The meeting place for science and spirituality
Hi everyone,
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.
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5.
The last two years are without question the most unusual years of the 21st century. With surprise, alarm, disorder, and panic as a backdrop, the ordinariness of life stands out. I want, therefore, to celebrate the normal rather than the above-normal. To that end, I want to recognize someone who didn’t just go above and beyond this last year, she also went below and beneath. By this I mean she kept and maintained normalcy in the day-to-day life during a very chaotic time. She is someone who in her normalcy provided a glimpse for why the human spirit will triumph in the end.
Like a large portion of working professionals, her employers required my wife Jane to switch to working from home. It was psychologically and practically a disruptive event. Yet, her only real complaint was that she was less productive at home because the wi-fi speed of our internet was slow. Gradually, however, she adjusted to the slower rhythm even though it produced longer times spent at “work.” After a few weeks, she appreciated the rewards of being home. These included things she could let go, such as the need to commute, to dress-up, to be punctual. It also included things she didn’t know she missed, such as the comfort of being home, taking a break, snacking, catching up on the news at any moment. The result was a gradual switch and change. She was still not as productive, but she was enjoying her routine much more.
My wife suffered health problems following a trip to Australia in 2018. She was, therefore, in a high-risk group for catching the coronavirus. Because of this we decided, from the start of the pandemic in March 2020, to have her avoid contact with people as much as possible. She stayed home and away from crowds, and did most of her social contact through phone and zoom. It fell to me to do the grocery shopping and other activities requiring leaving the house. She went along with little complaining, and once again transformed the normal and naturalness of her social life into a constricted and cartoonish version of it. As the months rolled by, it became clear this new life would be less temporary than we imagined. She adjusted and did not grow depressed or anxious. She turned to her faith to provide the strength to bear the negativity and transmute it into a hopeful future. Her adaptiveness was a show of strength that bolstered my spirit.
I want to recognize my wife, Jane, whom I love and admire, as someone who did the nearly impossible – maintain a normal life and a confident purpose these last two years of the pandemic. By doing so, she showcased the strength and resiliency in all of us. In a similar way, many of you persevered and now look forward to a more normal future. Likewise, the triumph of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris this year was a victory of the American spirit over the darkness that had descended over our country. While the dark clouds have not totally dissipated, it is easier to see the sunlight.
We have been through a lot during this pandemic, but there is clearly a human spirit that is indomitable. We must, above all, keep the optimistic flames going by celebrating every act of normalcy we can, along with acts of kindness and acts of love!
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.
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:
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?
Jujutsu is a Japanese martial art that originated as the “gentle art” of manipulating an opponent’s force against them rather than confronting it with one’s own force. In the world of politics, many in high office have become experts in the opposite form of this art – what I call “kirajutsu” or “killer art”. Another description of this ability is that politicians fall prey to the cleverness of their own argument. By trying to manipulate their opponents, they end up manipulating and deceiving themselves and the country. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but the art of benefitting oneself.
Like any good lawyer, politicians learn to argue both sides of an issue, using whatever small rationalization is necessary to buttress their argument and score points. It’s an excellent skill that provides insight into how someone else, say an opponent, views the same set of facts. That gives insight into the weakness of that opponent. But in developing such a skill, politicians forget the moral aspects of their arguments. Instead of living and speaking with both the head and heart, they shelve the heart. The useful skill then becomes a dangerous tool-it becomes kirajutsu. Thus, one year a politician can justify waiting to nominate a supreme court justice because there “are only 88 days to election” and we must “let the people decide.” Four years later, and with a straight face, he argues vehemently that we must nominate a Supreme Court justice even if it’s “only 40 days to election” because it’s “constitutional.” It is the finest of kirajutsu moves.
Like most intellectual martial arts, kirajutsu and the cleverness of the combatants become an intellectual game of superiority. What such blatant arrogance produces, however, is cynicism and reduction in trust from those observing these hijinks. Citizens are not stupid and see through the politician’s cleverness, and in the long term the toxicity of their game erodes our belief in democracy. Unfortunately for us, both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, practice kirajutsu because for them it’s about power, not about doing the right thing for the country. Their selfish desire to benefit themselves or their affiliates becomes an inexorable force. When such a game is only about power, the country loses in the long term.
The most severe effects are on trust and truth. Our trust toward leaders to tell the truth decays, assuming they ever told the truth. Kirajutsu makes truth a relative value, based on circumstances. While politicians fool themselves that they are concerned with pragmatic truth, their conscience, in a futile attempt, tells them otherwise. That there is a different truth, one that is durable, not a function of circumstances and changing desires. But their kirajutsu cleverness swamps their small inner voice. The touchstone to a truthful life evaporates amidst the weaknesses and temptations of their human nature.
