“In speaking of the “savage” or “primitive mind”, we are, of course, using a very clumsy expression. We shall employ the term, nevertheless, to indicate the characteristics of the human mind when there was as yet no writing, no organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no importal specialization of function except between the sexes, no settled life in large communities…”
James Harvey Robinson
Mind in the Making
Chapter 7: Our Savage Mind
Since learning a few things about the relationship between language and thinking, and how both seem to have developed alongside one another and in relation, I’ve been wondering about what we were like before that— before we were able to intentionally think, to make connections, to form complex plans and abstractions. Our not-yet-capable, basic, savage mind.
When it comes to the brain and our ability to consciously interact with it, we would have been more like animals than we imagine; capable of passively having thoughts, but not quite capable of deliberate, complex thinking; having passive thought responses, but generating no abstract thinking of our own volition; thoughts were something we could have, but intentional intricate thinking was something we could not yet do.
A crude example of this can be seen in every person alive today as we are all born with the capacity to think but without the developed conscious command until later on down the line. Imaginations and dream-states can run wild, but only involuntarily and passively with basic survival input from the world around us, until we learn better.
Similarly, we are born with the potential capacity to command the sounds we make and turn them into complex sentences that can be received and understood by another person, but can not do so until we’ve developed the ability.
The foundation of this philosophical discipline is based on the awareness that the action of thinking and the neurological function of thought itself are different yet related processes, with some common and some distinctively different characteristics.
The action of thinking might be dependent on our ability to have thoughts, but the function of us having thoughts doesn’t depend on our ability to actively think. Passive thought comes first and sets the foundation.
Taking this into account, it sheds some light on the fact that the action of thinking presents an entirely different set of problems and challenges to us as a species. For example, because of the fact that we can think voluntarily but also incorrectly about life, we are challenged not to think our way into trouble or delusion, and there will be real consequences for overlooking that and for not discerning between our judgments of the truth and the truth itself.
This is a basic issue that is intrinsic to our ability to actively think — not to the neurological process of generating passive thoughts in response to whatever stimuli.
The BADN philosophical discipline operates as an alternative framework of interpretation to subject our thinking to. It functions as a series of checks and balances on how we interact with our thinking, developed to serve in instances where thinking alone falls short. Part of this means being able to recognise when there’s a need to call on our greater human awareness for insight rather than falling into the age-old tendency of filling in the gaps of our not-knowing with belief and opinion.
Therefore, it’s important to state outright that thinking is not, and never will be, a shortcut to truth.
“The map is not the territory.“
Alfred Korzybski
Although a common tendency is to try to bring truth and awareness into the captivity of our thinking, the reality we clash against is that when we understand something new, this new awareness transcends, informs and transforms what we previously thought.
This means that the buck doesn’t stop with what we think, and when people overlook this fact, we run the risk of slipping into delusion and leaving ourselves wide open to manipulation and the ideological indoctrination of others.
As individual people, we each risk thinking our way into forming isolating barriers between ourselves and reality, leaving us able to relate effectively only to what we think of life rather than life itself, and forming sub-groups among the species based on common patterns of distorted perception.
And even though we know that thinking is no shortcut to truth, this hasn’t been understood and applied to how a great majority of people live. If it had been, we would instantly call the devices and movements of our thinking into scrutiny the moment they present themselves, but instead the common tendency is to go the other way and to readily believe what we think just because we are able to think it and make sense of it.
Of course, there are other ways of thinking that don’t wall us in, nor isolate and shelter us, but instead lead to self-aware, reflective and refined worldviews that do not require endless self-validation nor an army or mob to back them up, and which nurture an appetite for natural change and harmonious personal growth rather than avoiding it for the sake of status, comfort, identity, and so on.
It can come as a defining moment in people’s lives when something influences them to look at their default ways of thinking from another angle. Casually, most people express this by saying they’ve “woken up”, and one of the most common challenges these people face is recognising that it takes a straining conscious effort not to accept your first train of thinking as a belief or to identify with it.
