The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part III, Ch 11: Understanding the Mind

Most of your choices are made half a second before you show up to sign for them and take the credit. Whatever freedom you have lives in that gap, and you can learn to widen it.

In brief: This opens Part III, where I finally turn the tool on itself. In this chapter I lift the lid on the mind and walk you through its working parts, from the fast instinct that runs without you to the late, slow consciousness. That last part can hold a small space between what happens to you and what you do. I want you to see how little of your living you actually choose, and why that small held space is where all your freedom lives.

I have spent this whole book using one tool to take everything else apart, and I left the tool itself for last. At the close of the chapter before this one, I made a promise. I said that the next thing I did would be to lift the lid on this and look inside. So here it is, on the table in front of us, open at last. The mind. The instrument that did the believing and the doubting, the fearing in the small hours and the slow letting-go.

I am not going to describe it the way a doctor describes a body. I am going to show you what surprised me when I finally looked inside, because it surprised me. And I think it will be useful to you long before it stops being strange.

The first surprise was how little of it is me.

I had walked around for most of my life sure that the one doing my living was me. I reached for the phone the instant the screen lit. I snapped at someone before the thought had finished arriving. I ordered the food the moment the picture appeared. Each time, I was sure it was a person choosing. It was not, mostly. It was the machine moving first, and a person showing up a half-second later to sign the receipt and take the credit.

For years the thing I called my deciding was mostly the press release the machine put out afterwards. That is a hard thing to find out about yourself. I am telling you early because everything else in this chapter rests on it.

Between what happens and what you do. So here is the one thing I want to put in your hands before anything else. It is the picture to keep through all the parts that follow. Between a thing happening to you and the thing you do about it, there is a space. For most of what goes on in a mind, the space is nothing at all. The kettle burns your hand, and the hand is gone before you knew it was moving. There is no space and no you, just the body doing what bodies do.

But the space can be opened. You can learn to hold it, for a heartbeat, then longer. And inside that held space is the whole of whatever freedom a human being actually has.

Everything in this chapter is either a part of the machine that works without the space, or it is the slow human business of learning to open the space wider. A mind, in the truest sense of the word, is not born when the body starts running its programs. It is born the first time a person holds that space open on purpose, and chooses.

A thing the body does. Two plain things about the whole instrument before I take it apart. The first is that there is no ghost in here. There is no separate spirit perched inside the body, looking out. That was the soul I already had to set down, earlier in this book. The mind is not a thing that lives in the body. It is a thing the body does, the way circulation is something the heart does.

You cannot lift the beating away from the heart and keep it on a shelf. And you cannot lift the minding away from the nervous system that does it either. When the body that does the minding stops, the minding stops with it. I know that is not what most of us were told. It is, as far as I have ever been able to check, what is true.

The second is that you yourself are an idea, in exactly the sense I gave that word back near the start. And like any idea, you come in three layers.

There is what you are made of, which is the body. The body itself has depths. There is the plain visible body you can point at. There is the quieter body underneath, where the breathing and the digesting and the blood-moving run on without you. And there is the deepest layer, the one the mind actually works through. Then there is what you are for, which is the part you play among other people. I am leaving that for the part of this book on living together.

And there is the layer that makes you nobody but yourself. It holds the particular tendencies you were born with, the conditioning that was poured into you, and the karma you have piled up. These are the mental modifications I have named before, and they are the thing the very next chapter is entirely about. Hold onto that last one lightly for now. The parts I am about to walk you through are the same in every human being alive. It is the modifications, and only the modifications, that make the same parts add up to a different person each time.

Start at the bottom, with the part that has no space at all. Instinct.

I showed you, early in this book, the one program the brain is always running underneath everything else. It sorts every single thing that arrives into two folders: threat and not-threat. That sorting is instinct, doing the oldest job there is. It was the first thing evolution built, before there was a self to speak of or an intellect to think with. Its whole purpose is speed. It throws the body out of the path of the falling branch before any slower part of the mind has been told there is a branch. The hand off the hot kettle is instinct. The flinch is instinct. There is no gap here by design, because a gap would get you killed.

