HIJACK THE REST OF THE BRAIN!

Images and words by

Cachecope Bell
CC3 Oppositebooks.com 2012
Creative Commons 3.0 You are free: to Share to copy, distribute and transmit the work to Remix to adapt the work to make commercial use of the work

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Judgements about film - thresholds

When I see something really good, I think: This is it, this is me, this is about me. I am in this film and I am choosing to look where the camera is pointed. This is all inside my head and I am the world. The sort of hypnosis a good film is capable of is like a zip being pulled up that joins you up completely with what youre seeing. When people talk about characters being relatable or character-driven-stories this is what I think about.

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Methods of making progress - Nuurgh!

Where are you, problem-wise? The bottom one is Buddah, so youre not in that one, neither am I, or any Buddhists, theyd be the first to admit it, if theyre any good at being Buddhists. What about the top one? All a bit of an effort, is this what it feels like, couldnt we just do that other thing for a bit though? No? Wed have to give up a heap of expectations to experiment with that kind of thing. Better to be a lion in hell than a sheep without a sufficient sense of autonomy?

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Im being funny - another swear!

Being the funny one is always a bit of a trap I think. But so is breathing. Theres a measure of control with everything though isnt there if you think about it? Hold your breath a bit, breath harder, we can choose that kind of thing, mostly. A swear is absolutely required here, it was optionally funny in image number one.

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Being entirely happy

Is this not-really-enough for a picture? Maybe its just here to set a tone? Setting you up for something, positioning you, if you dont mind being positioned, to look at the next thing from a particular angle. I hate it when things that seem under-conceived turn out to be part of the artwork. Im not sure thats allowed. Well, it is, but its like taking out a loan which you have to pay back later. If you dont pay back a certain number of questions with a certain number of answers people become very irritated indeed. I know I do.

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Inside my head
Im perfectly serious about this, psychologically. Far too serious for a cartoon commentary actually.. Me, the one speaking, Im just the pilot fish, down here with my words. The whale makes the pictures, mostly. Theres all sorts of research that proves we think things before we could possibly put them into words and rationalise them into justifications and arguments.. Maybe if you dont know what to do next you should wait and see what your whale does. I really like the nice whale.

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Universal signs for evil

This was from a series I edited out of this collection a bit. The Universal signs for exploration cartoon wasnt really up to it. It would have done a nice job of lowering your expectations but it was trying to make everyone think too much. This is much more friendly and like a little joke. Point number three could also read: Not understood by mathematicians, cartographers, division signs (sister of implied multiplication sign) y, or z (offended siblings of unfairly maligned letter x)

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What things mean

Bits of this are actually useful for a kind of psychology algebra we might get into later on, if youre up for it. Bits of this are just there to broaden the context of what signs can be for. Important note: # now means something quite different - this was drawn in about 2004. now # = attention seeking on the internet

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Different ways of writing two

Oh, er, ok. This was so borderline. I think Son of, Return of and Revenge of put it over the line and made me include it in the collection. Its important though. Theres some old fact in the back of my mind about the greeks not even having a word for two because their concept of number meant you only began counting at three. I dont know quite how that would work. If its true all those people who think that maths will be the right language to use to communicate with aliens (sci fi scriptwriters) are so wrong. We all secretly hoped that this was the case, lets not kid ourselves.

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Joy, logical brain and magical wonder

Im saying, what if, our Logical Brain had to compete against Magical Wonder for brain-space. Doesnt our brains processing power seem finite to you? I know if you overload people they get dumber - so looks finite to me. Then theres joy. This is a nice idea until you wonder about what would constitute gravity in this visual metaphor. Still, maybe its enough to get as high as you can before falling back to Earth? Oh, thats a bit dark.

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Stressed and unstressed brains

Theres a body of thinking out there to do with an idea called Reversal Theory. The last time I looked into it, it was tragically devolving into a sub-strata of management consultancy. But the basic idea was that people are initially happy because they drive towards specific goals and then, when theyve had enough, their motivation reverses and they spread out, exploring, and that makes them happy for a while too, until things reverse again. I think that theres a great pleasure in both using your Logical Brain and feeling Magical Wonder, maybe they just need to take turns nicely.