Recognising that a large part of our lifelong worldviews or the conditioning of the tendencies of our thinking has been based on distorted perception is a heavy weight to carry, and during times when people are finding their way out of their misperceptions and learning to think differently, the dying echoes of our old ways of thinking seem to reach their loudest.
This is because, even when we successfully start to think differently, we are still dealing with minds conditioned by years of influence from our past languages of thinking.
Many people report that an effective practice is to simply allow some time to pass before reacting to our own thinking in order to allow different parts of the brain kick in so that our reactions can be turned into responses. A simple shift like this can suddenly empower us to doubt, to scrutinise and to criticise our own thinking without risk of personal and/or social breakdown.
Taking this on board as functional insight is critical to any philosophical discipline or worldview that is concerned with awareness and truth; simple, yet powerful in its execution because it empowers us and leads us to observe how we are thinking rather than being completely absorbed in what we are thinking.
This is a defining foundational feature of BADN by necessity.
History is flooded with examples of what can happen when we misuse our thinking or allow ourselves to sleepwalk into delusion because of it; how this incredible ability can become harmful or can be weaponised against ourselves and each other, how easily we can become averted to discovering the truth behind our beliefs, how insecure and isolating the influences of our thinking can be – the list goes on.
At its most forgiving, our thinking challenges us in ways that help us develop inner strengths and awareness that will benefit us for the rest of our lives.
At its worst, through all the failures of awareness that allow for the development of splintering belief systems that rise out of fear-driven and divisive behaviours and the formation of personal and group egos, the species runs the destructive risk of trying to force other people, nature and life itself to adhere to what some of us think.
This is what some have called our “God Complex”, and it’s what can occur when human thinking goes unchecked and is presented as either truth itself or something more important than truth. Either way, awareness is deliberately shut down, learning is deemed unnecessary and the devices of human thinking take the driver’s seat in influencing the directions and standards for the wider human species.
It’s widely recognised, but scarcely applied to life, that everything in reality can present us with previously unknown insights, and so projecting what we think onto reality despite that effectively steals our opportunities to learn and to grow, and also leaves us less effective at relating to everything around us.
When we look out at the world, we can find endless examples of that in the institutions, but if we turn our focus inwards, we will most-likely be able to find examples within our own lives where we’ve avoided insight in favour of the self-preservation of our preconceived thinking.
This especially goes for subjects we might consider ourselves personally informed about, as it is often not just a mere piece of information that has profound influence on our thinking, but it can be in the way it’s presented; the certain way a sequence of words is spoken, or how it’s presented from an angle that shines a new or greater light on something we already knew.
It’s too easy, and unfortunately too common, to think our way out of openness to new information. This is largely due to deeming it either irrelevant or dangerous, or rooted in the assumption that “I already know that.”
These tendencies themselves are mechanisms of the active characteristics of the languages of our thinking.
“Get rid of self-conceit, for it is impossible to learn that which one thinks they already know.”
Epictetus
We have gone from an impulsive, brutish, reactive species to now developing the ability to consciously think, to learn, to understand our way through the trials of life, and to elevate our levels awareness to where we can strategise and plan our actions.
By necessity, considering the conditions of our past, our ability to think developed during a time when our awareness was low, and so our earliest languages of thinking would have been largely directly influenced by our fears, our needs, our primal subjective experiences, our imaginations and our dreams.
This is why, even in states of complete cultural isolation from one another, the functions of conscious human thinking seem to default to a set of tendencies in its infancy that are common across the species despite our cultural differences. After all, we were all born into nature with the same needs and the same varying set of natural challenges to us being able to fulfil them.
While it is true that the content of each person’s individual thinking can differ and take on infinite variation, the directions, movements and tendencies of thinking are shaped, taught and reinforced between people – and it is this shared underlying framework of our thinking that emerged during a time when there was little more than the pressures of survival and the brutality of natural life to influence it, as we had only just begun to thrive in an unknown world.
