Imagine you are in the cockpit of your mind, surrounded by an array of controls and displays. Close your eyes and let it mental images unite and materialize.
Now delete the idea of the cockpit and the pilot metaphor (Freud invited horse and rider) and explore the order of inner experience. Spatial, impressive, embodied, fantasy, streams of thought and language, rush of adrenaline, calming power. In cartographic terms, mapping the interior is a lifelong project—some things are obvious, some require long trips into the mountains, and others are reflected in social interactions and deep connections.
what’s up Is it capacious or limited, verbal or spatial, rich or subtle? Where does what you find seem to come from and where does it go? You can look directly at some of them. Some work by forming things that appear without your authorship – spells of psychoanalysts fantasywith φ, to distinguish it from ordinary delusion.
When surveying, some want to watch: it comes, it goes, you watch. Some want to direct: you are doing something, moving something. How does it feel when you drive? Like a hand reaching in? Like using force? Or a dreamer? Different textures of internal agency are often used without noticing the differences.
This is important because the next question is: what am I supposed to do with all this? When I’m stuck trying to figure something out, when I want to behave differently, when I want my life to be different, what can I do? We may find ourselves wondering how to navigate and use this inner space.
Depicting actions
Make a tough decision: You have to consider emotions, immediate and long-term consequences, relational consequences, strategy, tactics—many moving parts, each with some kind of internal image. The traditional action is to consider it, to weigh it, to register it. The list is growing. The needle does not.
But we have options, alternatives to being stuck, if we can imagine them – choices, actions, consequences for the internal outcome you may land on and the actual outcomes. When we free ourselves from within, we certainly have more real choices. This is a very powerful fact that is often taken for granted or applied intellectually rather than effectively.
- Pay attention. Before you attempt to do something, does your inner vision cover the entire expanse, let alone observe what’s out there? Does what you plan reflect what you really feel and want? What will it look like when we do? Now, from a bird’s eye view, from a meta-cognitive perspective, it lives on the plane of the earth. Make it a “meta-experiment”. to know can be so limited.
- Release. Let go (let go). What is the feeling of giving up something – catching a story, not useful? Resources are released. Sometimes it’s catharsis—an emotional outpouring that drains the emotional drain—and sometimes it just sets something up. attention can go elsewhere. The lower greater function shakes what is active, shakes the molecules of experience, meets what is at rest, what is difficult to achieve, what cannot be achieved, cannot be, is not.
- Follow up. Stop pushing and pulling; relax, turn off your mind, and go with the flow (that’s a Beatles quote)—with a hand in the flow rather than channeling the source. How about following in rather than leading something? Later, you can change the flow.
Such loops go inward, to the world, and back and forth. What we do inside changes what exists outside; what happens outside reshapes what we have to work on inside.
The example of a little stiffening is familiar. These three basic actions are part of a longer list, perhaps endless: push, pull, hold, allow, release, witness, follow, zoom in and out, write, notice … find your own words and phrases.
Pushing is the application of directional pressure. Pulling is pulling something toward awareness against resistance. Witnessing is accepting something as an object of awareness without changing it. Distance is distance from internal content.
Stiffness often means using one internal movement where another is appropriate: creating a chronic push where permission is needed. panic spirals. Chronic retention without release, stiffness. Chronic distance is where proximity serves.
Consciousness Essential Readings
A strange metaphor
What we use are internal appendages – the abilities we use to move, the way we do things with our limbs, hands and feet, the gestures of language and speech. We can imagine the internal operations as in physical reality, but the internal world is much more fluid and spacious, because it is relatively cheap to change thoughts and our brain is energy efficient here.
When we think about our own internal operations, we are faced with uncertainty. Terrain mapping helps us navigate when the urge strikes. What makes something an internal action that you can work on—rather than a fluctuating thought—is its instrumental signature: intention, execution over time, the ability to practice, a certain fatigue.
Different internal movements work at different speeds. In some moments, changes – perception can land immediately. Some take longer—it takes years to gradually change how you approach adversity, to develop a stable stance toward what has derailed you.
What you do when you read is to feel your inner workings, which is how your brain feels. Some call this autoneuroception a metaphor: a direct connection to the material reality of being a brain in a body in the world. Whether it names a specific meaning or stands as a metaphor remains an open question. Either way, it refers to rock.
A few examples
Some practices are meant to illustrate, not as a prescription. Along with our own research, there are many traditions that teach these inner possibilities.
- Give permission. If an emotion comes up that you normally try to suppress, stay with it for about 90 seconds – the rough arc of that emotion. feeling – without interference. It doesn’t work when there are too many; safety first.
- Catch. Focus on breathing or a stationary object for a short period of time. The job is to catch the slip and return it. Slips are practice.
- Approaching. Incremental movement towards what you’re driving – small, deliberate, repeated. Escape compounds; small approaches reveal what is hidden. It doesn’t work when we have to go through what we can survive.
- Compose. At the end of a hard day, notice what state is currently active and what helps you change it, and gently make the change. Air Traffic Control: What’s Working, What Can Stop, What Can Go Ahead. It won’t work if you run out of fuel; sometimes action is rest.
Departure
The cockpit does not come with a manual. What changes with practice is not the landscape, but your ability to navigate within it. The right move is sometimes smaller than what you’re avoiding, and sometimes smaller than the situation calls for. The work goes on – learn, choose, act, register what shifts – and the mapping deepens.
We think of ourselves as unitary, but part of the complexity of who we are—sometimes surprisingly—may be due to the different aspects of our identities, our sense of self, that don’t always work in the same way.
There are many ways to organize and deploy these intentions and their corresponding actions. They describe the rich architecture of living in the present, an architecture of causal-self-experience that has been formed over time, with defined contours and clear structure.