How do we get out of this democracy-destroying political kirajutsu? How do politicians recover their ability and courage to do what is right? The only way out is for everyone to recognize the truth. We must recognize that we are all one and what hurts others hurts us. We must remember the importance of morality, of eternal truths, of the ones we learned in kindergarden. Additionally, we must recognize we are one nation which can only survive together, not apart. And that kirajutsu, while fun and temporarily satisfying, is tearing us apart.
It’s what I imagine the playwright Samuel Beckett’s characters felt. Or, better yet, what God feels, while waiting patiently for someone to arrive. Waiting for anyone to hear the message, as He makes the birds sing, flowers blossom, the rain fall, the neighbor smile and say hello, and in infinite ways reaches out. The response: muted, silent.
A few weeks ago, I started this blog. Finding content was not the problem. I tackled the coronavirus, our anxious monkey mind, and our predictive brain. I even tried poetry. The response: crickets. My heavenly answer to this: Be patient. My Trumpian reply: Ingrates!
I’ve learned that the biggest hurdle preventing my voice from being heard over the roar of the Internet is leading the crowd to the blog site. They call it getting eyeballs! I still don’t know how that happens. At the moment, getting eyeballs seems gruesome and magical. Although, I am learning about tags and categories and posting on social media, etc. In the meantime, I sit and wait for Godot.
When original mind, the mind we have at birth, is unencumbered and allowed to flourish, it becomes an active, adaptable, dynamic, inquisitive, and inventive powerhouse. Tragedy encumbers it, as it did for Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who suffered from locked-in syndrome, yet still overcame his circumstances. William James, founder of American Psychology, conceived of brain-mind as “endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity.” Plasticity or neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself because of experience. It means that seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, feeling, and thinking affects us by altering the wiring connecting sensory experiences to emotions and actions. As water takes the mold of the container we pour it into, a developing intellect takes the mold dictated by its surrounding. An environment rich with music, laughter, conversation, love, toys, and other people will produce a healthy, curious, energetic brain-mind. An impoverished situation where these elements are missing will not. Neuroplasticity means the brain develops and programs the skills it needs to adapt to the specific habitat, and experiences the loss of skills unnecessary for that habitat. This malleability and adaptability makes us different from computers, whose hardware is unchangeable.
We cultivate an unencumbered original mind by encouraging curiosity.
Be like a child. Encourage your curiosity about everything. Ask questions. Focus on a dilemma. Use your creative imagination to visualize the issue. Write the hunches, insights, instincts, answers to the queries your mind conjures up. Writing strengthens the connection to your intellect and intuition.
Try this exercise: As you go to work or to the store, pay attention and note new details you had not observed before. Try to see something new every day on the same route. Attend to the variety of colors, textures, forms you encounter.
The coronavirus pandemic is the extraordinary moment we are experiencing in 2020. As I listen to the news of the coronavirus or COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 there is anxiety and uncertainty in the air. The slow crawl of the coronavirus, from East to the West, is bringing countries and societies to their knees. Economies are grinding to a halt. The frenzied activities of humanity are slowing to a remarkable crawl. The microorganism is powerful enough to devastate the earth’s population, so we shelter in place and isolate ourselves, hoping it will pass by. Paradoxically, the possibility of devastation is offering us a gift – it has forced us to pause and reflect.
Is it a coincidence that amid human-caused climate change, the ultimate challenge facing the earth, we experience the explosion of a pandemic directed at the ones responsible for climate change? From a religious context, some might view it as God’s response, in the form of a plague, to save the Earth. The punishment released on mankind for forsaking their God recalls the flood of Noah. In the realm of science, the explanation is simpler but equally devastating. From that angle, the interpretation relies more on the notion we have crossed a threshold in the fine biological balance established with other species on the planet. Encroachment by humans on territories inhabited by bats, which carry potential for diseases for which we lack immunity, has opened a Pandora’s box. It is an occasion to reflect.
I wish and pray that we see this pandemic as an opportunity to reconsider and reevaluate what our human activity is imposing on our mother planet.
There are several reasons for starting a blog. First, as a scientist, I want to share ideas and observations as they relate to brain and mind. Second, I want to share my writing, which to date involves an autobiography, books of poetry, and a prescriptive nonfiction book on the anxious, monkey mind. Organizing my life on paper to complete the autobiography was satisfying, for the process allowed me to detect patterns in a life, which like all lives make a messy set of data points. Searching for patterns in this immense array of events is why I went into scientific research as a career. Second, as a teacher, I want to help others. I see in my writing an opportunity to share the personal, scientific, and spiritual lessons learned over a lifetime. I hope you enjoy these offerings.
I am Professor of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. I retired from academic work in 2018. For 28 years, I directed the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory where I explored the relationship between mind and brain. I am the author of many widely cited papers in animal and human cognitive and systems neuroscience. But I am more than an academic. I have been interested in spiritual matters for over twenty years and have been writing poetry for a good part of my life. Here is my greeting to the world:
May you be attuned to life. 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.