The early centuries of human history are replete with tales of warring directions of thinking battling it out for whose worked better or whose was the more refined or authoritative. Combined with our low levels of awareness, this left the majority of people without any alternative but to be guided and dominated by the psychological influences of those around them, countered only by that which their sheltered perspectives could imagine.
Nowadays, in terms of our awareness and the huge wealth of information to available to us, along with all the new ways of thinking that are becoming capable of dealing with such information, we’ve never been so fortunate.
As new insight emerges that helps us defend against being misled by others, we are also able to learn through and to correct our own personal errors of the past. This falls to all of us as individuals and as a species which has gained the ability to reach for insight throughout the ages and to work from within to integrate these greater insights into our own personal historical perspectives.
Throughout most of our history, information travelled slowly and the growth of our awareness was often blocked – not only by the conditions of our world preoccupying us with survival nor because we lacked the necessary insight, but factors such as identity, security, personal comfort, fear of falling foul of the authorities, of being ostracised by our peers, of social breakdown, etc., often resulted in an aversion to pursuing truth and furthering our own awareness.
The history of the conscious human mind can be summed up as a long, drawn-out battle in striving for awareness, and its number one obstacle has always been the devices of its own thinking and their social manifestations.
These devices include belief systems and the social institutions they spawned to reinforce and to protect them, along with any and all superstitions and fears of imagined consequences for questioning or rejecting socially-acceptable ways of thinking. Factors such as these conditioned our early modes of thinking so deeply that the notion of scrutinising our superstitions and newly-developed states of mind wouldn’t, and couldn’t, have emerged until our tribalistic beliefs already had a centuries-long jump on it.
This paved the way for extended periods of brutal history where people could be exiled, attacked, tortured and even murdered for thinking outside of the norm, and where institutions actively suppressed anything that challenged the beliefs and authorities that defined their particular era.
Despite our vague concepts of open-mindedness, these tendencies are still present to this day and are re-emerging with significant force in recent years.
So, despite the fact that we have access to more information than ever before, a configuration of natural and artificial strangleholds on our awareness both within our own minds and in the world around us has kept our thinking trailing far behind current understanding to the point where it is reminiscent more of the thinking of ancient populations rather than a species adapted to an advanced, connected modern world.
Not only does the prospect of furthering awareness often threaten our preconceived, traditionalised beliefs, in effect threatening our very identities and evoking the fear of risk to our familial and social fabric, but it also threatens to undermine the basis on which a great deal of our social institutions are based.
As times have moved on, our methods and our minds have matured, and despite all efforts to capture or to completely halt the advancement of our awareness in order to preserve traditionalised ways of thinking and their institutions, this growth has seen our societies and cultures shift from being based entirely in belief to developing more of a solid foundation of technical insight and functional understanding.
So, while it is somewhat understandable that social stigmas and vague myths about certain disruptive concepts exist, it’s also a creeping insight that each person is capable of states of mind that empower them to handle truth in a way that enlightens rather than tears them to pieces, and what they often require is guidance, not leading, nor to have their energies and thinking co-opted by someone else.
States of mind such as these only need to be primed, and we have to first recognise that some of the most dominant tendencies of our thinking, both within ourselves and within the wider species, only gear us against that.
A capable humanity, with states of mind able and willing to handle the sometimes unsettling and disruptive nature of truth, is beginning to emerge, and it is no longer interested in the ancient vested ego-interests of belief-oriented thinking as its primary driving force.
Just as our own thinking struggles through overcoming vested interests in the preservation of certain influences, our social institutions, some more than others, are largely shaped by the vested interests of a select group of people.
Today, our dominant institutions are arguably the political, the economic and the religious institutions, as these run central to all the others that operate within and around them.
Now, as they run ill-equipped into the complexities of the modern world, and with increasing risk of being challenged and being discovered obsolete in the wake of new information and social methodology, their self-preservation is observably putting them at odds with the interests of the people they once may have set out to serve.
