Been thinking about what it means to be as inner-life oriented as I am.

For one thing, I am positive it is the main caused for my legendary clueless and absentminded nature. On a deep cognitive level, my mind heavily, heavily prioritizes inner processes over outer awareness. Thus, even when interacting with reality, my mind tries to get away with the absolute minimum about of outer awareness needed, and sometimes it goes too far.

Thus, for instance, the three or four times in my life I have gotten into trouble for walking right past someone who knew me and not knowing it, or responding when they say my name. They understandably think I just snubbed them, when in reality (that pesky place) I was just too wrapped up in my well developed (overdeveloped?) inner world to notice anything except the sidewalk beneath my feet. I sincerely did not notice them.

I would never snub someone deliberately unless they really, REALLY pissed me off.

And most of those times, it was someone who only knew me through my parents, and I wouldn’t have recognized them even if I had been exercising a paranoid schizophrenic level of awareness.

But that’s a different issue.

So basically, the rule is that at any moment, no matter how it looks on the outside, my mind is much more busy with what is happening on the inside than what is happening on the outside.

And the thing is, I don’t have a choice in the matter. Maybe I did have the choice during some formative stage long passed, but I literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be me without all that inner noise. I bitch now and again about how it makes it hard to sleep or relax, but to be honest, if it wasn’t there, I would not know how to handle it. It would be eerily quiet.

There have been times when I have tried my hardest to stay in the here and now, but the second I am distracted (far too easy a thing to do), my mind returns to its default position.

I think this is why I have never been very coordinated and hence never good at gym class. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on what was going on, the inward tide pulled in the opposite direction and kept me from ever being sufficiently present in the world to make it work.

And of course, every time you try to interact with the real world and end up hurt and/or embarrassed, that reinforces the whole “inside the mind safe, outside the mind bad” message in your mind and you end up retreating even further into yourself.

This, you will recognize, is the exact opposite of the right way to react, and will only make the problem worse.

Thus I ended up as your typical clumsy, uncoordinated nerd. I walk through the world in a fog created by my mind to block my view of the outside world and thus remove the possibility of distracting stimuli taking precious mental CPU cycles away from all the ideas, emotions, thoughts, and processes of my inner life.

This is not without its advantages. Like I have said before, I can have many very deep trains of thought all operating at the same time, without any input from the conscious mind, who only finds out when the answer occurs to me in a wave of revelation.

Then that percentage of my brain capacity is released, and I feel a rush of release. And it feels amazingly good! Thus the process is validated and the search for the truth continues.

Inner concentration is also very good for creativity. So much of creativity requires the ability to listen to the world inside for the soft and subtle voice of inspiration, and obviously, us dreamy high interiority (love that word) types have a natural advantage in that sphere.

People of lower interiority can’t imagine how people like me live. They can’t imagine what it is that is going on in our minds that takes up so much of our mental bandwidth that it draws us out of reality. From their point of view, everything they do is conscious and deliberate and when they ask you “so what are you thinking about?” and you say “lots of things” or, worse, “everything… and nothing”, that’s a null register to them. They can’t comprehend it. To them, it sounds like you are deliberately giving them a vague nonanswer.

But it’s the truth. I have a lot going on in my mind all the time, but like an iceberg, most of it is underwater. Beneath my consciousness. So there can definitely be times when I am in one sense thinking about everything as my subconscious mind grinds away at the lifelong task of integrating everything I know into a single comprehensive world-view, but in order to aid this I have quieted my conscious mind almost completely, and thus I am in that sense thinking about nothing.

And I am lucky. I can articulate this truth. That’s because I am a highly verbal dreamer. In fact, it could be said that I interface with reality primary via words. That’s why I love intellectual conversation so much. It is exactly what I want (mental stimulation, connection to others) in a form that I can handle.

And with no tricky visual angle my poor eyes won’t be able to understand.

All this makes me return to the image of myself as leaving in a sprawling castle of ice, only getting news of the outside world via feeble signals that rarely penetrate the ice.

If it was not for things like the Internet and my friends, my worst nightmare might occur : me finally losing all touch with reality and thus totally at the mercy of my inner processes.

If only I could control that inward tide and make it do what I want, instead of being totally at its mercy. Then I would be able to clear my mind and find things in reality that are worth the trip out of the castle, and thus will give me experience where coming out lead to good and happy things.

Reality is full of wonderful things I’d enjoy, if only I set myself free.

I will talk to all you nice people against tomorrow.