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.


The Scene Behind the Curtain

Every once in awhile I look back on my most recent posts and see them as too highfalutin. Without doubt I work hard to grow, stabilize, and understand. So it seems appropriate to emphasize my insights and successes in these essays. But just like the admonition about not watching sausage manufacture if you enjoy breakfast links, readers of WillSpirit might be dismayed if they saw me in action.

Let’s not forget that just a half-dozen years ago a psychiatrist had me on five medications for my so-called mood disorder. Plus, I relied on a powerful opiate to subdue my chronic spinal pain. Back then I had few friends and lived a constrained life. Worry confronted me daily against a backdrop of ongoing despair. My self-esteem had bottomed out after neck problems ended my surgical career, and none of my efforts seemed to lift it toward the light.

Given that history, it’s a bit disingenuous for me to present myself as a paragon of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure, this post will describe some of my less elevated behaviors during this recent illness.

When the pain first started, I suggested to my wife that a trip to the Emergency Department might be in order. During the years of confusion I just described, there were several occasions when palpitations, shakiness, or other symptoms compelled me to enter the ED for evaluation. In every case, the doctors treated me like the unstable mental patient they read about in my medical record, and they always sent me out with a clean bill of health. So my wife hesitated to take me in for this latest problem, even though it had been years since I’d sounded the alarms.

In the face of her refusal, I felt wounded and betrayed. I pouted and took a sleeping pill to get some relief from the belly pain and hurt feelings. It’s apparent to me now that waiting a little longer made sense, but I had no such clarity at the time.

The next low moment came as I obsessed about the possibility of pancreatic cancer. It sat prominently on the list of potential diagnoses, but in my mind it seemed a near certainty. The prospect of mortality hit me hard and led to one of the early posts in this series. Under the circumstances, there wasn’t anything wrong with considering the implications of terminal illness, but I held onto to the sense of doom much too long. Even as evidence increasingly pointed away from malignancy, I remained maudlin and fixated. This is hardly the sort of flexibility I announced at the end of another recent essay.

Then came my tantrum when the staff ejected me from my private room, which I’ve already described. As I wind up my stay in this hospital, the nurses still laughingly refer to the fit I threw. Evidently there is clinical need for single rooms right now, but they tell me no one would dare move me into a shared ward again given how I reacted the first time. This isn’t what one expects of the spiritually enlightened.

And there have been many occasions when the stress, pain, and fear have simply overwhelmed me and I’ve wept in anguish. My wife has watched me crumble under the pressure several times since this started. Although it makes sense to feel grief, and I have no problem with tears, some of my sobbing came from feelings of self-pity: Why do I have to face yet another hardship? Why me? Feeling sorry for the self is not a sign of transcendence.

Well, that’s enough in the way of examples, though I could go on. But the point has been made: although my words sound enlightened, my behavior often falls short of my ideals. This probably is no surprise to anyone, but it’s important to me to be honest in this work. And let me be clear that I recognize that none of these slip-ups are cause for ongoing shame or self-abuse. I’m OK with being human.

To drive home that final point: I just returned from a walk outside the hospital with my wife. We hoofed it to a small church a half-mile away. Feeling tired and ready to sit down, I looked forward to resting for a moment in the sanctuary. We got permission from the pastor and stepped inside. Unexpectedly, tears almost immediately flooded my eyes and I began to sob in great exhausted heaves. Yes, I felt relieved to be alive and not facing a malignancy. Yes, I felt fortunate to have access to good medical care and to be married to a loving nurse who can manage my home IV feedings. Yes, I felt fearful about the possibilities of permanent intestinal obstruction and further internal bleeding. But more than anything, I wept with an enormous sense of weariness.

It appears that despite my often-elevated language, I remain a fragile, frightened, and forlorn patient badly in need of rest.

So I still make mistakes and I occasionally break down, but as long term readers can probably tell, I’m getting better. My behavior and attitude have both improved over the years. The more uplifting pieces written here accurately reflect how I generally look at life and its difficulties. But I remain human and therefore fallible. At times I live up to my standards, and at times I don’t. The surest sign of my growth is that I am learning to accept my weaknesses even as I develop my strengths.

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Joy in Turmoil, Bliss in Pain, Truth in Sorrow

With luck, I’ll be leaving the hospital tomorrow. A long convalescence stretches before me, starting with a minimum of two weeks without any sustenance by mouth: I’ll be receiving nutrition only via intravenous infusion. An X-ray after the first fortnight will show whether my intestinal blockage has diminished so I can start to add in actual food. I’m hoping for the best in that regard, since the alternative will be surgery to bypass the obstruction.

