Tag: mind

The Mind’s “Thin Blue Line”

Posted on by japineda

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

William James

The thinnest of mental boundaries separates the darkest from the brightest thoughts. Our mind, it appears, can travel enormous moral distances in the blink of an eye within its imaginary space. From imagining murder or suicide to planning a wedding or feeding the baby. It’s a dizzying crisscrossing of thoughts that can occur nearly instantaneously without any impediment or remorse. Only when contemplating action or the outcome of these imaginary ideas do we encounter a moral universe. Within this thought-action universe where right and wrong exists, there is a metaphorical “thin blue line” separating order from disorder. It’s a mental safeguard that keeps us safe and sane in a dangerous and insane world.

One sign of sanity in crazy times is when the world becomes too wonderful to ignore. When the gauzy filter of bad, depressing, and sad news lifts and we see spread before us the bare awareness of what life really is. In those moments, life appears beautiful. What we need to realize is that life, through the filter of our mind, creates innumerable experiences we can tune into. But we have a choice of which experiences to attend.  We can, for example, overdose on CNN or FOX news. This creates a sense of doom and gloom given the constant barrage of current disasters taking place in the world or the political shenanigans of our leaders. Or we can change the sensory channel and walk outside to observe the variety of flowers, the blue radiant sky, and our smiling neighbors. We can indulge our appetite for porn to exhaustion, or pick up a Bible, the Tao Te Ching, and Bhagavad Gita and marvel at human wisdom. We can feel sorry for ourselves and fuel our anxiety and depression or reach out our hand to help those in greater need. These choices need not be black or white, there are shades. The amazing thing is that we have choices and each one produces a different mental experience.

Choice becomes harder to exercise when pleasure, pain, or other emotions overwhelm the rational self. We can even reach a point of no apparent alternative and no escape. In such a place, we feel closed off to other avenues and the only path seems to be to end our life. But even then, we have a choice. The choice is to let go of our sense of control and let something else, something greater than ourselves, take over. This is the ultimate choice, the thin blue line of the mind, and its greatest safeguard.

While the pressures of life can exacerbate our difficulties, the root of the problem is our anxious, fear-based, and uncontrollable mind, one centered on ego-based rumination.

When the mind dwells on problems through the viewpoint of past and future, it can get snagged in that mode. It then behaves as what the Buddha called the “monkey mind.” This mind causes confusion and helplessness when unmanaged. The solution, however, is not to get rid of it but to place its operation in the proper context. For the monkey mind is also the creative mind. Training and guiding the monkey mind back to a more natural and original state ignites creativity, allowing us to deal with the challenges of living in-the-moment. But this return to an original mind does not mean you gain something new, rather you lose something old. You lose the obsession with past and future. And when you lose this obsession, you experience flowing, problem-solving, present-moment creative living. And this realization, the crossing of this boundary, is the best indicator that whatever or whoever created us did so lovingly. For it wanted us to choose life over death. While many discover this thin blue line by accident or in desperation, it is always available, at any moment we choose.

Beyond Metaphors

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In my attempt to understand the mind beyond metaphors, I began exploring other alternatives in addition to science. One path led me into meditation and the spiritual realm. At some point in the 20 years of this exploration, the boundary between science and spirituality gave way. What became obvious at that point was that the thing I was searching for and trying to understand (mind, consciousness, God, Buddha-nature, enlightenment) was in fact the world I inhabited. I recognized my true nature in the life around me. And this new world stared at me as it had always been staring me in the face. This realization, as anyone who experiences it will tell you, is both funny (Is this a joke?) and infinitely “enlightening.”  Funny because it seems so obvious in retrospect. Infinitely enlightening because it is but the beginning of our real journey of discovery.

The most immediate change I experienced was a lessening in my need to achieve in terms of my career and professional goals. The self-evident purpose of my life wasn’t to achieve anything per se but to enjoy my beingness. Having studied to be a scientist, I had convinced myself that achievement drove my work. Accolades, grants, publications, and other aspects of research appeared to define the importance of who and what I was. Now, that discernment was reversed. I saw scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge and as having its own unique beauty without the need to make anything out of it. Everything else became secondary.

