WillSpirit!

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ Love, Clarity, Balance, Peace, & Bliss ∞

A science, mental health and spirituality blog written by a physician.

Disclaimer
- Dear Visitors:
  Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.
- ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.

Does God Need Us?

In my view, most metaphysical ideas are valid, but none are completely true. I believe this applies to both materialist and spiritualist positions. Having been raised by a physicist to be an atheist, I grew up very skeptical. It wasn’t until age 42 that I began to seriously doubt this anti-religion of my upbringing. Even after experiencing a series of powerful spiritual openings in midlife, I remained resistant. A long program of reading about consciousness studies, psi research, peak experiences, personal transformation, etc., was required before I began to feel confident that the materialist philosophy I grew up believing is incomplete: It’s not wrong, but it’s not the whole story. In my opinion you can say the same about most spiritual systems: none are completely wrong (though some are probably more wrong than others).

The preceding disclaimer paragraph was intended to demonstrate my understanding that what follows is necessarily speculative. I’m not saying that God has any defined or particular form. For that matter, I can’t claim absolute certainty that there is a God. But for the following, let’s agree that some sort of universal consciousness (i.e., God) does exist.

In ordinary parlance, God is taken to be unknowable, powerful, and far beyond human scale. For instance, at times I have felt in touch with an awareness reverberating with the nearly infinite suffering and immeasurable joy of life. This contact was an achingly beautiful and almost unbearable experience.

At other times I’ve seen the impassive flow of creation as a clear and immediate unfolding, instant by instant. I understood the breaking wave of karma to be a dispassionate collapse of ever-narrowing potential determined by the flow of circumstances throughout all history and prehistory. This showed me a creative element that wasn’t a ‘God’ in the usual sense, but which bespoke a mute cosmic intelligence that seemed vast and aloof.

Get the picture? My glimpses of the Ultimate have usually revealed an inscrutable force: huge, potent, and incapable of human intimacy.

However, my first really remarkable spiritual experience actually started very small. It began as a tiny, hovering dot of crimson a short distance in front of my face. This miniscule presence exhibited apparent playfulness as it danced before my eyes momentarily. Then, without warning, it burst into a replay of the cosmic Big Bang that offered me an instantaneous and fleeting comprehension of the full sweep of time from the first incendiary moment until the present day, and the entire span of physical scale, from subatomic realms out to the furthest quasars. Because the explosive flow of visual experience and cosmic insight was so vast (and so saturated with love), the experience of it overwhelmed the dancing, provocative, dimensionless light that went before.

During a spiritual retreat this past weekend, I realized it was time to look back and explore the intimacy of that small light. I was in a Brahma Kumaris center, where their conception of deity sounds a lot like what appeared to me in 2000: a dimensionless light of pure consciousness. The first time I heard the BK sisters describe this picture of God, I was shocked to hear their words so clearly depict what appeared to me just before the mind-bending explosive moment eleven years ago. So on this recent retreat, I meditated on a God that can appear as a universe-spanning panorama, but also as a dimensionless point of light.

A tiny sparkle of God-light looks vulnerable and delicate, despite its vast store of wisdom and experience. It is something approachable, something closer to human scale than the grander conceptions of the Divine. It also reminds me of a powerful aspect of Christianity: the idea that God can suffer, too.

For what God that cared about its creation would not be wounded by seeing it unfold? And wouldn’t such a sensitive deity deserve our compassion and affection? It’s so much easier to understand how we might have something to offer the Divine when it appears so vulnerable and near.

We humans are at our best when we love others, but we usually work harder to find love than to offer it. So it is with religious feelings: we want a God to adore us, but it might be healthier for us to adore God. A deity that is small rather than vast is a deity that is easier to love.

Let’s end by giving atheists their due. Perhaps there is no God. But there is a bountiful and beautiful universe all around us. There are myriad intricate and vulnerable life forms that depend on humanity to preserve their homes and livelihoods. There is a gorgeous planet that provides what we need to live. Even if we don’t believe in a God that needs our affection, we can still realign our priorities to offer support rather than seek it. In doing so, we will earn the right to be called ‘humane.’

And who knows. We may also touch the heart of something divine.