“How can someone claim to represent you and then tell you what to think?”
Michael Malice
Because of this, in exactly the same way as individual people are being led into directing their thinking against themselves and each other in order to keep them from analysing the language of that thinking, society itself is suffering the same kind of compartmentalised, split-personality infighting.
The maps of our thinking have had abstractions of division, doubt, bitterness, and old unforgiven grudges written all over them. This is 100% understandable as the historical behavioural influences are there to be traced in real-time, but we run a real risk of allowing them to remain as the defining feature of our languages of thinking, and in essence, how we interact with the world around us.
The abstractions of ‘factions’ of humanity, divided along arbitrary perceivable or ideological lines such as class, race, sex, religion, politics, and so on, never cease to improve on their imaginative list of reasons to self-justify, to hate, to be bitter, to disrupt and to go to war with others.
Not surprisingly, these mechanisms and tendencies produce some of the most destructive forces in human thinking and behaviour, and while many may look out at the world and reject this phenomena with great judgment and scorn when it comes from people they consider to be others, they will go great lengths to justify and to preserve them when it involves the particular faction of humanity they consider themselves to be a part of.
But the point here is not to get lost in detailing humanity’s indoctrination towards divisiveness – we will explore that plenty in the coming pages. The point here is to frame the human mind in terms of what it is capable of now, what it has been capable of before and what kinds of results people and societies get when different directions of thinking are nurtured, along with exploring how new states of mind can form at a foundational level which then give rise to new understandings, new levels of awareness, and hence, new social standards oriented around truth and unification as opposed to belief and division.
It can not be said to be healthy that the world is full of people who believe things that capture or completely prevent their personal psychological and intellectual growth.
Unfortunately, this realisation usually leads to the common idea that reconditioning, also known as brainwashing, people from one belief to another might be a solution, which in turn contributes to the flood of attempts to capture people’s thinking. More often than not, these attempts at reconditioning don’t have the best interests of the other people at heart; not to improve their lives nor to enhance their awareness, but instead seek to use them for purposes of social control, ego-validation, and ideological gain.
“A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed.”
Carl Sagan
Developing the ability to consciously think was central to reaching our current level of maturation. Thinking has historically been both a help and a hindrance when it comes to our quests for truth, and all knowledge that it has afforded us has given rise to real insight and understanding that transcends what we may have once thought or how we have historically behaved.
As a result, BADN recognises that the species itself is tasked with the philosophical responsibility of having to develop a certain level of discipline and self-mastery, enough not to allow this ability to become the very thing that prevents us maturing further as it has for centuries.
When we acknowledge the varying processes of awareness and education that transcend what we think, and which are far more empowering than thinking aided by nothing but our impressions and impulses, we become far less likely to volunteer ourselves as prisoners of our thinking, which in turn reduces the risk of us being left at the mercy of someone else’s thinking.
As for our passive thoughts, it might be that we can’t influence them at all on the process level – maybe only on the surface/symbol level. It might also be that there is no natural calling to attempt to meddle with them, and should leave them alone as we focus on what we can consciously interact with.
When it comes to what we think, we can go some ways to influence the course and even the language of our thinking, so when we find ourselves having problems as a result of what we think, we are better able to correct them than if they were with thought itself.
This means that the root-causes of a great majority of our most pressing challenges as a species and as individuals, are largely not neurological, psychiatric issues, but are philosophical, psychological, social, cultural and linguistic ones. That probably covers just about all bases.
This goes to show how much of a conscious influence we can have in ‘matters of the mind’ so long as we’re willing to understand rather than just to think, and that’s double for people who have made beliefs out of what they started thinking and ran with them for the rest of their lives.
This means that, no matter how deeply entrenched we are, or if the problems and challenges we face come in the forms of mountainous personal egos or monolithic social institutions, there is nothing that can’t be undone or that our greater awareness can’t guide us through.
