The fact is that the majority of our thoughts and actions are on autopilot. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Our habits, routines, impulses, and reactions carry us through our lives so we don’t have to stop and think about it every time we wipe our ass or start a car.
I’m not sure I understand the point of this post. The majority of our actions are not on autopilot, they are more or less planned out. Why did I decide to do that? Because I didn’t think about it. I think it’s important to note that while every choice we make, good or bad, we have a strong subconscious memory of it.
This is true. You may have made a choice to do something or not to do something, but there is a strong subconscious memory of it, which means we don’t even have to think about it. If you think, “I want to do this,” but you never have the chance to decide, you can be sure that you are not making any conscious choice. If you think you have the choice to do something, you will almost certainly make that choice.
The subconscious memory is what I’m talking about. It’s a form of “self-awareness” or “self-control.” As you may have guessed, this is the part of us that can make a conscious decision. We can control our actions, but only if we have control over our subconscious memory.
What is self-awareness? It’s probably the question at the center of this chapter.
That is how much we often make decisions based on our subconscious memory. Even if we are aware of our decision, we often don’t stop to think of all the ways it could have changed our lives and the choices we could have made if we had just stopped to think before we made the decision. I often find this to be true. I was in a meeting the other day and someone made a comment that I made that decision, and that I had to make a choice about it.
This was a decision I made, and I decided to make that choice. I’ve been thinking about the situation for the past three weeks and realized that I can’t go back. I’ve made that choice, and I’m just going to carry on as if I didn’t.
Geoffrey Okamoto is a legendary Japanese artist whose work has been shown on television and in movies. He is best known for his paintings of the ocean waves and is responsible for introducing the term “oceanic painting” to the art world. In 2007, his painting “Oceanic” won the prestigious Grand Prize in the Royal Academy’s “Great British Painters” competition. The winning piece is one of the most popular of Okamoto’s work.
I first encountered Okamoto’s work at the Venice Biennale in the fall of 2000. I was a little young to know of his work, but I was fascinated with the idea of seeing a world that I had always thought existed in my mind’s eye. The entire city of Venice had been reduced to a landscape, and I could see it as a painting in my mind’s eye.
The Venice Biennale is a massive art event in Italy that runs for ten days a year. There are thousands of artists working, and there are more people visiting the city than there are there any other day in the year. Each day there are thousands of artists, thousands of visitors, and thousands of pieces from the works of all over the world. It’s huge.
Comments