A Well Oiled Machine
The mind is often pointed to as a “problem” and it certainly can appear that way at times. But it seems to me to just be a machine that does what we command it to do. “I am….” fill in the blank, and it just does what we told it to do. Any choice, declaration, command etc. is an instrument by which we give it instructions, from “I’m reliable” to “He’s a jerk”. Part of its nature, which is what we sometimes disparage, is that it defends the commands that we give it, a form of a survival mechanism.
It seems to me that any distinction generates a boundary between itself and anything else and that perhaps some survival mechanism comes along with the act of distinguishing. In the case of a command/choice directed to the mind, this means that not only is it to be executed as instructed, but also to be defended against contrary perspectives. It’s the defense that is more obvious than our choice that created it in the first place since being “defensive” is frowned upon and threatens our inclination to be liked/included.
Part of our conflicted natures is due to the fact that we have made many choices that are contradictory. We are often a mass of internal conflicts of interest of our own making. Internally we can chastise ourselves for acts or words that we regret, when in actuality we have simply allowed one of our own choices to override another. Choosing between any two is sometimes conscious but more typically automated. The automation comes in the form of underlying preferences, which I’ve addressed before, and may depend on a range of things but at least one’s “mood”, how far upstream the command was placed and the amount of energy (intensity) with which it was put there. “He’s a jerk” is a pretty narrow focal range but “I’m reliable” is, though filtered, flavoring a wide variety of behaviors and part of the mind is always on the job watching out to defend the command. The ones that are less deep, like “He’s a jerk”, are often easily discarded by being present to either our deeper commitments or to qualities in that person that resonate with our deeper selves. But those that lie farther upstream can be more entrenched and hold more sway. As in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the computer ignored what it considered lower level commands of the astronauts and followed the instructions higher upstream in the command structure.
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