A publicity campaign for my new book, Controlling Mental Chaos, started in August. These articles, published in the following magazines, are excerpts or expanded ideas found in the book. I hope you enjoy them. I also invite you to attend any of the local author events planned.
Controlling Mental Chaos:Harnessing the Power of the Creative Mind
Author Talk with Jaime A. Pineda
You are all invited to join me as I discuss the relationship between mind and brain. In my latest book, I show that anxiety and incessant thinking reflect uncontrolled creativity, and how, using time-tested techniques and our own mental “superpowers”, we can begin to recover our innate creative nature.
I will be giving more details, signing books, and answering questions at the following locations:
Mira Mesa Library 8405 New Salem St Sept 30 11 am
Barnes & Noble 810 W. Valley Pkwy Escondido Oct 14 2 pm
Coronado Library 640 Orange Ave Oct 17 7 pm
La Jolla Library 7555 Draper Ave Oct 28 3 pm
Warwick’s bookstore 7812 Girard Ave Nov 12 2:30 pm
Carmel Valley Library 3919 Townsgate Dr Nov 18 1 pm
Just wanted to let you know about the Wise Brain Bulletin which will be going out on August 7 and features my article: Your Amazing Original Mind. You can view a preview of the announcement going out here or if you would like to read and share the article with friends and others in your network, you can use this link: https://www.wisebrain.org/tools/wise-brain-bulletin/volume-17-4#your-amazing-original-mind.
According to polls, most Americans believe there is a mental health crisis afflicting society. They cite many factors for this calamity. Traditionally, the major sources of stress for a majority of adults have been personal finances, current and political events, and work stressors. Combine this with a rising sense of isolation, fear, and paranoia, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid/drug outbreak, the war in Ukraine, political upheavals, etc. These unrelenting social concerns exacerbate stressors such as feelings of disconnection to traditional psychosocial and spiritual sources of support. Politicians and malevolent troublemakers stir this stew of discomfort by manipulating valid emotions to weaponise fear in the name of political expediency. When fear becomes crushing, it adds a sense of no place to turn to for honest and wise counsel, as opposed to politicized rhetoric, something once provided by parents, clergy, and counselors. Homelessness and mental illnesses in children, teenagers, and adults are the inevitable results.
Imagine including in this powder-keg of emotions many guns, increased far right activity and racism, gender biases, brief attention spans, impulsiveness, and lack of emotional control. It isn’t difficult to predict the rapid rise in violence. This explosive stew of individual and social ills leads to despair, being on guard, hypersensitivity — issues typically associated with PTSD-associated disorders. We are, in fact, being traumatized by what seems like an out-of-control life. And unfortunately, only about 20% of us seek and receive mental health services. This reluctance to seek solutions for what is obviously overwhelming chaos is blamed on uncomfortable feelings talking to loved ones about issues and concerns about privacy, plus the stigma that still attaches to mental problems.
If there is an answer, it’s going to take a wholistic approach—and a concerted and common desire to solve the problem. People at the individual, community and societal level have to decide they have had enough, reached bottom, and sincerely desire to address the problem seriously. Social solutions require community and communication, assets currently in short supply. Thus, I want to focus more on what can happen at an individual level and what each of us can do to help.
It might be helpful to get a handle on the root of the crisis to consider what psychologists have known for a long time. In order to feel truly human and live fulfilled lives, we have to meet certain undeniable needs. A good starting point is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of those needs. Maslow argued for at least three major categories: physiological, socio-psychological, and spiritual. Physiological needs (food, shelter, etc.) make up the basement level of our being and must be met first to provide a stepping stone into higher levels of being. Spiritual needs (what he termed self-actualization) might be considered the apex of human nature. Between the two are the socio-psychological (social connections) needs.
From this humanistic perspective, we can imagine the number of factors mentioned previously, which underlie the mental health crisis we are experiencing, working to disconnect us from sources that nourish and promote well-being. Homelessness, malnourishment, alienation, loneliness, and lack of moral structure are conditions that exacerbate the decline in mental health because they produce severe disconnection and do not promote and provide our human needs. From an economic and socio-political perspective these problems appear solvable yet have proven to be intractable.
There is a different way of seeing this calamity and to ask, is there more to life than this? For those lost in the chaos, what I am about to say makes absolutely no sense. Because to appreciate this perspective, one must move outside of the storm. Imagine a raging thunderstorm, tornado, or hurricane. If you are inside, nothing else matters—it is all-encompassing, pervasive, unending. Yet, outside of the region or by taking a plane and flying above the clouds, you can see something different. Likewise, it is paradoxical yet possible to know that underneath the apparent madness of life there is a subtle presence, grace and stillness that can be quite beautiful. We all yearn to touch that. Its grace is available to anyone who dares and cares. And it begins by taming our uncontrolled mind.
