The Rational/Thinking Mind (RM)
If there is any other aspect of us that we use more than any other it is our mind. It is defined as the aspect of us that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons. The secondary definitions are that it is the conscious mental events and capabilities in an organism and its organized conscious and unconscious adaptive mental activities. I use this definition for the most part save that it feels and wills as these are not qualities of mind though I get that it appears they are.
Our feelings and emotional perceptions do not arise in or from the mind. They occur within our emotional body and will comes from our "higher/true self" and we will look at this in another essay. Will, like our emotions, appears to come from the mind as most are conscious aware almost exclusively through the thoughts them and are not aware it comes from our higher aspects.
Confusion about what the mind is and does is very common for most have not spent enough time meditating or practicing mindfulness. Both of these practices help us realize that while the mind does thinking it is not the thinker. Thinking and reasoning is primarily done by the mind whereas the thinker is our consciousness, our "true self". Our consciousness does not arise from the activities of our brain and exists before we are born and continues after our bodies die.
The mind is our consciousness' interface to phenomenal reality and is created by its reactions to its experiences in it. The meaning of the term rational mind differs depending on who is discussing it, and the context. I define the mind as mentioned earlier. It is the part of us that “thinks”, has thoughts and among other things uses words or language.
The mind is intrinsically linked to the body through the brain. It is the "seat of our waking consciousness". It is that which contains our thoughts and often what keeps us up at night by its ramblings. It includes the non-conscious mind, what people call their subconscious mind, which is always actively influencing our thoughts, choices and actions in the background. It is this portion that is the most difficult to work with as much of it is hidden out of view.
We have many thoughts in our minds and are only conscious of a very small percentage of them. What tends to be part of our stream of conscious attention are thoughts triggered by or associated with our experiences. This is something we will explore in far more detail in later essays. The relevant take away from this here is that despite many knowing our non-conscious mind influences us few realize the depth and breadth of it. It significantly affects all aspects of our life from our perceptions of and thoughts about everything to our very thinking processes and every choice we make. It is also where the roots of all our issues reside.
The mind is not a fixed or rigid thing like physical objects or our bodies, it is essentially a virtual construct. Unlike our bodies, which develop according to what is encoded in our DNA, our mind does so based on our reactions to experiences. Infants have fully functioning bodies but not functioning minds. They have to learn how to control their bodies and interpret perceptions by developing the thoughts that allow them to do so.
The mind only begins to take form after birth as a result of our consciousness' interactions with and reactions to its experiences and the integration of them. Every reaction we have to our experiences manifests thoughts or activates an existing one. The mind develops significantly in the first couple of years, though we are not consciously aware of it. We simply start to become more familiar with our bodies and begin to gradually develop the ability to interpret more of what we perceive and to communicate with others.
The minds foundation continues take form during the next few years as we begin to develop various concepts and skills. We react to all our experiences, including reactions to the thoughts we have build up in our minds. As a result we begin developing our basic beliefs about ourselves and the world around us as well as our rules and responses. During the first few years of our lives these reactions continue to add to the body of thoughts forming the basis of our rational mind. It is essentially a program that includes such things as rules and beliefs as well as establishing how we will react to experiences based what we have learned from our previous ones.
We continue to react to each and every experiences adding to the minds developing body of knowledge, capabilities increases its complexity. In the process our capabilities of expression continue to expand. The knowledge acquired is subjective as it is based on our reactions to what we perceive and our reactions are based on thoughts we have previously created.
When we are young we have had fewer experiences and have not yet developed good reasoning skills. As a result the rational mind develops with assumed truths rather than actual truths and a great deal of uncertainty (regardless of our awareness of them). The misconceptions we create in our minds do not necessarily stay with us as new information can affect existing thoughts and change or eliminate some misconceptions and resolve contradictory thoughts. Our physical functions typically use only verifiable truths; after all, we cannot function if we cannot get our bodies to do what we need them to. For example, we do not have misconceptions about how far the ground is when we step forward or where our feet are relative to it.
Typically, misconceptions arise where the thoughts are about other thoughts rather than being about "things". We create them when we integrate experiences and, for example, assign causality where none exists, rely on erroneous or incomplete reasoning or superficial observation. Stereotyping is a prime example of our misconceptions in action.
