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.

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.

Look closely. See the tiny hominids in the snow?

This afternoon my wife and I went canoeing on a reservoir here in the Sierra Foothills. Manmade lakes aren’t our first choice for boating, but today’s scenery was surprisingly lovely. The weather was warm, very nearly hot, but on the water the temperature was pleasant. The sage colored hills shone around us, covered as they were by scrub brush and scattered digger pines. A light breeze helped stir the air, and we saw more jumping fish and waterfowl than expected. A nice day.

But of course I’m not blogging about this trip just because it was fun. This same body of water is one we drive past frequently. Viewing it while cruising by at sixty miles per hour, it never struck me as a very big lake. How different it seemed on a canoe! It took ages to get across a narrow point in the reservoir, and the journey felt a bit nerve-wracking, since we ordinarily stay close to shore in our tippy watercraft. Half-way across I realized with slight apprehension that we were all alone on this vast body of water, and would not be noticed if we capsized.

The surrounding foothills rolling away from us on all sides emphasized how small we were relative to the landscape. This is a good lesson for the ego. It is bracing to look around once in awhile and get a feeling for the body’s scale relative to the earth’s. Ecological crises, networked communications, and global financial markets have persuaded us we live on a small planet, and this is indeed an important truth. But any one human remains ridiculously tiny compared to a mountain, not to mention a continent, the globe, or a galaxy.

In our immature phases, we think about our selves excessively. How am I doing relative to others? Am I attractive enough? Successful enough? Wealthy enough? Popular enough? With so much thought about ME, it is easy to get fooled into thinking my self important.

But let’s consider our actual situation. Imagine looking down from a jetliner at cruising altitude. Get a sense of the human scale against the backdrop of the planetary. This perspective makes it harder to feel as necessary as we do in our most narcissistic moments.

I’m fond of pointing out that to say the name of every person on earth, at the rate of one per second, would take two hundred years. A similar dwarfing occurs if we look at the length of a human life relative to the age of the earth. If the earth’s age were compressed to a single year, our lives would be lived entirely in the final half-second.

We are tiny beings of no great consequence beyond the small number of others who happen to have bonded with us. I say this not in a negative way, however, but to encourage us all to look at what matters more, what truly endures. Aside from life itself, the human family has lasted long enough to count even in this vast universe. And as members of it, we count too. Not as individuals, but as components of the larger whole.

So if our importance comes from association with the entire collective of people on earth, we should give thought to how we can benefit the human family. We should focus on the common good, and not our insistent but unimportant hungers. This is the path to sanity and even more, to realization. Yes, this is the path to Grace.

Yesterday’s essay seems like the one that finally got it right. It described a path to peace of mind and deep realization without invoking controversial spiritual concepts. Resistance to mysticism no longer arises within me, but I’ve always hoped to share techniques for achieving heartfelt wellness without excluding those uncomfortable with religious language and concepts. That last post goes a long way toward achieving my goal, or at least I hope it does.

Oddly, it didn’t garner many comments. Every time a blogger waits long intervals between postings, readership drops. So maybe no one is following me right now, and that explains the relative silence. Or perhaps the piece is so uncontroversial it failed to stir up much response. Or perhaps it simply isn’t as spot-on as I’d like to believe.

No matter the explanation, it’s amusing to watch my ego claim investment in what I wrote, when just about everything in the piece came from ideas heard elsewhere, and the writing poured out unplanned and spontaneously. My ego had very little to do with the creation of that essay, but I still see it grasping to take credit. It demands ownership of every success, but it also grabs the blame whenever something falls flat.

Which is just one example of the root attitudinal problem behind most misery, alluded to in the last essay. Although my best stance is detached awareness, my psyche is always plunging ahead and getting battered by life’s turbulence. It clings to accomplishment and gets stuck on failure. It grasps at shiny possibilities and shrinks from disappointment. It wants credit for ideas it hears elsewhere and gets hurt when its efforts go unnoticed. The poor, needy creature always seeks outside validation and craves affection. All of which leads to a life that gravitates around self-centered perspectives and animal hungers.

