For today’s purpose, a cartography of consciousness would designate the area in which ordinary thoughts appear as: The Temperamental Mind. An activity of the brain affected by one’s genetic disposition as much as is one’s digestion or aggression, and it is the same neural area in which is imprinted the plans for man’s second reality.
While this mapping is unique, common behavior readily observable in man, supports its premise. The brain is programmed to say that its consciousness and thinking, are separated from the rest of the body’s physiological activities, (or at least should and can be), and no amount of attempted dissuasion will cause a routinely wired brain to perceive it otherwise.
The Temperamental Mind is the only form of mind known to ordinary men. It comes with its own inherent proclivities and prejudicial characteristics, which consciousness no more realizes any more than would a born blind man that he is blind or purple. A person of acidic temperament will have both a stomach and mind to match, and the products of such a mind will perforce be caustic.
Men of angry temperament write angry books; those of timid disposition sing songs of timidity, and the ordinary thoughts for which all men are a medium are directly colored by their innate temperament, Thus too is the second, cultural reality that man constructs from plans imprinted in his temperamental mind.
What the few who are interested in The Thing are never told, is that the Temperamental Mind cannot be altered. This function of everyone’s consciousness, which normally constitutes the entirety of their mental life, is as set and permanent as is your body type, insulin output, adrenal response, respiratory strength, thyroidal activity, and digestive quirks. Those armored with the idea of moving from a state of dreamy, distorted consciousness to one of awakening and clarity, are certainly disaffected with the consciousness they find in control when they once hear of another possibility.
J.