From this one fast sorter, over a very long time, four more particular jobs grew. They became the rest of what we are about to walk through. There is the part that says which things are mine. There is the part that compares one thing to another. There is the part that keeps a record. And there is instinct itself, the part that just reacts.

The part that says mine is the self.

When the man in my earlier chapter saw the child on the rooftop, something in him picked that child out of the whole world and said: that one is mine. That something is the self. It is the quiet witness behind your eyes that has felt like the same single person from the time you were small. It is the part that draws a line around some things and calls them yours, and leaves everything on the other side of the line as not-yours. It is the most ordinary feeling in the world, and also the one with the biggest consequences. That is because where a person draws that line decides almost everything about how they live.

Draw it tight, around only yourself, and you get a person who is all elbows. They are competitive, careful of their own interest, and indifferent, in the end, even to a child in danger that is not theirs. Draw it so loose that the self disappears entirely into the group, and you get a person with no centre at all. They exist only as whatever the crowd needs them to be. Neither extreme is anywhere a human being should want to live.

The line wants to sit somewhere in between, and then it wants to keep moving outwards. This is the part that took me years to feel, rather than merely agree with. A self that has done some growing draws the line first around one other person, then around a family, then around the people nearby. If it goes all the way, the line includes everything and shuts nothing out. Then a person arrives at the plain fact that they were never anything but a bit of the same energy as everything else, wearing a name for a while.

I have spent enough of this book on that fact not to argue it again here. I only want you to notice that it is the self, of all the parts, that can grow. The line is yours to move, and moving it outwards is most of the work of becoming a person worth being.

Paying back a promise. This is also where I can finally pay back something I promised you a chapter ago. I said the strongest pull we are born with is the pull to stay alive. I said that a person can nonetheless override even that, and walk into the fire for a child, for a stranger, for something they believe in. And I said that I would show you where the override comes from.

Here it is. It comes from a self that has drawn its line wide enough that another life now sits inside it. When the line around you includes someone else completely, their survival has become your survival. Then the oldest program in the building will spend you to protect them, without your having to argue it into doing so.

The most human thing a person can do is to lay down the one thing the machine was built above all to preserve. That turns out to be the machine running correctly, on a self that has grown large. That is not a small discovery. It is most of what I think we are for.

Then there is the one that keeps a record of all of it. That is memory.

I have already shown you how it works. Repetition lays a road in the brain. The things that matter for staying alive get kept, and the rest is quietly thrown away. Most of what we call experiencing the world is really the old prints being pulled up and laid over the new moment. So I will not lay the mechanism out again. I want to add only the few things this part of the mind does that are worth knowing for daily life.

What you feel strongly, you keep. The dull fact slides off. The same fact, wrapped in a story that moved you, stays for life. This is simply how the wiring works. It is the whole reason every people on earth has carried its hardest lessons inside stories rather than lists. I have said, more than once already in this book, what goes wrong when a grown person keeps taking the story for the fact. So I will not say it a third time. I only note here that the storage trick is real, and that it cuts both ways.

Some of what you keep, you would rather not. The memories that put your life or your decency at risk are filed in the deepest, most permanent place, precisely so you will not repeat them. The night you drove when you should not have, and someone nearly died, will sit in you for years. That ache is not a malfunction. It is the record doing its job. Some of what is kept sits where you can reach it easily. The rest sinks below the surface into what we can call the subconscious. It stays out of reach until something (a smell, a song, a face) drops a hook and hauls it back up.

And some of what you think you have lost is not lost at all. Take the calculus you were good at in school and cannot do now, or the keys you cannot find this morning. The brain has simply decided these are not worth the cost of keeping sharp. The moment they become worth it again, you will be surprised how fast they come back. Forgetting where you put your keys is not the beginning of an illness. It is a thrifty machine, careful with what it spends, declining to pay for something it does not currently need.

Comparing one thing with another is the work of the intellect.

This is the part that takes whatever instinct hands up to it and sets it next to everything the memory holds. It is looking for a match, a meaning, a pattern that tells it what to do. It is why we understand new things by saying they are like old things. The whole of our cleverness runs on metaphor and comparison.

