Attached is Chapter 3 of my new book. I am sincerely looking for your feedback to improve it. Anything from typos to whether more should be explained or something removed that doesn’t make sense would be appreciated. I am trying to have each chapter stand alone, so if you find yourself saying, “I wish I had read the previous chapter” please let me know what explanation is missing. If it’s too academic, esoteric, or worse do let me know that as well.
The best way to provide feedback is to download the Word file, edit it directly with tracking on, and return to me via email (jpineda@ucsd.edu). Thank you for your time and effort. Know that any and all your comments are highly appreciated.
One positive bit of news. Academic Press has expressed interest in publishing the book, although no contract yet. Wish me luck.
I am attaching Chapter 2 of my new book, The Good Monkey Mind, so that you can read and provide feedback. Whether it is finding typos or other grammatical errors, commenting on the graphics, or on the readability, it is all appreciated.
This is a particularly critical chapter since it develops the idea of how the monkey mind comes about. Please let me know if the argument is convincing or needs work.
Thanks to all those who have provided feedback on previous parts of the book. Remember that if your feedback is incorporated, you will be cited in the acknowledgment.
I am attaching Chapter 1 of my new book, The Good Monkey Mind, so that you can respond creatively and provide whatever feedback you deem appropriate.
I truly appreciate it.
In a previous commentary, I encouraged everyone to practice stillness during this new year and assured you that touching such stillness, even for the briefest moment, would help you gain a feeling of contentment. It would also likely lead you to want to continue practicing. Today, I want to describe how touching stillness affected me in a positive and creative way.
Stillness is the attitude I adopted that “life is perfect as it is” or more prosaically that “life is what it is.” Not perfect in an ideal or Platonic sense, but as the only outcome out of a set of possibilities given the history and circumstances of each moment. I accept this reality in a willing, loving manner, and doing so from moment to moment gives way to a stillness of mind. Accepting the reality of the moment does not mean I am resigned to what life brings. The mystery is that within this acceptance lies the enormous creativity of the universe to engage and provide solutions that lead to wise change.
Like any skill, practicing mind stillness requires effort. This means keeping the “perfection of life” top of mind, especially when negative things occur. As I continued the effort, it became less conscious and more automatic – until the openness and acceptance remained without conceptual mentation. One of the first things I noticed as my practice grew was how less emotionally reactive I became to the surrounding turmoil. My emotions did not disappear or become muted—I actually felt more. The difference consisted in my response to those feelings. I did not immediately become anxious, fearful, or lash out in anger. I had the space and time to consider the unfairness or sadness of the circumstances, to feel them, but then consider how I could do something about it.
More than anything, the practice of stillness produced a joy that was totally unexpected. This joy is a fullness, closer to contentment than to happiness, even as the world seems to be more and more chaotic. Again, it isn’t a defeatist or resigned attitude but a perspective that says, “ok, this is how it is, now, what can I do about it?” This viewpoint leads me to not only follow the masking and distancing recommendations but also to volunteer to take part in the Moderna vaccine trials or be a volunteer to vaccinate people. The outcome of the vaccine trials has proven it was the correct decision. Hence, the more I practice stillness, the stronger my confidence grows about the intuitions that arise, and the more faith I place on those intuitions. It is a positive feedforward, self-fulfilling, and satisfying process.
I have asked myself about this “faith,” which has echoes of an early religious upbringing. It is a kind of faith my skepticism as a neuroscientist had displaced. My increased openness to it is something that developed as I continued my stillness practice. I struggle with it, in the sense that I resist it, something I relate in my autobiography, Piercing the Cloud. In the end, however, I see using the scientific method and intuition as complementary strategies to know and engage the world. Both are powerful yet distinct ways to approach and know truth. At our best, our brain-mind accommodates and uses both strategies to respond to life creatively.
“… It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.”
Richard Rohr
In the above quote, Richard Rohr, American author, spiritual writer, and Franciscan friar, defines the psychological liminal state, a transitional state that can be potentially terrifying. Such a state has many similarities to the state of enlightenment. Enlightenment is defined in infinite ways. In some spiritual circles, enlightenment is the state of attaining spiritual knowledge or insight, in particular awareness of your true nature as part of the unity of life.