At risk of gross oversimplification, thought is concerned with scattered, instantaneous, passive thought-responses and matters of the mind that take place beyond our conscious awareness, whereas thinking deals with various forms of consistency and reason, and which we can start at will, and for some, stop at will only with great difficulty.
Our conscious thinking, with the appearance of an absorbing personal sense-making exercise, is actually a socially-developed cognitive ability, and while we do have our own original thoughts and may potentially exercise novel thinking, we don’t have our own languages of thinking nor unique neurological functions of the brain.
This means that, despite being fully capable of exercising our own original thinking and having our own original thoughts, a lot of the characteristics, tendencies, directions and movements of our thinking will be learned from and shared with others. After all, we have not all gone through the painstaking process of developing our own original languages of thinking – we learn them from the people around us.
And it is within our thinking that we perpetuate our most complex logic and reasoning – the ways we talk to ourselves, the reasoning in between the imagery that strings it together for consistency, the sentences we actively form in our minds and all the things we choose to do with them there; to believe them, to build on them, to counter or to affirm them, to classify things with them, to repeat them, to identify with them, to further interpret through the lens of them, etc.
These functions of human psychological performance are, once again, intrinsic to our ability to consciously think rather than to the neurological function of us having thoughts. There are many animals in nature that are capable of having thoughts but which are not capable of any level of conscious thinking beyond what can be considered most basic.
Our ability to think, when coupled with our ability to observe, lays the foundation for us not to be constrained by our thinking. We can recognise it for the tool that it is, and also for the potential problems it can cause when misused.
Therefore, it’s a starting point of this philosophical discipline for people to start thinking about how they are thinking, rather than just perpetuating what they are thinking.
Doing so will not only make it infinitely easier to avoid delusion, but will also pull apart the false logic that directs thinking into an egotistical self-preserving search — not for truth, but for something to identify with and to believe in.
All of this is due to the solid recognition that certain insights and understandings, when uninhibited, transcend what we think despite what we’d like to believe, and transform us at our core in ways that forces that seek to control our thinking only wish they could.
This is an attempt at moving beyond the endless futile exercises of replacing one set of phrases and beliefs for another, and for using them to try to control the thinking of others – rather, it is about becoming a more active participant in the shaping of the directions, movements and angles of our own thinking.
Such conscious awareness would make it near-impossible, for example, for a malicious person to use kind words, friendly mannerisms and false relatability to go unnoticed as they indoctrinate us into a belief system or ideological agenda.
BADN is a way of thinking that has been developed to sound an alarm when the language of belief is invoked within our minds.
In this way, it offers many new layers of protection against belief systems and ideological capture, as this is a process that takes place within our active thinking. When thinking through a non-belief-oriented, self-scrutinising language of thinking, the chances of giving rise to belief and disbelief within ourselves is reduced to well below the point of risk.
Simply spotting the flaws in the logic is sometimes enough to bring down the tendencies of false thinking entirely, whether it’s a belief being “held” there, or just engaging in the habit of reducing everyone and everything to our personal interpretations.
While it has its place, to reduce our thinking to belief and to use it as the guiding force for all of life and human energy is, as we will see and which this extended period of history will eventually be known for, a double-edged sword that cuts through the species in favour of short-term power and financial gain, and, of course, personal ego validation and gratification.
The movements and directions of our thinking have been captured and dominated by certain interests throughout known human history, but despite that, we see, in scattered pockets, what we are capable of when empowered and uninhibited.
Glimpses of what the human mind is capable of are also glimpses of what has been stolen from the majority of us, repackaged and promised back to us in exchange for our time, energy, and quite often, blind loyalty.
And now that the starting point has been laid out, it’s time to put some focus on to the contents of human thinking in general, its common influences, and what, if anything, there is to be done about it.
Previous: Chapter 1: Introduction
Next: Chapter 3: Belief: Our Prehistoric Language of Thinking