Engaging Your Extended Mind

Part II of the Extended Mind Series

Considering 'mind as a field of living relationships, extending beyond the body.

This series will explore the concept of 'mind as a field', in contrast to 'mind as thoughts within a head', through a variety of theoretical and practical examples.

There is undoubtedly a difference between the intellectual apprehension of an existential or spiritual principle, and the lived embodiment of that principle.

If it makes sense to you to consider your mind as extending beyond the bounds of the body, how do you run with the idea and integrate it, live it - rather than worship it? Too often we fall into the trap of clinging to a description of a profound insight in lieu of engaging in the difficult task of integrating the essence of the insight itself.

Joseph Campbell, in his book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", describes how the final phase of the archetypal hero's journey, the return of the hero and integration of the 'jewel', is often (unexpectedly) more difficult than the phases preceding it. After one has been through such trials to obtain the jewel, one must then face the difficult and often prolonged challenge of integrating the jewel into the community for the greater good of all.

This entry will explore how the concept of the 'Extended Mind' might encourage us to shift our sense of what the 'substance' of the world is, how this relates to Buddhist principles and techniques, and how we can start to put this into practice.

A quick aside:

One of the interesting benefits of reading and investigating mythological stories is that you not only distil out archetypal symbols and relationships, you begin to see how these 'meta-stories' are relevant to situations in life at various scales. What I mean by this is... an archetypal story could nicely map your personal psychological development over the course of a year, but it could equally map the dynamics experienced through a single meditation session. If a myth is a deep monomyth, it is persistently relevant at all levels of resolution, in all places, at all times.

The World is Alive - Recognition of Flux

Reflect upon the space that surrounds you, the space that is always present, and within which your experience of life occurs. This space is not only an extension of 'you', but the space itself is alive. All phenomena within this space are in flux, nothing stands still. And by virtue of the passage of time, no physical space that you may ever consider consistent, is ever really the same space twice. Deeply engaging with these ideas can lead to a lived sense that everything is new and constantly renewed by your attention, but alas, on the flip-side, nothing stands still and so there is nothing to hold onto...

This dynamic of constant flux stands in stark contrast to the notion that the world is a 'dead' mechanical place, in which entities exist. Many of us operate with a sense that we ourselves are alive, that other organisms are alive, but the space in which we inhabit is mechanical or dead. Typically, when we think of what is 'living', we look to organic forms as evidence for the life held therein, but we don't often think of larger systems as 'living'. But perhaps we should. Our ancestors certainly did.

If we really begin to take the notion seriously that all that surrounds us is 'mind', or at least, intermingled with mind, then we must once again start to engage with the world as if the entire shebang is ALIVE. Looking back to the cosmology of our ancestors, many cultures for many thousands of years lived their lives with the understanding that the world itself is some sort of organism/being, and as if phenomena and the patterns of events they experienced through time were expressions of something living. Whether or not this 'something living' is personified or characterised, the key insight we can tap into is that the world we experience, from its component parts to the stories that unfold through time, are embedded in something that might be better considered living, rather than dead.

Suffering and Buddhism

Many key teachings within Buddhism assist a practitioner to accept that it is natural to seek what stands still, to seek something definite, something to hold onto in this world. It may be a place, an idea, a philosophy, an image of the world, or an image of the self. But the nature of experience is such that all is in constant flux within your living field of awareness, including you.

So, suffering follows from seeking that which stands still in a world where nothing does. Life is suffering.

The two equivalent precepts in Buddhism being:

Desire creates and perpetuates suffering.

Life is suffering.

To relate this back to our myth of the Extended Mind, consider that natural cycles of suffering and ignorance are linked to our compulsive seeking of something to hold onto within our greater field of experience - our Extended Mind. Grasping for a stable or final worldview can seem meritorious, but from a Buddhist perspective, it is an expression of ignorance. It is like building a sand castle at the beach, and then becoming quite distraught and neurotic about maintaining it, despite the inevitability of the ocean consuming it. This dynamic is in part why Zen Masters can present as quite blunt, obscure, and antagonistic, especially from a western perspective. They are faced with students who are endlessly building new sand castles, intent on discovering one that will last forever... so they must interrupt this pattern abruptly and in a way that is deliberately impossible to rationalise.

We can get pretty stuck in this sand castle building dynamic because we function on a suite of subconscious assumptions that are foundational for other conscious thought processes, and some of these assumptions are so at odds with nature that they sabotage our genuine searches for meaning, order, and self in life.

Two common subconscious assumptions:

1. 'Self' is something distinct and consistent - like our physical organism and our name.

