Even though I like to think of myself as a writer, my relationship with words feels conflicted. On the one hand, they’re fun to work with and they communicate ideas, but on the other they lead to big conflicts in society, relationships, and the human mind.

One problem is that language is unconstrained; you can say or think almost anything, whether it is helpful or not. Furthermore, a single object or event can be described in a multitude of ways, which invites disagreement. This leads to intense discord because we are programmed (either by evolution, society, or both) to take words very seriously. As people we attack our neighbors for saying ‘forbidden’ things, and we attack ourselves for thinking them.

Two essays back we discussed silence, which is key to resolving this language dilemma. The topic grew out of a quote a relative sent me, but it also tapped into concepts that I read recently in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2011) by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson. My understanding of that book, in turn, was aided by an older text about language evolution called The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon. And no doubt the influence of Eastern meditative traditions on the ‘Silence’ essay is obvious.

Citing these sources is my way of emphasizing that none of what I wrote was particularly original. In fact, it is quite likely that almost anything anyone writes about mental life has been presented before but with different phrasing. Go to any bookstore and in the self-help/psychology section you’ll find vast numbers of tomes that cover more or less the same material.

Granted, neuroscience reveals new mechanisms in the brain almost every day. But despite all the impressive research into brain physiology, we know little more about how to thrive as a thinking organism than was understood in the Buddha’s day. As I’ve argued in an earlier essay, when it comes to coping with the felt experience of being human, the sophisticated models of modern neuropsychology seldom improve on ancient wisdom. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, as articulated by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson, basically retools the timeless truth that the best way to grow as a person is to gain the skill of silencing, or at least doubting, the verbal mind.

On the other hand, it can be very fruitful to look at established wisdom in novel ways. Doing so solidifies knowledge as information gets reinforced by repetition and nuanced by the alternate viewpoints offered by different authors. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced as one word) elaborates a clinical method that guides people to the realm beyond words, where we can find greater stability and less ambiguity. The endpoint may be the same as the Buddha’s, but the path has been modernized.

My post about silence outlined the three consecutive benefits that I believe accrue as one works to achieve mental quiet. The ultimate goal for many meditators is the spacious emptiness that consciousness finds within stillness. But although this is certainly a powerful incentive for learning to dampen thought, the earlier stages offer important insight into the inadequacies of language.

Both ACT and Eastern philosophies teach that words are arbitrary and unsubstantial. Meditation can make this truth experientially obvious, but in fact it is easy to demonstrate with examples.

Imagine you’re at a party and you inform someone that you’ve had a headache for a couple of days. Your companion looks at you with brows furrowed and says, “that’s just what my sister said before they found the brain tumor!” If you’re a neurologist and fairly confident, this statement won’t trouble you much; you know that most headaches are not ominous. But if you tend to worry and your knowledge of medicine comes from online reading about the myriad illnesses that can kill, the string of words ending in “brain tumor” might spark a panicked obsession. And yet, even a hypochondriac could brush off the remark if the person speaking was known to be a habitual and mean-spirited liar. However, if a close friend confirmed that the liar’s sister actually did die of brain cancer, the potent sentence could propel you into your local clinic with demands for an MR scan.

See how the sentence shifts in meaning and import depending on who hears it, who utters it, what others say about the speaker, and so on? Context is decisive.

As another example consider this sentence: “Your dog looks dead.” If it’s spoken after your beloved pet gets struck by a minivan, the remark will sound devastating. If you hear it while your sweet, elderly dog rests on the hearth rug, you will likely feel annoyed. And if the comment follows your dropping a hot dog into the sand at a beach picnic, you’ll probably laugh. Yet even in these situations the speaker’s status will affect your interpretation. If a child pronounces your dog dead after the car accident you’ll be somewhat less alarmed than if a veterinarian does. And if your elderly neighbor with Alzheimer’s insults your pet sleeping by the fireplace, you’ll be more forgiving than if your sharp-tongued brother says the same words.

Today in a support group one of the members explained why she was feeling out of sorts. She spoke quite insightfully about how a painful situation affected her. Afterwards, she asked, “did that make any sense?” My reply was that yes, what she said sounded very reasonable. But I also added that she could have spoken in very different terms about the same situation, and she might still have sounded articulate and convincing.

Words are like this. Contradicting verbal statements can sound equally true in isolation. Meanings shift and change depending on context, speaker, listener, mood, history, prejudice, motivation, etc. Word strings cannot be relied upon as fixed determinants of reality (and yet they often are!). Two people can describe a single conversation in completely different ways, especially if they were arguing while it played out. What’s more, today’s “hell” can become tomorrow’s “heaven.” In fact, it happens all the time.

If language is this unconstrained and arbitrary during conversation, imagine how unreliable it is during mental self-talk, when words are generated continuously without any feedback or objective evaluation by others. No wonder we can drive ourselves insane.

Earlier, this essay highlighted the benefit of using different words to say the same thing. But I’ll end it by emphasizing the even greater value of not employing words at all. Just as re-phrasing helps learning, de-phrasing promotes wisdom.

