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

What is Non-Conscious?

With ‘non-conscious’ (not the Freudian subconscious) is generally meant: meaningfully mental processing ― not mechanical or straightforwardly reflexive. Brain and body For a long time, the mental has been confined (by me, for instance) to the brain, more specifically to mainly mental-neuronal patterns in the brain. More and more, however, we see that the brain Read the full article…

Insight = Change

Insight is not information. It is not merely conceptual knowledge. Insight is rather wisdom. Wisdom is yours. Your wisdom can never be mine. Therefore, I cannot give you wisdom. If I tried to push my insight into you, it wouldn’t be your insight. It might be inside you for a while, then wither like a Read the full article…

Antifragility

What if there’s a way to grow stronger, not just survive, through life’s inevitable challenges? This concept, known as antifragility, was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Unlike (Taleb’s concept of) resilience, which merely withstands stress, antifragility refers to the capacity to thrive and even improve Read the full article…

Translate »