Designing and Cultivating your Mindscape
Learn to work with your objects of consciousness
The New Mindscape #A2–1
To build your Human Operating System, the first thing you need to know is the things you need to operate.
One of the most important things you need to work with are objects of consciousness.
Objects of consciousness are all the things that come into your mind:
Thoughts, imaginations, perceptions, memories, feelings, and so on.
Imagine this:
You got into an argument with Jack, and he punched you in the chest. Then he walked away. The punch lasted one second. After a few moments, your chest didn’t hurt anymore.
After that, did you just forget about it?
I doubt it.
You got angry. Although there’s no more feeling in your chest, you have anger boiling in you.
Jack is physically gone, but he’s still in your mind. And whenever you think about him, you feel anger.
You spend hours thinking about him, about that argument, that punch, how he was unfair, and how you’ll get back at him. You couldn’t even sleep that night.
Days later, you’re still thinking about him, and the anger comes to you.
Maybe years later you’re still thinking about him, still burning in anger, planning your revenge.
The anger releases chemicals into your brain, affecting your mood, making you tense, making you plan and calculate, leading you to make decisions about your life.
What is causing this? It’s not the physical hurt, which ended after a few minutes and never came back.
It’s not Jack himself, who walked away and rarely physically appears in your life.
What is causing all of this is your memory of what happened, your memory of Jack, the image of this in your mind.
This memory, this image is an object of consciousness. It has no physical existence. But it’s literally affecting your mind and your body, and even, at times, taking control of it.
Objects of consciousness are coming in and out of your mind all the time.
The ideas I’m conveying to you right now are objects of consciousness.
Even as these ideas come into your mind, they’re jostling with many other objects of consciousness that are drifting in and out of your mind at this very moment.
That text message from a few minutes ago, and the reply you’re crafting in your mind. The friend who sent you the message, and how you want him to feel. What time it is now, and how long this is going to last. The next task you need to do. The plan for tonight. Those stupid forms you have to fill by tomorrow. That cute girl. The idiots you read about in the news. What to tell mom when she calls this weekend. That idea for the essay in another course….
The philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910), who coined the concept of “objects of consciousness”, called this flow of ideas the “stream of consciousness”.
That metaphor emphasizes how objects of consciousness always flow in and out of our consciousness, like a river.
But, although each moment is like a flow, some objects of consciousness keep coming back — they’re more stable, while others appear just once and flow away forever.
I’ll use a different metaphor here, which compares your mind to a landscape.
The mindscape
Just as the landscape is made up of all the physical objects in our field of vision, the “mindscape” consists of all the objects of consciousness in our mind.
When we look at a landscape, we see different things. Right now, I’m sitting in my office. I look out of my office window and see another building of the Centennial Campus. If I look closer to myself, I see my chair, my sweater on this chair, my computer, a cup of tea, my phone, and my beloved stuffed frogs who sit right beside my lamp. This is the landscape in front of me.
Your mindscape consists of all of the objects of consciousness that are arrayed inside your mind.
These objects of consciousness include abstract ideas, tangible experiences, memories, and perceptions.
They enter your mindscape and interact with the other things in your mindscape, influencing how you perceive the world and how you interact with it.
Some objects of consciousness occupy a central position in your mindscape: some ideas, thoughts, or concerns that you’re always thinking about or worrying about. Or some emotions or memories that keep coming back to you. You think about these things rather frequently, even when you’re supposed to be doing something else.
In other words, there are certain ideas, feelings or memories that are right there in the middle of your mind, with other things a bit further away. There are things that are hidden in the shade and in dark corners, that you’d rather not think about, but which are there too. There are places in your mindscape that you haven’t been to in a long time, full of forgotten things.
A landscape can be beautiful or ugly. It can be neat or messy.
The same goes for your mindscape. It might be full of beautiful things, or ugly ones. It can be orderly, or total chaos.
While you know where to look to find and appreciate a beautiful landscape, it’s likely that nobody has taught you how to step back and look at the panorama of your mindscape.
Most people only become aware of their mindscape when they’re so stressed out that they can’t make heads or tails of anything, and realize that their minds are in a mess.
Or when they’re relaxed during a vacation, they enjoy the fact that their mindscape has cleared up. But it’s a fleeting moment.
A gardener or a landscape architect can design and cultivate a beautiful landscape.
But nobody has taught you how to design and cultivate a beautiful mindscape.
And it’s not easy: objects of consciousness are constantly jumping in and out of view, jostling for your attention and controlling you.
If your mind is a mess, your life will be a mess.
If your mind is full of ugly things, can your life be beautiful?
If everyone’s mind is messed up and full of ugliness, can the human world be beautiful?
The Operating System that society has implanted in you makes sure that your mind is well programmed to keep the economic machine running well.
But it hasn’t given you the tools you need to take control of your own mind, and to become the gardener of your own mindscape.
That’s the first thing you’ve got to do.
See here for the chapter “The Stream of Thought” in Principles of Psychology by William James (1890), the first textbook of psychology, in which he develops the notions of “objects of consciousness” and “stream of consciousness”.
The New Mindscape series is a practical exploration of spirituality rooted in the critical perspectives of anthropology and sociology.
Click here for the previous essay in the series: Defining Spirituality.
Click here for the next essay in the series: Become a Thought Magician.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