The hunger for meaning. And the intellect carries one appetite that I want you to see clearly, because it explains a great deal of human history. The intellect cannot stand a thing it cannot find a meaning for. Disorder reads to it as a kind of threat, and it will reach for an explanation rather than sit in front of a blank.

I have already shown you, at length, what this hunger builds when no real answer is within reach. It is the name written across the lid of the unopened box. It is the maker, invented to stand in the empty space where understanding has not yet arrived. The intellect is the part of you that does that. Knowing it is the part of you that does that is the beginning of being able to catch it in the act.

Out of the intellect, working with the rest, come four particular skills, and they are worth naming quickly.

The first is intelligence, which is just the intellect working well. I would add only what the rest of this book has been arguing all along. Intelligence worth the name is the kind that keeps you alive without costing other things their lives. There are dim versions of it everywhere, of course. The rusting iron and the burning sun behave as though they were intelligent, following the rules with no one home. A plant or an animal does better, answering to a threat but able to ignore what does not threaten it. And we do best of all, because we can hold a response back and pick another.

But do not mistake any single talent for the whole of intelligence. A person sharp at one thing may be hopeless at another. And the various kinds matter as much as the kind a test can score: the bodily, the social, and the kind that handles feeling. The wider you grow all of them, the better you will live.

The second skill is intuition, which I unpacked already a few chapters back. It is not a sixth sense. It is just ordinary intelligence, run so many times that the answer arrives faster than thought. The third is attention, the editor that decides, out of the flood, what you will actually notice and what you will let pass. And the fourth is will, the push behind any action. It is the thing that lets a person bend their own future instead of drifting down it.

I have spent a whole chapter on what the will is and what holds it captive. So here I will say only the one sentence that places it in the map of the mind. The will is in chains until you free it, and freeing it is the work of moving it out from under the reactive parts and putting it under the part we are about to reach.

Which is consciousness: the part that can open the space.

Everything underneath this has been automatic or nearly so. Instinct reacts with no choice at all. The intellect compares and concludes half on its own, faster than you can watch. Consciousness is the strange late thing that can stand a little apart from all of it and watch it run. And, watching, it can reach in. I named it a few chapters back as the part that lets us limit how much our lives are decided for us. Here is how it actually does it, which is simpler and stranger than I expected: it slows the response down. It puts a delay where there was none. And the delay is the space.

Sleepwalking or awake. Let me show you the difference, because it is the whole difference. An advertisement for the food you love appears, and before you have thought anything at all, you have ordered it. That is the mind running without the space. It is intelligence alone, a kind of sleepwalking that an enormous number of people do for an enormous portion of their lives.

Or: the same advertisement appears, and you feel the pull, and you hold it for a moment. In that held moment you ask whether you are actually hungry or merely cued (set off by the picture), and then you choose. Same person, same machine. The only thing added in the second version is the space, and the willingness to stand in it. That standing is consciousness. It is what turns a sleepwalker into someone awake.

I want to be honest that we are, alone in all of creation, able to do this at all. An atom has no space of any kind. Carbon does not decide whether to join with oxygen or hold out for something better. It does what the rules and the conditions require, every time, with nobody choosing. Push a table and it moves. It has no say. For most of what exists, the response follows the cause with no gap between them, ever.

We are the one arrangement of energy that has learned to slip a gap in there. We can take in even a charging tiger, or an insult, or the fact of our own death, and hold it for a moment before answering. I know that people who study animal minds would argue with my word "alone". They have seen chimpanzees, ravens and even cuttlefish pass up a small treat now to get a better one later, which is a small gap of the same kind.

That gap is the most valuable thing we have. Most of us let it sit unused most of the time, because keeping it open takes effort and letting the machine drive is free. The work (really the work of this entire book) is to stand in that space more and more often, until awake is your ordinary condition rather than your rare one.

The stairs of awake. And there are degrees of awake. I found it helped to think of them as seven steps. Each one is a self drawn a little wider, and a gap held a little more open.

On the first step, a person is all survival. They are barely getting by, with no room left over to ask whether the getting-by is decent. On the second, they have steadied enough to take in the people closest to them. They will not knowingly harm their own. On the third, they are succeeding, and the success has gone to their appetite. They are consuming hard, taking more than they return, living well at other people's expense without quite noticing the bill. On the fourth, something softens. Compassion arrives, and charity, and the tight self begins, for the first time, to come apart.

