WillSpirit!

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

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








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • 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.


Let Your Body Seduce You

Imagine someone asks you this question: “What are you?”

We seldom get queried in this way, since the more typical questions are: “Who are you?” or “What do you do?”

So take a moment to answer the question of what you consider yourself to be, first and foremost. Some of us will answer with our careers: “I’m a physician.” or “I’m a writer.” Others will state an important social connection: “I’m a mother.” or “I’m an American.” A few will refer to religion: “I’m a Muslim (or Atheist, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, etc).”

But few of us will reply, without forethought: “I am a warm-blooded animal that walks upright on its hind limbs and possesses an enlarged brain.” And yet, that is probably the most central and accurate description we could provide.

Look back in time some five-thousand generations, or one-hundred-thousand years. Anatomically modern humans walked the earth, but most contemporary roles didn’t exist. Concepts about personality and social function, if articulated at all, must have been of more limited scope. We have no way of determining the language environment of these beings. No doubt people back then related to others as parents, children, and tribal members. Some may have been Shamans; some may have been leaders. So as individuals they may have had feelings about basic categories of identity and perhaps even words for them. But my guess is that they were far more aware than we are of their kinship with other animals and nature at large. The biological urgency of nutritive, protective, and reproductive drives may well have dominated their consciousness in place of the concerns about money, time, and networking that occupy our lives in the information age. They probably understood much more intuitively than we do how similar humans are to bears, monkeys, wolves, and antelope.

Humans were living, breathing, eating, defecating, copulating, and nurturing as animals long before they were writing, analyzing, conceptualizing, and philosophizing as citizens. Despite this, today we give far more attention to our concepts, and our feelings about our concepts, than we do to the basic biology that keeps us in the game. How many of us read a newspaper at breakfast or a magazine while sitting on the toilet? How many of us listen to our iPods while running or watch TV while digesting dinner? All these practices act to divorce us from our bodies. However, unlike unions between lovers, matrimony between mind and body is always “’till death do us part!” There is no chance of divorce, only alienation.

The powers of silence that I touted in a recent post may offer a return to our native state of mind. Before we learned to escape into the constructed realm of symbols and society, we remained grounded in the given world of bodies and biology. Make no mistake, I believe that language can help people heal, as evidenced by my efforts in writing these essays. But even more healing is learning to live beyond words, to dwell as organic beings embedded in the biosphere and related to all other life forms through an elaborate, eternal interchange. The material of our bodies came from the earth and constantly exchanges with it. Every calorie that keeps us alive is owed to some other organism that preceded us. Once death meets us at the end of our days, our physical forms will be released so their elements can again enter the timeless cycles of carbon, calcium, and creation.

In the meantime, we can find simple, lovely contentment by embracing, in silence, our bodies with their constant throbbing, gurgling, aching, hungering, and aging. Rather than feeling beleaguered by our organismic limits and imperatives, we can learn to honor them. Rather than hating how time drains the bloom from our faces and erases the potency from our contours, we can honor the natural, inevitable, and majestic seasons of every life.

Whenever the opportunity arises, I like to watch insects and other small creatures. The delicacy of their movements, the purposefulness of their travels, and the incredible intricacy of their bodies all impress me. A warm feeling of affection for these little beings often follows. If even a gnat displays this miracle of life, imagine how impressive you are as an organism. Think of the formidable truth of your brain, with its thousand-trillion synapses mediating a torrential flow of information. Remember the marvelous fact that you grew from a single cell inside the body of another organism much like you in every way.

With the stillness of meditation one begins to feel the ticking of the body, the flow of consciousness in the brain, and the exchange of air in the lungs. These activities are never-ending while we live, and through them our bodies are continually inviting our affection. Our living processes can be seen as somatic seductions that can help us reconnect with our true forms and escape the complicated tangle of words. They reach out to us every moment, beckoning us back into the sublime experience of living as warm-blooded bipeds on this ancient and bounteous earth.

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Let Your Body Seduce You was published on January 9th, 2012 . 7 comments






Sorrowful Grace

Mental states become oddities once taken less seriously.

At the moment my heart feels heavy. Perhaps my dip in spirits amounts to post-holiday blues. Our Thanksgiving celebration turned out quite pleasantly, despite the anticipatory angst of recent posts. Today’s drop in mood temperature might be an automatic reaction to the heat of happiness, just as diminished energy follows a sugar rush. Sounds plausible, though with little effort I could ferret out more ominous explanations. But as I’ve stated before, elaborating reasons for depressed feelings often just amplifies the sorrow.

