Machinery of the Mind, part 2 - Dion Fortune
Chapter 4: The Organization of the Upper Levels of the Mind
Those untrained in psychology generally conceive of the mind as a homogeneous whole; our first systematic examination reveals to us, however, that the mind is just as organic as the body.
The organisation of the mind may best be realised by thinking of it as a tank across which, at different heights, are placed sieves of varying coarseness of mesh. We must conceive of the mind as being composed of certain layers, and the layer in which our conscious life has its most permanent focus we will consider to be the outermost layer and name THE FOCUS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Immediately behind the Focus of Consciousness lies the level which psychologists call THE FRINGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, and the two are divided from one another by a sievelike mechanism which is technically called a CENSOR.
The understanding of these two levels of the mind may be rendered clearer if we next consider the uses to which they are put. Supposing a person is sitting in a room listening to a lecture, of what will he be aware? Firstly, his attention will be concentrated upon the lecture, and, secondly, he will be dimly conscious of the sounds made by the traffic in the street outside. By an effort of will he will pay attention to those ideas only which are connected with the lecture, and exclude from consciousness those which are connected with the street traffic; or, to express the process in psychological terms, we may say that all the ideas connected with the lecture are admitted to the focus of consciousness, and all ideas connected with the street noises are kept in the fringe of consciousness, and that the censor-sieve is so adjusted that ideas in the fringe may not intrude upon the focus. Its meshes may be conceived as being of such a size that only the compact little ideas appertaining to the lecture can pass through them, and the undefined ideas connected with the street traffic are held back.
It will readily be seen that our powers of concentration depend upon the satisfactory functioning of this psychic sieve. The more we can bring the adjustment of its meshes under voluntary control, the better will be our powers of concentration; whereas, if its mesh be loose or faulty, and we have acquired little or no control over it, we shall find that we are unable to hold our mind to any consecutive train of thought, and that our focus of consciousness is constantly liable to be invaded by ideas alien to the matter to which we wish to pay attention.
These two levels, the FOCUS and FRINGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, together comprise what is known as THE CONSCIOUS MIND. This is the part of the mind which most truly seems to be “our-self.” It is the section of the mind in which we carry on all our conscious mental activities, but it is by no means the whole of the mental house.
Immediately behind the fringe of consciousness comes the level of the mind which is known as the FORECONSCIOUS, PRECONSCIOUS, and many other things according to the school of psychology whose doctrines are adhered to. If, however, its function be understood, it will be readily enough recognised through the disguise of the varied nomenclature which, unfortunately, complicates the study of psychology. In this level of the mind are stored all the ideas which we hold in memory, but are not actually thinking about. It may, in fact, be defined as the level of conscious memory, and just as the focus is separated from the fringe of consciousness by an adjustable censor-sieve, so an exactly similar sieve interposes between the fringe of consciousness and the foreconscious, and works upon exactly the same principles.
Thus, the student listening to the lecture could adjust this second sieve so as to allow everything he had ever learned that had any bearing upon the subject in hand, to rise into the focus of consciousness and help him to understand the lecture. It is this faculty which is of such great importance in determining the critical powers of the mind, for the previously determined ideas, ranging themselves alongside the fresh concepts offered for assimilation, serve as standards of value, and form a running commentary upon the lecture.
These three levels together, the focus, the fringe, and the foreconscious, form the level of the mind to which we have access and of which we can make use; but we must note this point in connection with these levels, that any idea which we may wish to consider must be placed in the strong light of the focus of consciousness before we can see it clearly; we cannot consider an idea while it is still in the foreconscious, but we can, at will, take it out of the foreconscious and place it in the focus of consciousness for our consideration.
Indeed, these three levels of the mind may be likened to a kitchen, the foreconscious being the cupboard, the fringe of consciousness the table, and the focus of consciousness the mixing basin; and the ideas upon the three levels may be represented by the ingredients of the pudding, some of which are put away in the cupboard, some lie ready to the hand upon the table, and others are actually in the mixing basin being stirred. Those on the table, like the ideas in the fringe of consciousness, lie ready to the cook’s hand, but she is not dealing with them at the moment; those in the cupboard (the foreconscious) are out of sight, but she knows they are there and can get them if she wants them; but it is only those that are in the basin, the focus of consciousness, that she is actually at work upon.
To the average man these three levels constitute all there is of his mind, he has no conception of the strange hinterland lying behind the narrow strip of civilised coast, yet it is here that the springs of his being take their rise, and it is the discovery and exploration of this hinterland which has been the great contribution of modern psychology to the sum of human knowledge.
Chapter 5: The Organization of the Lower Levels of the Mind
In the level of the mind known as the subconscious or unconscious are stored all the ideas to which we have no direct access.
Some psychologists say that the memory of every impression which has ever been received by a sense organ is registered here as on a photographic plate, but this opinion is not universally accepted. We shall be quite safe in saying, however, that the memory of anything which has ever made a distinct impression on the mind is stored here and plays its part in the mental life.
Between the subconscious and the foreconscious is placed the great main censor-sieve of the mind, and it is this which is meant when the “censor” is referred to in psychoanalytical literature. This censor-sieve is of the greatest importance in the mental economy, for upon its function the health of the mind is largely dependent. If its meshes are too loose, we get an uprush into consciousness of ideas which should never be there; and if too tight, the conscious mind is cut off from the source of its energy, the subconscious.
This sieve is constructed upon the same principles as the two others which we have already considered, but it has one fundamental difference, it is not under the control of the will; the dimension of its mesh is regulated, not by what I, at the moment, may happen to wish, but by what the main tenor of my character may determine.
