The Operations of the Mind

While such sciences may seem like they are looking into causes for actions, they are not investigations into the operations of the mind, nor do they touch on or parallel them. All these invented schools of thinking are in fact mere applications of mental operations that remain hidden to the practitioner. Such imagined schools, like other manifestations of the intellect, are the outcome of operations occurring in the dark. Even if the true operations these men were using were pointed out to them, they would be as men in a haze - bewildered.

Classic psychological processes such as repression, projection, compensation, transference, denial and so forth are indeed theoretical psychological mechanics. But they do not deal with the operations because such theories ignore the question of why such coping mechanisms are used in the first place - beyond the need to cope. What is the root of the urge to cope?

Even if we say the mechanisms are used because the ego has a need to avoid anxiety, these practitioners fail to explain what this primal anxiety is caused by. In addition, the reason why one person will feel anxiety and choose a coping mechanism while another will not is not sought. What is inevitably given instead is a causal incident or condition. Then when a counter example is given, such as the example of a person who had the same experience or condition but did not respond in the same way, another causal incident or condition is given, on and on ad infinitum. This habit commits the fallacy of post hoc ergo proctor hoc (after the fact, because of) and suffers from an infinite regress of causal incidents without ever reaching a causal mechanics. Why is a particular experience causing a particular response?

In short the practitioners fail to recognize that they are offering events as causes, without explaining the causation. And even if some primal desire is proposed that if frustrated causes anxiety, such as Freud's posited desire for conquest of the mother, Adler's posited desire for love, or Frankl's posited desire for meaning, nothing is given to explain why such desires are present. What causes those desires?

By asking only shallow questions, students of the mind inevitably wind up with shallow answers. The result is that inquiry into the mental operations never begins. All academic human inquiry into the activity of the mind is inquiry into its effects, not its causes. Practitioners of the mental sciences have no way to uncover the cause because such considerations are quite frankly outside the scope of their awareness.

Sanskaras

What prevents us from grasping the operations is that we see the world inverted. If we even believe in a mind at all we believe that the body has a mind. What people do not realize is that the body does not have a mind. Rather the mind has a body. The body does not give rise to mental operations. Mental operations give rise to the body.

Likewise, the world does not have a Universal mind. Rather the Universal mind has a world. The world does not give rise to God's mental operations. God's mental operations give rise to the world.

...the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness. ( Meher Baba GS viii)

If the first cause of everything is an event in consciousness, and evolution is an evolution of consciousness, and even the end is an end in consciousness, then it is consistent to say that the world arises from psychic events. And if the world arises from psychic events, including our physical Universe, then we should be looking for psychic events, not physical events, if we are to discover the operations responsible for our thinking.

Meher Baba explains that the most rudimentary psychic event of the mind is the sanskara. Sanskaras are impressions left on the mind by previous experiences that then condition future actions. The operations of the sanskaras cause the whole Universe to come into their apparent being. The mechanics by which this occurs is explained in great detail in God Speaks and Discourses by Meher Baba. But for our purpose here of understanding how people think we are only concerned with the Mental Operations as they occur in an individual.

On the level of an individual human being, in general, sanskaras produce complex compound lenses, which promote judgments, that organize the world. However, we will need to be far more detailed than this about how people think if we are to account for the strange thinking habits of people. What accounts for the seeming inability of human beings to be reasonable even when it is in their best interest, their seemingly limitless ability to come to the conclusions they preferred to come to even before they went seeking, and the fact that people are bicapable of being either the cruelest and blindest beings or the most wonderful and creative in nature? What are the mental drives and tools people use to come to their exceedingly false conclusions?

Imitation, imagination, and desire

Most people go about their days performing various tasks, both physical and mental ones. These are usually done as a routine, mostly determined by conventions, to obtain the things they need for their survival and to promote their social existence.

• • People talk to one another.

  • People eat, drink, move their bowels, urinate, move about, and fornicate.

  • People do various activities to support the above functions (get their car fixed, buy groceries or plant a garden, buy toiletries, remain clean to attract a mate, etc.)

  • People seek entertainment (watch movies, read, write, perform or listen to music, gather in groups).

  • People do escapist things (sleep, take intoxicants, fantasize, pursue the opposite sex, etc. )

  • People kill, rob, rape, lie, and so forth.

  • People do acts of charity, kindness, and even unexpected acts of self-sacrifice.

  • People sit down and try to figure out solutions to things, usually having to do with how to obtain something they want or be rid of something they don't.

  • People combine all these of course. There are numerous combinations.

Now, what Mental Operations determine which one of these actions people do and when? Most simply put they are as follows:

1. Desire. People do what they feel themselves prompted to do. They are prompted by urges they don't understand or care to understand.