Joko Beck, an American Zen teacher, captured the unique nature of the enlightenment experience by describing it as walking on a knife’s edge. It’s a terrifying image, and as a spiritual liminal condition, one of potentiality, not the old nor yet the new, but a “cloud of unknowing.” A liminal condition, whether psychological or spiritual, is temporary and can terrify or be satisfying, depending on whether you learn to live with it. This recalls a quote from Dogen, founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan: “Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
The implication is that life is lived normally following an encounter with this spiritual liminal state-but with a difference. The answer is to learn to live with the cloud of unknowing, to love and trust it. When you wake up to such a reality, it becomes the only way to live a truly normal, satisfying and full life. Craig Hamilton, a contemporary American spiritual teacher, captures the difference in the before and after in this realization.
Hamilton has written that enlightenment is not a state of consciousness. It is not a thought. It is the intuitive realization of your true nature, that who you are is not this limited, separate self; or any of the thoughts and feelings that you previously identified as yourself. Awakening occurs as you realize that who you are at the deepest level is something much bigger and more profound than who you thought you were. It is the recognition of a kind of super consciousness, intelligence, love, being, and presence that is the foundation of reality itself.
This presence is already free, whole, and perfect. Who you are is this sacred dimension of reality that is beyond intellectual comprehension, yet somehow, you “know” it. It’s missing nothing, lacking nothing, and overflows with love, wisdom, power, and clarity. Enlightenment is not just the realization that God exists. It’s the realization that That is what you are. The thing you were always seeking and putting outside yourself is actually your true nature. This intuitive knowledge shatters every conscious and unconscious belief you’ve had in your own limitation. It destroys every sense of lack, of not being enough, of feeling there is somewhere else you need to get to. You realize that the whole thing is already here. This life is the spiritual liminal state of enlightenment that can terrify and be glorious at the same time. Enlightenment is the realization that I am That. Awakening to the essence that you and everything else is sacred is beyond measure and glorious beyond comprehension.
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” — Lao Tzu
This is the perfect question for anyone interested in spiritual growth as you begin a new year, especially after what the past year has brought: Should I learn to be and sit in stillness till something happens or should I beckon my creativity and do? It is the perfect question for new beginnings. No doubt that the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has brought much pain and suffering to the entire world. It has created an underlying anxiety prompting us to want what we had before the pandemic, namely, normalcy. You hanker for what you took for granted: the ability to be with family, friends, even strangers. You want to exercise your creative nature, which seems stagnant after a year of waiting. So, you ask, should I be or should I do as 2021 begins? As Lao Tzu, philosopher, author of the Tao Te Ching, and founder of philosophical Taoism noted many years ago, painful endings often disguise the opportunities for new starts and new growth.
To begin, although one cannot beckon the muse of creativity at will, you can certainly try. More often than not creativity and our ability to do shows up only when the ground of the mind is tilled and ready. The question, then, is really how you prepare this ground to allow for new, meaningful growth? Paradoxically, it requires stillness. Thus, the question is not a choice between doing and being but to first understand beingness and practice that and out of that practice arises the right doing. So, what does it mean to be still?
The stillness I am referring to is not related to physical action. It is not stopping of motor movement and motion. Instead, it is a psychological, and even more, a spiritual disposition. For those who meditate, it is a common experience to sit in meditation, a physical stillness, without really being still. It is the stillness of the mind that is important. So, you must really understand what a still mind means in order to practice it.
Mind stillness does not require stopping thought or thinking by suppressing or masking it. Were that even possible, it is certainly not recommended.
The stillness you are aiming for is an attitude, a perspective that you take. It is a way of evaluating information and circumstances that you experience. The perspective is that life is “perfect” as it is at every moment, and to accept that in a loving manner. Not perfect in an ideal or Platonic sense but as the only possibility given the history and circumstances of that moment. Accepting reality in this way is the basis for mind stillness. Life is what it is and cannot be otherwise. Thus, you need not lean right or left (meaning that if you accept that things could not possibly be anything else at that moment you don’t worry about alternatives). You are simply present to that reality and accept it fully. That is stillness.
