The Tyranny of the Thinking Mind

The Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power
by Gregg Jacobs, Ph.D.

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The Bible opens with an account of a perfect garden at the beginning of time, where mankind would have dominion, and would be free to partake of everything except the fruit of one particular tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We all know how that story ends: We bit into the apple and were cast out of Eden. Humanity would go on to advance in many ways, but life would never again be quite as peaceful, and it would certainly no longer be a paradise.

Could it be that "partaking of the tree of knowledge" was really a metaphor for the emergence of the self-conscious Thinking Mind?

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: Toward a Psychology of Optimal Experience, conveys the idea of the "paradise" we've lost in precisely these psychological terms:

The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, and danger. Unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, and guilt are likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.1

Many scholars point to the evolution of language, and a written system for recording it, as the primary catalysts for the development of the self-consciousness that led, perhaps, to our loss of innocence. Language probably evolved around 35,000 years ago, but its written form is only about 8,000 years old.

Language is an essential medium for all the activities we associate with the TM:

• conscious awareness and reflection
• analytical and abstract reasoning
• planning, anticipating, and predicting the future
• problem-solving and skill learning.

We can't go very far along the path of conscious awareness-even to an activity as fundamental as the distinguishing of self from non-self-without some way of defining boundaries and establishing concepts. That's one of the basic functions of words: enabling us to categorize objects and experiences as either known/unknown, recognizable/unrecognizable, useful or irrelevant. In so doing, however, language restricted consciousness by filtering our world through a verbal screen. The dark side of linguistic ability as an aspect of consciousness is that, as soon as something is expressed concretely as a word, the word has already been substituted for the full experience of the thing itself. This loss of immediate experience separated us from the vibrancy of the real world. Instead of being directly in touch with the world, we are only in touch with the words that have come to represent it.

In The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that self-consciousness emerged even more recently-at the time of the Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago. According to Jaynes, there was no sense of "I" before this period. It was their first experience of the Thinking Mind's internal monologue, Jaynes speculates, that ancient peoples attributed to hearing the voice of god, or being addressed by spirits.

Once it appeared, the self-conscious Thinking Mind allowed us to radically reshape our environment. Before the advent of the Thinking Mind, the course of human evolution was shaped by natural selection, the mechanism that directs the evolution of every species by weeding out those features that detract from each individual's ability to survive and reproduce in competition with others. The Thinking Mind enabled us to a large extent to step outside natural selection. Through learning and radical innovation we were able to become masters of our fate by dominating nature, but at a great cost: it was this taking control that allowed many "maladaptive" traits, such as persistent anxiety, to emerge-traits that contribute greatly to human illness and unhappiness.

Historian Henri Frankfort characterizes the early condition of precivilized man as one of integral connection with the environment.3 Our distant ancestors saw and interacted with spirits and gods who took form in every animal, tree, and stone. No distinction was made between subject and object. Because ancient man was too directly immersed in his world to stand outside of it, appearance and reality were not distinct phenomena; dreams and visions were as real as the events of normal life.

In The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore describes what he calls the "presiding presence" that once guided us:

Generations before us have had the sacred, poetic intelligence to speak of angels and demons, and fairies and ghosts, but we have forgotten that wisdom, so taken are we by the allure of facts and figures. Our ancestors knew the world by proper name, but we recognize it only in analytical description. They were so acutely aware of the personality of nature and of things that they could easily give names and faces to things we consider inanimate, and they could even imagine embodied spirits hiding in and near rocks, rivers, mountains, and forests.

This was the context in which the Ancestral Mind evolved, over a period of millions and millions of years.

Once it was able to separate itself from nature, the TM encouraged us to think of ourselves as individuals. There was nothing inherently wrong in that development, but this separation of Self from everything else did mean that we began to observe experience rather than participate in it. In the process of establishing this "subject-object" distinction, we came to perceive things in terms of their utility and purpose in relation to us, our fears, our past, or our future. We no longer really saw and felt what really existed, because we now viewed things through the distorting veil of words, thoughts, fantasies, and preoccupations, rather than simply as they are.

Once consciousness emerged with full-blown verbal ability, the Thinking Mind was able to assert its dominance over the Ancestral Mind by engaging in an almost continuous internal monologue. If you take a minute or two to close your eyes and simply observe your thoughts, you will probably be amazed at how easily this flood of mental activity wanders continually from the past to the future; hopes to fears; fantasies and desires; arguments and schemes. Eastern meditative traditions have a wonderful name for this tendency-the Monkey Mind-but its effects are very serious.

The internal monologue not only makes us even more self-conscious, but it also alters consciousness by dulling our perceptions of the external world. As we go about our routines, we tune out many of the most positive aspects of life. How many times have you missed a beautiful sunset on the drive home from work because you were fretting over a conversation or event that occurred earlier? We are all too often disengaged from what we are doing: When we cook, we ponder the evening's chores; when we eat, we worry about the phone calls we must return; at times we become so preoccupied with our own thoughts that we do not even hear what is being said to us by someone we love. We have all but forgotten how to "be" in the moment.

As we will explore in later chapters, this relentless internal monologue also plays an important role in causing many of our negative moods and feelings. The endless chatter of the TM adds to the stress that threatens our emotional existence by making us more anxious, hostile, and disconnected.

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Gregg D. Jacobs, Ph.D., is assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, senior research scientist at Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute, a research scientist at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School, and the author of Say Goodnight to Insomnia.