What Was I Thinking?

At this time yesterday, I had only the vaguest idea of what Episode 2 of The Wizard, the Prince, the Warrior and His Son (provisional title) would be about. I only knew that it would involve a girl recruit and that she was poor. I had barely even thought of Episode 1 since I had finished the first draft. I wasn’t even sure if it was Episode 2 or perhaps Part Two of the Pilot, as it would introduce a final member of the Crew and the major Antagonist of the series. Then I thought of a name for her, and she just drew the whole story after.

I started writing the Notes a little after 7 PM and when I looked up at 2:30 AM, the story, for all essentials was done. I was a little dazed and amazed. I pondered if I had come up with the tale in just those hours, or if I had been turning it over in my head for the ten days while things were lying fallow, or if, in a sense, I had been putting the whole thing together for sixty years. Ideas presented to me in the last two days, from Chill Dude Explains and Scott Adams, joined ideas presented by Colin Wilson and Madeleine L’Engle in past years, stirred up into a sort of ‘existential goulash.’ The question seems to be not so much what I was thinking, but how was I thinking, and was the I that was thinking the me who thinks he is thinking, and ‘oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.’ Anyway, here are the AI generated summations of those ideas:

Chill Dude Explains: The idea that the brain makes a decision "seven seconds" before a person becomes consciously aware of it comes from a significant 2008 neuroscientific study led by John-Dylan Haynes. This finding expands on earlier work that first suggested an unconscious component to decision-making, sparking renewed debate over the concept of free will. The study demonstrated that the unconscious mind is already at work preparing for a decision for several seconds before a person experiences the feeling of a "conscious choice". This suggests that our subjective experience of making a deliberate choice may, in part, be an illusion or an afterthought. While the findings are compelling, they don't provide the final word on free will and have been met with various critiques and interpretations.

Scott Adams' concept "the body is the brain" is likely a misremembering of the core idea in his book Reframe Your Brain, where he suggests that the "mind includes the brain, body, and physical environment" as parts of a whole system. This perspective argues for a broader definition of the mind beyond just the brain, incorporating the body and external surroundings into a unified system that influences one's overall experience and perspective. Adams promotes a holistic understanding of the mind, extending it to encompass the physical body and the surrounding environment. This view emphasizes the interconnectedness of the brain, body, and environment, suggesting they all play a role in thought processes and mental states.

 For Colin Wilson, the "higher self" is the potential for heightened consciousness and peak experiences, which can be cultivated through self-awareness and a willingness to seek challenges that promote mental and emotional growth. Wilson's philosophy, particularly his concept of the "Ladder of Selves," suggests that individuals are not fixed but can choose to ascend to higher states of being by developing positive emotions, imagination, and a sense of connection to the wider universe. He believed that by recognizing and embracing moments of clarity and fulfillment, one could achieve a more profound quality of life.   Wilson saw the self as a ladder with different "steps," where lower steps represent reactive, low-awareness states, and higher steps represent more complex and elevated aspects of personality.

Madeleine L'Engle used the metaphor of seeing through glasses to explain that one's body and brain are tools for perception, but the true self—the soul—is the conscious entity doing the actual "seeing" and thinking. She developed this analogy during an argument with a neurologist who asserted that a person is nothing more than their brain. L'Engle's analogy emerged from a conversation with a neurologist who claimed that humans are solely their cerebral cortex. As someone who is nearsighted, L'Engle used the example of needing glasses to see stars and faces. She argued that while glasses are necessary for clear vision, they are not the entity doing the seeing; she, as a conscious being, is seeing through them. Similarly, she proposed that the brain is an instrument for thinking, but it is the individual consciousness or soul that is the true thinker, thinking through the brain. 

The only conclusion I can draw? "There must be something inside."