Such an attitude can occur whether meditating or living the bustle and tussle of daily life. Spiritual teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle call it being present, in the moment, or in the now. I would agree and add that it means having situational awareness in every moment. It also means becoming aware of the stillness inherent in nature, from which you can learn. When you practice stillness, your actions flow in concert with your life, with nature, and that flow is the muse or creativity itself. Being and doing at this point are the same thing.
Having accepted the reality of the moment does not mean you are resigned to what life brings. It does not mean you do not try to change negative moments or circumstances. The mystery is that having accepted reality as it is, lovingly, causes the enormous creativity of the universe to engage and provide you solutions to wisely change what is negative, damaging, hurtful, inappropriate, and corrosive. It is a supremely intelligent, self-correcting system.
I encourage you to practice mind stillness in 2021. Adopt this new perspective, practice it, and if after a few weeks of dedicated practice, it does not feel positive or right then stop. I guarantee, however, that if you truly touch stillness, even briefly, you will not want to stop.
Greetings
May you be attuned to life
During this holiday season!
May you find it
In the silence and stillness
of your being.
There is no need to move,
For you are already there,
There is no need to create,
For it already exists,
There is no need to do,
Except for the joy of being.
Merry Christmas,
Happy Hanukkah,
Happy Holidays,
and
A Happy New Year!
Human thought at the beginning of history likely resembled a cauldron of ideas with little foundational grounding. These ideas were susceptible to change and control by external, unknown, and mysterious forces. In what we now call the Age of Faith (A.D. 325-1300), magical thinking, supernatural ideas, and religious beliefs found fertile soil in this intellectual turmoil.
Then, in what is considered the long 18th century (1685-1815) thinking became radically reoriented by a new-found skepticism and questioning of traditional authority. It led to an embrace of the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. This Enlightenment Era, known as the Age of Reason, was specific and somewhat definite in its self-understanding of what it meant to be “rational” and “modern.” For one, the term modern conveyed an understanding of “liberal” or “progressive” and linked with “reason” and “rationality.”
Enlightenment writers and thinkers had backgrounds in the sciences, and related scientific advancement to the overthrow of religion and traditional authority in favor of free speech and thought. Yet, a great philosopher of those times — Friedrich Nietzsche — suggested that intellectual prowess and true “rationality” involved a sense and quality of rhythm, deliberateness, restraint, balance, and proportionality. Rationality, he argued, is not a mere quantity or calculation, it is more like dance or music. He rejected the notion that there is any such thing as a ‘rational truth’ or a ‘universal morality.’ It was Nietzsche’s clarion call for a new and much-needed synthesis.
In the early 1900s a third radical change occurred in conceptual thinking that we now associate with postmodern thought. The 20th century exploded with novel ideas about concepts such as quantum mechanics, cubism, modern music, and Freudian psychology. These novel ideas challenged the accepted notions of space, time, motion, nature and natural law, history and social change, and the basis of human personality. By the middle of the 20th century, science had demolished the bedrock ideas that it itself had established. For one, science had initially set matter as the fundamental substrate in nature, as well as the idea that all elements, including consciousness, result from material interactions. But the same objective analysis investigating such realities questioned and shattered this foundation of materialism and of our basic identities.
In this postmodern world, scientists and intellectuals saw the negation of many Enlightenment or progressive virtues and values. The result was that many intellectuals imagined the main alternative to materialism as an absence or emptiness, or great void containing nothing. This absence or groundlessness conflicted with the existential longing for definition and individuation.
Before long, these attacks on foundational ideas of being produced individuals that Alan Watts described as “adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembled the Buddhist principle of the ‘Great Void.’” Furthermore, faced with such a possibility, the greatest wisdom of the West, its religious, philosophical, and scientific traditions, Watts argued, did not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a reality. To be nothing, immaterial, stand on nothing, and have no guidance on how to move forward can be psychologically disconcerting, paralyzing, and frightening. This is the postmodern sensibility.
