Mind or Minds?

Everyone is familiar with the practice of "thinking to oneself". Having a conversation in one’s own head. In fact, we take this kind of thinking so much for granted that we rarely stop to consider how amazing it is.

Most people, when they really think about it, will admit that the two voices conversing in their heads are both very sophisticated. In fact, if they were to record an internal conversation on a piece of paper, someone reading it would have every reason to suspect that the individuals conversing are two separate and fully conscious human beings. It turns out this is the very process undertaken by writers who are composing dialog between two fictional characters, except they might add nuances to the voices so as to render them even more unique from one another.

Anyone who’s ever tried writing down their internal conversations is often disturbed to discover what the fiction writer has always known; that sometimes what the speakers say is utterly surprising. As the conversation is allowed to flow on its own, each speaker may make observations or suggest insights that the author finds deeply moving and profound, more so than any ideas the author has ever come up with "on her-or-his own". But these characters are just a part of the author’s mind, right? We learn things from others who have had very different experiences than ours. Their unique points of view help us see familiar things in a new way. So how can an author learn something from a character that she-or-he has invented, who can’t possibly have had any experiences outside of those the author has provided?

To my thinking, the obvious answer is that minds are not as singular as people typically like to think. In fact, I seriously doubt there is or has ever been any such thing as a singular mind. A more accurate depiction of the human mind may be that a mind is made of minds made of minds made of minds… and so on in infinite regress.

As you go about your day and take in your life experiences, there are literally tons of data to which your conscious mind never pays heed. But unconsciously you take it all in, and like raindrops condensing about flecks of dust, subtle minds form around the experiences you discard and the events to which you are only exposed to vicariously. And so it seems to come out of nowhere when suddenly you can write in the voice of a victim of war when you’ve never been one, or you have flashes of insight or inspiration that you’re certain only normally come to those educated in a field which you’ve never studied.

In the roiling sea of minds that exist inside your head, eventually a pattern emerges that becomes what you perceive as your singular mind, just as the jumble of letters you are looking at now becomes a flow of ideas in your conscious mind. But your "self" is not the only pattern you pick up. There are, for example, various versions of you that you share with others according to where you are and with whom you’re interacting. Your family may see a different version of you than your coworkers do, for example.

Some of these patterns are so prevalent in human experience that nearly everyone has the same specific types floating around in their cerebral soup, like "Woman" and "Man" and "Teacher", etc. These near-universal "sub-selves" are similar to the phenomenon that Carl Jung called "archetypes". Their consistent function in humanity leads to a kind of unconscious synchronization among minds that Jung termed "the collective unconscious". When a book or film or other piece of art comes along that seems to appeal deeply to the vast majority of a given population, it’s said to have spoken to the collective unconscious yearnings of that group, and it is typically full of well-drawn archetypes.

It’s conceivable that many problems that trouble folks enough to send them to therapists could be better understood in terms of one or more of the various selves of one’s mind "not getting along". If therapy sessions with one person could be treated like mediation between that person and her-or-himself (much like marriage or family counseling is mediation between various members of a household), then perhaps better and faster progress could be made in helping a client get over her-or-his need for therapy.

Grandpappy seemed to understand the power of archetypes, and He seemed to grasp intimately the unconscious yearnings not only of the people among whom He lived, but of Humanity as a whole. His parables especially seemed to capture elements of human life that are almost universal, and the characters, situations, and lessons seem to have the power of speaking deeply to every human heart.

I suppose that’s why lots of people other than His kin still talk about Him.