2. Order is achieved through the imposition of distinct categories upon the world.

How might these subconscious assumptions confuse us? Well, if the starting point of any search is falsely apprehended, then it follows that the path we take to get from our starting point to the goal is not likely to get us anywhere near the goal. As Robert Fripp, the guitarist of King Crimson, once said in a 1979 interview:

"It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering. If one is moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but one believes that one is in phoenix, one's route is likely to be... confusing to say the least. In fact, there is a remarkably good chance that one will never get to San Francisco. So, first of all, one has to be aware of the situation in which one is. To have a direct glimpse of that situation is quite terrifying."

Part of what Fripp alludes to here, mirroring Buddhist thought, is that suffering is inherent to life because no matter how authentic or righteous our goals, we tend not to be aware of the situation in which we are embedded - we operate on unexamined fundamental assumptions that essentially ensure that we do not reach our goal and that we suffer the pain of ignorance.

This dynamic might help you to appreciate why Zen Masters in Japanese and Chinese Zen Buddhist stories appear to lead students on goose-chases in response to students seeking a supreme answer to their problems. Eventually, some students come into the realisation that their mode of seeking answers, wherever it may be directed, walks hand in hand with the very source of their problems and the ignorance for which they seek resolution or liberation.

Insanity has oft been described as trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Now we might think that when we try a new sport, adopt a new religion, get a new haircut, take up a new craft, seek out new friends and so on, that we are indeed trying new things to better our lives and solve our problems. As all of these paths and activities seem very different, we feel that we are trying different things. We do not assume that we are crazy. We don't believe we are trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Rather, we believe we are engaged in some pretty damn solid 'self-development'. And herein really lies the key, what is 'self-development' if we sub-consciously identify the nature of self in error?

Part I of this series explored how we tend to identify ourselves with our physical organism and assume that our mind is in our head, even though this model does not hold up to thoughtful inquiry or resonate with science, psychology, or ancient wisdom. If we sub-consciously assume self is singular and distinct, just like how we see our physical organisms, then no matter where we seek it, no matter how we look to 'develop' it, we will persist in ignorance and folly, without resolution, forever.

We are getting stuck compulsively seeking answers to a problem we haven't really ever given our full attention. We keep trialling 'solutions' and adopting 'answers' to a problem we haven't been culturally directed to examine and haven't developed the tools to engage with.

So, what can we start to do to get ourselves un-stuck?

Pay Attention

Pay attention.

Pay attention.

Pay attention.

Thrice great.

The Jason Bourne Technique

Practice doing what Jason Bourne does when he enters a new room or a new space - no, I don't mean lunge into combat before jumping out of the nearest window - I mean scan and take in the scene in which you find yourself in a subtle manner. Allow your eyes to pass over the space and pay attention to its elements. If you have seen the Bourne movies, you would have picked up that within seconds of entering a new space, Jason Bourne has taken stock of entrances, exits, number and types of people, hazards, vehicles, and committed them all to working memory. How? Practice. Practice and paranoia. But let's focus on the practice bit.

Ultimately this skill is an extension of a natural survival instinct rooted in thousands of years of experience - an instinct atrophied in our time due to an apparent lack of necessity. In a wild environment, lumbering inattentively from one area to another will 9 times out of 10, result in you running into mischief. It has been evolutionarily advantageous for us to maintain an awareness of the surrounding environment - to detect threats and opportunities. In a modern 'civilised' environment, we are insulated from the dynamic system that naturally calls us to attention. Today, many people find themselves 'zoning out' as a kind of survival response to the endless meaningless stimulus around them in a busy city environment. There is a great cost to engaging in this kind inattentiveness through time, but it can be simple to curb the inertia of this habit.

Consider that you have a responsibility to yourself to cultivate and retain a certain degree of 'spatial awareness' as you navigate your day. Similar to the responsibility you feel you have to keep yourself clean, find and consume food, drink water, and engage with others in a respectful manner - you can also consider moment to moment spatial awareness as an important requirement for wellbeing.

To put this into practice, casually perform the 'Jason Bourne' assessment as you enter scenes in your life that are so familiar that you have come to tune them out. This might be your own bedroom, or it might be the train, your local dog park. Start with the scenes you interact with so commonly that you no longer really LOOK at them anymore. When you enter or engage with them, breathe and take in your surroundings, casting your eyes over everything as if you are witnessing this space for the first time. Practice doing this calmly as you enter. Of course you do not need to stand in the entrance of every room in your house stunned and amazed... but do endeavour to feel that each space is alive and worthy of your attention.

Cultivate Openness

If what appears to us as external is no longer thought of as entirely other, then to remain open to the world is to remain open to ourselves.