The “180 degree change in attitude” mentioned last time requires that a new center-point be found. The best focus for stable living is felt love, which comes from within and arises spontaneously. This fountain of free-floating affection doesn’t depend on anyone approving our personalities, or applauding our work, or wanting our bodies. It doesn’t reject anyone or anything, it simply loves.

Who can object to such language of love? There may be those who’ve never felt the rapture of truly unconditional affection, and there may be those who don’t believe in it. But how offensive can such talk sound? Surely it won’t enervate people the way religious language sometimes does.

It’s unnecessary to invoke mysticism when speaking of this state, though often the warm glow of heart-sensibility does feel ‘spiritual.’ But whether these expansive feelings reflect higher mystical awareness or grounded material neurology is irrelevant. Spontaneous, selfless love eliminates our otherwise insistent hungers and fears. Not by satisfying our desires about how things ‘ought’ to be, but by elevating us above the surging waters of instinctual needs and egoic demands. Relief requires no conceptual belief on anyone’s part. It only requires that when we enter moments of heightened tranquility, acceptance, and compassion, we value them as meaningful and worth fostering.

Such states point to true sanity, achievable even within this broken human family. By meditating and maintaining awareness, we can gradually expand their scope until they become available whenever we invite them with calm and sincere hearts. Do you see how this offers us the chance of the most serene and stable mental health imaginable?

Yesterday an editor from a philosophy magazine sent me an email. How he got my address is a mystery, since he seeks a priest, which I obviously am not. He wants an essay to counter the arguments of the ‘New Atheists’ (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett), specifically by advancing the thesis that religion is a positive force in modern society. Although this editor reached me by mistake, I responded to his email by suggesting an opinion piece that would address the value of nonverbal states of consciousness, and how their attainment is one of the main benefits of religious activity. Although I have not read every book by every New Atheist, it is nonetheless clear that their arguments largely neglect this important reason why humanity seeks (and needs) ‘spiritual’ solutions.

A common theme in New Age philosophy is that problems arise when ‘ego’ gets out of control (Eckart Tolle, among others, does a good job of articulating this concept). More to the point, many of the most ancient spiritual systems arose after their founders discovered ways to shatter the ego-centered mind, and get in touch with selfless states of consciousness. The New Atheists often rebut claims that religions improve human charity, but I do not see them addressing the fact that religions help some people achieve a state of consciousness deeply rooted in selflessness, humility and surrender. Even if the atheists are correct, and on average religious people are no more ‘upright’ than others, it is also true that highly motivated seekers can use spiritual practice to escape the ego’s tyranny and destructiveness. Promoting the attainment of this enlightened state of mind is perhaps the most valuable function of religion, even if it often gets buried under layers of doctrine and hierarchy. Until the New Atheists recognize humanity’s need for ego-suppression, they will fail to win over many people who value spiritual development. They will simply be missing the point.

An oft-repeated New Atheist hypothesis is that religious tendencies evolved to buffer humans from a paralyzing terror of death. This viewpoint reduces spiritual aspirations to little more than fearful magical thinking. I’m often surprised to read long speculations about this proposed origin of religion from authors who claim to value ‘proof’ (and who insist their reliance on empiricism sets them apart from religions). With current information, we simply cannot know why people became religious in the course of evolution. Although fear may have played a role, it is equally likely that spiritual yearning evolved because there is survival value in remaining cognitively balanced. Individuals, families and societies suffer when people base their lives solely on the shallow concerns of the ego.

Personally, having been raised as an atheist and then trained in the western biomedical tradition, I see no need to invoke supernatural forces to explain or appreciate the universe. In that sense, I have no strong objection to the New Atheist opinions about ‘God’ and religious dogma. On the other hand, I see great value in overturning the self-absorbed mindset that is so widespread in our culture. Religion, at its best, promotes exactly this kind of transformation in people. The New Atheists, unfortunately, seem so heavily invested in linear thought that they fail to grasp the value (or even the existence) of any other type of consciousness. One does not need to be ‘religious’ to achieve a state of selfless nonverbal awareness, but it is the primary path available to most people. Because New Atheists seldom address one of the primary roles of spiritual systems, their well-argued views remain shallow and unappealing.

