Nycteris Musing @nycterismusing - Tumblr Blog

curseworm

human brain: sometimes we need to do boring things with no gratification or immediate benefit

monkey brain: absolutely not. die

lemonsharks

Human brain: ok what if we eat chips while we do the boring thing

monkey brain: I’m suspicious but keep talking

thejazzprocess-blog

About (so-called) concentration

At the moment, I’m reading The Wisdom Of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts played a major role in bringing ideas from eastern philosophy to the west in the 20th century and I now know why. This book is just beautifully written. For the most part, its analysis of the crisis of the west seems very up-to-date although it was first published in 1951.

Anyway, I want to quote a passage on what he sees as a “disorder of the brain”:

“The brain should, and in some cases does, calculate and reason with the unconscious ease of the other bodily organs. After all, the brain is not a muscle, and is thus not designed for effort and strain. But when people try to think or concentrate, they behave as if they were trying to push their brains around. they screw up their faces, knit their brows, and approach mental problems as if they were something like heaving bricks… The "lightning calculator” who can sum a long column of figures at a glance, the intellectual genius who can comprehend a whole page of reading in a few seconds, and the musical prodigy, such as Mozart, who seems to grasp harmony and counterpoint from babyhood, are examples of the proper use of man’s most marvelous instrument.“

As a student of the work of F.M. Alexander I can’t help but being reminded of this passage in Alexander’s first book Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Irdeat, p.66):

"Beware of so-called concentration…Ask anyone you know to concentrate his mind on a subject… If your friend is willing to play the game and earnestly endeavours to concentrate his mind, he will probably knit his forehead, tense his muscles, clench his hands, and either close his eyes or stare fixedly at some point in the room. As a result his mind is very fully occupied with this unusual condition of the body which can only be maintained by repeated orders from the objective mind. In short, your friend, though he may not know it, is not using his mind for the consideration of the subject you have given him to concentrate upon, but for the consideration of an unusual bodily condition which he calls ‘concentration’. This is true also of the attitude of attention required for children in schools. Personally, I do not believe in any concentration that calls for effort. It is the wish, the conscious desire to do a thing or think a thing, which results in adequate performance…”

I imagine Alan Watts coming to a lesson with Mr. Alexander. I’m a bit mad with the past because this should have happened but, sadly, it never did.

For Watts and almost all other, uh, eastern metaphysicists, he solution to this and most of our other problems is: less conscious thinking.

For Alexander, the solution is: more conscious thinking.

What if the problem here is not: who is right, but is there something wrong with our model of conscious vs. subconscious thinking?

Let me think about this for a few decades and I’ll come back and tell you what I’ve found.