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Hijack the rest of the brain!

Maybe, if you keep on driving towards definite goals or keep throwing yourself into wondrous chaos, the neglected form of thinking eventually rises up and sabotages what youre up to. Theres a bunch of things to do with stress, addictions and dependency that have something to say about emotional hijacking. This phrase, Emotional Hijacking means that you act in a certain way but youre not fully conscious of what youre doing. Its like a version of temporary insanity.

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Actions in my head
Or maybe its like this, going back to metaphors aquatic. Do you ever find yourself telling yourself stories about what youre like? Praising yourself up or calling yourself stupid. There are lots of theories about what were really up to when were doing this, mostly to do with our parents and our consciences. I like to think of a sort of animated Finding Nemo-style, funny, self-important pilot fish and a silent, far wiser, whale. Makes it easier for me to give myself a break.

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What it is like to be romantic

Surprise-giving is a dangerous method of courtship but valuable if used sparingly. Surprise requires planning, logistically speaking. I suppose I was just thinking that this structured form of being romantic is something like a displacement of organisational activity to make an experience into something more gift-like. I had a friend once who said his technique was to do as little as possible, so that everything he offered his partner was seen as real treat. Obviously, I dont hold with this. But the observations about context and expectations are interesting.

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Its good to make mistakes

The plankton in this metaphor are interesting to me. I remember when I found out that there was a psychological definition of some levels of thinking as non-conscious as well as the better-known, more mysterious, unconscious. This is what the plankton are I suppose, unconnected thinking capacity, unaware of itself and not part of a bigger pattern. The whale and the pilot fish eat the plankton. I wonder what would happen if the whale ate the pilot fish. That should really have a cartoon of its own. I suspect and hope that would be a very Buddah-like event, if a little messy. Like the profound and silent moment when the hero of a story calmly knows what to do and there are no internal voices of dissent. In this cartoon though, mistakes are just when all the elements of mind dont play well together. Nobody has eaten anybody else, yet.

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Parts of the brain

This came from all those bits of evolutionary theory that were flying around a few years ago. The lizard-brain hijacking the higher cortex when we get afraid. That sort of thing.

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Game
This wasnt so much about predetermination or anything. Using this metaphor it might seem that the winner and loser are fixed before the game is played. This might be the probability but, of course, games can have lots of outcomes, no point in playing otherwise. This was more about putting game elements into a different metaphor and trying to make them fit. I wanted to get a better idea of what games mean to people and why and how we use them. Not sure this exactly helped but I like that there is a decision-making axis (the bow string) thats both delicate and the key to how the whole thing works. I like that, so expect to see it again.

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Parts of the brain

I genuinely had this dream one night, years ago now, that I was curled up within a womb-like space and I knew I was inside the left hemisphere of my brain. I suddenly had a powerful urge to see what was on the other side of the corpus callosum, so I pried it open. On the other side there was something like a planet-sized ruby crystal that was rumbling as it was turning, lit from within. I woke up at once without any idea of what it might mean but I was left with a fantastic impression of what might be possible for the nature of our thoughts. I have slightly different ideas about what a soul is as a result, maybe more later on that.

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Idea
My favourite bit about this is the need element. When you only have an idea for a strategy it feels a bit like this. Theres just an arrow tip of effectiveness and you need the tension of the need to fire it. Theres more substance to your solution too but it has to be matched by commitment to participate and a vision of what it is to complete the strategy. Without flights on the back of an arrow its not a system for delivering energy, its just a stick

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Conscience as a notice board

Now were getting somewhere. I was trying to deconstruct the idea of a conscience so that I could think more clearly about how they go wrong. Ive known people to do extraordinarily damaging things because their conscience told them they really ought to. We dont question it so much. Freud or Jung, one of them, said that the conscious mind is just a system for carrying out what the unconscious mind really wants. But what if the contents of the unconscious mind, in the form of a conscience (the irony of names), is just a random list of stuff, backed up with childhood imagery? What then? If its just this random stuff how would we know what our values should really be? If you challenge the whole nature of the world what do you put in its place? Full of hope, I looked up books on ethics when I was younger but they seemed to be starting in an entirely different and non-human dimension compared to these thoughts. The ethics books were like maths, undoubtedly useful but entirely dependent on variable contexts for their meaning.