Instead, let’s return to the first sentence above. What happens if heartache is not judged as good or bad, or attributed to circumstance. What’s left? When verbal analysis is forgone, nothing remains but a vaguely unsettled mental state.

Imagine you had never lived through a summer storm, with its smoke-colored thunderheads and drenching curtains of rain. Imagine you had never smelled the ozone or felt the prickly static that precedes the arrival of such meteorologic turmoil. If you stood in open grassland and caught a scorched scent on the air, if you felt a rising charge, you would not know what it meant. The sensations might make you feel apprehensive, but they would not associate with any memory. You would not anticipate an approaching downpour. Rather than heading indoors or pulling out a raincoat, you might absorb these natural energies in a spacious and unprejudiced state. You would not predict anything, you would not act, you would simply experience.

This is how I feel today. Rather than letting my mind project catastrophe, or reconstruct grief, or explore my issues, I’m keeping quiet and feeling the sensations rise and fall like ripples on an infinite sea of awareness. Rather than giving them names and family trees, I let them roll past with neither history nor destiny.

With this attitude, mental states come and go, push and pull, build and shrink, but something (or someone) beneath the surface remains unshaken. The mind rests submerged in stillness: unstructured, boundless, timeless, and exquisite. This is not depression as I once knew it. This is Grace.

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Sorrowful Grace was published on November 25th, 2011 . 2 comments






To Dream, Perchance to Sleep

Having just returned from a retreat, I feel too tired and drained to write a lengthy post. Still, it was a powerful excursion and I’m drawn to talk about it.

The most striking event happened in the middle of the night. For years I’ve had great difficulty sleeping, and lately the problem has been worsening. It is not uncommon for me to go to bed at 10:30 and wake up a half hour past midnight. Sometimes I’ll manage another thirty minutes of sleep toward morning, but often not.

In years past this caused me much distress. Even if I slept as many as four hours, that still left way too much time for worry. These days, I simply meditate through the night, as I described in an earlier post. Meditating allows my body gets the rest it needs while I explore the deeper strata of consciousness. Through these many long nights I have found inner spaces that astonish me with their peacefulness, love, and power. But I haven’t felt well-rested even so.

Given this history, when the retreat wrapped up for the evening after its introduction, I fully expected to be awake most of the night. Bedding in a dormitory with two other middle-aged men did not seem like a recipe for restful slumber.

However, somewhere around 1:30 am, after my mind had felt alert for an hour, I suddenly realized that my body was in fact asleep. How did I figure this out? Well…

During certain stages of sleep, men enlarge in a key part of their anatomy, right? This is normal and automatic. As I laid in bed feeling quite aware of my surroundings, a certain tumescence came to my attention. The only plausible explanation was that although my consciousness felt fully awake, my body (along with deeper areas of my brain) was asleep.

I have heard that yogis can let their bodies sleep while their minds remain active. Apparently, with all those hours of nocturnal meditating, I had unwittingly learned the skill. Recognizing that only part of me was awake prompted me to attempt deepening into REM so I could start dreaming. After all, the paucity of dreams is the most draining feature of my insomnia. So I mentally reconstructed a reverie from another night. Sure enough, before long I was dreaming normally.

My awareness of the fact of my dreaming waxed and waned. Sometimes I knew exactly what was happening, and other times the scenery absorbed me and I forgot my true state. But remarkably and wonderfully, I drifted in and out of REM sleep for the next three hours. It was the longest continuous run of restorative slumber I’ve had in a very long time.

Every retreat I attend seems to confer a gift, but this two day outing surpassed all expectation. Although the formal content of the program was helpful, glimpsing the potential of human power over mind, and the malleability of sleeping consciousness, were greater realizations than I’d have dreamt possible.

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To Dream, Perchance to Sleep was published on November 18th, 2011 . 2 comments






The Evolutionary Spirit

Why did our minds evolve with the capacity to go mad? Why are our emotions capable of disabling us? Why did we end up with feelings at all?

Let’s start with the last question. When evolutionary biologists study emotion, they usually ask about its survival value. What is it that makes feelings useful to a creature’s reproductive success?

