Informing the Whole Committee
March 16, 2006
One of the strangest things about the mind is that it talks to itself. You’d think that if the mind were a single thing, it wouldn’t have to talk to itself. Everything it knows, it would know, without having to communicate. But the fact is there are a lot of different power centers or knowing centers here in the mind. It’s like a committee, and the different members have to send messages to one another. They have to inform one another of what’s going on. Sometimes one part of the mind will know something, and another part won’t know. Part of the reason for this is that we actually build walls inside the mind. In some cases the walls are necessary in order to function. When you’re paying attention to a particular task, you have to blot out everything not related to that task.