one of the hardest things to describe or
to be properly aware of is what it feels
like to be inside our own minds
the second-by-second flow of images
words feelings and sounds inside our
heads that philosophers call our
consciousness all day this consciousness
is filled with a tangle of material that
flashes by an observing eye so fast and
in so multi-layered and dense away we
can generally only arrest and focus on a
miniscule part of what is before us
there are waves of sensations fog banks
of moods collisions of ideas and swirls
of associations and impressions
consciousness doesn’t just unfold on a
single cinema screen of the mind either
we can think of it more like a multi
multiplex where a dozen or more moods
and emotions are projected at once in a
fractured collection of images
reminiscent of a puzzling collage of
avant-garde videos most of what we have
felt and have been will disappear before
it can ever be held in examined
furthermore little of the richness of
consciousness ever makes it out into
public discussion when we open our
mouths and tell other people for example
what we think or how we’re feeling we
have no option but to radically simplify
the nature of experience like a
journalist filing a hundred-word piece
on a battle or political revolution – an
indifferent domestic audience a
continent away we might say we’ve had a
quiet day so far or fairly cheerful at
the moment and a generous social code
means we don’t remind one another of
what an inaccurate portrayed this must
necessarily be part of the reason why
we’re not quite aware of the true nature
of consciousness is the fault of
literature in most of the novels we read
characters are attributed and utterly
implausible yet superficially beguiling
clarity of mental functioning for
example the influential 19th century
English novelist Anthony Trollope
likes to offer his readers a snapshot of
what was supposed to be going on in his
characters heads in his novel Phineas
Finn a
has elected to Parliament and trollope
describes him traveling by train to the
capital to take up his post and musing
moodily on his political prospects he
had many serious almost solemn thoughts
on his journey to London he wondered if
he would make a failure of the great
matter he had taken in hand he could not
but tell himself that the chances were
20 to 1 against now that he looked at it
the difficulties loomed larger than ever
trollope gives us the sincere impression
that this really is how human beings
think when they sit down on trains and
consider their futures the sort of
novels that trollope wrote have even
been described as extremely realistic
and yet the problem is that of course no
human who has ever existed actually
thinks or feels remotely like this it
took until the early 20th century for
writers to focus on and respond to this
foreshortening in 1918 in his great
novel Ulysses the Irish writer James
Joyce for the first time made the move
of putting a kind of microphone inside
his characters minds to pick up on what
became known as the stream of
consciousness it sounded radically
different from anything trollop or past
novelists had ever described at one
point in Ulysses we hear the stream of
consciousness of the heroine Mollie as
she lies in bed beside her husband bloom
in the middle of the night is he
dreaming am I in it he smells of some
kind of drink nor whiskey perhaps the
sweetie kind of paste
they put posters up with I’d like to sip
green and yellow expensive drinks Stage
Door Johnnie’s drink I tasted one with
my finger dipped out of that American
that had the squirrel he must have eaten
oysters I never in all my life felt
anyone had one the size of that to make
you feel full up what’s the idea of
making us like that with a big hole in
the middle I hate people who come at all
hours answer the door and you’re all
undressed we come to know more about our
own consciousness via Joyce’s unusual
portrait of Molly’s like ours
Molly’s mind moves extremely fast from
one topic to another at one moment she’s
thinking about liquors then about an
American she met at the theater that a
second later she’s wandering for
husband’s been eating oysters then she
thinks about his penis then she wanders
about her own body then gets perked by
the idea of people coming around to the
house when she’s not ready to open the
door there’s no dominant central theme
that gets carefully explored
despite the monstrous complexity Ulysses
arguably still amounts to a radical
simplification of the true nature of
experience after all the novel exists
only as words whereas our real stream of
consciousness includes a disjointed and
random streaming of films and pictures
images constantly flit across
consciousness sometimes we’ll see
something extraordinarily specific a
door handle from 27 years ago or an
image of a boat on a canal in western
France or remember looking out of a
train on a journey through Germany but
there’ll be no further details or real
