THE MANAGEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The management of consciousness is a kind of oxymoron since most of what goes on in one’s “mind” is unconscious. If it is a mistake to speak of a person’s body-being as entirely separate from the “reality” out there in the physical world, what is it to face the fact that 90% of what we “think” we don’t even KNOW we think? It’s one thing to say that the “map” of the world can’t be entirely accurate without being a duplicate of the world, but what if most of the map is “folded under” where our conscious and reflective mind can’t get at it at all?

Beyond that, how can one exert intentionality if so much is not under intentional control? When I was small, my mother used to get very frustrated because I would not nap while my younger brothers and she were desperate to sleep. I can remember lying alone in the middle the quilt on her big bed, blithely kicking my heels and thinking big thoughts. “Go to sleep!” she would call, but I didn’t know how. And her frustration with me kept HER from sleeping.

Gary J. Cook and I have been talking about the management of consciousness because it is so vital to the business of war, hunting, religion, and writing. The old-time Blackfeet knew a lot about managing consciousness but a former student of mine, when asked what he’s been reading lately, tells me he’s rarely “in the mood” for reading. He feels it’s not his fault, that moods are not anything one can control. The world just kicks a person around like a soccer ball. (I can’t blame him much -- I’m rarely in the mood for exercise.) It seems to me he’s assimilated this idea from the modern world -- that it’s not an old-time Blackfeet way of thinking. Between humor and fatalism (that gambling asset) they at least managed their RESPONSE to what happened.

But now, with the fMRI studies that can see the places and structures in the mind where thinking actually takes place, a record of electromagnetic changes, we have evidence of the mapmaker at work that is entirely separate from what the person consciously thinks they are thinking. We discover that there are two memories, one of which might not correspond to the reality, and that a major mistake shows in one’s brain before one knows it was done. This is disturbing to us as we try to understand what legal testimony, what psychoanalytic interpretations and what sensational memoirs “really happened,” quite apart from the witness’s belief. We had thought such things were controlled by us “on purpose.”

I’ve been thinking about consciousness-controlling strategies. I read that if one is asked to remember something or preparing to create something, one should look quickly to one side and then to the other. They say this brings the two sides of one’s brain into harmony, which is helpful since we know that one side tends to be focussed on language and sequential, rational reasoning and the other leans to image, emotion, and creation. Of course, there are dozens of other subtle controls, filters and recorders in the brain all working at the same time, so maybe this little exercise is not quite so powerful as one might hope. I mean, what does this do to one’s amygdala? One’s hippocampus?

Here’s a list of “consciousness changers” off the top of my consciousness.

1. ENVIRONMENT
We know what happens to claustrophobes in tight spaces. Entering a space like a cathedral or standing before an ocean sunset will seize consciousness and memorably introduce a sense of transcendence. The vistas of prairie, the ramparts of mountains, may in themselves account for the persistent mysticism of the Blackfeet.

2. INGESTION
Food, of course, can change your mood. Way beyond the idea of “comfort food” or “brain food” is Michael Gershon’s amazing book, “The Second Brain,” which examines what it means that the neural network embedded in the intestines operates on the same molecules as the brain. When you say, “I have a gut feeling,” it is real and profound. Bad thinking can make you throw up or develop colitis. (Not ulcers -- they're caused by a "bug.")

Lack of food, fasting, was one of the ways the old-time Blackfeet altered their consciousness so they would have a vision. Lying in a dream bed, they neither ate nor drank for as long as several days, until they felt they had contacted an alternate reality.

Drink as in intoxicants. We know a lot about that, but even the temperature of what you ingest will change your state of mind, whether you need warming or cooling. All that English tea must preserve sanity in the midst of cold rain and mist.

Drugs -- legal or illegal molecules that drastically change the way your brain works. Daily we meddle with coffee, antihistamines, etc. and probably underestimate their impact.

Inhaling -- the tobacco factor with its paradoxical stimulating and calming nicotine. Incense in church may change your mood. Stores know to provide pleasant smells to make you relax and shop. Blackfeet used smoke constantly, as incense, as cleansing preparation, and for practical aims like repelling bugs or curing meat.

The strong associations with smell, which is produced by actual molecules lodging directly in the brain’s receptors, can trigger memory and mood (the Proust effect) more powerfully and suddenly than almost anything else.

3. MOVEMENT
Memories are also stored in gestures or movements: one person told about being seized by a memory of a certain stone-paved path because of his ankle being slightly twisted the way a particularly shaped stone always caused his foot to turn.

Many Asian disciplines are movement-based and act powerfully to control mood. Dance of all kinds is the same. For the Blackfeet repetitive rhythmic movements, extravagant movements as in fancy dancing, and movements that mimic well-known and often-observed animals, all three, contain states of mind.

4. SOUND
We all know what drumming can do for our state of mind: rev it up, focus, calm, summon memory, and so on. Music is highly dependent on associations: where one hears it, who is alongside (“our song”). One weeps, one laughs, one leaves quickly.

5. CONDITIONING
They say that if a child eats a vegetable three times, it will become palatable or at least tolerable -- IF you make the child feel good about it. A grizzly that finds food just ONCE is conditioned. Big X on the internal map. That’s what they think is there for the rest of their lifetime. If a cat does something three things, that’s their map from then on. At my house we do things on the cat schedule, because it’s so hard to change. One of the secrets to writing is to associate a time and place with the act, so that when one gets there, one’s inner being thinks writing is a natural act. That's the real meaning of "lucky hats" and "favorite pens."

In spite of all these strategies, and there are many many, and in spite of the power of some disciplines, like yogis who learn to control their breathing and heart beat, there are some times when the map is simply wrong but so intense or meaningful that mapping instruments in the brain cannot register the wrongness in spite of intentions. We call them mistakes. We call them psychosis. We call them dreams or visions. Sometimes we call them memoir. They are on the underfolded part of the map, the unconscious. They are part of what makes us human and causes us to need each other.