That, anyway, is the argument I proposed to the magazine editor who is putting together an issue about New Atheism. Since he specifically seeks a priest, I doubt he will be receptive to my suggestion. But because I believe these viewpoints to be valid, it makes sense to post them here, in the only forum readily available to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless of one’s beliefs about the existence of transcendent realms, human beings need something akin to spirituality to counteract ego dominance. Religious systems encourage humility in order to bring practitioners out of self, and into appreciation of a larger reality. People argue about ‘God’, and obsess about whether we live in a purely material world versus one with mystical foundations. But debates about the nature of the cosmos, while fascinating and important, could be sidestepped if there were an easy way to escape the ego’s tyrrany.

Although I know only a little about philosophy, my understanding of evolution is a bit more sophisticated. Recently, I read the textbook Animal Behavior, by John Alcock, which looks at the subject from an evolutionary perspective. It rounded out ideas that first came my way through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Despite the rudimentary abilities of certain apes, only humans employ verbal, rational, and linear thought. Predictive skills and long-range strategizing appear to have evolved only recently. Other animals have minds of some sort, but they must work differently from ours. Anyone with a dog knows it has desires, and abilities to communicate them. A dog is good at getting humans to provide what it wants. But one of the wonderful things about canine pets is their lack of guile. They don’t plan, manipulate, deceive, or ‘think’ long term. Those are uniquely human qualities. Although animals have very complicated, and even flexible, behaviors, they do not have complex thinking. Such cognition is a new development on earth.

ACT starts with the premise that we suffer from overactivity in the ‘newer’ parts of the brain, which generate complex and abstract thinking. Adept at describing, comparing, predicting, and judging, the human thought apparatus has proven its strengths in developing technology. From stone tools to agriculture to industrialization to the internet, our cognition has created the sophisticated and tangled culture we see today. For all our mastery of nature, however, we have lost control of our selves. Unless we deliberately nurture other mental abilities, we remain locked in rational thought. Even when we face no immediate dilemma, we fail to revert to the wise and ancient modes that served our animal ancestors for eons. We persist in judging and predicting even when there is little need. Many of us get trapped in obsessions, overwhelmed by anxiety, or crushed by regret. When these conditions become chronic, we start diagnosing mental illness. Although it sometimes destroys us, we cannot easily turn off what ACT calls the ‘thought machine’.

When a person quiets the ceaseless patter of thought, and experiences a bit of silent presence, peace arises. As older and wiser parts of the mind come to the fore, problems seem less complicated and less pressing. With practice, one can combine mindfulness with acceptance, and begin to align with the mind’s nonrational forces. During the past year an ACT therapist helped me make progress in those directions. But by itself this failed to displace my ego from its throne; although life became a bit easier, my judgments remained rapid and harsh. At best I enjoyed a few seconds of serenity, before the machine of criticism stormed back into control. For some people, exercises in meditation, tolerance, and value-seeking will suffice to attain lasting peace of mind. But for me, with my habit of pessimism and negativity, something more was required.

Enter spirituality. Whereas Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) teaches how to think less negatively, and ACT persuades the judging mind to relax its grip, religion works by appealing to deeper regions of the brain. By helping us feel the presence of forces larger than humanity, they give the older parts of the mind enough strength to reassert their rightful place in the human psyche. In the West, this has been accomplished by appeal to a unified God. In the East, there has been more emphasis on awakening the heart to the vast scale and depth of creation. The spiritual awakening alluded to in the last post arose from a more Eastern than Western way of seeing things. Regardless of its philosophical heritage, the awakening of my deeper spirit has forced my ego to share the stage. Although the cloud of depression remains, it no longer colors my entire world view. I can feel the low moods percolating, and yet remain open to the beauty of life. The improvement results from a newfound ability to see my ego’s judging stance from a broader perspective. I understand there are other ways of understanding the world, and that I can live without weighing and evaluating everything. An atmosphere of equality has replaced the scales of judgment.

Whatever works. Some will rationally understand the value of escaping the ego’s web, and with that knowledge, break free. Others require an omnipotent deity to shake them loose. Still others will find release by meditating on the subterannean connections between the mind and the cosmos. Using the term loosely, all represent forms of spirituality, in that they release the human spirit from the prison of the human mind.