In this second post on “the mind” I’ll turn, as promised, to some of my personal experiences of trying to know my own mind—

some examples of what ideas, experiences, beliefs have occupied it,

and some of the later processes of learning about how it works.

So, first, The Whats:

·       Although my memories of my childhood are more sparse and less clear than those of some of my friends, I do recall a few relevant things from early on. One was the dawning of a clearer sense of responsibility when I was seven years old and my sister, Betty, was born. Although those wide years between us did not make for a very close relationship as we were growing up, happily, that relationship has become a close one even though, ironically, we now live a long distance from each other. I also recall that my consciousness of responsibility was also sharpened when, in my early teens, I began a “paper route” that was miles from where we lived and that became a symbol for dependability and accountability.

·       My memories of learning start early, since my Mom gave me a series of novels about a man and his dog(s) —author and title are long gone, although I do remember reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild—and encyclopedias were visibly available in the bookcase I remember so clearly. I also remember with great fondness checking out books—mostly novels, as I recall—on a regular basis from the City Library, which happened to be just across the street from the First Baptist Church where my parents and grandparents were active members, and, later, as was I.

·       My own choice of library books aside, I have little memory of discrimination regarding what I was learning in school since those choices were largely made for me, although as early as Junior High School my capabilities and interests clearly showed a preference for “words” over “numbers” and the courses I liked and excelled in were more literature, history, and civics than science and math. Those proclivities continued even more strongly in college and enormously in seminary and graduate school.

·       Also starting in college was an awareness of wide differences between my beliefs and sense of acceptable behaviors, and what I observed in other students who also claimed to be Christians, even Baptists! Although the college I attended was still fairly conservative, I felt pretty much “out there” as compared to the “sheltered” confines of my own pre-college circle of friends who came almost exclusively from the evangelical, extremely fundamentalist church in which I was raised. That was the beginning of what would become a long, thoughtful, and life-changing journey through my initial basic seminary education, to my doctoral studies, and my long career in higher education.

·       The longer my graduate studies and, particularly, my teaching career progressed, the Whats” became “joined at the hip” to the Hows and all of that went on steroids when I retired and began to blog about the time I turned eighty. I’ll come back to that in a bit more detail, but it’s time to switch gears and turn to . . . .

The Hows:”

·       My first remembrance of a conscious awareness of my intelligence and learning capabilities—not some “degree of,” but simply having them—came as the result of a major research and presentation project my last year of junior high school, i.e. ninth grade, even though I recall only that I did it, not what it was. All of that “mindfulness” ramped up through high school and college, and took a major leap in seminary where I first confronted major intellectual challenges to my fundamentalist beliefs through being introduced to an historical/critical approach to the Bible—the oral, written, and ecclesiastical processes by which it came to be.

·       And check off another primary escalation, not only in the Whats, but also in the Hows, as I began to tackle major research projects. Especially important was my exposure and attraction to philosophy, as well as learning to discriminate among widely different points of view in biblical/theological studies, all of which started to make me more attentive to and curious about how the mind works—the conscious, reflective processes of which I was aware and which I largely controlled, and the unconscious, non-reflective ones which largely went unnoticed unless I deliberately thought about them or was forced to do so by a malfunction or the necessity of a decision. Still, that said, I was not dominated by the Hows, nor did I write or talk about it.

·       All of that became sharper still—although mostly overshadowed by the Whats—when I stared teaching. In the beginning I was overwhelmed by putting together the “content” of the classes, as well as the methodology—the pedagogy—which they do not teach you in doctoral studies! But even then the How became at times part of the content of the philosophy courses I taught and, thus, began to assert itself in my own consciousness.

·       How once again became subordinated to What when, after twenty years in the classroom, I began my administrative career and it was necessary to learn a whole new set of tasks. But as the years passed and I became more comfortable with the administrative procedures—the different responsibilities and deadlines, the fun of saying “Yes,” and the difficulty of learning to say “No” without being demeaning—my mind inevitably turned again to my interest in How it works.

·       Somewhat to my surprise, when I retired and shortly thereafter began to “blog,” How continued its “rise to the top” as I ventured into such “mental content” topics as experiences of failure, sorrow and regret, hope, the process of aging, paradox, knowing and believing, etc.  Let me illustrate my continued fascination with how the mind works with those last two items—paradox, and knowing and believing. Some of what I will relate is drawn in part for use now, in this quite different context, from blogs posted two to two-and-a-half years ago.

As noted in the Home section of my blog site, I have been intrigued for most of my adult life with the notion of boundaries: the lines that separate and define distinct spaces and entities while, at the same time, forming the borders that allow them to touch, engage, connect.  It is the same fascination that has attracted me to the concept of paradox: two statements or ideas that seem to be self-exclusive, inconsistent—”on the one hand, on the other hand”—but which, on reflection, may come together to provide a glimpse into the truth of things.