That was the point of writing about silence. As long as we remain submerged in the murky swimming hole of words, we miss the fact that human life is meant to be lived on dry land. While lost in our fascinating but confining verbal turbulence, we miss the warm sunshine, the birds in the trees, and the children playing on the shore. We mistake both the medium and the message for reality. Most of all, we remain baffled by the unstable meaning, ominous implications, and contradictory concepts that come from words.

In the last essay I sketched the advantage of merging scientific with meditative currents of knowledge. This marriage of the experimental with the experiential provides the mental health world with a new paradigm, one that promises to finally solve many of the mind’s most troublesome afflictions.

Still, a few questions remain. First, given that meditative traditions have produced a vast and venerable literature backed by centuries of experience healing mental ills, can we be sure neuroscience adds anything useful? Although experimental work has greatly increased understanding, has it improved healing?

In an earlier essay I argued that neurobiology has offered lots of information about the brain, but little inspiration for the mind. Most of the practical suggestions that come from brain science sound like ancient prescriptions restated in the language of neurotransmitters and neural circuitry. They don’t offer new approaches as much as new ways of describing old ones.

Readers might argue that medications and other material interventions (like shock therapy) clearly differ from the methods of meditative traditions. Leaving aside the fact that Chinese and other holistic medical systems have long employed herbal preparations to settle mental derangement, we need to ask whether these material therapies are effective enough to be considered breakthroughs. I wouldn’t argue that they have no value, but even when they work well (and they often don’t) they merely mask symptoms. They don’t transform mental life or lead to deep insight. Add to this fact the awful side effects, withdrawal symptoms, financial cost, and corruption of our health care system by profit motives, and we can legitimately question whether scientifically derived treatments are a boon or a bust.

So I am not willing to concede much to the materialist perspective when it comes to these sorts of intervention. But the scientific view remains very valuable. First, it legitimizes ancient knowledge. Spiritual texts describe consciousness and its various expressions in deeply thoughtful terms, but they also contain mythologic and metaphoric language that troubles moderns. Empirical approaches validate the wisdom attained by yogis and restate it in objective language, which helps us accept the truth of it.

Furthermore, the neuroscience perspective gives us information unavailable to meditators. Two posts back I showed how the idea of competing circuitry can explain the unevenness of our behavior. Looked at in the right way, many experimental findings can be valuable in this way. For instance, we hear about mirror neurons, which fire in the brain when specific actions are performed either by the self or another person. That our systems contain such cells shows how tightly bound we are to one another. Yes, meditative practice suggests the same interconnection, but less verifiably.

Finally, although one goal of meditative practice is escape from affliction, another is insight. There is no doubt that brain research offers us profound information about who and what we are. The brain is by no means an entire personality, but it is a big part of one. By understanding our nervous systems, we understand ourselves.

When I am feeling down these days, I sometimes visualize my dense, twining circuitry busily churning out electrochemical signals within my skull. Pondering deeply on this view of my mind, I understand in a concrete way why yogis refer to the world as Maya, or illusion. There is undoubtedly something real outside our bodies, but what we experience within are scenes manufactured by billions of interconnected neurons. Does it make sense, knowing that, to believe that a particular emotion is catastrophic? How could one seriously contemplate suicide knowing aberrant neural circuitry to be the ultimate origin of suffering? Why should one feel afflicted at all?

In fact, with that understanding held in mind, any state at all can be viewed in a detached and admiring way. What a privilege to experience the workings of this marvelous living brain, this complex organic structure, while embraced by the whole of the biosphere. Appreciating our true situation allows us to dwell in the body with wise detachment, at once dispassionate and tender. Enlightenment is thus informed by both meditative explorations and experimental findings. We are privileged to have access to these two sources of understanding. Dare I say we are blessed?

This a science, mental health, and spirituality blog. It says so right in the site’s header, so it must be true. Yet before now I’ve never explicitly linked the three.

Science is an analytic system that describes the world on the basis of observation, theory, and experiment. Spirituality is also based on observing, theorizing, and testing. In the former case we use physical instruments to query the external, material world; in the latter we use meditation to explore the interior space of mind.

Science would claim that mind is purely explainable on the basis of matter; religion would disagree. But for the moment let’s accept the claim that mind is a product of matter, with the proviso that we consider the shadowy quantum realm in the equation. With that step, matter contains enough ‘magic’ to account for the experiences of mystics and saints. (This is a controversial point that I’ve addressed in this earlier post, among many others.)

With this as our basis, we now recognize two legitimate modes for investigating mental life. Science looks at mind from the outside, whereas meditation looks from within. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Although the book I mentioned last time (A Universe of Consciousness, by Edelman and Tononi), dismisses the introspective approach at the outset, this seems to me shortsighted. Fortunately, many other experts understand the value of combining interior exploration with exterior experimentation. The Dalai Lama regularly convenes gatherings of meditators and open-minded neuroscientists in order to dovetail the vast knowledge banks possessed by the two camps.

Last time I attributed the saltatory nature of personal growth to competing neural circuits. This shows how the scientific method can help us negotiate freedom from mental distress. But numerous other essays have drawn on my personal explorations of inner space through meditation. Mental health really does connect with both science and spirituality.

