Thinking is Steering

and minds are bodily motions we've hardly discovered yet

I write unscripted every other Wednesday on something related to the Navigational Approach to Mind, which I’ve been working towards for over a decade in philosophy and neuroscience. This post is a bit more psychedelic than others, but that’s partly because it requires some strangeness to slip into a constellatory perspective from the usual dichotomous ones. This navigational approach can be taken literally or metaphorically. Metaphorically may be most helpful at first, but I mean it literally. I’m trying to find ways to make that meaningful. Thank you for making this journey with me.

What are minds?

Minds are actions by which bodies move and steer themselves.

What are minds?

Minds are bodily actions.

When you are thinking or remembering or ‘listening to that voice inside your head’, you’re doing something similar to what you are doing when you are driving or when you are walking, you’re just doing it through different sorts of landscapes. Call them landscapes of the mind, but actually, minds are ways we make geographically, too.

It seems to be helpful to students and others when I say that the body is the vehicle and the mind is the steering. Thinking is sort of steering for the body.

This is a great entryway into this approach, but in truth, it is not entirely accurate. For one, any mechanical or technological vehicle pales in comparison to what the living sensual body is doing with its minding. And by minding, I do not mean doing what someone wants. I mean thinking but not necessarily with words or images or even with awareness of it. I mean minding as the verb of mind itself, because there actually is no mind that is a noun.

Another reason the vehicle and steering comparison is off is because bodies are nothing like self-driving cars, even if self-driving cars are a little bit like bodies. This is because bodies do not have minds inside of them or minds like software programs; mind is the body’s ongoing cohesive movement. And we hardly have a clue what is possible there, or how to handle the power of it.

Another way of saying this:

Minds are ongoing actions of bodies that are not programmed but that do become habituated even as the body continues to align and shift its movement accordingly with all it encounters. Minds are cohesive bodily action, not something in the skull or something slathered over top skeletal action.

A body’s movement is always both beyond it and behind it, which is partly how we can feel ourselves catching up to ourselves or why many of us are precognitive.

Sometimes bodies become aware of part of their actions even as they are those actions themselves. Most of us have this experience and many of us remember an early time that we did. I remember when my little brother came home from the hospital, for example, as a moment when I began to notice the capacity of steering and of how one might steer and be steered.

As we grow, we notice more of our movement in such realms. We notice how we move through the house or the school or the social situation or through economic expectations or through the emotions of our family and peers.

These are ways we (as bodies) become aware of how our thinking steers us, but minding has been steering us long before that, and continues even as we notice the tip edge of its motion.

Much of our mind is happening without our attention or awareness falling upon it.

We are mostly not aware of it, just as we mostly do not remember most of our lives and mostly cannot sense most of the next 24 hours, though we can remember and sense some of it.

This being aware and not being aware when we are not aware of our mindedness is a peculiar situation. Perhaps that is why we are all constantly noticing for each other when we are ‘not quite there’ and trying to help one another steer better.

Sometimes you may find yourself outside in the garden taking in a deep breath of air. Other times you may be sitting at your desk and think: I should go get some air, and then notice as you move to the garden.

This is not a linear process and it is not happening with an on/off switch. Most of the time mind is minding without our direct awareness of it but with bodily sensuality being that minding itself. We become aware of it when we need extra steering or when things have steered off track or when we want to be sure we align directly with something we are reading or studying or doing or saying. This is what study is, at its base, and why it changes us.

We shift the paths we are making and becoming each time we become aware of our thoughts or memories, and each time we are attentive to what we are moving through, and this happens whether we do it on purpose or not.

The body is constantly creating its paths, spinning and re-spinning them as they are spun and re-spun by all that is encountered. The body is doing this as its attention and sensuous potential nonstop; when we are aware of what we are thinking or when we are focusing on really understanding something we are reading or when we really want to be present with the person in the room with us, or when we really look at the light on the leaves, we are steering in a way that is much more potent than we might realize.

Likewise, when we are in the dark flow of an online scroll or caught up in the whirlpools laid out for us to get our attention and route it for profit, this is also potent. These are both potent because they are the ways we lay down our paths even as we are walking them and they are the ways our bodies are spinning the world into memory and precognition; they are the ways we choose which of the layers of what we have experienced will continue to lead to which of the layers of what could come next.

This is also why, being these amazing bodies with so much unexplored power and potential, we have hardly even touched the surface of what we can really do with the actions we develop as minds. We are hardly even able to handle the littlest bit of what sorts of motion is possible here for living bodies as they scale.

This is probably why we are mostly unaware of our minds, and why so many of us are now engaging in ‘mindful’ practices or cultivating attensity, or forming in-person communities towards feeling this bodily movement beyond screens so as to recognize its power for the first time. Together we are trying to grow capable of noticing and handling more of this power, and of finding ways to help one another with it, and to discern it from what tries to make us want attention or want to get the attention of others, which is not the same thing and not real power, at least not anymore.

The power of the future is in developing our bodily ability to be with our own bodily movement, and in so doing, to create landscapes of the mind that are intentional.

Because in so doing, we also begin to be able to handle all the ecological mind of which we spring and of which we can hardly notice or sense into fully as of yet.

All living bodies have minds because they all have some cohesive movement, but some creatures who have minds may not have awareness of them. Perhaps that is part of what we’re here for, to be able to be that awareness of them, having come from them, being part of them. When you really give your attention to the sunflower, it has awareness of itself as your awareness.

Mind is a word for what is not a noun but which points to the suite of actions bodies develop to make ways through the world. And this is happening at so many scales. We can hardly sense into them yet.

Your body has been minded (or is minding, if we make a verb of it) for as long as it has been a body. For as long as it has been a body, it has been minding. All bodies have actions to orient and move themselves coherently and cohesively, no matter what kinds of bodies they are and no matter whether the spaces they are moving through are geographical, emotional, conceptual, etc. Minds as actions are always all of those at once. Things that are not alive and minded can move through spaces and not be bodies, but bodies cannot move through spaces and not be minding.

Try and take this literally.

If you do, you’ll start to realize that you are laying down paths even as you walk them and that these paths layer all around you in intimate webs and tangles that have never been linear and have no beginning or end.

Because what bodies are doing by having minds (by ‘minding’) is mattering. They are making mattering materialize, including their own. They are making paths and following them and changing them and making landscapes as they go. They are accepting the nourishment of the entropy of those who have moved before and made it matter so that there is a place to be able to matter at all.

The paths are the body and they are made of the body; they are mattering all that the body moves through and encounters and becomes, and cannot become. As they move, they encounter all the sensorium that is not the body but that the body moves through and with as it encounters all that is, the ongoingess of stimulation that is all worlds.

There are no gaps. Mind is navigational. And happening at many scales.

To really imagine this as it really is requires letting go of the theory of empty space. We have to imagine all that is encountered more like silt, thick and full and gapless but also made of air at the scale of experience. We have to imagine our body is becoming all it moves through and all it moves through is becoming with it at levels of what we measure as time and space which is still mostly unmeasurable.

Bodies have minds so as to find new ways of being bodies together and of what bodies can be. We are all multiple bodies, and our overall direction is how we all steer.

Minds are navigational actions that bodies make as part of themselves so as to move through whatever they encounter in each moment, in more dimensions than even those bodies can notice or understand. That is true for any body that is alive, not only for the bodies that are human. And what that motion can be has hardly dawned on us yet.

Paul Klee Abfahrt der Schiffe