What does it take to be well guided? One principle is this:
A good guidance system must be simple enough to be decisive, and complex enough to be careful.
Simplicity is required because attention is limited. The fewer decisions you have to make consciously, and the less time it takes to make them, the more well-marked your path. Conscious thinking slows down your response to your situation: its one advantage is that it allows you in the long run to improve your set of habits. Your investment of time and effort – in considering possible courses of action, and turning some of them into habits through actual or anticipated practice, to the point where they become ‘second nature’ – is repaid when your body can handle now-familiar situations on its own, leaving your conscious attention free for more significant things.
Consciousness is the narrow neck of the Klein bottle of mind. Passing through this bottleneck, intention becomes the experience of conscious will, perception becomes the experience of conscious awareness of the world, and the implicit model of the world becomes an explicit description. It is a bottleneck because working memory is so limited, attention so narrowly focused and conscious decision-making so slow that very little “content” flows through it – but its emergy is high in transformity.