SPECULATIONS: A SERIES OF MEDITATIONS ON HAPPINESS
An Option Method Monograph
THE MIND
SELF-TEACHING
The human (probably the human brain and its relevant mechanisms) invents the mind as a means of teaching itself things that would not otherwise be learned by simple, biologic, sensible experience.
SELF-EXPERIMENTING
The ability to induce, deduce, discern, and refine what is learned into concepts and meanings such as pertinence and relevance, and to extend those ideas into possibilities Is what we call the mental faculties of a person. This ability to experiment in fantasy, and imagine various consequences by mental trial and error is, in itself, the greatest aid to invention, and perhaps the only evolutionary difference from other animals. It may be what caused the evolution of the mind and the body.
THE MIND IS A MENTAL FICTION
Although there is no need to speak of a bicameral mind as if it were un-integrated, there is the functional experience of thinking: the person (mind) speaking to itself, or reflecting on itself. This, of course, is a mental fiction. The one mind can be three, or four, or more contestants in the experiment for development if ft so imagines or determines itself. Argument is the name for mind. Or vice versa. Resolution is not a necessary requirement for mental exploration. That is a value to be determined by the mind. The mind is neither satisfied or unsatisfied, save by its own determinations. The person’s mind creates itself as a function of the person.
AN EXPRESSION, NOT A COMPONENT
The so-called split between mind and body is a proposition of the mind itself to reflect its own arguments within itself. The mind is a mental fiction, it can no more exist without a whole person than can a state without people, or the ring of a bell without the bell. The mind is an activity or expression of a person, not a component of a person.
SELF-CHANGING
What is believed by the person to be that person/self can now causally change what it can feel and seem to be like as that person. A person may very well believe that his/her mind is a component; a partner, or even a rival. The various attributes of mental states are reflections of the beliefs of the person, and, as such, are an idiopathic condition.
CREATES SELF-BELIEFS
Learning is response to stimulus, even if that stimulus is the belief about self which is autogenously independent of external experience, External experience is, after all, subject matter for belief, and as such is subject to responses based on judgments. Judgments (beliefs) that an experience is bad, or the experiencer is a bad person, certainly cause responses different than contrary judgments.
CREATES UNHAPPINESS
Unhappiness, or the “disturbed” emotional state, is the illusion that there is a non-integrated mentality to be suffered. In short, an unhappy person believes that his/her mind is in danger of being unable to experience the person as he/she chooses/wishes to experience the self/mind. It is the mind-created belief (fear) that the person will be forced or convinced (influenced) to believe it is against itself.