Reply to comment

Hope this isn't too incoherent in turn ...

My guess is that we don't need an "Observer" distinct from the I-function/story teller, that the key here is indeed to engage the I-function/story teller in the kind of "non-judgemental watching" from which comes "a certain degree of freedom to re-construct or abandon some of the elaborate secondary stories."

Could the "Observer" be distinct? Yes, of course. But I'm disinclined to go looking for something new/additional without some reason to think we need it to make sense of things and I think we can for the moment better use the phenomena at issue as incentive to better understand the cognitive unconscious/I function/story teller interplay. Along the same lines, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of "naked or primordial awareness" insofar as it implies a particular common place everyone can/should get to. My hunch, as per this exchange, is that one can enhance the ability to be non-judgemental about one's inputs from the cognitive unconscious (as well as from other people) but that's always a process of getting it less wrong (from wherever one starts) rather than a journey with a destination.

There are, of course, a lot of Zenish overtones in that thought, as well as in naked awareness (Suzuki Roshi writes about "beginner's mind" and, amusingly, likens it to that of a frog). And for that matter in the relative simplicity of a cognitive unconscious/I-function interaction (as opposed to more elaborated stories, including ones involving an "Observer" ... see my images of the bipartite brain (a cenote with a simple structure on top of it) in contrast to efforts to build more elaborate understandings (used and explained toward the end of The Art Historian and the Neurobiologist).

Yep, I think there are benefits in acquiring the observer skill for educators, as well as for students .... as well as for humans in general. But perhaps, as with all things, costs as well?