This approach troubles me, because it suggests (implicitly) that animals might just as well have evolved as heartless robots, devoid of any true investment in life. The only reason for feelings in this style of evolutionary logic is that they increased mammalian ability to foster viable offspring. And note that the word mammalian is not arbitrary. Such hypotheses generally go on to assert that reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates are devoid of meaningful emotion. Which, if you think about it, is another way of saying they don’t care about their lives.

But as I’ve pointed out in another post, even spiders seem pretty insistent on their preference for living over dying. So-called lower animals don’t appear robotic and unaffected. They behave quite passionately when their survival is threatened. Could it be that feelings aren’t just utilitarian, but fundamental to life?

Consider next how this reductionist style of evolutionary reasoning gets applied to psychiatric conditions. How does this rubric explain the persistence of mental afflictions in human populations? After all, psychiatric conditions strike during reproductive years and carry a significant mortality rate (possibly as high as 20% for bipolar conditions). If we argue by selection, we must conclude that the reproductive benefits outweigh the risks.

What are the positive qualities that accompany mental instability? Here we start by considering that intellectual and artistic abilities might have evolved because they increase a mate’s desirability. The idea is that the cavemen who could paint evocative bisons had more success with the cave-ladies. Those who created also procreated.

Then remember that mental health conditions occur more commonly among artists and visionaries. Could the persistence of madness result from its tendency to increase creative output, not to mention reproductive drive?

It’s a reasonable argument, and probably one with some underlying truth. But to me it seems a surprisingly uninspired view of inspired lunacy. It sounds like something a bureaucrat would think up.

And in fact, one criticism of Darwinian theory has always been that it suits capitalists. Bean-counters like “survival of the fittest,” because it justifies the hoarding of beans. To say that passion, creative drive, and wild thinking evolved through better baby-making may not be wrong, but it may leave out mysterious and vital undercurrents in human life.

Let’s imagine, momentarily, that there is more to the cosmos than the material realm. It could be, after all, that mystical forces affect our lives. In which case we might expect that some of our qualities result from influences other than competitive insemination and over-protective child-rearing. We might have lessons to learn, for instance. Maybe some human qualities arose to help us evolve in the spiritual rather than biological sense.

So could it be that mental health problems are serving a higher purpose? Just possibly, the pain of psychiatric distress serves to break down egos and open minds to realms beyond the physical. Maybe “mental illnesses” are not as disastrous as many believe. Maybe they are Grace in formation.

If that were true, and I admit to wild (creative?) speculation here, we would be completely misguided in trying to suppress such conditions. By doing so, we would be robbing people of their chances for growth. We’d be better advised to help the potent energies of psychiatric distress play out in safe and instructive ways.

Unfortunately, the choice in current society is all-too-often between medication and alienation. Or between hospitalization and jail. Inner turmoil no longer has any chance of creating shamans or prophets, because we drug down or lock up anyone who deviates too far from the claustrophobic modern mold.

This is the danger of accepted wisdom. Everyone assumes that natural selection is the sole element at play in evolution only because that’s what everyone assumes. While selection is no doubt a potent force, it has not been proven to be the only influence on evolution, and many scientific facts suggest that we need a more encompassing theory. Postulating purposeful nudges that supervene among the changes sculpted by selection would resolve the evidentiary problems in conventional evolutionary theory. (These nudges wouldn’t necessarily require an omnipotent deity, but could arise as part of the natural self-organization of the cosmos—but this is a topic for another essay.)

Yes, it may be that feelings, madness, artistry, and the like can all be explained in terms of robotic animals competing for resources and mates. But let’s at least admit that richer and more interesting possibilities remain. Until they have been ruled out, we are neither scientific nor inspired if we dismiss them from consideration. And if other explanations deserve attention, then so do other treatment models. If mental conditions are meant to teach us, our society should honor rather than abhor them, and our psychiatric care should promote rather than hinder their flowering.

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The Evolutionary Spirit was published on November 10th, 2011 .






Change Will Come

Walking down Market Street in San Francisco, I witnessed a touching and distressing situation. Lying atop grimy pavement beside a low wall, enfolded in blankets and sleeping bags, surrounded by a few sacks of belongings, a middle-aged couple napped in the midst of Saturday’s chaos of tourists and hawkers and vehicles. What struck me more than anything was the tender way they casually remained in contact with each other: his hand on her forearm, her head touching his shoulder. They looked like any longterm pair of humans, with history and affection, sleeping together in the comfort of a shared bed. Only it couldn’t have been very comfortable or relaxing to recline there, destitute and exposed. Danger and humiliation stalk all who live on the streets, and they looked neither hardened nor cynical enough to brush off discouragement and fear. They appeared to be an ordinary but unfortunate couple who lost whatever home they might once have enjoyed.