Why do I bother to write a whole post about this rather obvious fact? Because we are witnessing a revolution in mental health care that owes its genesis to the merging of the two realms. The best psychotherapists now stress the importance of spirituality, while the faithful increasingly turn to science to better understand human distress.

Our culture did not invent psychiatric turmoil; since the dawn of humanity people have endured pain and sorrow. And since all distress is experienced in the mind (even physical pain is mediated by the brain), all suffering can be considered a form of mental illness. The Buddha grappled with this dilemma twenty-five centuries ago, and Hindu sages worked on it even earlier. These traditions explain the workings of the mind in great detail, and also suggest how we can restructure mental processes to reduce psychic discomfort. Significantly, modern neuroscience shows layering within brain processes that is consistent with Eastern views, providing evidence that the two methods truly do investigate the same phenomena from different sides.

Combining interior knowledge with scientific understanding promises potent solutions for the pains of life. By merging science and spirituality, the mental health world is on the verge of decisively answering many psychiatric problems. My hope is that the historical antagonism between materialist and spiritualist views will not delay this welcome trend.

Not long ago a reader emailed me a narrative of her struggles with mood issues and painful events. What impressed me most was her eloquent capture of something I believe characteristic of maturation: inconsistent embodiment of wisdom.

As we gain insight and self-awareness, our behavior doesn’t always keep pace. We may know better than to criticize our spouse, but speak harshly anyway. We may understand how obsessing about a friend’s failure to acknowledge a gift undermines our serenity, and why true generosity makes no demands, but feel resentful even so.

These lapses alternate with times when we find it easy to forgive others and graciously give of our time and resources.

Readers can track the unevenness of growth by comparing my posts with one another. Scrolling through my archives, I see essays that celebrate realization mixed in with tracts that whine about fate. Some days I can view my life from the distant vantage of wise detachment, and other days I get lost in a muddle of mediocrity. It’s as if there are two brains in my head: one aimed at self-realization and the other at self-gratification.

This dynamic interplay between the higher and lower minds seems built into the metamorphic process. Granted, some people enjoy a single mystical experience and are forever changed, like Saint Paul on his way to Damascus. But the majority, I believe, achieve grace in fits and starts.

Zen Buddhism is comprised of two schools that differ on this point. One faction believes satori happens suddenly, jolting the practitioner into permanent enlightenment. The other expects realization to build more gradually, through long practice. Observing myself and others as we stumble toward maturity (no doubt a lesser attainment than satori) convinces me that most people climb in stepwise fashion, and at first with many backslides.

Ken Wilber distinguishes between state and stage. A person can have a profound state experience, a mystical awakening, that leaves him or her feeling radiant and enlightened for days. But sooner or later the system settles back to its habitual stage of development. Brief spontaneous elevation may accelerate personal growth by showing what’s possible, but seldom effects immediate, sustained improvement.

In my own case, I was locked in a self-centered and materialist frame of mind at age 41, when a series of breakthrough experiences transported me to an enlightened state of being. For a time I felt and acted like a happier and more generous person. But eventually I sank back into pessimistic selfishness. Only after years of contemplation and meditative practice did I grow more consistently alive to my better nature, and I still suffer many days of impoverished attitude.

I’m currently reading A Universe of Consciousness, by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulo Tononi. Edelman is a Nobel Laureate brain scientist, and the book summarizes contemporary theories about the neural mechanisms underlying mental life. He explains that the millions of circuits in the brain intertwine and feed into one another in complex and rapid cycles. Each pathway competes with its neighbors, and the ones that so-called “value” systems highlight get strengthened, while others fade away.

If we never question our thoughts and behaviors, they get rated by instinctive value systems that crave immediate gratification. We gravitate toward food, comfort, sex, and aggression. But if we intervene as thought unfolds, we can encourage healthy attitudes and discourage negative ones. We can deliberately build up maturity and wear down selfishness. This is the essence of neuroplasticity.

But make no mistake, this is life and death competition. The egocentric circuitry fights tooth and nail for its survival. It has no interest in fading quietly and would sooner destroy happiness than face dethronement. So when we are tired, distracted, or agitated, the old pathways seize the day and we act badly.

This is no cause for alarm. Many addiction experts believe that relapse is part of recovery. Occasional napping is part of awakening. At first, our eyes may only open briefly and under the most favorable circumstances. But as we work and grow, they stay open longer and in the face of greater adversity. Finally, the day comes when depression howls as loudly as mine did yesterday, but we stay alert and open to the experience. We don’t close our eyes or turn away. We don’t hurt ourselves or anyone else. We just settle into our deep core of serenity and enjoy the storm.

This pattern should be familiar to anyone who has mastered a skill of any sort. At first one executes clumsily, but as time goes on performance becomes better. And at first quality is uneven, but with practice consistency improves. When I learned oculoplastic surgery, my early cases were slower and less skillful than those that came later. And in between the beginning and expert phases passed an interval when some of my operations looked brilliant and others amateurish. Eventually, however, I acquired the ability to reliably perform procedures of high quality.

This is how we learn, whether to be surgeons, musicians, athletes, or yogis.