At the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to be standing at another junction in which both faith and reason are being challenged. Although many attempts at synthesis have been put forth throughout history, including St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica and the recent Ludato Si of Pope Francis I, these arguments assume a synthesis that maintains the independence between faith and reason. This does not seem far-reaching enough.
From a perspective of unity, the nature of postmodern emptiness, absence, groundlessness, or void, or the battle between faith and reason, is much more sensible and positive. Emptiness in this viewpoint is not the absence of things, but a condition in which actions flow unimpeded and unobstructed by other actions. In such a universe, matter performs its own unencumbered role. This way, emptiness serves as foundational for matter to express itself in a natural and perfect way. If no emptiness condition existed, it might not be possible for the material world to exist and function. To understand and live within THIS perspective is to overcome the postmodern sensibility. It is to live a productive life in which one feels at home in groundless emptiness. And in which one feels no terror but a positive delight. This is the potential of the contemporary synthesis, of what Nietzsche’s called “true rationality.”
This is a very condensed essay about large themes. I welcome your thoughts.
The historian Warren Susman discusses the changing views of character in Culture As History. He argues that the transformation we are witnessing in today’s culture is one from a culture of character to a culture of personality. We might note the prominence and value of character in presidential elections prior to 2016. Then, character became less important and personality more central when Donald Trump ran for president. The evidence suggests such transformation is happening throughout society. I would argue, however, that whatever is happening is not changing the essential nature of the American character, only obscuring it.
Character is a complex and multidimensional attribute that it is difficult to define and discuss. It is something we are strong in, or good at, or have a great deal of it. Most adults aspire for “excellent character,” but our current culture rarely emphasizes it beyond our childhood and adolescent years. We tend to confuse character with personality. Yet, these are distinct concepts. Character reflects deep-seated identification with truthfulness, idealism, morality, and orientation towards life. Personality, on the other hand, defines responsiveness to external events, such as how we respond to others because of how they view us. We might, for example, consider ourselves fortunate because people admire that we are rich.
As someone born outside the U.S. and integrated into American society, I have a unique perspective that may differ from native-born citizens. As an adolescent, I grew up with the idea that the U.S. was the land of Oz, with emerald cities paved with gold, and opportunities around every corner. As an adult, I became more cynical about these things, yet could not ignore my journey, which has been mostly positive. What I realized is there exists an essential core in the American spirit that is strong. This despite the winds of apathy, ignorance, and radicalism that are making a culture of character into a culture of personality.
What is at the core of this spirit? It begins with an openness that many around the world find unique and endearing. Americans are seen as transparent and friendly. They smile all the time, say visitors, and even say hello as they pass you by on the street. It is a remarkable openness characterized by warmth, friendliness, and humor. It is one of the first things that strikes anyone coming from another culture or who has been overseas for a long time. This openness combines with a generosity of spirit that is the expected response of a sincere heart. How much and how often individuals give to charities and to those in need illustrates this big-heartedness. There is also a level of American volunteerism that has few parallels in the world. In the society, an infrastructure has evolved to help others that echoes this generosity. Aside from charitable and non-governmental organizations and innumerable private foundations, there are the governmental treasures such as the National Institute of Health. Government grants have been an invisible driver of American ingenuity, technology, and free enterprise.
In all the endeavors I have engaged in since coming to this country, getting an education, becoming a scientist and an entrepreneur, and starting a creative writing career, I have always found a wealth of support and encouragement. This has taken the form of scholarships, grants, advice, and guidance that comprise the helpful culture that surrounds me. This leads to the other characteristics I find unique in the American spirit. One is an adventuresome quality thatengenders entrepreneurial and give-it-a-go attitudes at once child-like and infectious. Adventuresome behavior is combined with a steely confidence of success, one that says, “I can do this.” Finally, there is an almost preternatural forward-thinking mentality that has given rise to new technologies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and a thousand other ventures that have revolutionized the future of humankind.
We need to encourage such inimitable character. If we do not cultivate it as an important aspect of our identity, we are in danger of losing its meaning and significance. Fortunately, the essence of this character is in the ambience of the culture. While obscured by personality and social craziness, it is the default attitude children learn. It is up to us to become vigilant and identify those things that obscure this essential treasure. Then, we just need to get out of the way and let it express itself.