My body has been weakened by this episode. After a week of starvation I have lost both abdominal fat (yeah!) and muscle mass (ouch!). How completely I can regain my conditioning while being fed with milky fluid streaming directly into my heart remains unclear. Most likely, robust health will only begin to return once I’m on solid meals.

A friend visited yesterday morning and I told her that my default position on hardship is that it teaches me about life. Looking at setbacks this way is my main mechanism for sidestepping discouragement. You’d think, perhaps, that simply living through this life-threatening episode would be sufficient, but I’m perverse enough to still worry about the fate of my acupuncture practice. And I’m carnal enough to feel frustrated that I couldn’t join my wife last night as she ate at a restaurant with friends. Only by seeking meaning can I quell the riot of discontent.

How can we be sure meaning even exists? Some of us are convinced the universe is random and pointless; others believe in a creative God; many find comfort in spiritual practice but resist religious dogma. Whether reality as a whole seems of deep significance varies accordingly. But there is a difference between unveiling the purpose of the entire cosmos versus finding meaning in the stories of our individual lives. We can all discover meaning in this smaller sense of the word.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl paraphrases Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” My own personal why has become a quest for ever broader understanding of human life, suffering, and fortitude. This means I look for patterns in the cosmos that illuminate our daily lives. It means I examine when and how difficulty gets transmuted into wisdom. And I investigate why most of us continue to value life despite its trials.

Here is one pattern I’ve tried to keep in mind throughout this ordeal: all living things are connected so intimately that it is artificial to conceive of individual persons as separate from the whole. The appearance of division is superficial, whereas the reality of unity is profound. All that I experience is part of what everyone goes through, and vice versa. As a result, I feel less alone and beleaguered. This conviction that life is shared greatly reduces my sense of suffering. Moments of hardship are like the troughs among ocean swells: they are transient depressions that blend seamlessly with the peaks. At this moment I may be far from the higher, more pleasurable heights of living, but somewhere out there a couple is making love for the first time, or cradling their new baby, or sitting on a veranda appreciating nature and retirement.

Here’s what this disease taught me about how hardship can transform into realization: When pain gets extremely intense, past and future recede from consciousness and only the present moment remains. During my most agonizing hours of abdominal pain and vomiting, I no longer worried about my acupuncture practice, or even whether I might have cancer. I remained utterly fixated on my body and its insistent sensations. Since absolute present-moment awareness is the goal of many meditative practices, I see the tendency of intense pain to focus the mind as a surprising consolation prize that ameliorates its awful sting.

And here’s something I’ve known intellectually but understand on a deeper level after spending so much time on an inpatient ward, where the mostly elderly population deals with so much disease and discomfort: No one gets through life without hardship, illness, and death. It may seem that the first two get distributed unevenly, but sooner or later every person sees his or her share of life’s dark side. And yet, everyone also enjoys moments of contentment and affection. Life is not as unfair as it seems, since all are privileged to live it, all must cope with infirmity and mortality, and all discover moments in the sun.

These observations place my current difficulties in a larger context. I see how my tribulations are balanced by others’ joys. I appreciate that pain connects me with the instantaneous jolt of life. I recognize that illness and death are universal, but so are pleasure and love.

This major illness has proven a wise teacher. How much it has enlarged me! Even though my recent problems have been uncomfortable and disruptive, I see so much meaning in them that I feel grateful. Because I find lessons, I embrace my troubles despite the agony, uncertainty, and grief.

Do my words sound like hollow rationalizations? I suppose people will interpret this essay according to personal beliefs, but I’m sincere when I say that these perspectives helped me find precious moments during the past few weeks, despite the arduous challenges.

Many times in years past I believed my trajectory so punishing that I planned to truncate it. Now that I’ve learned to create meaning out of those same hardships, I can’t imagine wanting to shorten this spectacular span of living.

With luck, I’ll go home tomorrow. With Grace, I’ll keep seeing humanity as shared, imminent, and balanced even as my life gradually returns to normal.

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The Advantage of Disadvantage

Life promises us nothing but the experience of living until we die. We cannot expect our dreams to be fulfilled. We cannot avoid hardship and loss. These principles apply to all.