Duane Sherry, an online friend, frequent commentator, and creator of the valuable site Discover and Recover, alerted me to a discussion sparked by a comment of mine on another site. The blogger who wrote in response to my story calls himself 1 Boring Old Man, and is a psychiatrist who criticizes his field.

My contribution was nothing more than the saga regular readers here already know: after neck disease ended my surgical career, I suffered major mental health problems and then even worse difficulties caused by psychiatric drugs.

These days I don’t write so much about psychopharmaceuticals, their marketing, or their toxicity. But in the past these topics occupied many blog posts. Even so, I’ve never been much of an anti-psychiatry activist.

There are reasons for my low profile in this debate. For one thing, I’m more interested in highlighting tools that can help us safely achieve mental wellness than in dwelling on treatments that can’t. More important in the present context is the fact that justifiable anger about psychiatric drugs too often gets expressed as attacks on psychiatrists. Such contempt, bordering on hatred, sounds to me both unhealthy and unproductive. Some of the responses to the 1 Boring Old Man discussion remind me of this troubling trend.

Maybe such language bothers me because I’m a physician myself. Even though I no longer practice Western medicine (I administer acupuncture to alleviate emotional and physical pain), I spent many years among conventional doctors and learned to understand them. There is no denying they can be arrogant and insensitive, but most started their careers with the best of intentions and strong callings to help. Psychiatrists of my era were trained during a period of great optimism about brain science. Although it was relatively new at the time, the assumption that mental conditions were due to diseased nervous systems (as opposed to unconscious conflict or problematic upbringing) was unquestioned in residency programs. Drugs given for psychiatric problems often conferred dramatic short term benefit. When first administered (before the side effects accumulated), they looked like miracle cures.

And of course there was the tsunami of pharmaceutical marketing, which promised a revolution in mental health care based on what looked like impressive research. To give you a sense of the naivety common among doctors, take a closer look at my own case. When I started taking potent psychiatric drugs and was confronted with lengthy warning labels, I refused to read them. I assumed the medications wouldn’t be allowed to reach market if they weren’t proven effective and basically safe. It seems so stupid in retrospect, but my training instilled in me solid faith in the medical system. It was only as I became obese, mentally clouded, hormonally impaired, sexually dysfunctional, and diabetic that my trust began to waver.

These complications were happening in my own body, not someone else’s, so they hit home in a powerful way. To the average psychiatrist, watching patients develop such side effects may have been troubling, but rather easy to write off since the suffering wasn’t personal. Yes, doctors should have been more compassionate, but they believed the drugs essential to wellbeing. The accepted wisdom was that mental disorders were so awful that bodily deterioration represented a reasonable trade-off.

My goal here isn’t to make excuses, but to point out that psychiatrists are human like everyone else. They are just as susceptible to delusions as are their patients. Like all of us, they can easily blind themselves to what Al Gore would call inconvenient truths.

They should change. They must. But my goal is to help us all find reliable paths toward health. To promote better methods, we must publicize the fact that medications are dangerous and ultimately ineffective. But the people who most need to hear such information are the psychiatrists, and they won’t listen if they hear hatred.

Although to speak out and agitate for change is vital, accusing psychiatrists of being soulless monsters is both wrong and counterproductive. Doctors are far more likely to change if their critics look rational, open-minded, and kind than if they sound unreasonable and blinded by anger. If psychiatrists hear venomous attacks rather than reasonable appeals, they will simply harden their views. That is human nature.

The real monster in this story is capitalism. In my opinion it’s nearly always an evil, but it’s especially destructive when serving as the driving force behind health care. The inevitable result of developing psychiatric treatments with a market mentality is that profit becomes the over-riding value: not healing, not safety, not compassion, but the bottom line.

The capitalist system, the governments that serve it, and the health care systems developed by it, have been built by people but are not people. Let us direct our contempt at the structures directly responsible for harm, and then help those trapped and deluded by capitalist values and marketing learn the error of their ways. This means speaking the truth firmly and loudly, but also rationally and calmly. It means minimizing accusations about past behavior (although we must be clear about the historical facts that led to the current disaster in undermined mental health care), and concentrating on gathering support for future improvement.

Almost a dozen years ago, as neck problems caused the implosion of my surgical career, my moods spun out of control. From my earliest years I had been highly emotional, easily wounded and often upset. My temper would flare without warning, but I could also settle quickly into good cheer. My instability worsened under the stress of child abuse, and I suspect my stepmother enjoyed pushing me into emotional collapse–a sensitive child must be the perfect victim for a sadist. By reasons of genetics and trauma, I entered adulthood accustomed to rapid and dramatic shifts in feeling. But in 2000 my moodiness rose to new heights. My lows became lower and my highs higher.

I presented twice for hospitalization. The first time I sought confinement as I became frightened by my growing determination to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, frightened isn’t the right word, because I knew very little fear. The cold and collected way in which I was arranging my end dismayed me and led me to seek help. After two weeks the doctors discharged me from the first hospital, and I left feeling much happier. A bit too happy, in fact. The powerful new antidepressant worked quickly to elevate my mood, first into mild giddiness and then, five days after discharge, into full blown manic psychosis.