This poem comes from the Hua Hu Ching of Lao Tzu, who 2500 years ago knew this truth/solution to our modern problems. He provides the answer (discover the harmony in your own being) in a clear and direct way, or at the very least, points you in the right direction.
Why scurry about looking for the truth?
It vibrates in every thing and every not-thing, right off the tip of your nose.
Can you be still and see it in the mountain? The pine tree? Yourself?
Don't imagine that you'll discover it by accumulating more knowledge.
Knowledge creates doubt, and doubt makes you ravenous for more knowledge.
You can't get full eating this way.
The wise person dines on something more subtle:
He eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed,
That all being flows from non-being,
That the describable world emanates from an indescribable source.
He finds this subtle truth inside his own self and becomes completely content.
So who can be still and watch the chess game of the world?
The foolish are always making impulsive moves,
but the wise know that victory and defeat are decided by something more subtle.
They see that something perfect exists before any move is made.
This subtle perfection deteriorates when artificial actions are taken,
So be content not to disturb the peace. Remain quiet.
Discover the harmony in your own being. Embrace it.
If you can do this, you will gain everything,
And the world will become healthy again.
If you can't, you will be lost in the shadows forever.
I heard the word Anthropocene for the first time recently in terms of the human impact on Earth systems and the way human presence is changing the planet. The perspective comes mainly from geologists and paleobiologists, but also anthropologists, archeologists, historians and social scientists. Basically, the argument is that human activity is now the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Indeed, “this has led to dynamic conditions in which Earth is operating under different boundary conditions than the epoch spanning the prior 11,700 years, which served as the cradle for advanced human societies under relatively stable environmental conditions.”
The implications are far-reaching for it suggests a change in Darwinian evolution, from one driven by “natural selection” to one driven by “anthropoid selection” or conscious evolution. Our presence on this planet has brought us to a clear tipping point in which environmental dynamics can change from those in which nature is the controlling principle to one in which humans are the driving force. The standard narrative at this critical junction is that we will tip over to a period of destruction, chaos, and the potential end to the human species. It is, I would argue, probably time for us to consider these dynamics from a religious and spiritual perspective to provide a more hopeful and balanced view.
Many of us drawn to the religious-spiritual sphere have felt a rising energetic change during the last several decades that we attribute to more and more people realizing their true nature as part of larger relational networks that include others, life, nature, and the cosmos. Until now, our disconnection from this great web of life has been the source of most of life’s pain, suffering, and struggles. As more people reach this new understanding and remember what we once knew, there is an increase in consciousness and in our responsibility to the planet. We notice the side benefits, including the larger numbers of people who try to do their part in recycling and cleaning up the environment, in helping others, and in turning the other cheek. The violence we see may obscure this gradual positive change, but this positivity is part of the predicted spiritual revolution that is to follow the Industrial and Information Age. Such a change coincides with a revolution in the science and understanding of the human mind. Indeed, many of us describe this period of change in spiritual terms as life becoming aware of itself. And like a toddler at this stage of development, we are making many mistakes, but we are learning quickly as well.
We find ourselves at a unique tipping point, the Anthropocene as increased awareness, in which we can either learn quickly to guide the dynamics in a positive direction or else usher in the catastrophe many predict. As I get ready to join a class of 2000 folks from all around the world, who for the next two years will focus their energies on being helpful to others by learning to be meditation teachers, I feel optimistic. My entire life, like those of many of my cohorts, has been about discovering the unity of being, the inherent divinity that we are, surrendering to the intelligence inherent in this unity, and wanting to help and inspire others. I am convinced that this small sample of the spiritual evolution is part of a larger conscious effort representing the gathering of life forces in the struggle to tip the balance in becoming conscious without destroying ourselves.
Some of you may react skeptically to this interpretation. Yet, this is not dissimilar to the message Jesus taught over 2,000 years ago. In John 14:10-12 of the New International Version of the Bible, he says, “The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.” In 1 Corinthians 3:16, Jesus goes further, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”
Richard Rohr, a Catholic priest for the past 50 years and bestselling author has commented that humanity was not ready for this revolutionary message 2,000 years ago, but maybe the time is now. The beauty of rediscovering that we are all part of something larger and wiser is that one can see this force at work in everything around, guiding us toward a unique moment of singularity. This is the conscious Anthropocene revolution.