But even though no one can squeeze guarantees out of fate, there is great unevenness in our fortunes. Some people simply seem luckier than others. They enjoy families that provide more resources of love and support. As a consequence, or maybe because of inborn personality factors, they grow into confident, resourceful, and resilient adults. They suffer little self-doubt and have no sense of self-loathing. Their lives unfold relatively smoothly, and as they enter the later stages of adulthood they can look back with pride at how they built success. They may have achieved career acclaim, raised happy children, and/or simply radiated good cheer as they walked upright through the world.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way for everyone, and we all know of human situations that fall short of such comfort and success. First, there are the large populations across the globe that suffer under extreme poverty, chronic warfare, and oppression. We see the images of shantytowns and war-torn cities in which stunned and dusty children wander wide-eyed and alone. We observe their innocent, wounded faces and wonder: what can these orphans possibly hope for in the future? And yet, they seem far away and unconnected to our affluent societies. We try to reassure ourselves that these kids don’t suffer like we would in the same situation, because they don’t know what they’re missing. It’s a vain and selfish hope, of course, but sometimes it’s our only defense against feeling overwhelmed by the unfairness in the world.

We naturally think in terms of this culture’s material advantages, but unless poverty and turmoil are so severe that food, clothing, and shelter are compromised, we cannot assume that wealthier populations are happier. I haven’t been to Mexico since the recent outbreaks of violence, but in earlier years the joy among the country’s populace was impressive. Despite much lower living standards than enjoyed in the North, the Mexicans seemed far more contented and jolly than Americans. Why? I suspect because they lived in more stable communities, where friends and family didn’t regularly move away. They knew their neighbors their entire lives, and lived embedded in rich relational webs.

In contrast, many of us in the USA and other Western countries were raised in isolated nuclear families. Relocations were so common that we often didn’t feel close to many neighbors and developed few longterm friendships. If we were unlucky enough to have alcoholic, depressed, and/or violent parents, we had nowhere to turn. We may have suffered severe traumas or bereavements in relative isolation.

We may then have grown up to face the same demons that tormented those who raised us. We may have had to battle addictions, chronic sorrow, and/or festering rage ourselves.

Those of us who endured abusive, bereaved, or neglected upbringings entered adulthood with few useful tools for dealing with life. Many of us require decades to sort out the injuries, the humiliations, the recriminations, and the grief. Sadly, many who come from such homes simply deteriorate and die early, tragically, or alone.

But if we survive, then what? Before long we find ourselves in middle age with lives that look less than idyllic. We often have fewer friends, less stable families, and more fatigue. Childhood trauma translates into adult difficulty, and many of us end up with lives littered by broken relationships and abandoned dreams.

And then what? Ultimately, if we hope to find peace, we learn how to cope. We mature. We forgive the damaged parents who hurt us. We forgive the entire cosmos for failing to meet our childhood needs. We find meaning in all the hardship, setbacks, and breakdowns. We become wiser and more spiritual. We begin to find beauty in every nook and cranny of creation.

But still, we can easily see that our lives could have been better. It is all too obvious that we have not thrived like the more fortunate. We may feel isolated; many of us suffer health problems that resulted from the massive stress and poorly chosen coping strategies of earlier years. We feel damaged and aged in a culture that worships youth, wealth, success, and beauty.

Is there any upside to this realization? Perhaps only this: we are also the ones who are forced to enlarge our hearts the most. Our pain, isolation, grief, and remorse all compel us to learn unconditional acceptance and radical forgiveness. Despite all the mistakes and brokenness, we lovingly embrace ourselves, our families, our communities, and whatever divine forces might be witnessing this mysterious passion play.

There are other paths to growth, but loss, injury, and failure can be potent stimuli to spiritual practice and mystical awakening. Humble but exalted realization becomes the consolation prize for the brokenhearted who persist. At first such gentle wisdom barely tips the scales as we judge our lives, but as cosmic love and insight grow, we begin to feel less and less unfortunate. Until, finally, the day comes when we look back on our fractured histories and see their value, their majesty, and what in retrospect seems like Grace.

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The Wrestling of Two Minds


In case anyone’s wondering about my near-daily posting, rest assured it will be over soon. I’m aiming to exceed my previous record for number of essays in one month, but after November 30th (my birthday), the pace will slow. I may even take December off to give everyone a chance to catch up.

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.

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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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Blogging By Desire

Every once in a while I hate blogging. Why? Because it fails to satisfy my desires. (So yes, I’m still on the topic that’s consumed the past several posts.)