On the fifth, a person is living with the people around them in a way where both sides come out ahead. This is the arrangement I keep coming back to under the old name of mutualism. And they are not only living that way, but lifting others towards it. On the sixth, they begin to see further than the plain facts: reading what is unsaid, sensing what is coming, joining what looked unconnected. And on the seventh, the line around the self has gone all the way out and shut nothing out. A person is simply at home in the whole of what is, with no quarrel left between themselves and any of it.

Nobody lives permanently on the top step. But knowing the stairs are there changes how you climb, and which direction counts as up.

Now, what is all that held space for? It is for telling right from wrong. That part of the mind we call conscience.

The intellect, using the self, sorts everything into pleasure and pain, and that would be enough to run an animal. But a person notices, over time, that some pleasures end in pain and some pains end in pleasure. Out of sitting with that crooked fact, a finer instrument grows. It is one that can tell the sweet thing that will cost you later from the hard thing that will pay you back.

That instrument is conscience, and I want to be plain about where it comes from, because a great many people have been told it could only have come from above. It did not. It grew, like everything else here, out of the long business of staying alive together. The actions we call good are the ones that, over time, help us survive alongside each other. The ones we call evil are the ones that, over time, eat away at that.

The rulebook, boiled down. The whole tangled rulebook every culture has piled up can be boiled down, I think, to a single line worth carrying. Anything you think or say or do that harms no one, not another and not yourself, is not wrong. And the measure of right and wrong, where harm is involved, is simply whether it helps another life or damages it. You will break that line sometimes. Everyone does. But you will find, if you watch yourself honestly, that you are quietly glad on the days you keep it.

The intellect, awake. When consciousness is fully turned on the work of the intellect, that work gets new names, and they are worth a sentence each. Thinking is the intellect used on purpose. It traces the records back and forth to arrive at a meaning, one thought striking the next like flint striking stone. Used steadily on a single aim, it can rewire the very machine doing the thinking. Reasoning is thinking kept honest by logic. It is only ever as good as what you have fed your memory, since a mind stocked with rubbish will reason its way to rubbish, however carefully.

Understanding is what you have when a checked thing finally settles into you and becomes yours to use. And expression is the whole machine running cleanly and awake. It is a person no longer merely behaving, but living and saying exactly what they mean, mindful of each thought and word and act. That last one is rare. It is also the thing the rest of this is for.

The mind does not only take the world in. It answers back, inwardly and outwardly, and these answers are the last two parts.

The inward answers are emotions. They are not noise laid over the real business of living. They are messages, every one of them built to keep you alive. The good ones (love, the warmth towards another person, the lift of things going well) are the mind's way of saying: there is no threat here, come closer. The hard ones (fear, anger, the grip of wanting) are the mind's way of saying: something is wrong, attend to it.

Fear especially gets a bad name it does not deserve. The fear that floods you when a tiger steps onto the path is the thing that saves your life. The very same tiger, seen from inside a safe vehicle, brings delight instead, because the message has changed from danger to none. So do not punish yourself for a dark feeling. Read it. Ask what it is telling you. Deal with the thing it points at quickly, before it piles up with others, and let it pass. And when the good feelings are running high, keep one eye open, because untroubled is exactly when a real trouble can walk in unannounced.

From emotion to mood. Emotions are quick. But let enough of the same kind pool together, and they thicken into something slower. That is a mood: a weather that colours every memory it touches and outlasts the thing that caused it. It works the way a fine first meeting can keep you bright for a week, and a sour one can dull you for days. A mood and an emotion feed each other in a loop. The cricketer hit by a stray ball in a friendly game laughs it off. But the same man, hit by the same ball in a match he cannot afford to lose, turns and quarrels. The event is identical. The mood decides the response.

Knowing this is a quiet kind of power. When a grey mood settles, you can go looking for its cause. You can keep a short private list of the things that reliably lift you, and reach for one rather than sinking further. Lean, always, towards the light side of yourself. It is a choice more often than it feels like one.