sense of why this has come into our
heads right now nevertheless Joyce’s
work is hugely significant because it
helps us to start to see what we’re up
against when we try to understand our
own minds it is not a case of just
opening up a hatch and finding a welter
of well-formulated thoughts when we turn
our attention to ourselves we won’t be
able to locate crystalline attitudes and
precise ideas we will discover only
chaos and elusive thoughts more
significantly it’s from this primeval
mulch that we will have to assemble the
solid and serious plans we need to
navigate through existence we have to
decide what we care about how we should
erect our lives who we should try to be
knowing more about the stream of
consciousness prepares us for the work
we have to do to pull out from the
stream that decent and accurate thoughts
we need the mind won’t automatically
yield clear answers when we ask
ourselves what we think or where we
might direct our energies there can
naturally be a temptation to avoid the
hard work and there are some
alternatives to proper introspection
some of the content we hold in our minds
is coherent and very easy to grasp but
it suffers from a marked drawback it
isn’t really ours it’s secondhand stale
and a derivative bank of ideas and plans
we have certain notions in our heads
that come not from our deeper resources
of feeling and intuition but from what
we have sucked in uncritically from
outside from what we’ve read in the
newspaper or heard about from parents or
friends these are our received ideas we
don’t need to think hard at all to
regurgitate them they’re just waiting in
prepackaged form in the reception room
of our minds and yet it’s only the
thoughts and feelings that are
originally unprocessed that come from
the caverns in ourselves that are the
ones richest in information even if
they’re also painfully the hardest to
make sense of knowing a little more
about the stream of consciousness shows
us that our brains are a more delicate
Messier organ than we’re normally
allowed to imagine many of the
introspective tasks we set ourselves
turn out to be more fiddly and are going
to need more resources than we typically
allow for yet the rewards for mastering
introspection correctly are immense for
it’s by becoming experts in our own
streams of consciousness that we have
the chance truly to understand who we
are and thereby to align our lives with
the way we really feel and with the
goals that can truly satisfy us when we reach them
to be properly aware of is what it feels
like to be inside our own minds
the second-by-second flow of images
words feelings and sounds inside our
heads that philosophers call our
consciousness all day this consciousness
is filled with a tangle of material that
flashes by an observing eye so fast and
in so multi-layered and dense away we
can generally only arrest and focus on a
miniscule part of what is before us
there are waves of sensations fog banks
of moods collisions of ideas and swirls
of associations and impressions
consciousness doesn’t just unfold on a
single cinema screen of the mind either
we can think of it more like a multi
multiplex where a dozen or more moods
and emotions are projected at once in a
fractured collection of images
reminiscent of a puzzling collage of
avant-garde videos most of what we have
felt and have been will disappear before
it can ever be held in examined
furthermore little of the richness of
consciousness ever makes it out into
public discussion when we open our
mouths and tell other people for example
what we think or how we’re feeling we
have no option but to radically simplify
the nature of experience like a
journalist filing a hundred-word piece
on a battle or political revolution – an
indifferent domestic audience a
continent away we might say we’ve had a
quiet day so far or fairly cheerful at
the moment and a generous social code
means we don’t remind one another of
what an inaccurate portrayed this must
necessarily be part of the reason why
we’re not quite aware of the true nature
of consciousness is the fault of
literature in most of the novels we read
characters are attributed and utterly
implausible yet superficially beguiling
clarity of mental functioning for
example the influential 19th century
English novelist Anthony Trollope
likes to offer his readers a snapshot of
what was supposed to be going on in his
characters heads in his novel Phineas
Finn a
has elected to Parliament and trollope
describes him traveling by train to the
capital to take up his post and musing
moodily on his political prospects he
had many serious almost solemn thoughts
on his journey to London he wondered if
he would make a failure of the great
matter he had taken in hand he could not
but tell himself that the chances were
20 to 1 against now that he looked at it
the difficulties loomed larger than ever
trollope gives us the sincere impression
that this really is how human beings
think when they sit down on trains and