Psychosis was the technical term for the experience, and I suppose it describes well enough what the psychiatrists saw in me. But from my side, it felt like a series of the most profound and mind-expanding experiences imaginable. I heard angels, saw God, and met Jesus. A lifetime of habitual atheism evaporated. My entire perspective on the mystery and meaning of life was transformed.

But this post isn’t about that. It’s not about visionary experiences, the relationship between insanity and grace, or even the power of psychiatric medications. It’s about how quickly life’s value can seem to change. During that period of time, while all I’d worked for disintegrated, my attitude shifted so frequently that it must have been bewildering for my wife to watch. One day I’d be relieved to be free of the intense physical and emotional stress of being a surgeon. The next I’d despair at my bad luck in losing such a challenging and rewarding career.

I vacillated between feeling like the most worthless person on earth to believing myself blessed with knowledge known only to saints. I’d berate myself for myriad sins, then pride myself on my ability to see the heart of creation.

As all this went on, however, I wasn’t aware of my mind shifting very much at all. It was the world that seemed to change. It didn’t seem like my brain moved from its depressed state to its ecstatic one. Rather, the entire cosmos gyrated. One day it appeared to be hell and the next, heaven. One day the weather looked dismal, my future unfaceable, my past a disaster. The next everything glowed with preternatural radiance, my future looked limitless, and my past seemed like the perfect prelude to spiritual breakthrough.

Am I making this at all clear? Although I knew on some rational level that the problem resided in my nervous system, experientially the difficulty seemed to dwell in the outside world. It was as if the lenses through which I viewed the world changed from gray to rose when my mood flipped from low to high. I saw everything differently, but I felt like the same Will the whole time.

A similar process must explain why some people refuse to understand that they are in the throes of abnormal mentation. The person ranting at unseen tormenters believes himself in a hostile world; he doesn’t locate the problem in his own mind. When parents of young people suffering from schizophrenic conditions hear their children refuse to ‘admit’ their problems, they get frustrated and angry. But it isn’t stubbornness that makes this connection difficult. We simply cannot separate the world as it really is from the world as we experience it.

There is a deep point here about the human condition. Whatever it is that exists outside our brains, beyond our eyes, and past our skin, it is not the same thing we experience inside. We live in a reconstruction of the real world built from sensory input, memory, and conditioning. This is probably what the Hindus understood when they named the formed world Maya, or illusion. The cosmos may be real in material terms, but our experience of it is determined by far too many subjective and internal factors to be solid or reliable.

Consider this scene: two strangers sit on a wide, sandy beach on a warm day. They both feel the sunlight streaming onto their faces, and they both hear the surf’s watery heartbeat in equal measure. Imagine they both come from similar families and backgrounds. They don’t know each other, but they share like temperament and values. They are, in fact, nearly identical people. But just before sitting down, the person on the right learned that her beloved father died unexpectedly a few hours earlier. Do you think these two women are experiencing similar inner states? Everything surrounding them is the same, everything in their history is nearly so. But a potent bit of news has completely darkened the bereaved woman’s day. This time on the beach will ever live in her memory as a vertiginous epoch when her world felt upended, and a central pillar in her life gave way. The woman on the left may not think back on this beach scene at all.

This is the nature of human experience: wholly colored by interpretation and expectation; unfixed, unfixable, and and ever surprising. Catastrophe and delight waiting at every turn. Nothing reliable, everything mortal, and all beliefs vulnerable to contradiction. No wonder we go mad.

And no wonder the best path to sanity is to quit fighting. Only by letting the world have its way with us, by swimming with rather than against life’s currents, can we finally make progress toward stability. As an adolescent I spent much time bodysurfing off Southern California beaches. A lesson you learn early is to not fight a riptide, but let it take you where it will. Swim sideways to limit how far the current pulls you, but never confront the flow head-on. To do so is to invite exhaustion and possibly a watery death.

Life is exactly like those riptides, always tearing us away from what we thought was reliable ground. The gift of temporary insanity is that it teaches you that your mind determines the world, not the other way around. Sure, evolution, genetics, and upbringing may sculpt our inner processes, but after we are formed the internal shapes the external. This is why people get seduced by suicide. There is little thought given to the loved ones left behind. The mind is enthralled by the horrifying delusion that it can end a punishing world by ending itself; it thinks itself the Master of the Universe.

But no, the mind cannot destroy the cosmos, only the happiness of those nearby. But it can also, with proper motivation and instruction, reshape its own viewpoints so that life is finally understood to be magical, precious, and utterly mysterious, no matter what it brings. Our experience is an illusion, but it is one we create by our own thoughts and attitudes. Let us create a beautiful world. Let us be Masters of Mind.

In ancient times, spiritual vitality and mental health were considered identical. People did not conceive of a mind separate from the soul.

The kinds of behavior that now get referred to psychiatric wards were considered evidence of spiritual illness or demonic possession. When this system of belief functioned at its healthiest, the deeper value of the person was not questioned; it was instead assumed that mystical torment obscured a sufferer’s brighter lights.

However, in some case inflexible religious attitudes probably stigmatized many people that our society would try to view more compassionately. When such cases are considered, labeling someone ‘psychiatrically ill’ may seem preferable to declaring him or her to be in the clutch of demons.

