Bilateral Course (6)

The Four Languages of Conscious Thought

1. Verbal thought: speaking in your mental voice, just as if you were expressing your mental processes aloud in words, phrases and sentences - this is 'inner speech'.

2. Visual thought: seeing mental pictures, which are often fuzzy and fragmentary and which are recalled from memory or imagined.

3. Auditory thought: hearing others' speech, natural sounds and music, which are recalled from memory or imagined.

4. kinesthetic thought: experiencing bodily sensations, feelings and emotions, as reactions to a memory, immediate experience or imagined situation.

For example you can think about your friend, lover or relative by saying that person's name in your mind, by forming a mental picture of that person, or by tuning-in to the feeling response to the concept of that person. For much of your conscious thought, all four of these thinking languages come into play simultaneously. One may play a dominant role, since others may be suppressed, depending on your relationship to a particular subject (such as dislikes, fears, bad memories; or likes, compulsions, good memories).

Below the foreground of conscious thought is a continuous stream of preconscious unseen mental activity, which organizes mental contents and controls actions 'without even thinking about it', like when you turn the pages of a book. The four thinking languages are the means by which you project snapshots of the rapidly moving preconscious processes onto the 'screen' of your immediate attention.

You can capture some of these fleeting thoughts and translate them into conscious form, but the vast majority of them flow on invisibly and reliably without your conscious attention. The left-brain level of preconscious thought is quite capable of making decisions, of reasoning logically, and of directing a large share of your moment-to-moment actions, usually in the form of pre-programmed habitual patterns of behavior. The right brain aspect of the preconscious is the basis for hunches, or intuitive thought processes, which seem to tell you what to do on a gut-feeling level, but offer no well worked-out verbal reasoning processes to substantiate the proposed course of action.

The preconscious thought stream, then, is the result of the conscious verbal left hemisphere and the nonverbal but aware right hemisphere, interfacing beneath the surface with the deeper sub-conscious and the still deeper unconscious processes of both hemispheres. The preconscious emerges into consciousness in the form of the four thought languages: verbal, visual, auditory and kinesthetic. The content of the deeper subconscious may also erupt into consciousness, through the medium of a fifth language: that of metaphors and symbolic representations. This occurs most of all during dreaming, and twilight states of consciousness.

Suppression of the sub-conscious (and by extension, repression of the unconscious) has the effect of reducing the perception of smell and taste, because these two senses are mediated by the more primitive (sub-cortical) centers of the brain which are the seat of the unconscious.

However, for those who have developed a high level of integration between the hemispheres, integration of the sub-conscious has to a significant extent begun, so a further dimension of perception becomes apparent: the thought languages may be represented by taste, smell and color, blending together in a synaesthesia. Improved integration, then, enlarges the spotlight of the conscious mind, so that neither irrational thoughts nor useful intuitions are likely to pass by unnoticed, and the full wealth of the experience of life becomes open to view and may be appreciated.

Objective & Subjective Reality

Our knowledge of the perceived Universe is a mixture of the 'Real Universe' i.e. Objective Reality (what actually is) and our own 'Subjective Universe' - which in turn is a composite of a shared Subjective Reality (held in common with the culture) and our personal construct: the Personal Subjective Reality.

A workable model of Reality is described by the diagram below:

The circle stands for Objective Reality.

The square represents the cultural Subjective Reality - the 'group-think', an aggregate of opinions, judgments and evaluations held generally by a particular cultural grouping. These notions are known as Norms.

The triangle represents a particular individual's Personal Subjective Reality. This will contain elements of Objective Reality, the generally held Subjective Reality and further imaginary elements (indicated by question marks) which are either creative insights about Objective Reality, or fantastic or crazy ideas which exist in no reality at all and have their origin in the unconscious mind.

Mind must first experience physical reality, to construct within itself replicas of the world, i.e. mental reality. Mind can then manipulate these forms more easily than the physical world, designing new artefacts in a subjective way, as a computer-aided designer now manipulates graphics on his VDU-screen. Mind first adjusts to reality, with the ultimate objective of adjusting and adapting reality to its own purposes.

Sane people agree that there are desks and chairs, people and things. They have a very solid agreement about reality; they recognize that things are real. Insane people have hallucinations, which they think are real - they cannot differentiate between the Objective and Subjective universes. As ideas are not composed of matter, energy, space and time, there can be disagreement about ideas, but there can only be agreement upon the reality of the physical universe. Objective Reality is an agreement, not necessarily with other people, but with the reality of the physical universe.

When we are talking about reality, or we are in communication with someone within an agreed reality, we are using words as an equivalence for reality. Objective reality may be regarded, in this context, as an Absolute, whereas the words being used may be regarded as a map of the territory being communicated about. The words that we use represent an abstraction, removed from the actual objective physical reality being discussed.

An abstraction must be compared to the Universe to which it applies, and brought into the categories of things which can be sensed, measured or experienced in that Universe, before such an abstraction can be fully understood.

Subjective Reality

Subjective Reality (including personal constructs) may or may not map-over Objective Reality, either in whole or part. It forms an approximate map of Objective Reality at best, and consists of at least the following components:

1. Observations and perceptions.
2. Rules made by ourselves or others.
3. Imaginary content and content with an origin in dreaming.
4. Thoughts both analytical and reactive.
5. The content of memory, learning and experience.
6. Ideas considered necessary by oneself or others.
7. Attitudes, emotions, feelings, sensations and pains.
8. Postulates, considerations, evaluations, inferences and opinions.

The contents may be mistaken (based on false data or faulty reasoning), misattributed (considered one's own when they are in fact another's or considered another's when they are in fact one's own) or self-created (such as imaginary fears or rationalized justifications).

Subjective Reality may be described as a continuum with observation at the most objective end of the continuum, and assumption at the least. That which is imagined or dreamed may contain no objective elements whatsoever.

Therefore we are able to rank Subjective Reality on a scale of relative certainty or degree of verifiability:

direct observations
reports that are obtained from someone else
inferences (reasoning based on facts)
assumptions.

Our subjective mental maps may be described as informative. However, these maps have the potential for misinforming ourselves and others, as a consequence of the introduction of our evaluations. An informative description may be a direct observation of Objective Reality or a judgmental evaluation may have been added.

For example 'I see the sun' may become 'What a nice sunrise!', putting the observation into an overlapping Subjective Reality. Similarly, the report 'The weather forecast is good' may be evaluated 'Forecasts are often completely wrong'. The inference 'It may be hot today' may cause the judgment 'I only need to wear a T-shirt'. The assumption 'It's summer, so the sun will stay out' may become 'It's sure to be a hot and sticky day'.

Thus we can make a classification framework, which permits us to ask questions of a client, to determine which version of Subjective Reality is being operated from:

EVALUATION   (Left) <-------------------- > (Right)   INFORMATION

Verifiability:

Assumption..........Inference...........Report.........Personal Observation

 
Progress is made with a client, by making the contents of his subjective reality more and more informative rather than judgmental, and deriving from objective inspection rather than second-hand reports, misinformed inferences or misconceived assumptions.

The solution is to ask clarifying questions, based on the table above, using the Bilateral Meter as guidance. You may ask: 'Is this statement information or an evaluation?', 'Is this your own observation?', 'A report from somebody else?' or 'Is it an assumption, conjecture etc.?' In terms of the Bilateral Meter, the needle will read further to the left, the less verifiable the statement is and the more evaluation is involved.

Needs

Clients will operate from different levels at different times, but many will have a chronic level where they are operating much of the time. The requirements of that level have to be met, if there is to be the possibility of progress to the level above.