My wife recently went on an outing to visit a mansion that wealthy heirs donated for use as a tourist attraction. The building’s footprint covers an entire acre of land. I don’t know much about the family that lived there back in the day, but I’m guessing the husband and wife would have slept together in just such an intimate way, assuming they avoided marriage’s many pitfalls of alienation. If you stripped away their feather bed with its gilded frame, and placed them in dirty blankets on a busy street, and left them unwashed for a time, they might have looked exactly the same.

Internally, the experience of sleeping with your partner is the same for us all. We have sensations of comfort, familiarity, and maybe a few resentments and regrets. We know the person beside us, and share memories of life-building. We know the weaknesses and strengths of our mate. We forgive and admire as we are able. We accept the declining physical form that supports the timeless soul with whom we negotiate the ups or downs of experience as they occur. It doesn’t matter our skin color, our surroundings, our wealth, or our misfortune, we share a common human experience when we sleep together.

So how did we end up with a society that permits such disparity? How come some couples snuggle in mansions, while others sleep fitfully next to newspaper racks and subway stairs? Can we honestly imagine that there is any significant difference in the worth of these people to account for such unfairness? And this is just one example of the maldistribution of wealth. I saw it with my own eyes, so it had a stronger impact, but we commonly observe similar or worse poverty through the media. In Africa, South America, India, and many other places, shanty towns spread for miles. Billions live in squalid conditions, often without sufficient food or safe water.

While all the time and everywhere, the internal experience of being alive remains similar. The eyes work the same, the brain works the same, the heart works the same. Consciousness is a shared tableau that connects us all. So how can we permit others who are just like us to suffer as they do?

Yes, it seems overwhelming to imagine changing this culture to eliminate such unfairness. But change will come. It may not be the positive shift that would solve this travesty, but the world is poised to transform in a major way. The global economic machine is faltering, the climate is shifting, the biosphere is stressed, and the populace is agitated. Unless we learn to live in a fashion healthy for all humans and all life, and soon, we will be living in new ways not of our choosing. More and more of us may be suffering before long, if we don’t make some major course adjustments. Perhaps the ruling elites will cling to their riches in air-conditioned palaces on high ground, surrounded by security fences, and stay comfortable. But my guess is they’d be happier if they committed their wealth and power to creating a better world order, where they owned less but enjoyed more connection with the rest of humanity. In fact, most of us could find contentment by giving more and consuming less.

We all share the same human consciousness. Let us share our earth’s resources, too.

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Change Will Come was published on September 26th, 2011 .






Hold the Light, But Hold It Lightly

Remember how I said essays were too distracting for me right now and that a break was needed? The plan was to post mainly poetry, and that’s still my intent. But during a recent visit with my dear aunt we shared an interesting conversation, and afterward she remarked she wished she had a recording of it. In order to collect the ideas we touched on, I wrote the prior essay about how one can find reassurance in any situation by developing the right attitude toward life. Now, as I look at that piece, it appears incomplete. I need to write another.

That last essay gave the impression, perhaps, that I believe spiritual pursuits unnecessary. However, that’s not my stance. Transcendent development is important. The problems arise when people hold fixed beliefs about the nature of reality. Because we can’t know ultimate truth, any idea or theory is provisional. New data could appear at any moment to undermine conviction. If one believes, for instance, that God works in mysterious ways for our own welfare, one can too easily end up bargaining with the cosmos: “I’ll be happy if there is an all-powerful deity who decides what’s best for me.”

Such specificity in belief is precarious. If too much hardship accumulates, one begins to doubt God’s beneficence. The traditional religious solution to such wavering is to cleave even more tightly to ‘faith’ in a particular kind of God. This hardening of ideology in the face of contradiction underlies many religious and philosophical battles, sometimes with lethal results.

So it is important to find a foundational belief system that relies as little as possible on blind faith, and as much as possible on incontrovertible fact. That all life is interdependent can hardly be questioned. That we are reliant on others is obvious. Taking such evident truths and using them to conclude that what matters is the whole collective of life and not our personal stories offers a stable system for making sense out of hardship and tragedy.