The outward answers are behaviours: what the world actually sees you do. Some are built in, like the hand snatched off the hot cup, with no choosing involved. Most of the troublesome ones are learned. They are poured into us by everything we are steeped in. Think of the advertisement that makes us want the new thing we did not know we wanted. In the end a whole society is buying what it will use twice, and the planet is paying for the storage. Satisfy the need, the old line goes, not the greed.

Behaviours, like everything else in this chapter, can be run blind or run awake. The difference is whether you have brought the held space to them. It is whether you can catch yourself in the act of a thing that looks fine today and will cost you tomorrow, and change it.

String enough settled behaviours together and they harden into what we call a personality: the particular shape that makes you you and not someone else. It is worth tending. A character is not fixed for life. It shifts with circumstance, and the awake person sees to it that the shift goes the right way. But it is close to the whole of what you have. Lose hold of it and you have lost almost everything.

And the deepest move available to a conscious mind is to sit a little above even your own personality, and watch it the way you would watch anyone's. It is to stop being merely the character, and to become the one who can see the character, and adjust it.

Where the book keeps pointing. That, in the end, is the inward journey this whole book keeps pointing at. It is to draw your attention back off the outside world, in past the parade of these moving parts, until what is left is just the one watching. And then, at the very last, it is to set down even the watching, and rest in plain awareness with nothing in it. You do not have to take that final step to be helped by knowing it is there.

So that is the instrument, with the lid up. Underneath is a stack of fast machinery that mostly runs itself: sorting, recording, comparing, reacting. It was built to keep a body alive, and it is very good at it. And above it is the one late, strange addition that can stand slightly apart and reach back in. It is the part that can open the space, hold it, and choose.

Picture the mind as a vehicle, if it helps. The body is its frame, and all these parts are its instruments. The awake self is at the wheel, taking the readings the other parts call up, but deciding the road itself. The whole of what I have been calling freedom is just the difference between a vehicle that drives itself down whatever slope it is pointed at, and one with somebody actually steering.

One design, many people. What I could not understand, once I had the parts laid out, was this. The machine is the same in every one of us: the same seven pieces, in the same order, doing the same work. And yet it has never once turned out the same person twice. The very design that should have made us alike is the one thing that makes each of us unrepeatable. Same instrument, endlessly different music. How a single design throws off so many different people was the thing I needed to work out next.

Words to Keep

• the space: the gap between something happening to you and what you do about it. Inside it lies all your freedom.

• mind: not a ghost or soul living in the body, but something the body does, the way the heart does circulation.

• mental modifications: the tendencies you were born with, the conditioning poured into you and the karma you piled up. They make each person different.

• instinct: the oldest, fastest part of the mind. It sorts everything into threat and not-threat, with no gap, by design.

• self: the part that says "mine" and draws a line around things. Moving the line outwards is most of becoming a person worth being.

• memory: the part that keeps the record. It holds what you felt strongly, sinks some below the surface, and lets unneeded things go dim.

• intellect: the part that compares what instinct hands up with what memory holds. It hungers for meaning and cannot stand a blank.

• consciousness: the late part that can stand apart from the machinery, slow the response down, and open the space.

• conscience: the sense of right and wrong, grown out of living together rather than handed down. Harm is its measure.

• emotions: the mind's inward answers. They are messages built to keep you alive, to be read and dealt with, not punished.

• mood: many emotions of one kind pooled into a slower weather that colours your memories and outlasts its cause.

• personality: settled behaviours hardened into the shape that makes you you. It is not fixed, and it is worth watching and adjusting.

Sources and Further Reading

• Most of this chapter comes from my own watching of my own mind, not from any one book.

• Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946). The idea of a space between what happens to us and how we answer is often credited to him, though the famous wording is not found in his writings.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). The idea of evolution behind instinct as the first thing built, and the slow growth of the other parts out of it.

• Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind (1983). The idea that intelligence comes in many kinds, the bodily and the social among them, not only the kind a test can score.

• Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1995). The kind of intelligence that handles feeling.

• Mahatma Gandhi. "Satisfy the need, not the greed" echoes a saying about need and greed that is usually credited to him.