2. Imitation. People imitate each other in thought, speech, and action. Most of what we say we 'think' or 'believe' are learned thoughts. Even most so-called 'rebellion' is learned behavior. People are prompted by an urge to imitate and generally don't ask why or care.

3. Imagination. People are endowed with abundant imagination - the ability to reorganize components of memory into new and even often delightful configurations. The components that are organized can be linguistic or sensory. Generally speaking, people use their imagination as an automatic reaction to facing a problem that requires a solution when there is no known model to imitate. Thus the expression, 'necessity is the mother of invention.' On a day to day level most acts of imagination occur quickly and without people even being aware they are imagining. What is referred to as 'quick thinking' is in fact quick imagination. Even most famous thinkers generally rely on their imagination without realizing it, even when they make a lot of fuss about appealing to logic and reason.

Unlike imagination that is applied to thinking, which usually goes unrecognized for what it is, acts of imagination that are applied to the performance of the arts are conscious and intentional. In the arts imagination is utitlized in the full light of awareness of what one is doing and why. Thus art is in a sense higher than ordinary thinking, because it is done with greater awareness of its own Operation.

These are then the three basic Operations that determine what people think and thus do.

But of these three the most fundamental is desire. For desire determines which of the other two Operations will be used and how. Therefore, for sake of even greater clarity, we can organize the three Operations as follows.

1. Desires are the motivation.

2. Imitation and imagination are the strategies people use to fulfill their desires.

Of the two strategies, imitation is the default position. Imagination is the standby strategy that is used when imitation fails to produce a desired outcome. If imitation is sufficient to get people what they want they will be happy to continue imitating. If it fails and there is no one available to tell them what to do, they will resort to imagination. Also, which things people will choose to imitate and what they will imagine are determined by desires. So desire is the cause. And imitation and imagination are merely the strategies people use to satisfy their desires.

This scheme of the Operations of thought should not be seen as a human failing. On the contrary, both on an individual level and for a society as a whole imitation and imagination are indispensable. Imitation is responsible for consistency, cooperation, and continuation (and many other good things), while imagination is responsible for invention, change, and sociel reform (and other good things).

People who imitate a lot are usually called sane. People who fail to imitate at all and resort exclusively to imagination are called insane. Most people do a bit of both, with an emphasis on imitation, which is not in itself a bad thing.

Precritical intellect vs. critical thinking

What is generally called intellect and critical thinking are two different things. Most of what is called intellect is generally nothing more than a simple operation of imagination functioning under the dictates of subconscious desires. Critical thinking is the opposite. It is systematic and slow and seeks to root out causal influences like sanskaras and desire to get at the untarnished truth of any matter. Intellect is basically imagination and tends to be productive of divisions and original abstractions, while critial thinking is the gradual and systematic eradication of imagination and its invented divisions. One rearranges and adds. The other examines arrangements with an eye to removing them if possible, and attempts to subtract what is unessential or in doubt from the mind in order for it to see clearly and without conditions.

The intellect that is precritical works by combining its two techniques: imitative parrotry and imaginative invention. For example, an intellectual reads and remembers what he reads or sees. He then regurgitates this uncritically. Then when the intellectual wants something new, to make life conform with his subconscious desires, he rearranges portions of his memories into a new configuration. This occurs in the imagination. Most theories in the sciences are little more than this. The basis of such thinking is desire. Its operations are imitation and invention. Its outcome is the cultural world we find ourselves in, which is mainly arranged imposed intellectual inventions.

Critical thinking also often begins with reading or observation. But in critical thinking the person neither parrots nor invents. Instead when he is alone he attempts to question the validity of what he has heard, by comparing it to his immediate observations. Very often the critical thinker discovers that what was said of the phenomenon is not true, or is merely one manner of interpretation among many. As he does this he begins to see past the veil of imposed invention toward the real condition. This process is much slower than the first, more systematic, and aims toward a more ultimate goal of singular and absolute truth, while intellect has no aim beyond its limited ephemeral desires.

Critical thinking is also directed by desire, but a higher form of it. Reason is not the goal (Meher Baba always emphasizes) but a stage on the path to it. In reason the desire that motivates thought is for truth. When the truth about a matter is wanted more than any other desire, then true reason is taking place. In such a case the thinker seeks a rationale for holding each belief he once had. In other words he questions each of his own beliefs. If he finds the rationale to be either missing or fraudulent, then he discards the belief, even if this mean thwarting other desires besides truth. This is a path of effacement and unlearning. When reason is done in this truest sense the thinker is left believing very little. When he has reached this state then the roll of reason is complete and he continues on to the next stage of the path where there is neither intellect nor reason.