On the other hand, the elevated states of consciousness that have informed saints and prophets throughout recorded history are now considered delusional, hallucinatory, and insane. So whereas traditional societies would honor those capable of expanded consciousness, conventional psychiatry has defined spiritual ecstasy as a disease.

Although our current philosophies of mind help us view those in chaotic states a bit more kindly, they undermine the sorts of spiritual realization that from time immemorial have rescued people from lives of torment.

While we don’t want to return to blaming mental distress on evil forces, we need to recognize the soul as a participant in mental health. We need to regain a sacred view of mental life in a way that demands compassion toward those in the grip of chaos. And we want to encourage mystical realization, not squelch it.

Modern psychology severed the connection between mind and soul because it rests on a materialist and supposedly scientific foundation that dismisses spiritual leanings as irrational and immature. This bias against mystical beliefs has led to a theory of humanity that embraces only solid, physical reality, and views the mind as a byproduct of molecular events in the brain. Sacredness has no place in such a model.

If the materialist picture of the mind were sufficient, we might see people responding better to medications. Unfortunately, patients commonly experience only transient improvement after starting antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs. Why? Because pharmaceuticals do little to affect the deeper self. Medications (sometimes) alter mood temperature, but they don’t increase our sense of purpose, or our ability to find meaning, or our maturity.

Better results obtain from treating the whole person and addressing the material, mental, and spiritual spheres. Western psychiatry and psychology provide medications for the material underpinnings of emotion and cognitive therapies for disordered thoughts of mind. However, they seldom address the soul or deeper self.

Many theorists from Freud onward promoted the view that only the ignorant and simple-minded resort to spiritual practice. They failed to understand the distinction between mature commitment to higher purpose and infantile belief in primitive mythology.

Fortunately, as I’ve said before, one can pursue spiritual growth without abandoning reason. All it takes is a willingness to believe life matters. We need to see ourselves as important agents in a world where right action is better than wrong, and where living beings deserve respect. We need to look for lessons in life and value the growth that comes from transcending problems. We must foster our better ethics and reject our culture’s acceptance of greed and selfishness as proper behavior.

Working toward these goals often leads one to humbly admit ignorance about the ultimate nature of reality. Rock-solid beliefs of less evolved states fall away and get replaced by awe and open-minded awareness. This is a common experience of those on paths toward profound mental wellness.

We need to question whether a psychiatric theory that rejects notions of soul and higher consciousness is truly healthy. Can a system based on a rigidly materialist view of the mind be called one of ‘mental health?’ Can a treatment model that denies humanistic elements that have felt central to people for eons be trusted to heal?

Luckily, the new paradigm I’ve applauded takes a broader and wiser view. Those moving toward this new system of psychiatric treatment know that soul must be recognized as a vital player in human life and encouraged accordingly. They see that labeling mental distress as a brain disease dehumanizes us all. They understand that drugs only mask pain; they seldom resolve it.

All humans require respect, compassion, and encouragement. These soul-values, and not drugs, must form the axis around which any system of true mental health revolves.

Does brain science help us? In times past, I never doubted it. Then, last week, I attended an all-day seminar about the neuroscience and clinical management of destructive habits. Afterwards, I found myself wondering how much our massive research into the brain’s activities is really benefitting human life.

The neurophysiology of addiction has been studied in depth, and the lecturer talked a lot about it. Dopamine secreting neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) send messages to the nucleus accumbens apprising it of opportunities in the environment. The accumbens integrates all of its inputs and either releases the basal ganglia (e.g., the striatum and substantia nigra) to indulge in a habitual action, or restrains them to abstain. Drugs of abuse, especially those that act directly on dopaminergic neurons (e.g., cocaine) are acutely habit forming because they trick the brain into thinking a tremendous payoff will result from their ingestion.

This brief sketch belies an enormous amount of investigative work. Countless scientists now study addiction, mental illness, and brain science in general. Pharmaceutical marketing and popular media have celebrated how this huge and costly investigative effort has yielded many advances for treating psychiatric disease, substance abuse, and neurologic problems. But has the clinical payoff really been that high?

At the seminar, when the presenter started speaking about the treatment of addiction, rather than the science of it, there was a shift in emphasis. Medium spiny neurons and dopamine physiology dropped out of the discussion. Instead, we heard how changing social groups is important, so addicts can find support for abstinence rather than peer pressure for addiction. We learned how alcoholics should clear their homes of booze. The speaker extolled healthy activities like exercise and yoga. She strongly endorsed mindfulness meditation to improve tolerance of uncomfortable emotional states.

Sure, there was a section on drugs that treat addiction, like naltrexone for alcoholism, buprenorphine for opiate dependence, and mecamylamine for nicotine cravings. But in each case we heard how the medications won’t work in isolation, and instead need to be part of larger programs of behavioral management. In other words, they aren’t miracle cures.

What are we to think when the brain science sounds so sophisticated, but the best treatments remain based on common sense (e.g., change social networks), or come from ancient wisdom traditions (e.g., meditate)? Can we conclude that brain science has resolved much mental distress? To me, it would seem premature to assert that neurophysiology has greatly helped us in day-to-day life.