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We Are All Mentally Ill

The movie, “I Am” was recommended to me several times before I decided to see it. For some reason I expected a typical New Age feel-good film, overly general and sparse on novel information or outlooks. But as you might guess since I’m writing about it, the film surprised me. One of its best features is film maker Tom Shadyac’s statement that his is a story about mental illness. Indeed, we see how he suffered a post-concussion depression that changed his life. But the psychiatric disorder Shadyac refers to is of a different sort. He points out that indigenous cultures look at people who hoard rather than share resources as mentally ill.

This makes sense. The biggest problem in the world today isn’t pollution, or warfare, or injustice, it’s greed. The insane hunger of the elite, who exploit and hoard on a vast scale, is the root of most other global difficulties.

This observation led me to rethink my notion of mental illness. Not just to accommodate the picture of greed as a disorder, but also to see the many other ways people stray from the path of sanity. Most of these deviations never find their way into psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Does the man who assumes he’s smarter than everyone else get diagnosed? Or the one who’s too closed off to hug? Does the woman who relentlessly drives her daughter to succeed out of a sense of unfulfilled potential get labeled as mentally unbalanced? Not usually. At times, we may all act in ways that cause others to feel put-down, unloved, or pressured. Is such behavior properly sane?

Maybe in the narrowest sense, but not in the largest. In the most expansive view, true sanity would imply equanimity, universal love, and generosity. It would require behavior that was consistently sustainable on a global scale and supportive on a local one. It would also be unattainable. It would be a goal to strive toward, with the recognition that we would often fall short.

To have a mind is to have a mental illness. There is no one who doesn’t suffer from delusions, insecurities, and unhealthy desires. Just because most of us can vice-grip the steering wheel and stay on society’s narrow road doesn’t mean we have sound minds. It just means we can fit in, for now.

A good indication that our definitions of mental illness need revision is the fact that many sages throughout history have been judged deranged. When those the culture ultimately recognizes as enlightened are initially seen as crazy, we know that our system for identifying soundness of mind needs improvement.

The good thing about my lifelong struggle with the more conventional mental illness of depression is that I now have few qualms about admitting my psychic frailties. But look how many people, clearly on the edge of one insanity or another, continue to insist on their rationality and rightness. Look how many justify their harmful actions in the face of bad effects.

I’m calling for humility. Let’s admit that it’s not easy to be human and sane. Let’s admit how hard it is to do the right thing all the time. Let’s admit the difficulty, and resolve to do better. We can accept our insanity, then work toward enlightenment.

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Symbiotic Spirit

One of my recent reads was Darwin’s Blind Spot, by Frank Ryan. Having studied biological sciences in college, graduate school, and medical school, it surprises me that a significant battle among evolutionary biologists completely escaped me until now. Although Ryan’s book held little factual information that was new to me, I learned that behind the scenes almost since the time of Darwin a philosophical struggle has roiled through evolutionary sciences. In brief, it pits those who emphasize individuality and competition against those more inclined to highlight interdependence and cooperation among organisms.

Why do I mention this conflict in a blog devoted to ‘Peace, Balance, and Clarity‘? Because the disagreement is emblematic of a much larger tension in modern society. On the one hand, we have those who value rugged individualism, unfettered markets, and aggressive exploitation of resources. On the other are those who build their lives around ego-denial, cooperative exchange, and conservation. It would be difficult for me to write this without making my own preferences obvious, so I’ll state openly that it seems excruciatingly clear to me that the era of raw competition in human culture must come to a close, to be replaced by an ethos of inter-reliance. Only then will we find anything like true peace in the world.

But it is also clear that many would disagree. Especially here in the United States, where freedom is defined in marketplace terms, the idea that humans could actually cooperate and trust one another beyond the ethic of tit-for-tat gets treated as naive and laughable. Whereas many countries have perfectly respectable socialist parties, in the USA socialism is a dirty word.

The naked hostility that market-indoctrinated scientists have expressed toward those biologists who dare to point out the massive interdependence and cooperation that underly evolution comes as no surprise in this culture. The question is, can this bias be changed?