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Everything you say to yourself is us

Hahahahha put this on a T shirt.

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Conscience as a simple system

I loved trying out lots of these without changing Decision to join in like it was always possible to control these systems with a little more applied thought and decision making. Also it makes for a nice sequence. One of the worlds greatest living artists, a fellow called Jamie Gregory (entirely unknown to the bustling population of the art world, because he lives happily in Wales and has somehow avoided fame), drew a great sequence of images years ago now. They started with a simple line drawing of a switch, this image was entitled switch. The next image was of the the world, roughly drawn with a small cable hanging from it and another switch image drawn there, The worlds switch was the title of this piece. This was followed in a similar fashion by, Gods switch Daves switch (I think, I may be making that one up, but it would be in his style.) A birds switch (He had a thing about birds.) and so on. The sequence terminated with a singe image entitled Button. From this building-up and changing of a sequence he was able to unfold a whole range of meanings from simply changing one thing. I loved it of course. Its no exaggeration to say that this entire work, the one you are reading here, has been delayed five years because of fears that I am simply plagiarizing Jamies amazing and unrecognised achievement. Five years having now past, I think I can get away with it, so long as nobody joins the dots...

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What is the deal with pain?

Is it this, is this how we feel pain in the broadest sense? Our nerves do this, define an image of our bodies and then report on the corruption of that image to give us a painful feeling, we do not like it. Emotionally this is also true, we feel pain when there is disruption to the image that we have invested our empathy in, be it an idea of family, a character in a story or a sense of our role. If this is the case, this would explain why change seems so profoundly hurty. If we could adapt the images that reside in our minds, would we be able to think about pain very differently? Or would it still hurt just as much and cause us to abandon this theory pretty quickly? The best meditation technique I ever found was in a book that was written to help people cope with constant physical pain. It emphasised noticing, without an agenda or a sense of what-was-before or what-was-to-come. Noticing alone would bring the end of pain, just as it had brought its beginning. Youve got to respect what the Buddhists have come up with there.

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Worries are about plans

This seems self evident at first but if you see worry as a subsection of planning it becomes a little bit easier to deal with. You can work out, for example, if your plan is to actually do something or if your plan is really to get to a reassuring milestone or event that would not really constitute a success in itself. This can be very liberating. Having painfully hiked up to a bit of reassurance and then discovered that you havent really delivered anything is really horrible, maybe we dont have to do that? There is always a sense that you could have a good worry about something. Its justification for itself is that it is part of your planning system and as such it is protecting you from disaster. I tend to try to turn that underlying motivation against itself to disarm the worry. Like, you say to yourself, this planning is actually loading me up with untimely considerations which will reduce my effectiveness when it is time to act. So, the only way to enhance the plans at this point is to stop worrying. So stop it please and let me think. This actually works pretty well for me.

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The conscience as a bodily organ

I really liked this, I was imagining it situated somewhere underneath a bit youve heard of, like an obscure gland. I like the idea that noticing could be a big part of its work, with a limited amount of adaptation, inertia is good. Dont change things until youve tested how it feels. Theres also a lot of specific non sections in this thing, non-want, non-fears etc. Theres some engineering principal about it being harder to get energy out of a system than it is to get energy into a system. I imagine these non organs have some serious work to do to discharge wants and fears that would cloud up the functioning of the conscience to the point where one would have a conscience attack? Suddenly prone in the street, begging people to beat you on the small of your back to restart your conscience before you get really callous and say, throw a hot cup of tea in someones face. (I have never done this.)

