The cliche, “if you stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything,” rings true. Our faculty for perception is a never ending river.
The stream of environmental stimuli such as typographic words or audible language is a ceaseless factor influencing consciousness.
Having deeply conditioned oneself towards an aim of some ideal value to be strived for preloads our subconscious to seek via filtering of input and resonant thoughts towards some end. This process is constantly operating, such as how in the film Inception, a dream is structured with an outline and is filled by the generations of our subconscious.
Identifying a future goal or desired state sets in motion the process to acquire relevant information and filter for such from the torrent of sensory data our physical organism perceived.
Consider how a driver on a long stretch of highway aims to travel in a straight path for a long period. It’s not so that they travel a truly linear path, but make hundreds of corrections alternating left and right to maintain the intended course.
Concepts such as the law of attraction, intentional manifestation, or wishful thinking, all have merit in their overlapping of true psychological processes. The uncertain territory, as Alan Watts has put forth, is that we don’t know where our decisions come from. The influencing factors are myriad, and attempting to reflect and describe the factors that led to particular behavior or decisions is largely subjective.
In the absence of a definitive target, what does our subconscious use to filter our environment? How does one create their own filter when presented with the ocean of reality? These questions arise from seemingly nowhere. This line of inquiry has muddied the waters of the mind of the writer. Perhaps some silence is in order.