Usually my disillusionment with blogs happens when the work seems to go nowhere. If there are neither comments nor emails, or if the visitation drops, it can feel like I’m writing into a void. The project fails to satisfy my yearning for service, connection, and (let’s face it) recognition.

On the other hand, when the site garners responses, and especially if readers seem appreciative, blogging strikes me as a rewarding endeavor. Satisfaction elevates my mood; my self-esteem rises.

Wherein lies the problem. My mental state varies according to factors I can’t control. The best way to attract comments is to provoke controversy, but this tactic is hard for me because I generally like to write in a way that doesn’t offend. And even when I try to evoke some disagreement, my efforts often fall flat. Sometimes blogging meets my expectations and sometimes not, and nothing I do can guarantee success. It’s easy to believe I’d be better off not wanting anything in return for writing.

So it seems to me that not desiring is the safest path, but of course things aren’t so simple.

I didn’t expect desire to a controversial topic, since my treatment of it was not different from what I hear regularly at Buddhist and Hindu meditation events. But this is a case where what sounds perfectly reasonable in some contexts can sound perplexing in others. Without the common agreement that one finds in a group of people attending a spiritual gathering, the idea that desire is bad sounds troubling.

And I see why. Yearning seems to underlie much of what’s good in life, from chocolate to social progress. Thinking back to my early days in Buddhist centers, I remember the philosophy first struck me as dry and life-denying. (And keep in mind I still don’t consider myself Buddhist, though I’m quite accustomed to the language by now.) After all, I’m a biologist at heart, and I admire the teeming, expansive, hungry, fertile, and beautiful qualities of life. The idea of remaining detached from the panoply of organic urges and turmoil struck me as escapist, if not Puritanical.

Obviously, I see Eastern “non-attachment” in a more nuanced light these days. But that has taken time and practice. It has required me to recognize how many of my hungers do, in fact, ultimately lead to frustration. Even so, I remain captivated by life as it is lived across the biosphere, not just by the human slice of it. For most biological forms, urges ensure survival.

However we, as intelligent apes enjoying abundance (obviously, a large portion of humanity is not so fortunate, and lives near starvation–but I doubt many suffering such privation are reading my blog), need to ask ourselves if perhaps our desires are propelling us so far beyond mere survival that our existence is now threatened by the very yearnings that once assured it. Are we not sublimating the hungers that once kept us alive into impulses less useful and more destructive? Aren’t animal forces that were once essential now inviting catastrophe? This would seem a strong argument for reigning in desire.

But then there is the question of higher motives. A number of commentators point out that there can be spiritually inspired desires, and I don’t disagree. Who could deny that there can be yearnings that aren’t base? But even (or especially) such higher causes can get frustrated, and for that reason may lead to suffering. As I’ve tried to make clear, the objection to desire isn’t a value judgment, it’s a viewpoint that derives from observation of effects. To desire often means to feel disappointed.

Does that mean that all desire should be avoided? No, I don’t want to insist on that. Going further, is it necessary for all suffering to be avoided? I would say not. Suffering can be beneficial. Look how often it leads to growth. As is always the case, the situation is complicated.

So here’s another reason for discomfort with blogging. This time not because it feels pointless, but because it seems incapable of capturing deep truth. In a short blog post, or even a series of posts, important points inevitably get left out or glossed over. An entire book (or dissertation) could be written about subjects I try to cover in brief essays. The desire to do a topic justice was one of the reasons I recently considered writing a book. A blog is not sufficient to the task.

I like hearing from my readers, so the fact my treatment of complex subjects is inadequate turns out to be positive. My failure prompts others to correct my understanding, which helps me sculpt my views to be more comprehensive and less dogmatic. But I still feel like the blog is failing to convey the deep peace that comes from efforts to reject desire, and to completely accept life despite its chaotic failure to satisfy yearnings. It’s frustrating to write about something that feels true and helpful, only to realize that my words are inadequate.

In addition to blogging failing to garner the attention I crave, and failing to convey the truths I hold dear, there is yet another reason it frustrates me sometimes.

For all my recent talk about the value of rejecting desire, today I’m feeling a lot of it: I wish for more happiness and less dreariness. This time of year is hard on me as we in the Northern Hemisphere enter the short, cold days of winter. I yearn to feel better, to smile more easily, to walk outside and feel the sultry passion of summer.