Retirement came early for me in 2018 after a 30-year career in scientific research because of the limits I encountered following that approach. As I’ve written in my 2020 autobiography Piercing the Clouds, it became increasingly obvious that science could not provide me with answers to the burning, ultimate questions I had; questions about reality, consciousness, the mind, etc. (see My Unease with Science).
Trying to find answers, I convinced myself that knowledge could flow from other sources—such as first person or noetic experiences. Noetic means inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or implicit understanding. It is a way of knowing beyond our traditional senses. Scientists often deride this approach as subjective, religious, even mystical. Their reasoning is that it lacks verifiability since by definition only one person can access such knowledge. And verifiability is the sine qua non of science—otherwise, how can one trust the results? It was, therefore, with a tremendous apprehension that I left academia to pursue such alternative approaches.
Even as this new direction bears fruit, there have been moments in which I’ve questioned the sanity of my decision. I still lack confidence in my own insights, and original thoughts lack truthfulness and validity until someone else confirms them. Hence, it was with a great deal of surprise and relief that I read the latest version of The New Scientist magazine (Jan 2023). Its discussion of the limits of knowledge instantly crystallized the fuzzy thoughts I had that led to my retirement. The coverage validated my decision to leave and motivated me to compose this essay as a summary of the arguments. The intention is to give a clear description, while providing a grounding of support for others’ questioning of the matter.
The first major problem encountered in terms of the limits of knowledge is that, from a scientific perspective, we must first be able to identify, define, and quantify the object of study. This does not prevent its investigation, but makes the process difficult, if not impossible. Quantum mechanics shows that the underlying nature of reality is probabilistic and inherently unknowable. This implies there is a hard limit to our understanding of it. Hence, we know of a handful of subjects that even the laws of nature tell us we can never study scientifically. While such a list is not exhaustive, it gives a sense of where we cannot go:
The inside of a black hole
Going beyond the edges of the expanding universe
Knowledge of the quantum world
The origin of life
The inner workings of the human soul
Consciousness
The supernatural
Part of this limitation involves what scientists have termed “the limit of horizons.” Just like the horizon on a clear day represents a fundamental limit on how far we can see, imposed by the curvature of the earth, the origins of the universe and of life on earth are subject to a type of horizon. For about 300,000 years following the Big Bang, scientists theorize that the environment was so hot and dense that electrons, proton, neutrons, and even photons combined. Then, in what has been called “recombination” the universe cooled enough allowing charged particles to combine to form basic elements like hydrogen. This meant that photons, which have no charge, could no longer combine with other particles and were free to roam, allowing us the ability to “visualize” objects. For now, we cannot visualize the universe prior to recombination—a major constraint. Likewise, biologists can trace all species to a single organism. This last universal common ancestor (LUCA) gave root to all life on earth. Unfortunately, it’s the end of the trail since we cannot study what came before it. Thus, it represents a kind of horizon limiting scientific investigation of the origin of life.
Another major limitation to a scientific exploration is the complexity of nature, its objects, and their relationships. Weather prediction, understanding how a disease spreads, the way proteins fold, and how the brain works are so complex that we can only study tiny parts at a time. Super computers and artificial intelligence are approaches that have helped push the limits created by such complexity. At some point, however, these tools will “understand” but humans won’t—a limit we may have already crossed (see The Evolution of Multidimensionality).
A final limitation is that the tools we have to study nature and its complexities are inadequate. From language to describe the dynamics, to the mathematics that quantifies it, to logic and the science of the formal principles of reasoning, these either don’t exist or are insufficient. Mathematics, for example, has to make assumptions about reality—and its validity rests on such assumptions. Are we sure we are using the right assumptions? Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem states that if you have a consistent mathematical system (i.e., a set of axioms with no contradictions) in which you can do a certain amount of arithmetic, then there are statements in that system which are unprovable using only that system’s axioms. The mathematics is incomplete, and it is, therefore, impossible to prove everything. This problem reminds me of an Emily Dickinson poem on nature which asserts that, “Nature is what we know—Yet have no art to say—”
Given these and other limitations of science, what can overcome them? First is to recognize there are alternative paths to knowledge. Whether we focus on what we consider emotions or knowledge of the heart, action and selfless service, or faith, meditation, noetic, and religious experiences, what we learn from these alternative approaches is that we can indeed capture distinct aspects and dimensions of the same reality. These approaches provide access to unique forms of knowledge which may be indescribable, but an experience that we can still try to communicate to others.