When you identify as distinctly singular and separate and put up walls to the world and to new experience, the waters of your 'little mind' are not renewed by the greater waters of experience. Water that does not flow tends to become stagnant and putrid. If your mental constructs cut your attention, engagement, emotions, and interests off from the river of experience, then your mental waters will only ever be renewed through great storms - periods and events of great turmoil and upheaval. Far more desirable, is the cultivation of a healthy relationship to fluidity in principle, allowing one's vessel to flow with and draw upon the natural currents of life.

But openness does not need to be sought as an end in itself...

Catch, Relax, Balance

Recall from earlier in this entry - one subsconscious fundamental assumption that causes confusion is the conviction that order is achieved through the imposition of distinct categories upon the world. This assumption underpins the sense that with certainty comes order and stability.

To relax the grip of this assumption, practice 'catching yourself' in moments when you become extremely certain. If your certainty revolves around a clear claim that you can write out in plain English, such as:

"I must be feeling sad because of XYZ"

...take a moment to relax, think of at least one to two alternative statements or explanations that could serve as equally suitable. The closer they are to conceivably possible, the better. They can oppose or undermine your original statement, or they can provide alternative or complementary explanations. The purpose of this task is not to convince yourself that your initial conclusions are wrong and to seek 'better alternatives' to then become certain about. Its purpose is to develop your ability to even notice yourself entering into a state of certainty, and to naturally highlight the intellectual constriction taking place when you are possessed by certainty. If you practice this diligently and regularly - catch, relax, balance - you might come to identify a deeper sense of balance when you are able to accomodate at least two, potentially contradictory, statements about anything, compared to how you feel when you are hooked on just one. Certainty eventually becomes less comforting.

There's a reason Frodo threw the one ring back into the fire whence it came!

Humour my nerdy side here for a moment ~ let us reflect upon some symbology in The Lord of the Rings...

A ring of power, in the context of our practice here, might symbolise a 'complete self-contained explanation', and with a ring of power, come... power. But alas, we were all deceived! Though complete and singular explanations are deeply attractive and afford wielders apparent power, they all are linked and underpinned by the one master ring, the principle of a complete and final explanation. This one ring is the creation of the deceiver, and is born of cruelty, malice, and the will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.

As emphasised by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, humans are particularly susceptible to the seductive power of 'the ring' - or the principle of a complete and final explanation. Though we like to imagine we are far removed from the primal and tribal urges of our past, they persist in each of us and express themselves in subtle ways. Our often-subconscious urge to conquer the chaos of the world through the imposition of finite categories and complete explanations is one example of our raw animal nature dressing up in sophisticated clothing and strutting around undetected in our time.

So if you find it helpful like I do, imbue this exercise of catching yourself in moments of certainty and intellectual constriction with the gravity of The Lord of the Rings narrative, and do not allow yourself to descend into intellectual tribalism in service of the dark lord Sauron. The fate of our world depends on it.

Buckminster Fuller once said:

"The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events."

"The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended."

Mystical Engagement

Rather than the world being mechanical, external, hard, dead, and based in pure mechanical causality - if it is instead engaged with as being alive, and mysteriously of the mind - then we can't really be so sure as to what the 'substance' of our world is. Is it stuff? Things built up from smaller component parts? Or is it 'mind' - whatever that is?

Active consideration of your Extended Mind can lead to an enhanced sense of mystical participation in life, as the world's nature is mysterious, and inextricably linked to the central mystery of self. Even the same places we visit everyday are reborn as mysterious if we consider them in the realm of our Extended Mind space.

Part of what we can lose as we become adults is the lived sensation of participating in a mysterious world, full of enticing and terrifying unknowns. Rather than putting this dynamic down to children being naive, consider instead that it is reflective of the naivety of adults.

EPILOGUE

Across a great many mystical disciplines, key goals of a mystic are commonly described as:

• Union - Self and Other.

• Union - God and Man.

• Union - Above and Below.

  
  

Here, we may consider these as deep underlying goals sitting fundamentally below all other goals - 'below' in the sense that they are fundamental, primal, and permeate more layer of our experience. In the symbolism of 'Extended Mind' these deeper goals, deeper paths, deeper methods may be considered to revolve around experiences of union, or continuity, between 'little mind' and 'big mind' - OR - of our distinct selves with the world around us. From the perspective of such states, little mind and big mind never really existed - the distinct self, as separate from the world, has no reality.

Such journeys and states may sound fantastical, but let's continue to explore them in a way that makes the seem slightly less so...

Upcoming entries:

• Thinking is Doing, Doing is Thinking.

• Flow States.

• Union - Yoga and Magick.