A sensitive creature: On thinking

My thinking, when its fruitful and rich, seems to run on two tracks. Apart from the conscious thoughts, which are like a kind of flotsam, there is an underground current. The latter is not thought in the sense of being conscious, but it is mind working. I feel it as something dark and moving, something that is active although it is opaque. It’s like when you’re on a boat: you can only feel the sea indirectly, but you know that it’s powerful. Now here comes the important thing: you must acknowledge and respect the movements of this sea and enhance your sensitivity to it! Conscious thoughts on their own are seldom interesting. They’re like a melody without accompaniment; a melody that is banal and sterile on its own. The unconscious current that carries them, by contrast, is always productive, pregnant with things that you feel, in time, will appear in the form of splendid conscious ideas. It is this feeling of something taking shape that makes thinking enjoyable. For you to think well, the interplay between the conscious and unconscious elements is indispensible.

Try to encourage this interplay! This goes for all thinking; also for the thinking you engage in while reading a book, talking to others, playing chess, watching a film or listening to music. Don’t focus too much on what is explicit or foregrounded. To focus only on the words, tones or conscious thoughts is a mistake that will prevent you from doing them justice. They are important but insufficient on their own. For them to be fruitful, they must be like raindrops falling into the vast sea of your unconscious. There must be a dialogue between them and this sea. This dialogue may seem bizarre, like a dialogue in a movie where you can only hear the words of one of the persons speaing while the words of the other person have been silenced, but don’t fear these silences. They’re active silences, and they need to be there for thinking to be worthwhile.

The dark undercurrent of the unconscious is a sensitive creature. It easily gets scared. Try to be kind to it, invite it and encourage it. Find places that it likes, such as the cemetery where I sit and read books in the summer or the road by the canal in Kyoto where I used to walk so many eveings when I lived in Japan.