Thoughtcraft 1-9: The Master-Servant Relationship
All complex thought processes, and all efforts to achieve ends, involve multiple thought processes, in multiple modes, in master-servant relationships.
Visioning frequently brings the other modes of thought into its service. When a visionary idea begins to move from reverie toward purpose, an essential step is to bring new thought processes into the service of the idea. Thus when a visionary thought begins to harness the work of explanation, a step has been taken toward realization; an effort to work out how to present the vision to others has been started. At some point puzzle-solving thought will be brought into the service of the vision, as the thinker begins to work out how to resolve challenges to the idea’s realization.
Visioning is not the only mode that presses other modes into its service. Any mode of thought may be master over other modes. The likeliest master processes are visioning and maintenance, visioning because it so often leads to an effort toward realization, maintenance because it is essential for survival and because many maintenance activities require other modes of thought in order to be carried out.
For example, many physical maintenance tasks are of such complexity that conscious schemata are necessary in order to perform them. Even as simple an activity as brushing one’s teeth is done by many persons in a ritual manner, with a conscious inward recitation of the steps involved, the number of strokes in each area, and other details. In some (probably not all) persons, these recitations involve explanations: “we do this because…” Maintenance tasks frequently cross the line from simple remembering to puzzle-solving. For example, while eating is a simple activity, obtaining food is less so; when hunting and gathering are required, then puzzle-solving has become the servant of maintenance.
Frequently, visioning is also called upon as a servant even before puzzle-solving; the hunter who must puzzle-solve in order to find the prey may need to image the successful outcome in order to motivate and focus the puzzle-solving effort, and sometimes to recall the conditions under which success was achieved in the past.
Of most interest to us are those processes which are either ruled by visioning or which employ visioning as one of the “first servants hired,” so that visioning becomes a master over other processes. These are the processes whose over-motive is expansion rather than maintenance, which in a sense vie for territory.
Yet even when the over-motive is maintenance, once visioning has been employed and assumes a master role over other processes, the overall process is in a sense expansive. It aims at an alteration of outcome, which is another way of saying a claiming of territory.
When the route to food is simply remembered, although there will no doubt be a change in the world when the food is claimed and eaten, the eater has little or no sense of mastering or prevailing over the food such as inheres in actually puzzle-solving to obtain the food. This is clear in the case of hunting prey in the wild. But even in the simpler case of maze-running, the first learning of the maze is a puzzle-solving activity, and is expansive in that success results in a kind of ownership of the maze.