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The perfect conscience as a Whale

This is a non-nihilistic notion of resignation. What if the subconscious is capable of doing this and we just dont let it? That would be a relief. Probably not as easy as all that. But then, thats exactly the way we all miss out on the the obvious good stuff. With doubt-ridden little self-conscious thoughts like that. Shut up little fishy.

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Reassurance as a lighting strike

Pilot fish never shut up, ever. You can try to make them shut up and you just get them saying, Shut up, shut up, shut up. To themselves. Maybe they build up a need for reassurance that can only be discharged by a periodic resignation and connection with the unconscious mind. This also happens in cases of self-sabotage and hijacking of the rest of the brain by thoughts in rebellion. The unconscious mind both reassures and humbles the conscious mind with a simple wordless act which could be as powerful as a lightning strike. When assailed by temptations and terrors, Buddha simply touched the ground, a gesture which says a lot or nothing at all depending on how you engage with it, but it certainly debunks the narratives of desires and fears that are coming at you.

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Timelessness
The punctuationally majestic poet Edward Estlin Cummings described those without love as... Blind sands,at pitiless the mercy of time time time time time... This timelessness is the happy opposite of that. The Buddhists (I imagine them like street gang, always somewhere else, but threatening to appear whenever Im on their territory) say that when two enlightened souls meet they are like two hosts without a guest, able to share a great mutual abundance. (This is actually paraphrasing several bits of thought crammed together, it is, frankly, research so shoddy that it may in fact be an original notion.)

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Ideals as distant flights of birds

It was fellow diagramarian Edward De Bono who wrote that, though it is exceptionally useful to know which way is North, its not necessarily a good idea to live at the North Pole. Is this what ideals are like? Things that move in relative migratory patterns which might be good to follow but maybe not too far? Not sure we get anything absolute when I think about it that way, but then some things are so clearly obviously good or bad, maybe it just depends on shifting your perceptions. Physicists engaged in problems concerning Quantum theory certainly get different results depending on the way they measure something but Im not sure reducing anything to this sort of level is useful. Maybe we dont need fixed ideals, just people better-able to live in useful and healthy ways.

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Does thinking move?

I was interested in repetition, upward and downward cycles of thinking and how we get stuck. I think it started with a comparison between obsessive compulsive disorder, reassurance and feedback. I think feedback is overrated. Its extremely valuable of course, you cant really do much without it. But in itself, it doesnt necessarily create value and can be part of a downward cycle. The squeal you get when you put a microphone near the speakers is feedback too. But just as Im happily pounding away on that line of thinking I remember I was making a completely opposite polemic just yesterday. The thought was about feedback and absolute love. The idea was that absolute love could be something like what you might see when standing together between two mirrors. Mirrors, because, when in love, your happiness depends on the happiness of the Other. Two mirrors facing each other, because, when its mutual, the search for that happiness is both contained and infinitely reflected, all at once. You know it when you see it because when it is there you get a feeling of vastness. Time time time, indeed. And in those iterations of reflections there are the mystic patterns of fractals in the chaos. The secret is that love is alive. People of most faiths will tell you that, to them, it was never a secret.

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A graph of my journey home

This was made in response to the worst thing possible, as shown above, actually happening. The other way of expressing this was as a description of branching possibilities that one would need to relate parallel to each other, like this. I could have waited for the second bus and then attempted to overtake the version of me that would have set off walking. But then, if Id started walking, Id be racing slightly to keep ahead of the version of me that waited behind to get the bus. This sort of content does not lend itself to good wordsmithery. Theres also something here about contextual frames. The idea that the worst thing possible could be such a limited detriment is nice and a bit funny too.

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Biters
Whats the point of a shark? To set up a bit of creative tension? The basic function of our mind is to orchestrate survival. To predict and negate threats we need to make models them and, in so doing, take them inside of our systems. This is what the shark is for. Its not a bad thing in itself. Its a placeholder for warnings. This is great, but putting it in charge without any moderation isnt going to work out well.