The foreconscious, then, may be likened to a reference library, but the great storehouse of the subconscious is a vault in which the archives are kept; and although the bulk of them never touch the conscious mind, it is their indirect influence which determines the tone of the character. The remotest level of the mind, whose functioning is purely automatic, has the control of all the vital functions of the body. Its thought processes direct the activities of the spinal level of the nervous system, whereas the other levels of the mind have the brain as their physical organ of manifestation, as is proved by the fact that a disease of the brain can throw the reasoning faculties out of gear and leave the purely physiological nervous functions intact, whereas a disease of the spinal cord may render inoperative the nervous processes of the bodily functions, though the mental processes are unimpaired.
The psychic processes of the automatic mind govern all the biochemical processes of the body; it is this level which controls the involuntary muscles, regulates the blood supply to any part of the body, controls the output of the ductless glands, and hence the chemical composition of the blood. It is these facts which may throw light upon the origin of many functional disturbances and upon the phenomena of mental healing. Although the automatic level is not normally in touch with the conscious mind, it is enormously affected by the general feeling-tone of the mentality, and especially by the emotional states of the subconscious, hence the alterations of physiological function which take place in nervous disease.
This level of the mind was the first to be organised in the history of biological development. The dim mentation of the rudimentary beginnings of life was of the automatic order, being entirely concerned with physiological processes.
As organisms became more evolved, a higher type of intelligence was necessary for the carrying out of their life activities, and we get mentation of the type that is carried on in the subconscious level, the impulsive mentation of the instincts.
Level by level the mind builds itself up, in the race and in the individual; and level by level, under the influence of old age, disease or drugs, the planes of consciousness break down in the inverse order to that in which they developed, the more recently organised higher centres going first, and the automatic mind, the oldest and most stable, with æons of habit behind it, working on to the last, keeping the bodily mechanism running long after all that made the organism a man has withdrawn from its dishonoured vehicle.
Chapter 6: Complexes
Having studied the levels into which the mind is divided, we must next consider the nature of the material that is stored in them, and to do this we must study the workings of MEMORY.
When an idea enters the mind it does not remain an independent unit for very long. It seems to be a fundamental characteristic of ideas that they form alliances among themselves, and these groups of ideas are technically known as COMPLEXES.
A complex may be compared to the branching growth of a pond-weed; it has a central starting-point from which ramify threads that divide and subdivide, and branch in every direction, and connect it with other systems of ideas that have similar branching threads. Thus it is that if an idea on any subject enters our consciousness, we find that it is not an isolated unit, but one end of a chain which branches into all sorts of side issues; we have not touched a single line of thought, but a whole railway system.
These systems of ideas spread and ramify through all the levels of the mind, but if we trace them far enough, we shall invariably find that they have their roots in one of the great primal instincts, deep down in the subconscious. It is from this that they derive the vitality that binds them together, for all complexes have a core of emotion, and it is from the instincts that the emotions spring.
Let us take an example from actual life, and see how these principles work. A man may, for example, be a grocer; he will therefore have a Grocery Complex, that is to say, all his ideas connected with the buying and selling of household commodities will be linked together, so that if a train of thought be started in connection with any one aspect of his business, by an easy transition many other aspects may drift into his mind.
Now, grocery is not in itself an absorbing subject, like literature or science, yet the man is interested in it; and why? because his grocery complex has its root in his self-preservation instinct, for it is the means by which he keeps himself alive. If his grocery business prospers, he feels pleasure, because it means a fuller and pleasanter life for him; if it diminishes, he feels pain and fear, because his means of keeping himself alive are threatened.
In addition to being a grocer, however, he may be an elder of the local chapel, and have a far-reaching complex of religious interests, ramifying, interlacing, and having their instinctive roots in his subconscious, just as his grocery complex has. Then, one day, he may be looking up the current price of pepper in his trade list, and from pepper his thoughts pass to spices in general; their pungent odour suggests incense, and he asks himself whether ritualism is ever allowable. It will here be seen that a trailing branch of his grocery complex has made contact with his religious complex and brought it into consciousness.
Again, our grocer may be thinking of getting married, and immediately his grocery complex throws out a side shoot which strikes root in his reproductive instinct, and his interest in grocery is reinforced by much of the interest which gathers round sex in his life, for it is upon the prosperity of his business that his prospect of marriage depends. Thus it will be seen that the mind is filled with a ramifying mass of complexes which throw out branches in every direction, and that if the end of any thread be caught hold of, by gently pulling upon it we can draw all the complexes with which it is connected into consciousness.
This is how memory works, and even if an idea has been “forgotten,” that is, passed from the conscious into the subconscious, it is still possible to recover it by taking advantage of this tendency of ideas to stick together; for by gently pulling upon the parts of the complex to which it is affiliated which are in consciousness, the branchings which are in the subconscious can be coaxed into light. It is upon this factor that psychoanalysis bases much of its work.
Ideas tend to group themselves in complexes according to certain welldefined principles.
- • I. All ideas connected with the same subject tend to become associated together.
- • II. Ideas which enter the mind at the same time tend to become associated together. For instance, if I have a nasty fall on a piece of banana skin while going to the pillar-box, when I see bananas I shall think of falls and pillar-boxes, and when I see pillar-boxes, I may think of bananas and falls.
- • III. Ideas of cause and effect become associated together.
- • IV. Ideas which have any sort of resemblance, fundamental or superficial, tend to recall one another. Thus, if I think of sausages, I may be put in mind of Zeppelins, and if I think of the fall on the banana skin, my mind may leap to the Niagara Falls or fallen women.
This irrational method of thought is of enormous importance in applied psychology, for much of the thinking carried on by the subconscious mind is done in this way, and it gives rise to that peculiar method of thought which will be dealt with in the chapter on symbolism.
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