This attraction has been stimulated by the persistent reminders of all those either/ors that we need to hold together in that delicate balance of the paradoxical—teaching and learning, theory and practice, self and other, personal and public, intellect and feeling, reason and intuition—and you can grow the list yourself.

Playing the role of Niels Bohr in the play, Copenhagen, brought back to me my longtime fascination with the “wave-particle duality” that quantum mechanics introduced into our understanding of the physical universe at its most fundamental level, and which I addressed in my courses on The Philosophy of Science—sometimes it behaves like particles, sometimes like waves and, as Bohr said, experiments can show one or the other but not both at the same time. So if even at the heart of material reality, we must embrace the paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, why should we be surprised that at the macro-level of our lives, we are confronted with the same challenge? If that is true of our human experience as well as at the heart of material reality, why should we be surprised if it can also be embedded in our minds? (For a fuller discussion, see “Reflections on the Notion of Paradox,” published on my blog site, December 1, 2018.)

Finally, let me turn to the issues of “knowing” and “believing,” keeping in mind that I am still talking about my awareness of both the What and the How of the workings of my mind. ´The longer I have lived, the more I have become aware of all that I don’t know, and of how my “certainties” have lessened alongside that great repository of the unknown and, perhaps, of the not-to-be-known.

I must start with my acceptance of experiential knowledge, what I choose to call an “inclusive empiricism:” a way of knowing that primarily affirms the centrality of sense experience in the formation of ideas, but also embraces the wider ranges of experience, including the exercise of reason and of intuition. My confidence in my mind’s power to order the experiences I have reflected upon (reason), as well as its capacity to grasp patterns in “aha” moments of insight (intuition?), leads me to accept the notion—consistent with my experience—that I am a meaning-and-pattern-seeking creature; that it is crucial to my survival, my sanity, and definitive of my existence that I make some “sense of things;” that I will look for order in my experience and where order is not evident, I will create it or at least try to do so.

I am obviously helped by the things I am confident that I “know,” and I must be responsible for concluding, as I have shared above, how I arrive at knowledge. While I am not hesitant to generalize this epistemology as central to all human knowing and learning, I obviously cannot impose that confidence on others.

So what is the difference between “knowing” and “believing?” Let me just offer some basic definitions that make sense to me.

• Knowing is the result of first-hand awareness of something I have personally experienced, primarily through my five senses, reflected upon, and which my rational mind has processed, ordered, and confirmed. Such knowledge, while dependable and evidentiary, is, along with and like science, not absolute, undeniable, unchanging truth.
• Believing in something is a choice I make because, even though I cannot verify it by the same processes as what I claim to know, I have come to accept it by inference from my experiences, by a rational argument from some assumption, an intuitive conclusion, acceptance based on an authority I trust, or even a hope that it is true.

Neither of them provides absolute certainty. However, that does not stop me from thinking, feeling, acting, and living on the basis of some things I claim to know and some that I choose to believe with far more certainty than they can legitimately provide.

As noted above, I am happy to affirm my confidence that the conclusions I have reached for myself are applicable to the human mind in general, although awareness varies from person to person and each individual is free to draw their own conclusions. These are mine:

• The mind’s effort to understand is central to the very nature and existence of humanity. We do it because we can’t help it, because the enterprise of understanding, ancient as humanity itself, is what has carried us from somewhere in the slime to the lofty but precarious perch where we now rest.
• All of which leads me to the notion—the possibility—that some things may be buried in our minds—unconscious perhaps?—such as, noted above, the effort to understand. But also perhaps the notion, the possibility, of the existence of a Great Mystery—God-by-some-other-name—as well as a longing for “something beyond” this life. Even if we reject those possible “beliefs,” they had to “be there” in order to reject them.
• Now, does the presence in our minds of those ideas/beliefs mean that they are true? I don’t “know”—refer back to my definition of “knowing.” They may be and some may take their “mindful” presence as evidence of the realities they offer. On the other hand, in my judgment, not necessarily. They may be “lodged” there simply as a result of our evolutionary development into people with reflective capacities who have learned to long for answers to ultimate questions and for a continuation of the thoughtful and reflective life we have come to love. But there they are and we must choose or, like some of us, simply claim that we cannot know, but, perhaps, choose to believe.

And with that, I bring to an end this accounting of my own efforts to understand  the Whats and the Hows of the workings of my mind, as well as the conclusions that I choose to accept as applicable to the human mind in general. I apologize both for “rattling on” as well as for all that was left unsaid about this subject. As we move on to an exploration of knowing our own bodies, I promise an effort at a more inclusive as well as a more concise account of the topic.  I hope you’ll stay with me.