What if the mind is merely a stream flowing between the individual and the infinite?
There is something rather strange about being human.
We spend most of our lives looking outward.
At the world.
At our work.
At other people.
At our bank accounts.
At our phones.
And, occasionally, at ourselves.
But what exactly is this “self” we keep referring to?
Is it the body?
The brain?
Our memories?
Our personality?
Our beliefs?
Our conditioning?
Our soul?
Or is the self merely the temporary point at which something much larger interacts with the cosmos?
I have been thinking about this for a while.
And I recently created a graphic to help me think about it. A philosophical map, if you will. A way of putting several ancient and modern ideas next to each other and asking: Could they be describing different parts of the same mystery?
Here is the proposition. Imagine a human being standing at one end of a river. The river begins somewhere around the navel. It carries the contents of the mind. Some of those contents are visible to us. Some are not. Some are old. Some are inherited. Some are created by our experiences. Some seem to arrive before we have consciously decided anything. And within this stream sit what many traditions might call imprints. Karmic imprints… Conditioning… Memory… Tendencies… Habits… Patterns…
The river then flows outward. Eventually, it reaches an ocean. And that ocean is what I am calling: Universal Energy… Consciousness…
The easiest place to start is the brain.
We know that we have a brain. We know that the brain is involved in thought, perception, memory, decision-making, and a great deal more.
So in my map, the conscious mind sits around the brain. Not because consciousness literally lives in the brain in a neat little compartment. Rather, because this is the part of ourselves we most readily experience as “me thinking.”
I can think:
Should I write this article?
Should I call him?
Should I eat another piece of cake?
Should I meditate?
There is an apparent thinker making decisions. This is the territory of awareness, reflection and choice. Then things become more interesting.
What about the heart?
We routinely use the language of the heart to describe emotions.
We say:
“I felt it in my heart.”
“My heart wasn’t in it.”
“Follow your heart.”
Modern neuroscience does not locate a “subconscious mind” in the heart. And the term subconscious itself is imprecise. The American Psychological Association describes it as a popular term used for the unconscious or preconscious, and notes that psychologists generally avoid it because of that imprecision.
So why put the subconscious around the heart? Because I am using the heart symbolically.
Emotion… Memory… Feeling… Attachment… The things we know without necessarily reasoning them through. And then comes the territory that fascinates me most.
The gut.
Have you ever walked into a room and immediately thought:
“Something isn’t right here.“
“That person is familiar to me.”
You couldn’t explain why. Your brain hadn’t assembled the evidence. Yet something inside you had already voted. We call it a gut feeling.
My earlier writing on internal energy actually describes the navel/gut region as an “energy battery” and associates it with the intuitive sensing of people and environments. So, in my map, the unconscious mind sits at the navel.
Again, not as anatomy. As a function along the HPA Axis. The brain knows. The heart feels. The gut senses. And underneath all three may be something deeper still.
Then there is the Spirit
Look at the original graphic again. Behind the navel is a cloud. I called it Spirit. And inside that cloud is Soul.
Why?
Because I don’t think “soul” and “spirit” necessarily mean the same thing. Different traditions use the words differently, of course. And I’m not trying to settle that argument here. I am playing with a distinction.
Perhaps Spirit is the animating principle. And perhaps Soul is the reservoir of our individual potential and experience.
Think of a reservoir behind a dam. You cannot see everything that is stored there. But the river that leaves it carries something downstream.
What if our lives work similarly? What if experiences don’t simply disappear when the event is over? What if something remains?
A tendency. A reaction. A preference. A fear. A longing. A capacity. A pattern. A lesson.
Or, in the language of karma: an imprint.
Enter the mind-stream
This is where my idea starts becoming particularly interesting.
Buddhist thought has a concept commonly translated as mindstream: a continuity of mental experience rather than a permanent, unchanging self. The Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia describes mindstream as a continuum of awareness and discusses karmic imprints in terms of what is carried within that continuity.
Yogācāra Buddhism takes this further through the idea of ālaya-vijñāna, often translated as “storehouse consciousness.” The metaphor is powerful. A storehouse. Seeds. Impressions. Potentialities. Something is deposited. Something remains latent. Something may later become experience.
Now notice what happens when I put that beside the river metaphor. A river doesn’t merely carry water. It carries sediment. Bits of earth. Leaves. Pebbles. Organic material. Everything it encounters can potentially influence what it carries forward.
What if the mind does something similar? An experience happens. We respond. The response gets repeated. The repetition creates a tendency. The tendency influences the next response. And eventually we say: “That’s just who I am.”