One could go the next step and believe that humans are interconnected on a non-material plane through subtle influences in the ground substance of reality. This might seem to provide a stronger basis for insisting on the sanctity of all. However, such a putative matrix of universal awareness, while possible, cannot at present be proven. So it serves as a poor platform for stable contentment.

This does not mean, however, that mystical awareness should be ignored or discounted. True spirituality is not based on belief, but on direct and nonverbal experience. Transcendent states can be described by the rational, verbal mind, but they can’t be entered through it. Through meditation, or contact with nature, or after reversals of fortune, one can discover immanence. The nature of radiant consciousness is such that words become inadequate, and the unity, rightness, and encompassing love of the cosmos feel immediately present and beyond question.

Left to its own devices, the mind quickly begins to conceptualize such experiences. A Christian might believe the spirit of Christ has embraced her. A Buddhist might believe he has gained direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality. A Pagan might interpret the radiance as the collective energy of nature. But the experience itself belies such categorization. It simply is.

A habitual atheist would perhaps explain a similar state in synaptic terms, ascribing the numinous feelings to atypical neurotransmitter balance. This is nothing more than yet another metaphysical stance, albeit one reliant on scientific study. Despite the tremendous progress in neuroscience, we cannot even begin to explain states of mind in terms of cellular activity. The belief that the transcendent experience is potentially explainable in purely material terms is just that: a belief. In any event, if the altered state was exceptionally powerful, it might alter the atheist’s worldview, (as happened in my own case).

The belief system can also affect the unfolding of the transcendent state. I suspect that if visual phenomena arose, a Roman Catholic would be more likely to see luminous forms suggestive of biblical angels, whereas a Tibetan Buddhist would perhaps observe lights tracing the shape of a mandala, as described in some texts of that tradition.

No matter its form, and regardless of how it’s interpreted, mystical awareness has tremendous transformative potential. It reforms a neurotic life into a numinous one. At first, such improvements last only a short time, perhaps a few days. But as we gain confidence in the significance and reality of direct realization, our neurosis becomes less solid and destructive, while peace gains ground.

The best approach, I believe, is to experience mystical awakening without demanding anything of it. The verbal mind wants to organize and explain what happened, but that leads to unstable belief systems that require defense. Better to simply remain open to the flow of sensation and realization, and not place constraints on it.

Mystical experiences feel weightier than ordinary states of mind; they resist reduction to simple neurologic description. They engender a profound sense of connection with forces much larger and more distributed than the individual personality. Even so, there is no way to prove that any objective reality underlies the subjective sense that transpersonal currents are at play.

True, many writers have described how contemporary physical theories are consistent with the existence of distributed consciousness in the cosmos. But even though I personally believe such cosmic presence to be real, it remains a belief with all the problems described earlier in this post. Ideas and theories are not stable enough to serve as a nucleus for inner peace; one needs a foundation based on fairly certain facts in order to sidestep doubt and the tendency to fossilize opinions.

Spiritual growth is important. Whether or not there are mysterious forces outside the individual mind, it is unarguable that human beings contend with powerful and untamed energies within. Reconciling these qualities, befriending them, and making them work for us is important. At the very least, humans are spirited in the secular sense of the word, so ‘spiritual’ practice makes sense if we want satisfying and meaningful lives. But we need to keep our rational minds open to all possibilities and not concretize a universe far too complex and subtle for full and final description in verbal terms.

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Hold the Light, But Hold It Lightly was published on July 31st, 2011 . 6 comments






An Organic Afterlife

The last post, about grief, went up both here and on my other blog, GuidePosts to Happiness at Psych Central. Over there, it prompted comments by readers with strong faith in an afterlife. Since it doesn’t seem appropriate to post a purely metaphysical piece on a mental health website, I’ll speculate here about our fate after the failure of our mortal coils. The astute reader will also notice that today is Easter, an appropriate time to talk about life after death.

This is touchy ground, because religious ideas figure strongly in people’s feelings about what happens at death. I have no desire to offend anyone’s beliefs. In fact, as I’ve said before, it seems clear to me that every spiritual and philosophical tradition offers a glimpse of ultimate truth. On the other hand, none can legitimately claim total and complete knowledge. What I try to do, therefore, is piece together a coherent whole from the many fragmentary views provided by the sages and saints throughout the ages, using my own meditative and spiritual experiences as guides.

