I don’t believe we should delve too deeply into the subconscious. The inside of our head is a very slipperly slope…we may reach the bottom, but how then do we return?
Somewhere in the recesses of our head is the motivation for our actions. The serpent of our desires is always slithering around in there somewhere, lurking about, affecting our decisions.
We weigh pros and cons, mull about, converse with friends, dilligently research…and think we arrive at a “rational” decision.
But that snake in your head is making a mockery of you. It pushes you to weigh the pros as more important through the cons be more numerous, to mull about for the correct period of time, to converse with friends that reinforce what you want to believe, to research the idea that supports your subconscious desires.
I believe in free will mostly. I am free to write these words after all. They are not predetermined.
But if you put a rat in the middle of a tube with food at one end and nothing at the other, the rat will move towards the food. It assumes in its little rat head that it made a decision. (I am not a licensed rat psychologist.)
We see that the rat is simply responding to a food incentive, that it will always make the decision to go towards the food. In effect, it is not deciding, but responding to stimuli in the same way plants grow towards the light. The rat is not making a decision any more than the plant is……anymore than we are.
Rationality is what we use to justify the decisions we’ve already made…or have been made for us, depending on how you look at it.
Of course, this does have some bearing on my life otherwise I wouldn’t be thinking about it. The problem lies in the number of serpents. If there were just one, how easy then would it be to make a decision? The number of competing desires and the degree to which those desires disagree with each other can cause some serious dissonance.
It is truly a den of snakes in my head.
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