Imagine you are in the cockpit of your mind, with an array of controls and displays around you. Close your eyes, and let the mental imagery coalesce and materialize.
Now erase the idea of the cockpit and pilot metaphor (Freud suggested a horse and rider), and survey the layout of inner experience. Spatial, affective, embodied, fantasy, flows of thought and language, the rush of adrenaline, the pull of sedation. Cartographically speaking, mapping the inner terrain is a lifelong project — some things evident, some requiring long treks into the mountains, others reflected back in social interactions and deep connection.
What’s there? Is it capacious or limited, verbal or spatial, rich or thin? Where does what you find seem to come from, and where does it go? Some you can look at directly. Some operates below the surface, shaping what comes up without your authorship — what psychoanalysts spell phantasy, with a ph, to mark it off from ordinary daydreaming.
As you survey, some feels like watching: It arrives, it passes, you observe. Some feels like directing: You’re doing something, moving something. When you direct, how does it feel? Like a hand reaching in? Like using the force? Or dreamlike? Different textures of inner agency, often used without noticing the differences.
This matters because the question that comes next is: What do I do with all this? When I’m stuck trying to work something through, when I want myself to act differently, when I want my life to feel different, what kind of doing is even available? We may find ourselves wondering how we move around in this inner space and how we make the best use of it.
Illustrating Moves
Take a difficult decision: You need to consider feelings, immediate and longer-term consequences, relationship implications, strategy, tactics—many moving pieces, each with some kind of inner representation. The conventional move is to think it through, weigh, list. The list grows. The needle doesn’t.
But we have options, alternatives to being stuck, if we can conjure them — a choice, an act, an inner outcome you can land on, with consequences for real-world outcomes. When we free ourselves up internally, of course, we have more actual choices. That’s a powerful fact, and one often taken for granted, or landed on intellectually rather than effectively.
- Noticing. Before trying to do anything, does your inner take capture the full expanse, let alone track what’s out there? Does what you’re planning reflect what you actually feel and want? What is it like, when we do this? Now inhabit the bird’s-eye view, the meta-cognitive perspective, the lay of the land. Make that “meta-experiential,” as cognition can be so limiting.
- Releasing. Let it go (let it go). What is it like, to let go of something — the grip on a story, a feeling held past its usefulness? Resources free up. Sometimes that’s catharsis — emotional discharge clearing emotional bandwidth — and sometimes it’s just setting something down so attention can go elsewhere. A larger function underneath juggles what’s active, jiggles the molecules of lived experience, encounters what’s parked, what’s hard to reach, can’t, won’t, am not.
- Following. Stop pushing and pulling; relax, turn off your mind, and float downstream (that’s a Beatles quote) — with a hand in the stream rather than redirecting the source. What is it like, to follow something inside rather than steer it? Later, you can shift the current.
Such loops run inside, to the world, and back, and anon. What we do inside changes what’s available outside; what happens outside reshapes what we have to work with inside.
The example of being a bit stuck is a familiar one. Those three basic motions are part of a longer list, perhaps effectively infinite: pushing, pulling, holding, allowing, releasing, witnessing, following, approaching and distancing, composing, noticing…find your own words and phrases.
To push is to apply directional pressure. To pull is to draw something toward awareness against resistance. To witness is to take something as an object of awareness without changing it. To distance is to move away from inner content.
Being stuck often means using one inner move where another would fit: Chronic pushing where allowing is needed produces panic spirals. Chronic holding without releasing, rigidity. Chronic distancing where approaching would serve.
Consciousness Essential Reads
A weird metaphor
What we’ve been deploying are something like inner appendages — capacities we act with, the way we do things with our extremities, our hands and feet, the gestural action of language and speech. We can imagine inner operations akin to those we do in physical reality, but the inner world is vastly more fluid and expansive because change in ideation is relatively cheap, and our brains are quite energy efficient here.
When we think about our own internal operations, we meet vagueness. Mapping the terrain helps us navigate when push comes to shove. What makes something an inner action you can work with — rather than a thought drifting by — is its motor signature: intention, execution over time, trainability, a particular fatigue.
Different inner moves operate at different speeds. Some shift in moments — noticing can land immediately. Some take longer — the slow reshaping of how you handle difficulty, the years it takes to develop a steady stance toward something that used to derail you.
What you’ve been doing while reading — sensing your own inner movements — is your brain sensing itself. Some call this autoneuroception, metaphorically: direct contact with the material reality of being a brain in a body in the world. Whether it names a specific sense or stands as a metaphor remains an open question. Either way, it points at the bedrock.
A few examples
Some practices, not as prescriptions, but to illustrate. There are many traditions which train these internal capacities, along with our own explorations.
- Allowing. When a feeling you’d normally suppress rises, stay with it about 90 seconds — the rough arc of an emotion — without intervening. This doesn’t work when it’s overwhelming; safety first.
- Holding. Sustain attention on the breath or a steady object for a short period. The work is in catching the slip and bringing it back. The slips are the practice.
- Approaching. Graduated movement toward something you’ve been steering around — small, deliberate, repeated. Avoidance compounds; small approaches reveal what was hidden. This doesn’t work when we’re forced past what’s survivable.
- Composing. At the end of a hard day, notice what state is currently active and what would help shift it, and gently bring the shift about. Air traffic control: what’s running, what could be parked, what could come forward. This doesn’t work when there’s no fuel left; sometimes the move is rest.
Heading off
The cockpit doesn’t come with a manual. What changes, with practice, is not the landscape but your capacity to move within it. The right move is sometimes the one you’ve been avoiding, sometimes smaller than the situation calls for. The work continues — survey, choose, act, register what shifts — and the mapping deepens.
We tend to think of ourselves as unitary, but part of the complexity of who we are — sometimes to our consternation — can come from the way we have different sides to our personalities, different facets of our sense of self, which do not always work in unison.
There are many ways of arranging and stacking these intentions and their corresponding actions. They describe a rich architecture which lives in the present moment, an architecture of causal self-experience, which as well has shape over time, definable contours, and definitive structure.