I say this as someone who underwent cutting-edge psychiatric treatment for many years. A prominent Bay Area psychiatrist managed my mood issues with as many as six medications at a time. I seldom questioned her advice when she added another drug, or increased the dose of one that clearly wasn’t working. Only as side effects overwhelmed me and my productivity plummeted did I finally begin to question her strategy.

Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to realize that I’d be better off with meditation than medication. Now that I no longer use pharmaceutical support, I see that although drugs help in crisis situations, they often serve poorly as long term treatments. Don’t take my word for it. Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, shows clearly the many shortcomings of psychopharmaceuticals. Whether we speak of addiction management, or treatment of depression, or assisting schizophrenics, the sparkling promise of brain science remains largely unfulfilled in clinical terms.

Understand that I studied synaptic signal processing as a biophysics graduate student. In medical school I took most of my elective classes in neurology and neurosurgery. I’ve educated myself about the nervous system ever since. I’m well aware that neuroscientists have collected impressive quantities of information about the brain and its component parts. As an intellectual enterprise I continue to support this research. But we need to recognize that genuinely safe and effective treatments have not so far been forthcoming.

It frustrates me that despite this limitation, it has become difficult to say anything about human behavior without invoking the findings of neuroscience. Although meditation clearly helps people cope, and has done so for millennia, its benefits now need the imprimatur of functional MR scanning in order to be accepted. Although building positive activities into one’s lifestyle can assist with battling addiction, we apparently need to hear this common sense advice framed as neuroscience before we’ll take it seriously.

If it were just a question of objective science validating ancient wisdom, I’d have no complaint. But because of the neuroscience perspective, human behavior is now viewed as a product of computations carried out in brain tissue. Different aspects of our experience get ascribed to named nuclei in the brain. Thus, the amygdala is our ‘fear center,’ the hippocampus is a ‘memory module,’ and so on.

These descriptions are not only highly reductionistic, and therefore a bit suspect, they are also gross simplifications of exceedingly intricate and redundant neural processes. By describing people in these stark terms, we strip them of their native complexity. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if something valuable were gained, but as I noted above, the best clinical treatments come from experience with people, not experiments with brains. The largest effect of neuroscience has been to persuade us to think of ourselves as computers made of flesh. Is this really an improvement over the view that humans are sacred beings of mysterious origin? Is it an accurate belief? Could it not be the case that there is more to humanity than synaptic activity?

Personally, I’d recommend a grandmother’s advice about how to achieve happiness over a neuroscientist’s. I’d embrace a yogi’s opinion about how to manage anxiety over a psychiatrist’s. And I’d endorse a saint’s ideas about the meaning of human life over a reductionist’s. Sure, let’s continue to study the brain. But until the research proves itself in the behavioral realm, let’s not grant it so much influence over how we view ourselves and our struggles.

The recent marriage between neuroscience and meditative traditions may hold the key to the future of human civilization. Few other modern trends hold any potential to derail humanity from its track of destruction. Many of Daniel Siegel’s writings demonstrate how a combination of internal (meditative) and external (scientific) explorations of the mind can relieve age-old sufferings of humankind. Rick Hanson’s book, Buddha’s Brain, distills this fertile and vast field into a roadmap for personal breakthrough to peace.

Living north of San Francisco, I am fortunate to be able to attend a weekly meditation event led by Dr. Hanson. Recently he guided a discussion about the fruits of practicing a venerable Buddhist meditation called Satipatthana. In the course of such work, one sequentially pays attention to body, to feelings, to mind, and to the obstacles and vehicles one encounters on the path toward awakening. Rick inquired about our personal takes on the benefits of this system of meditation. My thoughts cohered too slowly for me to participate in the discussion, but after returning home I wrote down what I believe Satipatthana is teaching me. I soon recognized a close connection between this meditation practice and what I’ve been saying on this site about the value of sorrow.

Back when I still suffered from chronic depression, my mind seemed like a monolithic psychic prison. With effort I could adopt a few moments of positive thinking, but all-too-quickly my internal world spiraled back into its baseline state of despair and negativity. It was as if my emotional habitat had been formed of poured concrete; it looked like a solid and monotonous block of cold gray stone. Changing my inner experience seemed about as likely as a prisoner breaking through the walls of a penitentiary with his fists.

Partly as a result of Satipatthana, I now understand that my mind is actually a fragmentary collection of mental activities that can be reshaped with the right kind of effort. The gray monolith turns out to be no more rigid and massive than the Styrofoam used to make stage props. By using this meditation practice to explore my body, feelings, and thoughts, I have learned that my mind is composed of many different parts. There is a module that directly monitors sensations; another evaluates what has been perceived; a slightly separate unit grasps or rejects the judged experiences. Further along the line, there is a component that suffers when desired experiences dissipate or undesired ones persist. Finally, there is an expansive region that remains detached and simply observes. While enjoying the steady peace of meditation, I can shift my focus and attend in turn to these distinct elements.

This helps me recognize the difference between the bodily and mental sensations that accompany sorrow, and the suffering that results. In the ordinary course of mental life the experience of grief and loss seems inseparable from the anguish that arises. In actual fact, there is a sequence: first comes identification of loss, then comes the sensation of grief (often felt as a hollow ache in the viscera), and finally comes the mental anguish.

