Depth is Everywhere

October 7, 2022 Cognitive Insights, Mental Depth No Comments

Everywhere and nowhere. Depth is a characteristic of human mental processing.

See: What is ‘Depth’?.

Depth is how the brain works by default ― nothing special.

See, for instance, The Poetic Brain.

At the same time, we see a stark lack of depth in so many places and situations. The world is sleepwalking from crisis to crisis by lack of depth. The least one can say about this is that it’s weird.

Not culture-bound

The being and the not-being present of depth where it matters most is not bound to any culture. Looking at it from very far, it seems to be a problem of the human species.

Therefore, it’s essential to see it as such and to try to amend something about it from that angle. Anything less will only be temporary at best. I described this as three waves of attention. It can, indeed, be seen as an issue of how attention evolved from the start of life on Earth and also how it gets realized in each individual’s life.

Depth is everywhere.

Thus: you, right now. How are you reading this text? Are you jumping over the pieces, or do you let yourself be touched profoundly?

One needs to slow down in order to move in another direction. Metaphorically speaking, one needs to slow down horizontally in order to start moving vertically ― the direction of depth.

This move is always possible.

How-to?

Meditation, of course. But for those who don’t like the word or the idea, it can be put as ‘blanking the mind.’

I posted three exercises about this, called – sorry – three short meditations. You may as well look at them as something else. I think these can be done at any time. With some expertise, they can even be done while proceeding horizontally in some slow-down mode. That is also the way I am writing this text right now.

Slowing down is the same as Opening yourself.

Opening-with-capital means: towards yourself as a total person, conceptually and subconceptually. By nature, you have the brain to do so. In principle, you can do so at any moment.

IF you adequately do this, you may perceive that it also Opens you to the outside: situations, other people, the comprehension of what on Earth I am now writing about ― and you are reading it.

I write invitations to your Opening.

Have you noticed?

Depth is here. I don’t bring it to you since it’s your depth and can only ever be so. Depth never comes from the outside.

Depth is everywhere if you find it inside yourself.

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

1 Psyche and Soma, Two Sides of One Coin

‘Body-mind unity’: necessary vision for further scientific development of medicine. Psyche and soma and a lot of questions Psyche and soma: mind and body. They are both important, so we learn during our student years and also after that in and through practice. But how do we give to the psyche a proper place in Read the full article…

Qualia

What is it like to be a human being who sees redness (or anything)? The difficulty in describing this lies at the core of ‘the problem of qualia.’ Since the Middle Ages, many philosophers, theologians (looking for the soul), and scientists (looking for the brain) have quarreled about ‘qualia.’ To this day, they haven’t agreed Read the full article…

Depth and Distillation

Compression of knowledge may lead to crystallization into surface-level concepts ― sometimes with a loss of depth. However, starting from broad mental-neuronal patterns, compression may lead to in-depth wisdom. I call the latter a process of Inner Distillation Poetry Excellent poetry is a quintessential form of Inner Distillation. Notoriously, the poet doesn’t consciously know how Read the full article…

Translate »