What about observation? People who are precritical (prior to reason) see very little of the world as it really is. Rather what they see is distorted by beliefs and projections. They see the world as though through a glass darkly, or a prism. They make divisions that are not there, see what is absent, etc. Thus most of what passes as observation is a projection of people's own minds. Only a small bit of what such people see is actually in front of them. Most is read into it. Thus most of observation is useless to the intellect as it only confirms what it supposes, though it is indispensable to reason which seeks to check and be sure of what he realizes is absent really is.

The driving force of desire

We have all heard the expression that people are led by their emotions. Emotions are really nothing more than the visceral way we experience our desires. We usually desire things that we associate with a memory of pleasure. We call it "fear" when we desire to avoid something we associate with a memory of pain. So fear is also a kind of desire. Desire manifests as many emotions including fear, hatred, anger, lust, and so forth. When one desires to hurt someone it is called anger. When one desires to have sexual pleasure with someone it is called lust. Hunger is a desire for food. The desire to make someone happy we call love. When we want what another has we call that jealousy. So desire subsumes nearly all emotions and thus all motives - even most spiritual ones.

Imitation is largely instinctual. It is at least partly a leftover from evolution which is rife with imitation. It serves various survival functions. But if there is a psychological motive for human imitation it is the desire to mold oneself comfortably with the group in which one finds himself. So its motive, if anything, is desire.

Imagination is the creative act of rearranging one's thoughts (whether music, images or words). But what causes one to arrange one's thoughts one way rather than another? The answer is that the person is looking for a particular outcome. What determines which outcome will satisfy him? The answer is judgments. The choice of outcome that the person will seek is the result of judgments that the person makes, generally without realizing it, about what is of value to it. So the outcome they desire, and so use their imagination to help bring about, is determined by the value judgments they make of things.

If what is desired is the result of one's judgments, then what causes one to make such judgments?

The answer to this last question is sanskaras. Sanskaras are the cause of Judgments and judgments determine what one desires.

Sanskaras - Judgments - Desire

So a person's sanskaras cause one to make judgments that determine which outcome the person desires. And of course what one desires will determine what one will think and do. So human intellect and thus behavior is not actually governed by prudence, love, or reason or even fundamentally positive or negative forces. It is governed by sanskaras.

If imitation is sufficient to produce the desired outcome (judged good or desirable), nothing more needs be done by the person. He or she will be satisfied with going along with the flow almost entirely unconscious of what he's doing. If imitation fails to be sufficient to produce the desired result, however, imagination will be resorted to.

Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. (Oswald Spengler. DOTW, Vol I. Alfred A. Kampf, Inc. 1926. p. 39)

Note that thinking is not geared toward truth or justice or love or even loyalty, as people most often like others to believe of them. Rather human thinking is geared toward attaining outcomes deemed desirable by the person thinking. And even what outcome is judged to be desirable is not tied to any principle, as people like to imagine of themselves, but only sanskaras that live beneath the veil of awareness. This means that people are not first-most living in a truth oriented world. They are living in a desire oriented world.

Three kinds of desire

Meher Baba teaches that there are three kinds of sanskaras: gross, subtle, and mental. Each type of sanskara causes a different kind of desire.

Gross: Most people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge physical things like food and sex to be the highest good. These people have what Meher Baba calls gross sanskaras.

Subtle: Some people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge occult powers and experiences as more worthwhile than physical attainments, and even demonstrate a willingness to forgo physical pleasures to attain them. These people have what Meher Baba calls subtle sanskaras.

Mental: A few people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge truth or knowledge as more worthwhile than either physical objects or powers and occult experiences. Those people have what Meher Baba calls mental sanskaras.

A very few people have no sanskaras at all and thus have no desires. Baba calls these jivan muktas.

In short, the desires are according to the sanskaras.

Note: Many people want power in order to attain or control material things. This would not be a subtle desire. Likewise some want information or the ability to control minds in order to attain or control material things. This again would again be a material desire. Subtle desires are such that the occult experience is wanted for its own sake and mental desire is where knowledge or truth is wanted for its own sake. For example, a person who wishes to know enough to secure his job, even if that knowledge is philosophical knowledge, is an ordinary gross plane person.

The downside of misapplied imagination

Imagination takes memories (sensory and verbal), breaks these into parts, and then reassembles them into new shapes and conclusions. Imagination is experienced both as pictures (formed from memories) and self-talk. It is a place of invention. It takes experience, forms something new out of it, and tries to apply this back to future experience.

The problem with using imagination is that whatever it forms is the outcome of sanskaras (conditioned mind) and is almost never oriented toward truth. The obvious exception to this is its application to the arts which, when honestly motivated, can be a means of expressing great inner truth. However imagination is a poor guide to the objective sciences. Scientists who rely upon imagination generally add more confusion than they resolve, though they have the feeling of doing the opposite.