Thanks for reading. I am open to criticism so please respond if you don’t agree or have additional ideas about essential qualities of the American spirit with which you identify. I would like to compile a more thorough list.
Whether we call it nondual awareness, unity, oceanic feeling, or universal love, we have inadvertently placed such an experience out of reach and available only to mystics, saints, and special others. However, as I have written previously, we are born with this unique sense of being only to apparently forget it as our ego and individuality develop. The dark curtain covering our oceanic feeling, or okeoagnosia (from the Gr. okeanos or ocean and agnosia), is, however, overcome through meditation, prayer, inquiry, falling in love, paying attention, or with drugs. It is remarkably recoverable.
The argument I want to make today is that the news is even better than that. If we think of recovery from okeagnosia as a path, then such a path starts from the awareness that we already have a unity experience. We have it moment-by-moment since it is intrinsic to our human nature. What is needed is to “increase” that sense of being. One can do this by focusing on particular aspects of it, such as enhancing our emotional presence (heart) and unifying it with our intellectual presence (mind) (An Enhanced Sensory Experience). In the end, we gauge progress by the regained sense of joy, love, wonder and curiosity.
The following describes a path of recognition, realization, and appreciation that may be cultivated:
Attend to how you see, hear, feel, and think of the external world. Whether you see it as full of independent things with which you interact in a distant, objective, cold, or analytic way or as close, intimate, and loving entities.
Realize that your experience of the world (objects, feelings) is the result of your brain’s activity. You are a co-creator of that world and partly responsible for what you experience.
Realize that you see the world as individual parts but also holistically.
Recognize your care for this external, holistic world because what happens out there affects you inside in small and big ways, especially what other people do. Begin to see this common ground.
Recognize that caring can extend not only to others like yourself, but to animals, plants and everything in between. See the common ground in all.
Realize that the feelings of caring for all of life takes on a sense of intimacy and closeness. The coldness gives way to love and compassion.
Recognize that unity reflects an intrinsic sense you have but forgotten.
Recognize that this experience of unity is possible in others as in yourself (Trusting Stillness).
Recognize that it reflects a non-separation, compassion, and love knowingness (Unencumbered Original Mind).
Realize that you experience unity when you participate in some activity in which you lose track of things, of time, of yourself, etc.
Appreciate that you experience unity when in love or during focused attention where your ego disappears in the presence of someone special (lover, wife, husband, children) or something that interests you to the exclusion of everything else.
Appreciate that as you move down this path of recognition and realization, life becomes more joyous, your curiosity increases, as does love and compassion toward others.
Appreciate that as you move down this path, you begin to feel a greater connection, less distance and more intimacy between you and the world.
Appreciate that outside and inside are the same. What appears to be outside is also inside. Figure and ground are just different aspects of the same thing. They define each other but are the same. No greater intimacy than this.
In the rest of the blog, I only want to address the first and most important assumption: That we already have a unity experience. Many will undoubtedly balk and argue that it is not so and are not convinced. This is because we all have different notions of what unity means. We may not agree but let’s start by trying to define a common starting point. At the most basic level, a unity experience means that our perception of the world isn’t a jumble mess of sights, sounds, and emotions, scrambled in such a way that what we experience does not make sense.
In his 1890 volume Principles of Psychology, William James, the founder of American psychology characterized a baby’s experience as such: “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Yet, developmental psychologists now know that James was decidedly wrong. Even at an early age, as we close and open our eyes, what we experience is not a scrambled set of sensations but a unified world that we understand and that makes sense.
Such an integrated, unified world has orderly physical laws that make prediction of events possible compared to a chaotic or random system. Because we live and are part of such a unified, orderly world, humans have evolved unique prediction algorithms to anticipate outcomes, understand the meaning of actions of others, etc. (Reducing Uncertainty in a Chaotic World and Our Predictive Brain).
