Our brain is well furnished for life in the jungle and savannah. But when it comes to the lay of the land, here and now in this modern, complex world, some of its furniture may be shopworn, ugly or ill suited.
The brain is hardwired with ancient data perfect for the task of running a tiger or an antelope. But the human brain is open for business and refurbishing, too. Billions of its neurons are not wired in a specific way when we’re born. Happenstance will plug some of them in, but many we can designate. This is where we upgrade, repurpose and rearrange. Let me tell you what I mean.
Some of the furniture of the mind, is mentally accessible when we want it to be. Some, such as disgust and bitterness, registers on the face, whether we like it or not. Some—like the brain’s pituitary gland that produces hormones to regulate the body—affects us though we don’t consciously manage its processing.
The brain is the control center of the central nervous system responsible for perception, cognition, attention, memory, emotion and action. Subsequently, it is not difficult to imagine that virtually everything we say or do has a correlate in the neurons.
If we can play a musical instrument or catch fly balls, or pass on a second glass of wine though it’s the best zinfandel on the market, it’s in the brain. So, too, is our ability to think on our feet, or recite psalms or Shakespeare, or speak a second language or “will” ourselves out of a mental stupor when imagination and creativity are needed. When we’re angry or moodily reviewing an old resentment, neural correlates are at play.
If we were fortunate enough, or driven enough, to become well educated, we have a particular type of reference library in our brains. If we were schooled by hard knocks, what we refer to is somewhat different. Tough experience can bend us in every conceivable manner from distinctly aggressive to peculiarly passive. But no matter how we were reared, the education of one of the mind’s most crucial furnishings—willpower, aka the transcendent will—may not have been seriously addressed.
Luck isn’t generally reliable as a means to proving ourselves or to improving ourselves. But, lucky for us anyway, though neither blessings nor brainpower were equally distributed, each of us has a fair chance to acquire or refurbish this vital resource. We can upgrade at any time and like the remodel of a home, it can take some time.
So, the mind is crowded with furniture. But it doesn’t always serve our ambitions. In fact, too much of what we do may seem mindless or out-of-sync, a jumble of un-coordinated moods, drives, anxieties, attitudes, hormones, fears and appetites. Though we can’t get the furnishings recalled as defective or throw them out, we can remodel and repurpose some key pieces. It’s definitely doable.
Certainly, over practically every darn thing in the world, we have little individual control. Yet, you and I are capable of a progressive expansion of the autonomy born of overcoming reflexive brute nature and counterproductive habits and developing a life of our own design.
In other words, we can have far more control over our minds. What’s more, the state and content of our minds directly influence the quality of our day-to-day experience. How well we appoint it, fine tune it and use it is pivotal to the presence by which we are known, and know ourselves.
As I said above, one of the mind’s most crucial pieces of furniture is willpower, also known as the transcendent will. But there’s a telling distinction between willfulness—the way we just are in our indulged immediately realized presence—and willpower or the transcendent will. One has moral character. The other does not.
WILLFULNESS: the trait of being prone to disobedience and lack of discipline. WILLPOWER: control deliberately exerted to do something or to restrain one’s own impulses.
Each of us can (and often does) make a case for our persistent willfulness, a case for our lack of discipline, creativity, resource, morality and commitment. We could say that our willfulness is sovereign and it reigns over everything because it’s an in-the-brain limbic system oscillation, innate, immediate and urgent. Fired up and close, it can feel like the real, true us and sometimes we like to pamper it, let it percolate and spill over, whether or not it serves our ambitions.
Commonly, though, if we lack the ability to shepherd our energy and intention to overcome the willful authority we experience in immediacy, what we feel is sheepish and bad, no matter how many justifications we can cite.
What actually perfects the sovereignty or command, what deserves our respect and merits our pride, is our intention to bring the transcendent will to our thinking, speaking, listening and acting. It helps us to end the anxiety that I discussed at length in my post titled, Behaving badly, a sign of desperation. And it helps us to construct the ease and elegance of character that I discussed in my post titled, Behaving well, affinity, affection and attraction.
This is what the well-furnished mind looks like, and we feel comfortable and at home in it, too. Moreover, our willed display of thoughtfulness, connection and affinity places us among the good guys and saints. So, we begin to remodel and address ourselves to reason, harmony and hospitality.