Along with this experience, I sensed a developing confidence.  I knew this realization was not a temporary state or another creation of the mind that would be soon forgotten. It was a real awakening to and appreciation of life. I developed a sensitivity to the “sacredness” of all things.   Sacredness in the sense of appreciating the beauty and uniqueness of everything, while appreciating their role in the larger unity of which I was part. Since that recognition, quiet moments and meditation have become my engagement and appreciation of this new sensibility. These changes in perspective and awareness do not mean I am no longer interested in doing my job, attend baseball games, make friends, or make love. Rather, it’s the motivation for doing these things that’s changed. The doing to achieve a goal is no longer important, just the doing is enough. Thus, an intrinsic joy in being human and doing normal things came to the forefront and was very satisfying. The experience reflected a natural flow, without the anxiety I had felt previously.

I also sense a paradox in all of this. The desire to know the unknown motivated my paths in both science and spirituality. But the closer I got to understanding the true nature of being, the self-centered motivation to know and to do faded and disappeared. Replaced instead by an intense desire to let whatever exists unfold without interference. Further, I learned to be content without having to do anything to garner such contentment. Since childhood, I have had an inner drive giving me the energy to excel and outdo others. It has motivated my desire to learn and explore science, but also facilitated my dissatisfaction, anxieties, discontent and fears. In my old skin, I felt guilty at not being productive. Following my realization, that driving energy still exists, but the sense of movement or needing to move and to do does not. I am calm, yet still motivated to learn and explore, but do not experience the anxieties and fears that accompanied my earlier life. I am not guilty resting. Instead, I am energized by rest and relaxation, by not-doing. As I write this I recognize how “normal” this all sounds, which is the whole point. Recognizing who we truly are, both the small swirl in the stream of consciousness and the stream itself, is as normal as normal gets.

Metaphors and Not Knowing

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To not know is an experience that feels like an impenetrable wall of silence. We rebel against it and invent tools, such as metaphors, to penetrate that silence. But, as useful as metaphors are, they are limiting. For one, they create boundaries where no such boundaries exist. Lakoff and Johnson, in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By argued that the metaphors we use for a thing dramatically constrain our freedom to think about it. If we touch the elephant’s snout, in the story about the blind men and the elephant, and think it is a snake, that concept will forever affect how we relate to it. Or to put it more scientifically, analogical thinking constrains hypothesis-making. Hence, the mind-metaphor of a container means we will tend to think of things either inside or outside the container mind. But that is an artificial distinction.

A more interesting relationship between mind and metaphor is the idea that mind, specifically thinking, or the intellect, or conceptualization, is the process of attempting to capture and understand the unknown. Metaphors are the essence of how we think and is so pervasive we aren’t really aware of doing it. As some psychologists have argued, “Figurative speech reflects how we actually experience much of our lives.” Mind is the meaning-making or metaphor-making process we engage in.

But even more interesting in the relationship between mind and metaphors is the question about the necessity for metaphorical thought.  Is there a different way of understanding an ineffable experience or an unobservable condition than by comparing it to something known? Does a metaphor truly increase our understanding or is it simply a way to increase our sociality, the ability to communicate with others?

My experience suggests that its more the latter than the former. Mind, on its own, is quite capable of experiencing the silence of the world, of not knowing, of actually knowing the unknowable, its beauty and terrifying aspects without language and intellectualization. But because we are social beings, we need to express these experiences in a transmittable and understandable way. Metaphors are necessary tools not for living but for sociality.

Fetters of the Mind

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I feel not like a thousand chains
Around me, only a few,
Enough to hide the fears,
Enough to hold the tears.
 
I feel oppressed unable to express
The cries of pain, in vain.
The more I struggle to be free,
The more enslaved I be.
 
What must I do, dear God?
For time seems running short.
The shallow breath-
Is it a sign of death?
 
The key lies not in trying to undo
The fetters of the mind.
To understand the whys isn’t enough;
It only makes the pain so much more tough.
 
It takes a silent moment
To instruct that prisons
Built by active mind
Are simply not
When mind serene
Becomes.

An Exploration of Brain and Mind

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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.