Unified implies an experience of closeness, intimacy, and love. Each one of us comes into environments varying in love and acceptance. This can either extend our intrinsic unity experience or cause the dark curtain of okeagnosia to descend quickly. How thick that curtain is distorts and destroys our sense of unity. And it affects how we feel toward others and our environment. We become distant, cold, unemotional, fearful.
Now that you know, are you ready to step into the path of regaining the greatest gift you were born with, the jewel at the center of your being? Start by asking yourself, which sense did I display as a baby? What sense do I display now? How do I get from here to there?
Romain Rolland, French dramatist, novelist, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and all-around mystic coined the term “oceanic feeling.” He used it to describe a sensation of eternity and unity, a perception of being one with the external world. Rolland studied Hindu Vedantic philosophy through the works of Swami Vivekananda and was likely familiar with the Vedantic notion of nondual awareness. Like nondual awareness, Rolland’s oceanic feeling describes an overwhelming experience of non-separation, compassion, and love. It is, for some, the ultimate unification of heart and mind.
A friend of Sigmund Freud’s, Rolland wrote him concerning his ideas about nondual awareness. He construed it as a deeper reflection of religious feelings than Freud had considered in his book, The Future of an Illusion (1927). Unfortunately, Freud could not identify with the feeling and viewed it in more psychoanalytic terms, as a vestige of an infant’s consciousness that had not yet differentiated itself from others. He described it as a sense we have at birth but lose very early on as we develop our egoic personality. In his next book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud appeared open to the possibility that a similar feeling could occur to someone who has fallen in love. In love, a person has a sense of ego-dissolution and merging with another.
Science, unfortunately, has failed to rigorously or systematically study this feeling of unity or nondual awareness. For most of us, identifying with it is difficult since it is the rarest of experiences associated with mysticism or love. Yet, a few people never lose the sense of connection to everything. Many others regain, recover, or re-experience it through the practice of meditation, doing inquiry, falling in love, or with drugs. The sense of unity resembles the experience of synesthesia (such as the ability to “hear” colors as sound or “see” sounds as colors) in that a small percentage of us experience synesthesia. But this transformative experience occurs under unusual circumstances, in autism or with LSD.
There is compelling evidence that nondual awareness is real and the perception of unity is recoverable. One can return to this original undifferentiated beingness, if not permanently then temporarily. Perhaps this is the implication of what Jesus meant in Matthew 18:1-5 when He said: “Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” During development we lose the ability to recognize this intrinsic unity experience. An agnosia (Gr. for lack of knowledge) develops to it. Agnosia refers to a rare condition involving one (or more) of the senses. For example, losing the ability to recognize objects through touch or what we call tactile agnosia, or inability to recognize faces or prosopagnosia. I call our inability to recognize nondual awareness okeagnosia (from the Gr. okeanos or ocean and agnosia).
One key characteristic of okeagnosia is the inability to create a general percept or understanding of the whole from the individual parts. In the 1995 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes a patient with prosopagnosia. This person can describe individual facial parts but is unable to recognize the person or even his own image in a mirror. Similarly, we experience the individual parts that make up our world but not the sense of how they are unified, as an ecosystem, a oneness. We now know that brain areas in the occipital-temporal stream of visual processing (or ventral stream) are associated with prosopagnosia. Specifically, the fusiform gyrus, in the temporal lobe, plays a crucial role in the ability to assemble together a recognizable “face.”
A logical hypothesis is that our capacity to sense unity is also located somewhere in the brain. Whether it involves a specific area like the fusiform gyrus, or a distributed network. The fact that unity isrecoverable through meditation, love, or drugs implies it is inactive temporarily, perhaps under active inhibition. Or, equally likely, disuse has weakened the functional connections and activity does not reach the threshold of awareness when the network is activated. Drugs potentiate such a response. While other explanations exist for okeagnosia, it begs the question of why science has dropped the ball on this most important of senses. The responsibility falls on each one of us to do what we can. For, recovering the brain area or circuit that provides a unitive experience foreshadows an unimaginable well-beingness that humanity can use. We are, in this moment in time, in dire need of recovering our intrinsic sense of non-separation, compassion, and love.
My next blog will describe the path to recovering our unity experience.