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The Shark
The Buddhists, damn them, might suggest we should ignore the shark completely and work directly with the whale. Its an attractive idea. The empty mastery of the the simpleton genius is described sometimes as the ability to walk along the edge of a razor without being cut. If the sharks purpose is to protect us but it, in fact, deprives us of this extraordinary facility, cant we get rid of our sharks? Could fully integrating this knowledge generate a sort of shark suicide?

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The Pilot Fish

This is the image of the very worst things about immediacy. Its the primacy of the plan that you think is in-play right now. Not what your subconscious thinks is going on. The pilot fish thinks you can only do things if you stick to the plan. Like a stereotype of a cold war Russian General.

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The Whale
Does not explain itself

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Business plan
Jason Donovan once said, on TV last night, that achieving success wont bring you happiness, but achieving happiness can bring you success. Where did he get that from? Im going to Google it. Oh, I think it was him. I think it was actually Jason Donovan.

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Humility
So, so, so close to humiliation. Our Whales like to kick our sharks in the abdomen once in a while. Just to let them know they can change the game if they want. This can be nice but disturbing for a pilot fish, like an earthquake for their value system. However, struggle against it and youre only putting off the inevitable. Sometimes the entirely innocent are emotionally attacked but the very nature of there serenity gives the attack no purchase whatsoever. Whales simply arent afraid of sharks.

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Reassurance
We cling to our fears. Our fears keep us safe, we think. When were faced with the terrifying and incomprehensible we often focus on an interim fear that is easier to be afraid of. You often see people obsessing over an entirely inconsequential detail before a big event. Better the fears and the devils that you know than the ones you do not know... However, this can be annoying to our subconscious mind which sees the bigger picture and hasnt got time for fears, not really. Persist with a focus on reassurance and you might get a little bit of self-sabotage going on. How many times have you seen people unconsciously maneuvering to end up with the one thing they believed they were trying to avoid?

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Freuds brain
Im not saying any of these ideas are new. The Buddhists, always with the Buddhists, say that enlightenment is like freshly baked bread, the recipe is always the same but the work of the process is something which must be undertaken anew every day. So maybe this is just for me and youll actually have to come up with your own way of thinking about this before its any use to you.

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The way you treat yourself - the way you treat others
This works for me because the intent for the two lines is the same but theyve come out slightly differently from each other and maybe thats just because I cant ever reproduce one action exactly, or maybe its because the very act of copying something is different from doing someting spontaneously, which is the way the first one was done can you tell? The second one does look a bit forced to me, thats part of it too.

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Things that seem big - things that seem small

If you reversed the labels it still works depending on your point of view. Death seems very small and distant to the young sometimes or if youre watching a fiction. But of course Death can equally be seen as very big, inseparable from life etc. I like the idea that if you look down the terms in each category you can think of a context where its true in some way. Things are neutral, patterns give them meaning and that can be very subtle. A gift can be a weapon or a lifeline. Words can be something you pay to access or something someone would have to pay for you to read. The line is particularly blurry for ebooks, where some are very expensive and some are thinly disguised adverts.

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The pyramid of human needs

People have theories for everything. Again, these theories can just be meaningless stuff but if you can make use of them to change the pattern of your life then that can turn into real help. The pyramid of human needs is an idea that was going around to explain why people misbehaved or werent any good at getting jobs etc. The idea was that people couldnt proceed to live authentically - something the old Freud-Jung axis referred to as self-actualisation - until theyd got all the supporting blocks in place. In my experience I did not find this to be the case. I needed to explore things more widely before feeling like I could get things together and start living well. The pyramid needed a broader base. In Joseph Cambells study of comparative myths The Hero with a Thousand Faces he describes one of the ultimate goals of the Universal Hero figure as Freedom to live. My own theory is something like the idea that we are all driven towards mastery of the opposite of our natural gifts. Artists seek to produce work to order and to regulate their inspiration. Administrators ultimately seek elegant and trascendent solutions to problems. We cross and meet and shrug off people heading the other way sometimes.