Really?
Or is that simply what the river has accumulated?
Karmic imprints
The word karma often gets misunderstood. Karma is often reduced to: Do good things and good things happen to you. That’s a rather simplistic version.
In several Indian and Buddhist philosophical traditions, karma is more closely associated with action and its consequences, including the way actions condition future experience. The metaphor I find useful is a seed.
Plant a seed. The seed doesn’t immediately become a tree. But it has acquired a direction. Under the right conditions, it can germinate. Likewise, an experience can leave an imprint. And that imprint may influence what we notice, how we interpret, what we fear, what we desire and how we behave later.
Modern psychology gives us an interesting parallel. Habit research shows that repeated behavior in recurring contexts can become increasingly automatic. Neuroscience has linked habit formation to brain systems including the basal ganglia. So here’s the intriguing juxtaposition:
Ancient philosophy:
Impressions can condition future experience.
Modern psychology:
Repeated responses can become automatic and cue-dependent.
My hypothesis:
Perhaps both are looking at the same human phenomenon from different windows. I’m not saying they are identical. I’m saying the comparison is worth making.
I find it useful to think of these three consciousnesses as minds with layers of experience. The conscious layer is the ego, rather visible. The less-conscious layers influence us without necessarily announcing themselves. And the deeper layers may contain processes that we cannot directly observe at all.
Freud, Jung and the hidden mind
This isn’t new. Sigmund Freud famously brought the unconscious into the center of modern psychological thinking. Carl Jung took the idea into another direction with his concept of the collective unconscious. Jung’s proposition was provocative: Perhaps some structures of the psyche aren’t simply personal memories. Perhaps human beings inherit deeper archetypal patterns.
Now put that beside karma. And beside the Buddhist storehouse consciousness. And beside conditioning.
And suddenly we have an interesting question: How much of what I call “myself” was actually created by me?
My parents? My culture? My childhood? My evolutionary inheritance? My experiences? My repeated choices? My ancestors? My previous lives? Or something even deeper?
I don’t know. And that is precisely why I find the question interesting.
The Eastern traditions make the map even bigger
The West often starts with the individual and asks: How does the mind work?
Several Eastern traditions have historically asked a different question: What is the relationship between the individual and reality itself?
Vedanta gives us the famous relationship between Ātman and Brahman; the individual self and ultimate reality. The proposition, in some interpretations, is radical: What if the deepest self is not separate from ultimate reality?
Taoist thought gives us another vocabulary.
Qi.
Life energy. The animating flow. Chinese traditions developed elaborate systems for thinking about the relationship between body, breath, energy, and environment.
My own exploration of Qigong comes from this territory. I have written before about Qi, Ki and Prana as different traditional vocabularies for vital energy. Again, I am not claiming that Qi is scientifically proven to be a cosmic energy field. I am asking whether the metaphor helps us notice something about our experience.
And then there is the idea of Universal Consciousness. That takes us from psychology into philosophy.
Here the Western philosophical conversation becomes surprisingly interesting.
Panpsychism, for example, is the philosophical view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in nature. It is not the same as saying “the universe is God,” nor does it automatically imply a mystical Universal Consciousness. But it does challenge the assumption that consciousness must simply be an accidental by-product of sufficiently complicated matter.
And that creates an extraordinary possibility.
Maybe consciousness is something the brain produces.
Or perhaps the brain receives, shapes, or participates in consciousness.
Those are very different propositions.
I don’t know which is true. Neither, I suspect, should we pretend that we do. But the question itself is worth keeping alive.
From river to ocean
And now we arrive at the right side of my picture.
The ocean.
I have labelled it:
Universal Energy
and
Consciousness.
Why an ocean?
Because a river has an identity while it is a river. You can point to it. You can name it. You can photograph it. You can say: This is the Ganges. This is the Nile. This is the Amazon. But eventually every river meets something larger. And once it enters the ocean, where exactly does the river end? At what precise molecule? At what precise moment? There is no obvious line. e water has become part of something larger without ceasing to have been water.
Perhaps the human journey is like that.
Perhaps the individual self is a temporary expression of something universal.
Perhaps consciousness is the ocean.
And what we call “me” is a wave.
The wave is real.
But it is not separate from the ocean.
That is not neuroscience.
It is not a laboratory finding.
It is a philosophical proposition.
A very old one, in fact.
And one that keeps returning in different languages.
The strange role of the mind-stream
Now look at the whole picture. There is the individual. There is the soul. There is the mind-stream. There are karmic imprints. And there is universal consciousness. Notice something.
