Mental Health
Your Multicameral Mind: Becoming Intentional in Our Thoughts and Feelings
Managing our thoughts and feelings is the only true challenge of our lives. Here’s how to start.
You are not the critical voice. You are the person aware of the critical voice. You are the person feeling perplexed by it or bummed out by it or believing it. You are the person trying to understand and work with it and get rid of it. … The critic is not the core of you. The core of you is the you of your aspirations, of your inner wisdom. The critic is a kind of intruder. It’s a voice that happens to play in your mind, but it is not who you really are.
—Tara Mohr
In the last three years, I’ve started a company, walked away from that company, separated, divorced, moved across the U.S., lived through a pandemic (Wait, you too? Fancy that, huh.), switched from full-time in-person to 100% remote work, supported my dad through cancer from diagnosis to remission, learned how to be a part-time single dad to a five and a three year old (but, are you ever really “off the clock” as a parent?), been to too many funerals of close family and friends, watched more Netflix than I will ever admit to you, and mourned over how few options there are for truly good chocolate ice creams at pretty much every grocery store. (I’m still looking for any explanation as to why Ben & Jerry’s decided that a global quarantine was a good time to stop distributing Chocolate Therapy. Shame on them.)
In other words, I’ve experienced a few of the major life-rocking traumas. And I’ve spent a lot of time alone with nothing but my own thoughts and feelings to keep me company.
What have I learned after all this? Wehehehellllll… Lots of answers to that question, but hands down the most important one has been this: Managing our thoughts and feelings is the only true challenge of our lives.
Which is how I found Julian Jaynes.
The Bicameral Mind
In 1976, Dr. Julian Jaynes attempted to explain the development of human consciousness and argued that for much of history, human beings possessed a “bicameral mind”. Just like the U.S. Congress and most other modern legislatures, which are divided into two chambers, each with different roles and characteristics, our minds, he argued, were also divided into two “chambers”—one that appeared to be “speaking”, and another that listened and followed.
It was only in the last few millennia, as cultures, civilizations, and ideas began to collide on unprecedented levels, that humans started to question their “speaking” minds. The mental civil war that ensued gave way to what we now call “consciousness”.
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an experimental state. It is frail, menaced by specific dangers and easily injured.
— Carl Jung
In other words, Dr. Jaynes argued that consciousness is not the state of being in control of our thoughts and feelings, but simply of being aware and intentional about which of them we listen to.
The Multicameral Mind
Every minute of every day, we’re flooded by thoughts, emotions, ideas, and intellectual “code” fighting for our attention. It isn’t easy to be intentional with all that going on. It’s even harder to break out of our “loops” and venture into genuine agency.
Yes, mindfulness helps. But once you’ve noticed your thoughts, which of them do you follow? Some would say we never really choose at all; we’re all just following our own “programming”.
For me, though, as I have spent the last few years watching my thoughts, I have seen not just a bicameral mind at play, but a multicameral mind. The “speaking” mind isn’t just one voice, but multiple, each with differing views on the world and on myself. And very often, these views conflict starkly with one another.
Our Bodies
Take our bodies, for example. Our bodies remind us when it’s time to sleep, or provide us with the intuition to eat wisely, or alert us when we’re sick. There are as many or more brain cells in our stomachs as in our brains. No wonder it often feels as though our stomachs are “talking” to us.
Each of us has inner guidance available that we can tune in to in order to create vibrant health — now.
— Christiane Northrup, M.D.
And yet, our bodies also betray us. The 11:30 pm ice cream craving I’m having RIGHT NOW. The fight or flight reflex that makes my palms sweaty at exactly the time I need them to be very not sweaty. The addiction that keeps us from showing up for the ones we love. The “hanger” that makes it so easy to say things we regret.
Our Thoughts
And then there are our thoughts. Those that move our life forward in some way: the solution to the issue at work, just the right words to say sorry for what your hanger did last week, the plan you made for your day tomorrow. As well as those thoughts that leave us spinning: “I’m not good enough to get the job.” “She wouldn’t want me anyway.” “I know I should be going to bed, but this idea is just too good to let go.”
The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
— Albert Einstein
Our thoughts can teach us a lot about who we are and what we want and where we’ve been, but they can also trap us in the past or in an unproductive cycle.
Our Feelings
The same could be said of our feelings and emotions, those parts of us we can’t always frame in words, but that keep us rooted in our own humanity. These can invite empathy, or at least keep us from growing cold and robotic, or attract trust and friendship. Or, they can lead us to lash out in pain, or overwhelm us with depression, or cripple us with anxiety.
The World Around Us
And we haven’t even talked about the voices outside our own selves that influence us. Our friends and family, for both good and bad. Advertising and culture and norms. Our physical and meta-physical environments that feed our minds and bodies and hearts.
You think you know how the world works? You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses?
— Ancient One (Dr. Strange)
You
Somewhere in the middle of all these voices is the part of you that has to make a choice — thousands every minute—as to which to listen to, which to acknowledge, and which to ignore completely. Tending that part of you is the most challenging and most important task of our lives.
Whether you call this your soul, or spirit, or god-spark, or just “you”, this is that part of you attempting to understand the meaning of everything you hear and see, and to fit these into your sense of identity.
The language of the soul is meaning
— Rachel Remen, M.D.
That’s not a small task. I’ve found it helpful to start with taking the time to ask myself two questions:
- “Where does this thought/feeling come from?” Try to name its source. Is this your body talking? Or your mind? Or is this energy from outside you, from a friend perhaps? You may also need to split a voice up into its parts. After all, the lines between body and mind and heart and world aren’t even close to black and white, so it may be all of them speaking at once, each with a slightly different message and tone. Or it may be several emotions or thoughts at once. (Just Google “Parts Work Therapy” for more on this…)
- And secondly, “Will this thought/feeling help or hinder my progress in life?” Or, “Do I choose this thought?” It’s one thing to let a thought or a feeling play out across the stages of our awareness; it’s another to invest in it, and give credence to it, and follow it, and make it our own.
It may take a lifetime to truly make sense of ourselves—to become “transparent to the soul”. But maybe that’s the whole point. Is there any better use of our time here?
Everyone and everything is caught up in the process of manifesting its soul. This struggle of the personality to become transparent to the soul is a struggle to become free from illusion, to grow in wisdom. The process of growing in wisdom, of becoming more transparent to the soul is going on within us and all around us. This is not usually a graceful or a deliberate process. We stumble forward, often in the dark, using everything to become more of who we are. It is an effort worthy of our patience, our support, our compassion, and our attention.
—Rachel Remen, M.D.