Fortunately, Ryan’s book does not stand alone. Many other texts have been written with an eye toward enlightening people about the power and universality of symbiosis (a technical term which is variably defined, but loosely refers to unrelated species depending on one another for survival). I find it encouraging that the scientific mainstream is awakening to the limitations inherent in Darwin’s vision of evolution, wherein adaptation is postulated as solely due to unmitigated competition between organisms. It is a sign of positive change.

But doesn’t science stick to simple facts? Isn’t it a cool, rational enterprise that prizes open-mindedness? Not much more than any other human activity, it turns out. The great geniuses come in two broad categories. Some, like Einstein and Darwin, solve a discipline’s difficult problems after they’ve been building for some time. These are the fortunate ones, who achieve acclaim quickly. Others have a more difficult road, in that they solve problems that other scientists don’t even want to see. They take much longer to be recognized, and seldom achieve the Godlike status of the ones who rescue a field from acknowledged confusion.

And why wouldn’t scientists want to see certain facts? Often because they fly in the face of broader cultural values. In the case of cooperation as a prime mover in biology, it has long faced opposition because it directly contradicts capitalism’s claims of reflecting the order of nature. An evolutionary theory based on competition (survival of the fittest) works nicely to bolster the insistence by dominant marketeers that unchecked opportunism is the best foundation for society. Scientists depend on the ruling powers for funding and positions, and are therefore inclined to view reality in ways that support the competition ethic.

In contrast, a biological theory that demonstrates widespread cooperation in nature and demotes the value of strife as an agent of evolution undermines those who insist unregulated competition will somehow solve the world’s problems.

It probably looks like I’m getting off-track here. I implied this post would touch on spiritual issues, but I’m writing about political ones. It turns out that in this case the two are related. The universal teaching of spiritual systems is that we are interdependent and should treat each other accordingly. Until recently, cynics could point to the accepted theory of evolution as indicative of a natural order devoid of such ethos. Now that the tide is turning, it is becoming increasingly clear that the higher truths sages have espoused for ages are reflected in a deep and profound way in the structure of life itself.

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I’m Happy For You

Sympathetic joy is the term used in Buddhism to refer to the happiness we feel when others experience success. The precise opposite expression would be Schadenfreude, a German word that indicates pleasure at another’s failure. Most of us have probably felt both, and most of us recognize that the former is an elevated and noble sensation, while the latter is base. Sadly, unexamined human nature is more inclined toward schadenfreude than sympathetic joy.

The good news is that one can easily train the mind to abandon its selfish tendency to favor its own happiness over that of others. I’ve written lately about the value of sorrow, and I’ve tried to make clear that bereavement and disappointment are unavoidably painful, but can even so be experienced as beautiful. One reason grief carries such a rich seasoning of grace is that it is universal. We all know the pain of losing something or someone we love. This sense of shared experience can be the seed of sympathetic joy.

On a recent meditation retreat, I several times visited a shrine where visitors have placed mementos of the people and pets they’ve lost. The altar is adorned with images, poetry, dog collars, amulets, and other tokens of love and memory. Almost every time I stood before this sacred accumulation of sorrow, my eyes brimmed with tears. It’s not that I ever knew the young woman with lovely large eyes smiling from a faux-antique print, who died earlier this year at age 24. I never met Alex, whose snare drum rested with a poem written on it by someone he left behind. The perky Chihuahua in a photo next to its cedar box of ashes looked a bit like my own dog, Emily, but other than that had no connection to my life’s narrative. So why was I so sad?

I was mournful because the pain expressed by these sacred offerings is universal. It is the bereavement I know well from losing my thirty-seven-year-old mother in first grade. It is the complicated mourning I experienced when my alcoholic father died in 2003. It is the grief I remember from the time my Pomeranian was killed by a large dog on a beach in San Francisco at 6:00 in the morning. It is familiar and shared by us all. It is tragic, but it is also the kernel of life’s beauty.

By recognizing the universality of emotional experience, we can begin to cultivate sympathetic joy. We soon find that it’s not a grudging acceptance of another’s high spirits, but a kind of benign theft. We discover that the ecstasy felt by our fellows can be brought into our own heart. There is no loss to the other party, and a great gain in our own treasure.