The mind-stream can be interpreted in two directions.
It carries the past into the present. And it carries the present into the future. That means the mind-stream is not merely a storage system. It is a transmission system.
What I repeatedly say, do, and be influences what I become. This is where RENEWALism enters the conversation.
My work has always been concerned with something very practical: If habits change the individual, and individuals change organizations, can changing individual habits ultimately change the world? That is essentially the premise behind RENEWALism.
So perhaps the river metaphor isn’t merely spiritual. It is practical. If I change what enters the stream… I change what the stream carries. If I change what the stream carries… I change how it returns. And if enough human beings do that? The collective river changes.
So here is my question to you.
What if the human being is not a closed system? What if the brain, heart, and gut are not separate command centers, but different windows into one extraordinarily complex field of experience? What if our memories, habits, conditioning and actions leave traces that influence the future?
What if the ancient idea of karmic imprints is pointing toward something modern psychology also observes: the past can shape automatic patterns in the present?
What if the Buddhist mindstream, the Vedantic relationship between self and ultimate reality, Taoist ideas of Qi, Jung’s unconscious, modern research into automaticity, and philosophical ideas such as panpsychism are not interchangeable theories, but different attempts to look at the same enormous elephant?
And what if the elephant is consciousness itself?
And there is a next question: If the stream is mine to influence, what am I putting into it today?
A few lenses through which I built this map
The graphic and this article deliberately juxtapose ideas from different traditions. They should not be read as saying these traditions agree with one another. They are intellectual lenses.
1. Freudian unconscious — the idea that significant mental processes can operate outside conscious awareness.
2. Jungian collective unconscious — the proposition that aspects of the psyche may be deeper than individual biography.
3. Yogācāra Buddhism — particularly ālaya-vijñāna, the “storehouse consciousness” associated with latent seeds/impressions.
4. Buddhist mindstream — continuity of mental experience without requiring a permanent, independent self.
5. Karma — action and consequence, including the idea that actions can leave tendencies or imprints.
6. Vedanta — especially the relationship between Ātman and Brahman, individual self and ultimate reality.
7. Taoist/Qigong traditions — Qi as vital energy and the relationship among body, breath, mind and environment.
8. Chakra traditions — symbolic maps connecting different aspects of human experience with locations in the subtle body.
9. Psychosynthesis — models that place ordinary personality within a larger hierarchy extending toward the higher self.
10. Macrocosm–microcosm traditions — the recurring philosophical intuition that the human being somehow mirrors or participates in the larger cosmos.
11. Kabbalistic Tree of Life — another elaborate attempt to map levels of reality and their relationships.
12. Panpsychism — the contemporary philosophical proposition that mentality may be fundamental and widespread rather than something that appears only in brains.
13. Habit science — modern research showing that repeated behavior can become automatic and cue-dependent.
14. Automaticity research — evidence that behavior can occur with limited conscious deliberation.
15. Dual-process approaches — the broad family of theories distinguishing more deliberate processes from faster, more automatic ones.
16. Body–Mind–Soul–Spirit models — philosophical diagrams that attempt to connect the human individual with energy and ultimate reality.
17. Universal Mind models — philosophical/spiritual models proposing that individual consciousness arises within or participates in a larger field.
18. Energy-body models — traditions that describe the human being as more than the physical body and include subtle energetic layers.
19. Aura traditions — the idea that living beings possess fields of energy or influence extending beyond their physical boundaries.
20. Kundalini traditions — models of consciousness and energy moving through the human body.
21. Storehouse/seeds metaphors — the idea that latent tendencies can remain dormant until conditions allow them to manifest.
22. River/stream metaphors — used across Buddhist and other contemplative traditions to describe continuity and change.
23. Ocean metaphors — used repeatedly in spiritual philosophy to describe the relationship between individual and universal consciousness.
24. Consciousness-as-field theories — philosophical attempts to understand whether consciousness might be more fundamental than individual minds.
25. RENEWALism — my own attempt to bring ancient wisdom into contemporary life through conscious habit change.
And that last one is important.
RENEWALism isn’t claiming to have solved the consciousness problem.
It only presents a modest proposition: Change the person. Change the habits. Change the culture. Change the world.
Perhaps the river begins much closer to home than we think.
Perhaps it begins with the next thought. The next breath. The next choice. The next habit. And perhaps every one of those tiny choices is, in some mysterious way, part of the larger stream.
Know the stream. Notice the impressions. Renew the habits. And keep looking toward the ocean.