consider their futures the sort of
novels that trollope wrote have even
been described as extremely realistic
and yet the problem is that of course no
human who has ever existed actually
thinks or feels remotely like this it
took until the early 20th century for
writers to focus on and respond to this
foreshortening in 1918 in his great
novel Ulysses the Irish writer James
Joyce for the first time made the move
of putting a kind of microphone inside
his characters minds to pick up on what
became known as the stream of
consciousness it sounded radically
different from anything trollop or past
novelists had ever described at one
point in Ulysses we hear the stream of
consciousness of the heroine Mollie as
she lies in bed beside her husband bloom
in the middle of the night is he
dreaming am I in it he smells of some
kind of drink nor whiskey perhaps the
sweetie kind of paste
they put posters up with I’d like to sip
green and yellow expensive drinks Stage
Door Johnnie’s drink I tasted one with
my finger dipped out of that American
that had the squirrel he must have eaten
oysters I never in all my life felt
anyone had one the size of that to make
you feel full up what’s the idea of
making us like that with a big hole in
the middle I hate people who come at all
hours answer the door and you’re all
undressed we come to know more about our
own consciousness via Joyce’s unusual
portrait of Molly’s like ours
Molly’s mind moves extremely fast from
one topic to another at one moment she’s
thinking about liquors then about an
American she met at the theater that a
second later she’s wandering for
husband’s been eating oysters then she
thinks about his penis then she wanders
about her own body then gets perked by
the idea of people coming around to the
house when she’s not ready to open the
door there’s no dominant central theme
that gets carefully explored
despite the monstrous complexity Ulysses
arguably still amounts to a radical
simplification of the true nature of
experience after all the novel exists
only as words whereas our real stream of
consciousness includes a disjointed and
random streaming of films and pictures
images constantly flit across
consciousness sometimes we’ll see
something extraordinarily specific a
door handle from 27 years ago or an
image of a boat on a canal in western
France or remember looking out of a
train on a journey through Germany but
there’ll be no further details or real
sense of why this has come into our
heads right now nevertheless Joyce’s
work is hugely significant because it
helps us to start to see what we’re up
against when we try to understand our
own minds it is not a case of just
opening up a hatch and finding a welter
of well-formulated thoughts when we turn
our attention to ourselves we won’t be
able to locate crystalline attitudes and
precise ideas we will discover only
chaos and elusive thoughts more
significantly it’s from this primeval
mulch that we will have to assemble the
solid and serious plans we need to
navigate through existence we have to
decide what we care about how we should
erect our lives who we should try to be
knowing more about the stream of
consciousness prepares us for the work
we have to do to pull out from the
stream that decent and accurate thoughts
we need the mind won’t automatically
yield clear answers when we ask
ourselves what we think or where we
might direct our energies there can
naturally be a temptation to avoid the
hard work and there are some
alternatives to proper introspection
some of the content we hold in our minds
is coherent and very easy to grasp but
it suffers from a marked drawback it
isn’t really ours it’s secondhand stale
and a derivative bank of ideas and plans
we have certain notions in our heads
that come not from our deeper resources
of feeling and intuition but from what
we have sucked in uncritically from
outside from what we’ve read in the
newspaper or heard about from parents or
friends these are our received ideas we
don’t need to think hard at all to
regurgitate them they’re just waiting in
prepackaged form in the reception room
of our minds and yet it’s only the
thoughts and feelings that are
originally unprocessed that come from
the caverns in ourselves that are the
ones richest in information even if
they’re also painfully the hardest to
make sense of knowing a little more
about the stream of consciousness shows
us that our brains are a more delicate
Messier organ than we’re normally
allowed to imagine many of the
introspective tasks we set ourselves
turn out to be more fiddly and are going
to need more resources than we typically
allow for yet the rewards for mastering
introspection correctly are immense for
it’s by becoming experts in our own
streams of consciousness that we have
the chance truly to understand who we
are and thereby to align our lives with
the way we really feel and with the
goals that can truly satisfy us when we reach them
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