On a hike a few days ago, I passed a young couple glowing with the pleasure of early love. The girl smiled broadly at the sight of a soaring red-tailed hawk, and her boyfriend’s face shone with the pride of an infatuated lover. I hate to admit that not long ago my reaction might have been envy. A man in his fifties knows that such passion will never again come his way. Even were he to initiate a new love affair in later life, and even if he took a mate three decades his junior, it would never recreate that joy of youth. But because of my recent meditation and work on expanding my heart, I felt nothing but absolute delight. I recognized that happiness is still exquisite, even if it’s not ‘mine’ in the narrow sense of the word. This couple’s good fortune was not only something I could appreciate from afar, it was actually pleasure that I intimately shared as a member of this grand human consciousness.

When we recognize the universality of life, loss, and love, we become larger beings. Our hearts swell to encompass so much more than our own little stories. We become vessels for the entire human drama, and we understand the eternal nature of life.

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The Tyranny of Self

In one of those strange and common coincidences, after completing the last post about altruism I came across someone else’s elegant discussion of the exact same issue. The late Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, published Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in 1993. They discuss altruism early on, and their take on the relevant principles of behavioral ecology is (not surprisingly) better informed than mine. To account for the widespread occurrence of apparent altruism, they invoke a diffusion of the instincts that support kin selection. In brief, they suggest that if there is a strong likelihood that neighbors share genes, then a blanket policy of helping out will tend to spread. Anyone interested would do well to read the book. It gives a nice history of the biology of the human race, and offers insightful observations about the possible sources of many Homo sapien characteristics.

But the roots of altruism are not as important as its effects. Regardless of why animals and people sometimes help one another, we can take comfort that the behavior occurs. If everyone acted with relentless selfishness, we would stand little chance of surviving the many crises we face as a species. Even though we are spoon fed a consumerist ethic that glorifies self-gratification, there are many people who devote themselves to the common good.

Having people ‘out there’ who like to help is a delightful thing. Even better is having an inner desire to help others. The last essay alluded to the fact that altruistic behavior makes people feel good. Every time we set selfish interests aside, and devote our energies to larger concerns, we grow wiser and more mature. The minute we quit focusing on our personal and constricting worries and problems, and start seeing the difficulties faced by others, we find that life is easier to bear. One sad fact about depression is that it encourages us to retract into ourselves and expend energy in fruitless battles against psychic demons. Unfortunately, dark moods and pessimistic attitudes get stronger the more we attend to them. It is far more healing to look outside and help others than it is to gaze inward in hopes of defeating our many internal enemies.

By adopting an altruistic attitude we gain by: 1) taking attention away from negative obsessions; 2) seeing our problems from a broader perspective; and 3) developing connections with other people. Let’s consider these in turn.

1) No one has ever cured an obsession by obsessing about it. The best way to escape negative cycles of thought and mood is to shift attention away from them. Although thinking differently about a tough situation can reduce pessimism, it is often better to not think about it at all. When we contemplate a potential loss, we should be careful not to exaggerate its likelihood, or overestimate its negative impact, or ignore our sources of support. But unless there is concrete action we can take right now, we will find the greatest relief by diverting our thoughts toward something else. And one of the most healing things to think about is how we can help another person.

2) As soon as we search for ways to help others, we awaken to the fact that suffering is widespread. Whatever our problems and fears, there are people who have greater difficulties and more to worry about. Seeing this, we recognize that much of the world shares our anxiety. We begin to feel gratitude for what is good in our lives, rather than anger and terror about what is—or might become—bad.

3) We also start to meet people who face similar problems. We find that by offering them support, we receive a measure of comfort in return. We enjoy richer connections with our fellow travelers on this lovely planet. The torment of isolation gives way to the treasure of community.

Aside from these concrete benefits, opening our arms to help others is a good way to escape being dominated and tormented by the egocentric parts of our minds.

Our biggest problem is not that we live in a difficult world. Our suffering does not come from outside. Our biggest challenge is overcoming the verbal and logical mind’s conviction that it is the most important object in the universe. Not only does the ego disregard the suffering of other people, it denies the value—and often the very existence—of older and wiser parts of the human brain. It insists on satisfying its endless hungers before it permits feelings of contentment. Since those appetites are rarely sated for more than a few moments at a time, the ego keeps us on an endless treadmill of striving and self-aggrandizement. The best gift of altruism is that it begins to free us from the clutches of this internal and miserable tyrant.

