, know what these things are in their substantive form. They are utter mysteries! They are unknowable, in the strict sense of the word; we are only able to investigate them on their surface presentations.
It benefits us immeasurably to preserve this wonder, this awe. We lose zest for life when we get too mechanistic, especially when the entity under investigation is the psyche. Thoughts and other psychic contents such as images and emotions have a dynamism that we cannot account for! In no way are we in total control of our thoughts - experience has proven this. They possess an autonomy that frustrates us! We ask them to go away but they won't! They have some remarkable, magnetic hold on us, just as the planets to the sun. They clearly have the power to disrupt our daily mental activity, and also shape the material world. Everything we see was once an idea! To deny that this dynamic entity emanates from some Source is egotistic. We are not simply little individual Prime Movers.
This is not a theological argument. A completely secular, non-religious person could accept the premise that it is difficult to account for the dynamism of the human organism, or any organism, without the concept of force, or energy. When evolution is explained as just "nature" running its course, that's dodging the question of a vital universal force that animates all life. This is the same universal force that animates our psyche, and the psyche, paradoxically, is the only tool we have for noticing it. The psyche is a big, energetic machine. It does not work mechanistically, mind you, though it does conform to certain patterns and tendencies, and it is guided by impulses.
In other words, when we reach back to find the Source, we cannot find anything tangible. We are left groping for filler - arguments to stretch over the Truth that we just don't know. When we say evolution is responsible for the way humans are, what are we really SAYING? There's still this gigantic question mark, this elephant in the room that is ignored dangerously - with the health of the organism at stake. We keep talking about the pretty balloon, but nobody talks about the air! We are mesmerized by the form and overlook the material substance that holds it all together. Unfortunately, science cannot measure this life-force. But it can describe it. This is what I am aiming to do.
An equally important, though frequently underemphasized quality of the psyche is its invisibility, or its seemingly ambiguous relationship to our conception of space. Though we can without question see its effects on a person (we know when a friend is anxious), it is, in itself, not apparent to the naked eye. In short, we cannot say for certain where the psyche is. Already we have established (in an earlier post), that "psyche" acts as un umbrella under which impressions from our "hearts," our "heads," our "guts," - perhaps even our genitals fall! So to speak of the "location" of the psyche becomes an exceedingly difficult task.
Instead, we put forth that the factor which distinguishes conscious psychic contents from unconscious psychic contents, and the factor which allows us to observe psychic contents via the psychic "eye," and the factor which produces the illusion of time are all the same. I am referring to light. Psychic light. Light, as an aspect or "quality" of the psyche, is the variable that reveals to us what is "in" our psyches at a given point in time, and in so doing brings these contents to consciousness.