Our rational mind categorizes all aspects of each experience by associating them with other thoughts we have created. Weakly related information is not strongly connected to other thoughts though we can force a connection by our conscious attention even where one does not actually exists. Our rational mind does this when there is a lack of information to interpret an experience. To do so it uses imagination and what reasoning skills it has acquired to connect disparate thoughts, even if they are not accurate or true, in an attempt to interpret the experience. This connects existing thoughts in new ways regardless of whether they are valid or not.
We create a vast library of virtual constructs and they blend in with all the other thoughts in our mind. We are complex creatures and our rational mind contains a virtually uncountable number of these connected thoughts/constructs. The misconceptions and contradictions among them lead to many of the issues we face. In terms of our growth we want to begin to notice and recognize these misconceptions for what they are. Fortunately, we can learn how to do this.
Noticing the consequences of our misconceptions is far easier than knowing what misconceptions we hold or which ones led to a particular outcome. This is, in part, due to the almost infinitely complex relationships that thoughts form among themselves and a lack of awareness of the thought we come to hold. As a result noticing the patterns of experiences in our lives can be even more difficult than finding and changing the thoughts themselves. We take on poor notions and develop many of our misconceptions as children in no small part due to what I have mentioned - our lack of a developed reasoning process and other mental skills.
During the teenage years, the physical changes in the body take precedence, driving the development of the child against the backdrop of previous experiences and their reactions to them. Many of the problems teens encounter are a consequence of their early mental development or programming. For instance, a child who is accustomed to getting his or her way, who is undisciplined, or who is catered to during their first nine years of life has a higher likelihood of having difficulty with control issues during their teenage years.
We tend to bury these issues or inconsistencies in our non-conscious mind rather than modify then as we grow older. Burying the thoughts associated with them does not remove their influence, especially in the case where we had strong or repeated emotional reactions to experiences as this empowers them. We are likely to express these emotions in some fashion or another because of their higher energy and the number of thought forms they share a commonality with. This has two consequences. It shifts our thoughts to lower mental levels, which in turn manifests lower emotional energies. When our awareness is focused on lower level thoughts we have limited our use of higher reasoning (assuming we have developed them). Strong, positive thoughts and the comparable emotions have the opposite effect.
As I have stated, our experiences and reactions to them form our foundation or base program. How minds does this is common to all; however, everyone creates their own unique thoughts and mental constructs. Collectively they are not dissimilar to a software program. When the program has flaws we have problems and issues in life. We often do not recognize the "bugs" in our mental programs but they are there, which is why we struggle to address our issues. At best, the result is only to delay the inevitable. We manifested the issue because of imbalances within us though the triggers may be external. If the imbalance is significant for our growth we will continue to manifest related issues until we resolve the imbalance. The importance of a particular lesson often results in escalation of the issue and draw other thoughts into the mix.
We are often not aware of the root issue(s) for a particular problem. One issue can manifest any number of ways, remain hidden from our conscious awareness or be masked by other issues. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, we are not here to work on just one specific issue or development point and second, we have collected so much junk over the years that issues become entwined and difficult to separate. By paying attention to what is going on in our minds and our lives and seeing ourselves as the author of our experiences we are better able to start seeing what we need to work on.
Every event in our life contributes to the programming of our rational minds. We learn by experience, through our interactions with everything around us. We continue to modify the program that is our rational mind with every experience we have. The less mindful we are the more robotic our reactions become, which can lead us to reacting without realizing why and attract certain experiences. We train our minds to avoid things that cause us pain in one way or another, but this does not mean that we are avoiding bad situations. We are the source of our own suffering and it remains whether we are aware of it or not. Further, with so much cross threading of thoughts and emotions if we are not mindful we can end up reacting to issues or problems in ways that make matters worse.
Without being mindful and paying attention many of our thoughts and memories and interpretations of events are not true or accurate. These misinterpretations can lead to our being stuck and living entirely through our poorly programmed rational mind. Given that our rational mind interprets what it perceives based on how its programming, there appears to be somewhat of a dilemma in even learning what the truth is. This is an all too real challenge. There is the event and then our reactions to it, the later being entirely subjective. In terms of our awareness, key points to remember are that truth is not essential when it comes to how our minds react to experiences and that we don't know ourselves anywhere nearly as well as we tend to think we do. The latter point leads to our not knowing why we react as we do.
The rational mind is the part of us that performs essential functions for us, unfortunately, we were too young to understand how it works when we built it. The fortunate reality is that our rational mind is definitely not us and we can learn to reprogram it. We will look at the mind in far more detail in Section 2: Growth Fundamentals.
Rational Mind Development: The Early Stages
© 2009 Allan Beveridge
Last edited October 28, 2020