When you inquire 'Who am I?' if you are honest, you'll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn't have an answer, so all of a sudden there is silence.
Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain
which scans the environment for any trouble making changes.
If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.
In order to explain why the ordinary Sadhus and Yogis take to tobacco and gānja [an intoxicant], I said that these cause stimulation of the physical brain. But these have reactions. And to stimulate the brain thus is not the proper process.
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
Sometimes it's very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it.