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Self actualisation
The Buddhists, who I cant seem to keep in their box at all, have this saying that enlightenment comes from great faith and great doubt. Now at first, I was like, oh yeah thats all about the back and forth that you get when you try to sit and meditate about something. You go, ok, Im doing this, here I am, sitting around and is this going to work and make me feel happier? Hang on, I shouldnt be asking that question, thats not going to help me achieve the emptiness of enlightenment. But wait, stopping asking that question of myself is the whole point. Im there, Ive stopped pushing myself to encapsulate everything in words. Im free. Except for this narrative Im telling myself about what Im doing, damn, ok start again and try to shut that down too... just stop thinking... That sort of thing was what I thought they were talking about. But then I came across something else about self actualisation and integrity that really interested me. The great faith bit could actually be the faith not to raise these questions of self-doubt, instead of the faith needed to keep answering them. The great doubt could be something that you apply to the ideas that arise from the world, before you let it scare you into a round of worrying and looking for reassurance. Thats a little harder to explain but it has a lot to do with that moment when Buddah touches the ground and lets it Earth all the horror and temptation that is directed at him with a single gesture. Great faith in your right to be yourself, great doubt in the dead-end doubts of fear and desire.

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Diagrams can be silly

And they can make you think differently at the same time.

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Typical paradigm
We cant even see these any more. We learn the systems when were very young and now we already expect them to turn up for us to interact with. I wonder how many people have taken things too far and ended up doing something criminal or very unhappy because they were expecting an Are you sure confirmation to stop them.. Im not complaining about this. Im just saying.

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Where we all always are

Try not to think of an elephant If you immediately thought about something completely different and filled your mind with questions and details about that different thing to successfully keep your mind active, and if you never checked back to make sure you didnt think about the elephant after all. You won. But the prize is actually nothing. Which in a spiritual sense is incredibly valuable. I have a personal theory that the soul is not a thing but an absence of a thing. When you lose your soul, youve allowed something into that sacred space and once there the compass of your life always points to it. But maybe youre happier like that. But maybe youre very much not.

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Why do we think at all then

If thinking and the human condition is such a curse, what are we doing it for? Getting away from monsters is a great motivation. The unknown is a kind of monster in itself. And if we dont react to it, what else have we got? Maybe nothing that we can consciously access.

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Stuff about nothing

Another survivor from the Universal signs for... theme. Im not impressed with my own rendering of Olde Englshe here. But the laziness is definitely part of the work, emphasising how distant and impossible it is for us nowadays to think about geographic unknowns. Were sat-navd up. What happened to all these solar flares that were going to wipe that all out? Even then, wed still know that the world is just the world. A lot is talked about to do with the idea of wilderness. Mystics need a wilderness to walk into. If we cant have them geographically any more it might explain the flight of man into virtual realms. And the quirky delusions of those poor souls who are convinced were living in The Matrix. God, that was a good film though. A friend worked with someone who had changed their name to Neo from Neil on the basis of that movie. See image one in this book.

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Protest is easy - alternatives are harder

Doing nothing is even easier still, unfortunately. But disillusionment is hard, painful. So we cling to our illusions and buy stuff to shore them up. What are we going to do?

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Do the inconceivable
I actually corrected the spelling of this with my free cheap-o version of Photo-Shop. The authentic one reads Do the inconcievable. I used to think I was dyslexic as a child but now I think I was just a conscientious objector to forced premature articulation. There are several other spelling mistakes throughout this work which are also radical acts of protest. I am not fully sure where they are. But I stand by them.

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Sanity is a localised phenomenon

It is. So no need to push to understand everything. It could all invert itself in an instant. Like, what seems like a piece of art in one context actually isnt art at all in a relatively similar context, say, an advert for example. With reference to that specifically, I saw a man selling framed pictures in a town centre once, hawking at passers by to try to get them to buy large gilt frames filled with photographs of puzzled dalmatians and babies giggling at their out-of-shot mothers, he shouted; You know its art cause you LOVE it. and we were all quite relieved and happy.

Cachecope Bell 2012