We live in an exceedingly rich information culture. Indeed, the amount of information exceeds the capacity of our individual brains to process it by orders of magnitude. Not only is factual-based scientific information being collected at prodigious rates, but the amount of non-factual disinformation created by our culture matches its rate. Reality-based information and its imaginary counterpart are apparently not sufficient content providers, for we are now considering developing a metaverse—a universe of infinite made-up possibilities. While human imagination is a source of all these creative outbursts, problems occur when there are no boundaries to its unconstrained nature, no checks on counterfactual thinking, no testing to see whether ideas are true. When we think up stuff and assume it is real, it creates the singular psychological basis for human suffering. Humans have known this insight for thousands of years and yet we march on, like a devastating tsunami obliterating everything on its path or like lemmings on our way to our own destruction.
The driving energy behind this is a mind that lives in scarcity, that is constantly dissatisfied, always searching for more to fill a bottomless emptiness. It is this unfulfilled emptiness that makes us addicted to information, to the content of what our mind can experience. For, while we attend to this content, it prevents us from looking at the core of this emptiness. Such a possibility seems too frightening to consider and so we develop more and more content to distract us. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
Human attention comes in short supply, and when the information it consumes overwhelms it, there is nothing left to attend to our unfulfilled nature. The only antidote to this devastating tsunami of human experience is to become quieter and more intentional. A time of silence occurs when we stop furiously examining the content of our conscious mind. What we discover when we turn from noise to silence is that what we feared, the emptiness we felt, is not really the bogey man we envisioned, but a unique source of nourishment unlike anything ever experienced. We briefly touch what Christ called “the living water” or others refer to as the “I AM.” Silence is one of the few remaining ways we express a widespread, shared experience of sacredness.
The more we drink from this silent emptiness, this living water, the less dissatisfied we become, the less we are interested in the content of our consciousness. Instead, we become more interested in that which contains it all: consciousness itself. We lose our addiction to information, and at the very end of such a process, we identify with the silence itself, which, in fact, contains everything.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
What if mystics and spiritual masters are right about us being spiritual beings having a human experience? Is there anything in what we know about the brain and its development that may be more associated with such an idea than with the standard materialist explanation? I interpret a 2021 meta-analysis of brain connectivity by Edde and colleagues as evidence that we should not easily dismiss these types of alternative explanations.
A set of biological rules or algorithms govern brain connectivity changes during normal development, maturation, and aging and, forming and shaping the macroscopic architecture of the brain’s wiring network or connectome. The standard model, shown in the Figure below, predicts that as we develop prenatally and during the first few years, local neural connections form first, followed by more global connections. This initial growth occurs in parallel with synaptogenesis, where macroscopic connectome formation and transformation reflects an initial overgrowth and subsequent elimination of cortico-cortical fibers. For most of the middle period of development, we see a plateau in the process and a strengthening of these connections. As we reach old age, the prediction is that things reverse, with global connections losing strength and finally local connections being affected. This inversion of the developmental process during aging accords with the developmental models of neuroanatomy for which the latest matured regions are the first to deteriorate. The graph below illustrates this inverted U-function of brain connectivity during a lifetime.
Mostly, studies of the human connectome support this standard model. The quirk in Edde’s recent analysis is the unexpected observation that it is local networks that begin losing strength in aging, while global networks maintain or even increase. The implication is that we lose focused, specialized functions with aging, but maintain or strengthen global, integrative functions. If we are preparing for death, why would this be taking place?
For a potential explanation, let us turn to a simplified spiritual model of development that closely matches these new observations (see Figure below). Initially, an understanding of our true nature (the spiritual path) provides the insight that ego development, while natural, interferes with knowledge of who we really are. We gain insight that we form highly local and specialized functions early in order to protect our fragile sense of being. These processes strengthen during adolescence and early adulthood (ego development). Time and further insights (e.g., identifying exclusively with this ego) during middle age propel us to embark on a process described as ego-death or at least diminishment. We seek to undo the local and highly functional networks that arose during ego development. The outcome of this effort is a switch in perspective, which many term realization. This basically describes a switch from identification with ego-based processes to a sense of the larger unity of which we are part. Realization can occur at any time in development, but usually after some effort in reducing ego-based thinking. Realization means a major strengthening of the global networks associated with the unity experience. This is more in concert with the proposal that “in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition.”
Why do we have diminished memory function as we age? While clinical disorders such as dementia exacerbate this condition, the natural trend in aging is for a reduced capability. Why? Perhaps the materialist models are wrong and what we are seeing, as supported by Edde et al., is a reduction in localized functioning, while strengthening of the global unity functions. For me, this preparation to join this larger unity in death would seem like a better explanation for what is happening in aging. This is in contrast to the idea that “the networking changes likely result from the brain reorganizing itself to function as well as it can with dwindling resources and aging ‘hardware.’”