Loss is inevitable. Grief is a natural and largely unavoidable reaction to major loss. But we can influence the depth of anguish and despair to which we descend. Before I started this work, the experience of grief almost always led to depression and a loss of all enjoyment of being alive. Meditation helps me embrace ongoing sadness while appreciating that life is a beautiful gift.

There is a difference between the sorrowful ache of mourning and the choking darkness of despair. The second does not necessarily follow the first. One can experience and even savor pangs of grief and remain grateful for every moment of human life.

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the … time of tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm, deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

James describes exactly the condition that I’ve been enjoying since the middle of January. However, he must be mistaken when he concludes that this state of mind is available only to religious men, because I am by no means religious. Setting that important discrepancy aside, the psychologist’s numerous case studies prove that a profoundly wise and peaceful state of human existence awaits us; our task is to find ways to achieve and retain this higher mode.

James’s classic compilation and analysis of spiritual growth experiences exerted a major influence on Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. It helped Wilson and his compatriots as they created a system to facilitate spiritual transformation in alcoholics. Here is Wilson’s description of his own awakening (from the ‘Big Book’ of AA, 1939):

All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence… A great peace stole over me and I thought, ‘No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are right’.

This transformative experience helped Wilson, a hitherto hopeless drunk, remain sober for the rest of his life. There was a time when I doubted that such a change was possible; I may even have questioned Wilson’s sincerity. But in the year 2000, after returning to AA following a long absence, I went through a series of experiences very similar to his. Here is a description of one of them, taken from a previous essay on this site:

I stood at a locus from which I viewed creation arising from subatomic scales to fill the entire span of the modern universe, in a near-instantaneous ‘vision.’ As I saw these things, I inhaled the atmosphere of all-encompassing love and ‘rightness’ that animates everything. I heard a chorus of celestial voices, and felt myself basking in a divine affection that erased all doubt that God existed, that life had meaning, and that I mattered.

Although that episode and others like it had an enormous impact on me ten years ago, I did not know how to maintain elevated states of understanding; as a result I sank back into a stubborn and miserable depression that crushed me for at least six years. Fortunately, as long term visitors here have read, transcendent awareness returned in January. As before, it was my work within the AA framework that made my heart receptive to transformation. Here is the result, once again quoting from an earlier piece (Note that this time around the experience did not feel referenced to ‘God’ or any other overtly religious concepts.):

I perceived the evanescence and formlessness of the human mind, the interplay between humans and nature, and how everything intertwines in the awesome depths of creation. The way the human spirit dwells amidst vast spreads of time, space, and scale became clear to me in ways that surpass words…The scope of this new perspective crushes into triviality many of my prior concerns.

Recently I’ve mentioned Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives, by William Miller and Janet C’de Baca. Like William James, these authors document many awakening experiences. Although James presented some transformations that came on gradually and others that were sudden, Miller and C’de Baca focus on ones that happened abruptly, as acute life-altering events. They cite many spiritual and secular leaders who have described swift openings of consciousness. The Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed, George Fox (the founder of Quakerism), Malcolm X, Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, and saints Paul, Augustine, and Theresa of Avila all underwent rapid and profound transformations of consciousness. The list could go on and on.

Citing work of James E. Loder, Miller and C’de Baca tell us that such experiences unfold in a characteristic sequence. “Something disrupts the way in which the person has been perceiving reality and making sense out of life…’an insight, intuition, or vision appears’…frequently accompanied by a great emotional release and a deep sense of relief. Then, with time, the person integrates and interprets the experience…and new patterns of thought and action emerge.”

It is likely that these psychic events are generated by novel patterns of neurologic activity. In fact, patients with temporal lobe seizures recount rather similar feelings. In Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, the authors paraphrase such patients:

I finally understand what it’s all about. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense…I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos.

These patients have demonstrable anomalies in their brain waves, so in at least these cases the new consciousness can be traced to altered neural activity. Often such people retain their elevated understanding of cosmic significance even between acute episodes. The authors speculate that new neural channels are opened that “permanently alter—and sometimes enrich—the patient’s inner emotional life.” These patients have seizure disorders, but there is every reason to suspect that even the brains of people without electrical abnormalities can be decisively transformed by powerful spiritual episodes.

In the five weeks since the onset of my altered consciousness, I have indeed observed major alterations in my ‘inner emotional life’. As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, the change has by no means left me in an unwavering state of bliss; the heightened and peaceful awareness comes and goes. Sometimes despair threatens to reassert control. On the other hand, I am learning that by taking some simple and concrete steps I can bring myself back into alignment and sidetrack my old neurotic patterns.

My message today is straightforward: humans have the capacity for elevated states of consciousness that reduce psychic distress. These psychological modes open the mind to broader ways of seeing life, reveal order and refuge in the cosmos, and often increase one’s desire to behave altruistically. Because they remove people from the narrow, egocentric and damaging patterns that society encourages from birth, these improved frames of mind may represent a natural maturation of the human mind. They can occur as religious epiphanies, but they can also develop as completely secular insights. Subsequent posts will explore the ways a person can make such transcendence more likely and more robust.