As I pointed out last time, most if not all religions believe in some sort of soul that survives death. Either this deeper self is believed to exit the material plane for residence in a more ethereal realm (such as heaven), or else it is thought to reincarnate in a new body. Ghostly persistence in the present world is usually seen as problematic, and many societies employ elaborate rituals to ensure that ancestral spirits move into their proper home rather than lingering among the living in disembodied form. But even here there are variations, with some cultures believing the ancestors remain near and available.

I don’t claim much knowledge about comparative religion, but even this minimal sketch of views about postmortem existence shows three very different putative fates of the soul: heaven (or hell), reincarnation, and persistence among the living. A skeptic would point to these apparently contradictory beliefs to argue the position that death is simply the end of consciousness. Conflicting pictures of the afterlife confirm, for the skeptic, that mythologies of life after death are delusional and wrong.

But I see it differently. When I encounter such seemingly irreconcilable ideas, each embraced by one or more ancient and inspired traditions, I try to imagine what sort of universe would accommodate all of them. How could spirits simultaneously move into an ethereal field of existence, populate the next generation of humanity, and remain nearby to guide the living?

One possibility is that consciousness is more like a turbulent fluid than a collection of discrete, particulate souls. In this view I embody not a solid soul named Will, but a temporary aggregate of conscious fluid that has built a persistent (but not permanent) identity. After death, a little bit of this fluidic eddy named Will enters the next human born, a little drifts into contact with the greater sea of awareness, and a little remains nearby to be close to those held dear. This view would be consistent with what we see in biological life: a robust mixing and flowing of matter, energy, and information. Little remains discrete and isolated for long.

This picture even allows the skeptic to claim a degree of truth: if my spirit separates into parts and intermingles with other soul-eddies upon death, then gradually I will cease to exist as a fixed identity. The deconstruction may happen slowly, but over time, as more generations pass, Will can be expected to dissipate. This seems sensible to me. Although time may be meaningless in the ethereal realm, it has meaning here. I believe it unlikely that Will as a defined entity should last for billions of years. Gradually my awareness will spread, intermingle, reform with others, and change. The ‘stuff’ of my body separates and recycles, so why not the ‘stuff’ of my soul? On Earth as it is in Heaven, and in Heaven as it is on Earth.

We could speculate further, and imagine that the soul-aggregate has some influence over which path is taken. A person with strong familial ties among the living might, at first, remain largely concentrated on earth. A soul with more loved ones departed might direct most of its flow toward the ethereal gathering place. A soul excited about life, and displeased with its ending, might focus mostly on rebirth. Who knows?

Certainly, I’m not claiming knowledge. I simply start with the premise that most spiritual and philosophical traditions possess part of the truth. I then look for a way to embrace the most fundamental tenets of the various disciplines. I add in the reasonable speculation that since decomposition, mixing, and regrowth are the rule in earthly nature, they may reflect a deeper principle within creation: if life is cosmopolitan in this way, then maybe the afterlife is, too. Putting all this together with my varied, brief glimpses of directly revealed insight leads to the picture I paint above.

How could this comfort the bereaved spouse, or child, or parent? The loved one remains near, but also moves on to enjoy life again. Simultaneously, the departed resides in a state of timeless awareness, waiting for joyous reunion when death greets the other member of the relationship. What could be more desirable than to have it all? And what could be more reasonable than to expect that as eons pass, the self dissolves, reforms, and mixes with others. Sure, it’s an assault on our sense of identity. But by giving up our small sense of ‘Me,’ we gain intimate participation in the great ‘We.’

This being Easter, we might ask: What could this say about Jesus? Perhaps Christ died and entered the same separating, mixing, and reforming ground as the rest of us. But maybe his powerful light of awareness, in the context of abiding faith by countless Christians, kept his spirit from dissipating, so that he remains available to those who need him. At the same time, part of his energy may be spreading like a powerful surge of love through the greater sea of awareness. Perhaps he has even been reborn, time and again as this sage or that saint throughout history. Perhaps other great spirits have also persisted longer than more ordinary ones.

Does this sound like blasphemy? I hope not. My aim is to honor and respect the views that have come to us from so many sources over so many centuries. I write these things not to build an argument, but because they feel like they may be at least partly true. I can’t stamp any of this with empirical authority. I only describe what makes sense to my mind, my heart, and my soul.