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The Nature of Altruism

Evolutionary biologists question whether there is any such thing as true altruism. The problem is that most, if not all, natural selection operates on the level of individual fitness. It is therefore difficult to see how genes for genuine self-sacrifice could survive the dispassionate fact that if you give up your resources (or life) for a stranger, you help someone else reproduce at the expense of your own chances to leave offspring. Any gene that promotes truly self-sacrificing behavior will tend to be eliminated due to diminished reproduction, unless it promotes self-sacrifice in the other guy. This seemingly bleak conclusion accounts for some of the uneasiness that the theory of natural selection provokes in religious circles. What happens to moral principles if altruism is an illusion?

Long ago, a girlfriend’s grandmother opened my eyes to a rather cold-hearted view of generosity. A Belgian aristocrat, she had ideas quite foreign to my liberal Californian values. She believed that even when people behave charitably, they primarily do it to make themselves feel better. These do-gooders only look selfless; in reality, they are self-righteous and self-congratulatory. She argued that empathy is merely disguised pity, and that generosity is nothing but a tool for ego-inflation.

Even though the concept of altruism faces these challenges, we cannot deny that it is one of the cornerstones of humane behavior. Must we discard the widespread belief that good people act selflessly, and conclude that in reproductive and/or emotional terms, those who appear to sacrifice themselves actually accrue net benefits?

In nature, one often sees what looks like altruism. The prairie dog that barks when a hawk flies overhead seems to risk its life for the sake of the group. The raptor will swoop down and catch that critter preferentially, will it not? But careful observations have shown that alarm calls improve the survival chances of the caller, not just the group. In those cases where reproductive fitness is genuinely sacrificed for the welfare of another animal, further examination typically reveals that the animals are relatives. A basic principle of natural selection is that individuals can often pass more of their genes on to the next generation by helping kin (who share those genes) than by pursuing personal survival. These behaviors do not count as strict altruism, since the end result is greater transmission of the responsible genes.

In the human world, true altruism is easier to find, although some examples that come first to mind don’t count. A mother running in front of a bus to push her child out of the way does not, in biological terms, perform a net sacrifice (she may very well ensure propagation of her genes by this rescue). A fireman running into a building is ‘only’ doing his job (albeit a dangerous and noble one). One can even discount the commonly reported battlefield heroics, because soldiers are indoctrinated to think of one another as (effectively) brothers. So saving a fellow combatant may represent activation of the genetically acquired tendency to support the survival of kin.

Despite these cold-hearted critiques, it seems safe to conclude that some examples of self-sacrifice are truly altruistic. They are not done to save kin (genetic or cultural), and are not done as part of paid employment. This does not close the door on the cynical attitude that charity is a way of puffing up the self, but I believe that argument is specious anyway. Everything we do, at all times, we do because on balance it seems like the correct response to the circumstance. Of course doing good things makes us feel good about ourselves; but that does not mean we aren’t genuinely concerned about the person we help. Jesus made a point of criticizing those who perform charity loudly, for show, and there are certainly times when people do ‘good works’ in order to garner attention and respect. But there are also many who are motivated by sincere kindness toward strangers.

But that isn’t my point. For the sake of argument, let’s presume that every act that looks altruistic is actually self-serving. Even if charitable acts are performed for selfish reasons, they still help. Better that people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, than never do the right thing at all. And how could it be a bad thing that a generous person benefits from helping someone out?

Regardless of its root cause, the fact that people (and even animals) sometimes put others before themselves is a beautiful feature of life. We should nurture selfless tendencies, even if they initially arose from selfish causes. Every spiritual system I’ve studied values helping others, and for good reason. Like humility, ego abandonment, and mental discipline, altruism promotes emotional wellness in both the giver and the receiver.

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WillSpirit!

Does God Need Us?

We Are All Mentally Ill

Symbiotic Spirit

I’m Happy For You

The Tyranny of Self

The Nature of Altruism

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