Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

05 Dec 2008

How Things are Changing: Intuition as Another Evolutionary Step in Fact-based and Creative Decision Making

So what has changed? How are things differing in reality? How is the shift in thinking impacting things?

The last few months postings (since c. September) have started to circle faster around similar subjects. The core of Just Seven Things was and always will be the mission to find out how it all works; in particular, how the relationship between the conscious mind and other-than-consciousness can be managed to optimise happiness.

The shift is to a greater reliance on the other-than-conscious. I had always trusted my intuition before, but I had not had a relationship with it. Essentially, I hadn’t used it as a tool: it had just seemed to happen.

First I probably need to define terms that are only just forming for me personally (rather than being others’ words on a page. I’m using unconscious/ intelligent unconscious/ undermind (borrowed from Claxton)/ intuition interchangeably at the moment. Essentially: the assembling of information and decision-making without direct attention (thanks to Royce Bell of Accenture in an FT article entitled ‘Gut Instincts Give Business Intelligence a New Flavour’ which helped me with these words)

Now, on a daily (near hourly basis), I’m increasing my awareness of and then listening to my other-than-consciousness. Trusting it to help guide my attention. To seek what I need to replenish my energy levels or creativity.

My need to consciously interpret is reduced as I see the evidence in the form of quality and quantity of insight and output.

My belief in relaxing into, and doing all that I can to facilitate, my intuitive and intelligent unconscious is accelerated on a daily basis by my rapidly increasing levels of happiness: even in the face of more challenging external environments in which I am working

Posted in Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
29 Nov 2008
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The Relationship between Conscious and Unconscious and the Next Stage of My Journey

Finally, I’m finishing Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. I feel like i’ve been on an epic journey.

I’m changed materially by what I have read. This blog probably evidences this in as good a way as any. As such, completing the book marks a shift in my needs and wants for this blog (and to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever particularly pandered to anything other than this in JST)

‘….an image of the mind as ‘the theatre of consciousness’, a brightly illuminated stage on which the action of mental life takes place; or perhaps as a well-lit office in which sits an intelligent manager, coolly weighing evidence, making decisions, solving problems and issuing orders. In this executive den, human intelligence, consciousness and identity come together: they are, in effect, one and the same thing. ‘I’ am the manager. ‘I’ work in the light. I have access to all the files that comprise my ‘intelligence’.

What I cannot see, or see into, either does not exist, or is mere ‘matter’, the dumb substance of the body that can do nothing of any interest on its own. It may manage certain menial operations like digestion, respiration and circulation without supervision; but to do anything clever it has to wait for instructions from head office.

This image continues to animate and channel our sense of our own psychology, of our potentials and resources…..

……and it is wrong in every respect’

– Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (emphasis added)

Posted in Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Knowledge Management, Learning and tagged , , ,
22 Nov 2008

An Important Jigsaw Piece in My View of Life

Padlock by Victures

Padlock by Victures

The only advantage of being sick over the last weeks has been my continuing revelations from Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. I’m nearly at the end and confident that I’ll be starting it again. Seminal.

So my reading really slowed down when I got to the chapter on ‘The Point of Consciousness’:

‘the intriguing possibility that areas of the brain might be getting on with their business at an unconscious level, without bothering to wait for consciousness to develop. A pool of neural activation may split into two, one part resonating with the self, and thus subserving the emergence of conscious awareness, while the other carries on with further processing such as planning a response’

‘These results indicate clearly that it is the conscious brain which decides what to do, and when; and that what we experience as intention is merely a post hoc confirmation of what has already been set in motion. Consciousness receives a kind of corollary ‘despatch note’, and then presents this as if it were the original order’

Had me in familiar territory already. Part of the reason for this blog’s existence was to understand a bit better what the other-than-conscious did. Not to necessarily ascribe meaning to it. As I noted in my first post in May, I firmly believe: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot, Beckett)

Read more…

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Mindfulness, Psychology and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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