Making sense of it all

‘This universal mind is intelligence itself and is the source of the mysterious meaning that erupts from each of us every moment.’ Tim Garvin

The major existential questions to do with our inner lives and consciousness — who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? What’s most important in life? — have been explored by thinkers for millennia, and all of us can gain from exploring our inner worlds.

As the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung famously said: ‘Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes.’ Well-trodden paths for such explorations include various forms of contemplation, meditation, psychotherapy and psychedelics.

The inner life is where we talk to, and debate with, ourselves. It is the abode of our memories, dreams, our thoughts, feelings and creative and, yes, our destructive drives, but at a deeper and more elusive level, our ‘heart’, ‘spirit’ and the will. It’s integral to our consciousness — including, indeed, how we are conscious of our consciousness.

We’re aware of it to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the type of individual we are, and it’s affected by the unconscious mind as well as events in the outside world. A simplistic definition of the inner life might be ‘what it’s like to be me’.