No such thing as mental space
There is no such thing as mind, perceptions, thoughts and feelings are in the same physical material spaces as us.
For a long time, and much more after cancer, I've seen my embodied life, my experience of the places I spend time in and the people I'm close to, as less real than the space of my mind, which I’ve seen as a seperate realm, unified and complete in itself. I’ve understood embodied emotions and human contact as things which penetrate my mental life and not the other way around.
Post therapy and especially since Leo joined us, Im back in the room, back in my body. Now I experience my body, feeling contact with people I know and love in the physical spaces we share as the most important level of experience.
Im still interested in how thoughts feelings and memories can be present in this space, but Ive lost this heaven like belief in mind as a seperate dimension of reality.
In the early 20th c. Psychologists invented the subconscious, the hidden part of our mind (and ourselves), in a layer of mind sub (beneath) the awareness of the ego and scrutiny of the super ego. The subconscious was a singular unified space which reached from its boundary with the ego seemingly down to infinity. This is the place where our most libidinous, selfish and irrational thoughts were. I don't see the subconscious as a separate space, I believe subconscious thoughts and feelings permeate our bodies and the physical spaces we share.
It’s not a zone below but a multitude of invisible, unknowable thoughts, impulses and feelings, each following their own desires as they struggle and glide through and around us.
There is no such thing as mental space. Thoughts and feelings inhabit the same spaces we do, between the walls, furniture, tvs, bodies and phones and other things. Thoughts inhabit the spaces we are in day to day and the spaces we remember.