Inner Dialouge

"Inner Dialogue", Leo Plaw, 80x100cm, oil on canvas

As promised, I'm following up on my recent re-appearance on Steem, with one of my recent paintings. I'm normally working on smaller artworks as they consistently pay the bills, so for a larger work like this, I had to schedule in time.

I'm guessing most of you will be thinking, "yes, yes, studio practice, bla bla... but what is it about?"

To answer this, some artworks end up with titles. Inner dialogue, refers to that "voice" or constant chatter of thoughts in our heads. There has been copious amounts written or discussed about this phenomenon, since, well I guess when it first started.

From my research, I have found the consensus is that it is byproduct of language. I started my life as monolingual, coming from one of those English speaking countries, where we assume no other language in life is ever necessary. Then later in my adult life I travelled and settled overseas in a non-English speaking country and started to learn the language. One day a curious thing happened. I started to think in the new language. When I discussed this with other multi-lingual people, I was informed that you know the language has really taken root when you dream in it.

While working on this painting, a curious question arose in my mind. But what of the thoughts of deaf people? The question was all the more curious to me, for during my schooling I had deaf friends, and I had never once stop to question if they too had a voice in their head when they thought.

So, in the wondrous age of internet searches, I found the answer. People who are born deaf will think and dream in the language they are taught, and that being usually sign. Some do also think in pictures.

It is therefore apparent that the form of our thinking is a social construct. This also has even greater weight, because language, being a corner stone of culture, also shapes our perception of reality.

Often in the West, we are plagued by the incessant chatter of our thoughts, especially those which loop. These are our habitual thoughts which are expressed as part of our personality. As we all know, there are "good" and "bad" habits. The lens through which this is usually judged, how beneficial such habits are, of course, dependent upon who is making the judgement, ourselves or others.

In the West, we have highly developed and trained this inner chatter and our society appears to prize it above all else. But increasing in this ever more complex world of ours, people are feeling overwhelmed by the constant tumult of thoughts that are generated from information overload. Thus people look for freedom from oppressive jailer of their mind and seek the freedom of a simplicity of being, through practices of the East - the taming of the monkey mind.

The perception of the East, that we in the West often have had, is one of serenity. The practices of the East, meditation, tantra, yoga are a topics of great depth and breadth in of themselves, which now fill the self-help shelves of bookshops and libraries worldwide, let alone the countless websites and blog posts that abound on the internet.

Thinking is a function of our ego. The Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, made a vast study of the topic and interestingly attempted to make cross-cultural comparisons the human psyche in an attempt to identify its universal structures. A conclusion he finally arrived at, was that no matter how hard we try, we can never completely extricate ourselves from the cultural biases we are born to, which as stated before, shape our thoughts and perceptions. He therefore cautioned that for some Westerners, immersion in Eastern practices may not be beneficial or even healthy for their well being.

One of the cornerstones of his later work, was the concept of the union of the irreconcilable opposites. The splinter parts of our psyche, those which we disavow, are those which have greatest control over us through, seemingly involuntary reactions, our subconscious. He arrived at the idea, that the only way we can make peace with the warring parts of ourselves was to integrate them into the whole, that we must first come to acknowledge and then accept, rather than amputate or suppress them. Only then do we have a chance of making balanced change for the well being of our lives.