So despite my elevated take on desire, right now I feel trapped by it. And once again blogging feels wrong. On this website I often write about how much life has taught me, and how clarity has graced me, but I still end up in occasional funks. When that happens I wonder if all this writing is not mere fraud. Yes, at times the world feels glorious even in the midst of heartache and loneliness, which is when I feel most moved to post essays. Other times, the glory seems unreachable, and I am left with the ordinary blues. More often that not, during those times I remain silent.

So even with a project as mundane as penning an obscure blog, desire causes problems. Desire for connection. Desire to feel helpful. Desire to be acknowledged. Desire to be understood. Desire to be authentic. All these yearnings, all these openings to disappointment and, yes, suffering.

But like I said above, suffering is not always a bad thing. And so perhaps, neither is desire. The secret may lie in observing the process of both yearning and frustration, and identifying with that part of the Self that stands outside and smiles at the amusing uproar of it all.

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The Healthy Desire for Righteousness

The last two posts argued that hoping for one outcome over another dooms us to suffering. Then what about the desire to escape desire? If our appetites lead to downfall, is it safe to hunger after realization?

Those of us who seek spiritual growth sometimes want very much to make progress. The Bhagavad Gita, mentioned last time, gives us an out by making an exception in the case of inclination toward righteousness. We even hear Krishna (God) equate his own divine presence as the source of such desire.

Even so, seekers understand that spiritual hunger can trap us just as easily as material wants. We see many leaders of churches, sects, and cults who have obviously lost their way by allowing their egos to claim credit for Grace. These are the ones who sleep with their disciples, accumulate fortunes, or incite destructive acts.

We can desire spiritual growth, but it is best to focus on the good of the whole world rather than the salvation of our individual souls. The Bodhisattva vows illustrate the safest stance: the seeker commits to remain engaged with the drudgery of material life until all beings are freed from the bonds of ignorance. If we pursue higher levels of understanding with altruistic motives, the web of desire cannot trap us.

But the path requires vigilance. The ego is persistent and cunning. It will seduce us with visions of personal gain that may appear selfless. No doubt there are wandering Indian mendicants clothed in rags, owning nothing and thin as rails, who believe themselves superior to others precisely because they have renounced comfort. They remain nearly as entangled in egotism as the billionaire industrialist flying overhead in his personal Gulfstream.

The more desire aims to improve the condition of self, whether by material, social, or transcendent measures, the more base its motives and destructive its effects.

The true saint cares little for his or her own welfare, but weeps when confronted by the pain of others. The tears may flow even amidst the understanding that life is ever ebbing and flowing, misery and ecstasy alternating in an endless dance, in a cosmic field devoid of lasting impact on the eternal and incorruptible soul. The saint understands that grief and joy are both optional, but chooses to weep and laugh anyway, in sympathy with the swirling ocean of life.

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Desire and Grace

The denial of desire that I mentioned in the last post might sound inhuman if looked at incorrectly. What about passion? What about beauty? What about love? Should we seek none of these and live instead in a bland state of emptiness?

More troubling still is social injustice. Should we not insist on equality and fairness? Should we not fight for the rights of the disadvantaged? Should we cease working toward peace?

Such concerns have caused many to see Eastern philosophies as overly detached and even heartless. How can we build a better world if we don’t desire wars to end, environmental destruction to be reversed, and inhuman conditions to be improved?

Part of the problem is semantic. To plan for a better world is different from wanting a newer car. The word desire can be used in ways that emphasize ethical standards rather than greed and materialism.

But this isn’t the whole answer. In fact, the spiritual path can lead to states of mind where happy and tragic times are seen as equal and necessary counterparts. Ease and hardship are recognized as two sides of the same coin. Going further, the entire drama of human life can appear empty of substance. It can look like an artifice to be observed without emotional distress.

These deeply resonant mind states are educational, and they calm the troubled spirit. But life should still be engaged. It seems wrong to refuse to participate simply because strife is built into the cosmos and material existence is empty. Yes, such understanding helps us release desire, but most people still feel the pain of life’s drama, and most of us need help. The sage who abandons the world to its own confusion may be wise, but he is not compassionate. True saintliness requires both understanding and concern.

So we return to the problem: how do we participate without desire? How do we engage the world when we know that sorrow and joy carry equal weight and are ultimately empty? How do we motivate our actions once we’ve learned to live without preference?