Great science is not imaginative, but revealing. A good example of revealing is the discovery of gravity by Isaac Newton. Newton was inspired by his work of translating the Bible into the belief that God's world is replete with balance and symmetry. This belief prompted him to examine with a clear mind where people had only enforced theories. This act of seeking with a clear mind, purified by celibacy and study of the Bible, revealed to him the law of gravity and its implications. He did not really invent something with his imagination.

Rationalization is the act of using the imagination to organize thoughts into a convincing justification of one's beliefs or actions to alleviate doubt, guilt, or suspicion. The objective in rationalization is obviously not the truth. It is the desire to convince. If the rationalization successfully convinces oneself or others that what one is doing or believing is right, then thinking stops at that point. If it fails to convince, rationalization continues to seek relief from doubt and suspicion. Like all forms of imagination, rationalization uses intellect to fulfill desire.

Imagination is at its best when it is applied consciously as imagination. Great works of art are created using the imagination. What is interesting is that many of these works actually convey deep indwelling truths that the artist discovers via inspiration. Fiction, music, painting, sculpture, dance, acting, poetry, photography, and film making, are all examples of arts through which inspiring truths and unseen beauty are revealed every day. It is when the person thinks he is discovering objective truth via imagination that the trouble arises in the sciences, in history, etc. Conspiracy theories, pseudo sciences, superstition, pseudo spirituality are all results of imagination applied outside of its scope.

Picturing a situation

Now for sake of demonstration let's examine one particular event in a person's life (we'll call him JOHN DOE) and see how it leads to a thought and then to an action. Imagine the following situation.

1. JOHN DOE sees a dog. This is the event.

2. JOHN DOE sees the dog through his complex compound lenses (his sanskaras) left by his past experiences with dogs. Through his past sanskaras JOHN DOE organizes or frames his experience of the event. This is the sanskaras.

3. The way the event is framed (due to the sanskaras) causes in JOHN DOE a particular psychic appraisal of the new dog experience. This is the judgment.

4. The judgment determines what JOHN DOE will desire. If the judgment is strong (due to strong sanskaras) JOHN DOE will experience an emotion. This is the desire.

5. Desire (or emotion) will prompt a reaction. (karma)

6. John's reaction (internal or external) will leave an impression (new sanskaras) on JOHN DOE.

In short, all internal thoughts and external actions are determined by desires. And the desires are determined by sanskaras + event.

Sanskaras + event

(causes)

judgment

(causes)

desires/fears

(causes)

emotional response

(causes)

imitation of learned behavior - or - invention of new behavior

(causes)

Action

(causes)

New sanskaras

Note that by "event" this can be a mental event. For instance a drunk pictures a bottle of his favorite kind of alcohol through the influence of his past sanskaras of pleasure he associates with alcohol. This then causes the positive judgment of getting some, followed by the desire, followed by the rationalization in his imagination or simply imitation of his past behavior, followed by the action of taking another drink.

The Operations of the Mind are the same for great or advanced souls, with two exceptions. Because the older soul is never entirely unaware of his own Mental Operations, having become more honest and introspective, he is more likely to be able to correct himself or at least observe his own ignorance at work. Secondly, as already explained, as the sanskaras are so are the desires they give rise to. So as sanskaras become less dense, so do the kinds of desires. Desires change from objects and possessions to more lasting and intrinsic things such as Truth, Love, Virtue, Beauty, etc.

Listening to tapes

The Operation of imitation has its sensory and verbal sides. We learn to dress a certain way and speak in a certain accent using sensory imitation. What we learn to say or think verbally we learn using the verbal side of our Operation of imitation.

Use of imitation in forming responses to perceptual stimulus can be likened to playing prerecorded sound tapes. Here is how the use of such tapes (prerecorded responses) works. We begin with a verbal type of tape. If you say to a person, "Hello, how do you do?" the person generally does not stop to think about how he is actually doing. Rather his brain recognizes the tape you just played, then turns to an automated program that determines which tape to play back in response. "Fine, and you?" These recorded automatic responses generally go on beneath the level of awareness so long as they lead to acceptable outcomes. In general it is only when they fail to bring about wanted results that people consider resorting to other methods.

We also have sensory tapes. When we jump in a car to go somewhere in response to some event, we most often are playing a tape. Our habits such as smoking are tapes we play again and again. These responses are learned through imitation and then repeated over and over. They generally will continue until some unpleasant experience causes us to examine them.

Note that imitation is value-neutral. There is usually not much consideration of good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false in our most automatic learned activities. They operate in us a lot like a machine. By far, most human thinking and thus most human behavior is the product of imitation. Relatively little is the product of imagination. Because of this automation most people never judge their own thoughts or behavior or consider what it is they are imitating. If they do, they are generally imitating complaints and praises about such thoughts and actions that they learned from conversation or television. Thus even most of what appears like imagination is imitation.