I could write much more about this topic, but this post is already overlong. Even so, in closing I want to touch on the fact that the comments on the other site took the position that because there must be an afterlife, there is no reason for grief. Although I have no argument with the idea of conscious persistence after death, I find it unrealistic to think this can rescue us completely from the pain of bereavement. We can certainly avoid being destroyed by loss, but sadness at the death of a loved one is venerably human. Hopefully we will see those important to us again, but in the meantime, they have died. We mourn during the period of darkness, and rejoice when light reappears. Such is the nature of human life, and the message of this day. Happy Easter.

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An Organic Afterlife was published on April 24th, 2011 . 2 comments






Kinda Like the Borg, Only Nicer and More Democratic

Allow me to expand a bit on one of the last post’s two themes. My main point concerned the problems with adhering too tightly to belief systems, which after all come from mental activity that cannot be expected to produce infallible pictures of reality. I’ll come back to this another time, because dogmatic rigidity underlies so many problems on individual, community, and global levels. But the second point had to do with the possibility of a human psychic collective.

This sounds a bit Jungian, I’m sure. The ‘collective unconscious’ is one of the roots of my thinking on this matter. Another is the idea (often entertained in New Age discussions) that quantum entanglement connects brain activity into a global consciousness, thus providing a theoretically plausible mechanism for linkage between minds.

For the moment, let’s grant that such interchange occurs: all human minds resonate on some deep layer of reality, probably at the Planck scale, as many modern writer’s believe. If that’s the case, then even though we experience reality as individuals, and have been indoctrinated to expect that the learning of our lifetimes remains isolated and will be lost at death (unless communicated through material channels), our minds are actually intertwined.

There would then be a web of mental and emotional understanding encircling the planet. I’ve occasionally read this compared to the internet with its various hubs interconnected but acting largely autonomously. If the quantum mechanism could be proven, the analogy would be sound.

Elvin Laszlo writes of an Akashic Field that has its own fundamental consciousness, independent from but connected with all life forms. This postulated entity supposedly works (in rough outline) in the quantum mechanical way suggested above. It’s purpose, or at least its effect, is to learn through the ages so that evolution on all scales (cosmic, galactic, biologic) becomes more and more efficient with repetition, through endless time.

If this is true, then the whole point of human consciousness may well be to acquire knowledge and experience of all sorts. On the collective level, this universal human mind would by now be impressively wise, despite our individual ignorance and social insanity.

Having acquired such perspective, this mind would presumably look back on its atomic elements, and began to nudge things in a better direction. Maybe the mind is not organized enough to accomplish this. Quite possibly it doesn’t even exist. But I sometimes get a hopeful feeling that we will find a way to save ourselves in the eleventh hour. The only hope, it seems to me, is that we begin to act as the interdependent creatures we actually are. If we can’t accomplish this working in the current, isolated mode, then maybe we will transcend to a more resonant state of collectivity. A long shot, I admit. But worth dreaming about.

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Kinda Like the Borg, Only Nicer and More Democratic was published on March 6th, 2011 . 2 comments






Changing Minds

My professional activities have kept me from writing as frequently as before. Another reason for the rareness of my posts is that I’ve been changing, or growing. Or at least that’s how it seems.

As a former surgeon, I’ve been forced to radically change my views about health and illness in order to adopt a new career in medical acupuncture. In addition, my extracurricular readings have taken me further and further into ‘consciousness research’ and the various lines of evidence that suggest mind can transcend body. As a result of these endeavors, I am now convinced that materialist science is simply wrong in its conviction that transcendent feelings are purely psychological, and that all spiritual ideas are either primitive, infantile, escapist, or fraudulent.

Granted, I’ve been moving toward this position for a long time. The difference is that I now believe there is a factual basis for believing in a transcendent reality. It no longer seems necessary to rely entirely on faith.

What we believe about the nature and origin of consciousness has wide-ranging implications. Back in college I greatly enjoyed learning about the nervous systems of insects and other invertebrates. Because these animals have large nerve cells with comparatively simple interconnections, they were amenable to electrical measurements that were difficult to accomplish in the vastly more complicated nervous systems of mammals. I also preferred studying invertebrates because I suffered few ethical qualms about experimenting on them; dissecting or killing larger and more complex animals would have troubled me.

However, I’ve been rethinking my beliefs ever since I recently captured a spider in my bathroom. The little creature showed clear signs of panic, and struggled valiantly to avoid my tissue paper. I finally nabbed it and dropped it out the window, hopefully unharmed. But the animal’s behavior made me wonder about the fairness of my old view of these little organisms as, essentially, biological robots. The spider clearly had an opinion about the desirability of capture. It did not seem to be reacting in a purely automatic way, but actively worked to dodge me and find an escape route. It seemed, dare I say, to have its own conscious volition. It may not have possessed the (obviously minimal) intelligence needed to write a blog, but it had desires and fears just like me.

The accepted scientific view is that consciousness arises as a result of the vast and complicated interconnections in the mammalian (and especially the human) brain. By this reasoning, an arthropod is not expected to have true consciousness, since its nervous system is orders of magnitude less intricate. Experimenting on a simple animal with a rudimentary brain would not be causing distress to any entity aware enough to truly care. It would be ethically sound.

However, if consciousness is not simply an emergent consequence of neural complexity, but exists independently in nature, then a spider probably has just as much right to fair treatment as I do. If awareness has its origins separate from the brain, then why should a larger and more complicated nervous system confer added rights?

This is just one tiny way in which my thinking and my values are changing. Believing that consciousness is an independent force of nature alters my attitude toward my thought stream, my inevitable death, and my sense of meaning. Overall, it gives me an awed sense of responsibility toward my own inner state as well as the well-being of others.

Incorporating this changing perspective takes time and energy. That’s a major reason why my posts have been so rare lately. Plus, during times of growth I hesitate to put my opinions out in public writing: I hate to pen essays based on transient opinions. However, I now believe my new beliefs about consciousness have solidified enough for me to make a small inroad into writing about them. There are many, many books about mind and spirituality, of course. I don’t write with a sense that I have much to add to the conversation, but I might as well chronicle my maturation.

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Changing Minds was published on November 10th, 2010 . 2 comments






The Mind’s Mirror

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Three decades ago, Douglas Hofstadter wrote his immensely popular and Pulitzer Prize earning book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I never read it, because neither the graphic designs of Escher nor the recursive fugues of Bach resonate with me. Now, after reading Hofstadter’s 2007 book, I Am a Strange Loop, I see that my narrow attitude deprived me of earlier exposure to the work of a remarkable mind (which makes me wonder how often negative and arbitrary judgments have so limited me). Hofstadter proves himself a creative philosopher, an incisive cognitive scientist, and a sensitive person who thinks deeply about our collective human experience.

His thesis in this recent book is that our conscious identity emerges as a consequence of the brain’s capacity to form representations of itself as an active entity in the world (an “I” or self). In this view other species have less developed selves because their capacity for encoding and categorizing experience is limited. But all creatures have selves to whatever extent their nervous systems can recognize and observe their own actions. In principle, a computer system could embody a self if it had sufficient symbolic power and motivational drive.

The concept fits well with my evolving understanding of how my thoughts, words, and actions emerge from a loosely connected group of emotional and cognitive influences. These mental currents arise within a complex nervous system that interacts closely with other beings and the world at large. In meditation it has become increasingly clear to me that these different parts of my mind compete for control, and no single one of them is definitively ‘me’. Yet I do have a sense of self.

Sometimes parts that I admire run things and feelings of satisfaction follow; other times lower influences take over and I feel ashamed. But somewhere behind all of my activities there is an observer who watches my life unfold. This watcher has only limited influence on my actions (though its efficacy as a director improves as I meditate more), and it views my behavior with a bit of detachment. It knows that it should neither get inflated by my better actions, nor be devastated by my flaws. It stands outside the fray, and does not get entangled in my emotions or evaluations.

If I understand correctly, that sense of a self watching a self is what Hofstadter considers the basis of consciousness. There is something deep, resonant, and reflective in this awareness, and it has been a great source of comfort for me to connect and identify with this fount of the soul.

Much could be written about the implications of this view. In particular, although describing the self as a kind of auto-referencing symbolic computer seems pretty materialistic and devoid of heart, in actual fact deep self observation is the surest path to the Sacred. It is the basis of mindfulness, and the key to awakening. Through each one of us the universe can open its eyes, look inward, and recognize its own miracle. All we need to do is quietly observe our experience, and divine awareness arises.

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The Mind’s Mirror was published on June 12th, 2010 . 5 comments






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