I can’t claim absolute clarity here, but I have a few ideas. First, it is poisonous to desire personal sensual gratification, but it can be edifying to help others feel better. Second, we can work toward a beneficial outcome but remain at peace whether we succeed or not. Third, we can recognize that preventing cruelty and injustice aids the disadvantaged but also helps the souls of those who would perpetrate harm; there may be a vast neutrality in the cosmos, but there are karmic consequences on the human scale. Finally, the universe may be inherently empty, but it is all we have; we should question whether abandoning it reflects ultimate wisdom or mere avoidance. We may not care about winning anymore, but we can still play the game.

This post grapples with deep questions that have been pondered by realized beings for ages. My amateurish thoughts won’t settle the debate, but I hope they show that one can reject desire without rejecting life.

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Complex Change

Is spirituality complex? Not in the usual sense of the word, perhaps. Most deep truths seem pretty simple once grasped. But the path to realization is fraught with turmoil, since we don’t give up our conflicts easily. We resist straightforward peace in favor of complicated discord. But there is a pearl of hope within the murky waters of confused living. And once we find it, we can keep it forever.

Complexity theory offers insight into a great many phenomena, from embryology to cultural anthropology. It sounds like something based on modern physics, but it is actually an observational field largely developed via painstaking work with computer simulations. Modern digital technology enabled researchers to run simplified models over thousands of iterations to get a sense of their behavior. Such work demonstrated that many systems self-organize on their own. After simulations showed us what to seek in the real world, spontaneously arising order is now suspected to operate in biologic evolution, technological development, and social progress.

In some recent reading about the behavior of complex evolving systems, I saw a parallel between spiritual growth and certain principles in this theory.

In brief, a complex system consists of numerous individual units that interact to varying degrees. In the case of the mind, we might have conscience, reason, emotion, sensation, memory, intuition, drives, choices, and much more. All of these modules interact and sometimes compete with one another.

It’s important to remember that each of these mental functions can be further broken down. For instance, memory consists of working memory (holding a phone number in mind while you dial it), episodic memory (remembering your last vacation), procedural memory (your body’s knowledge of how to ride a bike), and so on. And each category of memory obviously holds large numbers of individual traces (all the vacations of a lifetime, for example). Dissecting further, we might eventually get to the level of networks of neurons, or even individual cells, interacting in highly complex ways.

Most evolving systems are robust in the sense that change to a small number of components does not lead to any large scale shift in behavior. Think of United States politics for a moment. If a few dozen people in a historically Democratic state (say Massachusetts) shift to the Republican party, the state probably won’t elect a Republican governor. Only when a substantial fraction of individuals change sides will the behavior of the whole transform. The system is robust to minor fluctuations. (This means it is not chaotic, in the technical sense of the word. A butterfly in Rio won’t change the next election in this country.)

On the other hand, if enough individuals adjust their attitudes, the system could dramatically alter its course. The election of Barak Obama as the US president in the last election seems like a good example here. At first it seemed unthinkable that he could ever win, because so few people believed in him. But a tide swept the country and a historic election occurred.

For a robust entity to alter its behavior in a fundamental way, it is necessary that a large number of its component parts change their ordinary reactions. Whether a ‘large number’ means ten percent, a simple majority, or ninety percent varies from case to case. It depends in complicated ways on the details of both the system and its environment. But seldom will a dramatic alteration occur without change in a substantial proportion of the subunits.

In the human animal, this means spiritual transformation will not occur if we alter one aspect of our mind and nothing else. For instance, simply changing our beliefs about the existence of Universal Consciousness will seldom be enough. Reading an occasional inspirational book won’t do it either. We must work on our ethics, our habitual thoughts, our lifestyle, our emotional maturity, our intuitive awareness, and everything else we can change. Only by shifting our patterns in many different realms of behavior and thought will we finally emerge onto a higher plane of realization.

The good news is that once enough elements have shifted, the complex system jumps into a new and stable state of existence. In this new condition, it is once again resistant to perturbation. In technical terms, it has settled into the basin of a new attractor, and it will not be dislodged without changes (as before) in a large number of subunits. (The photo that heads this post shows a computer simulation with two nearby attractors. The system orbits one repeatedly, until a sufficient perturbation dislodges it into the adjacent basin.)

After we achieve a new plateau of spiritual and emotional maturity, we will remain in an elevated state. We won’t need to worry about accidentally falling back into our old neurotic behaviors and fixations. We can solidify our relationship with the world using our new understanding and begin working, yes, on reaching the next higher level.

I realize this was an abstract discussion. It may not sound too useful. But I wrote it down because it seems so hopeful. Sure, it is hard to accumulate enough change to transform, but once we make our breakthrough we will be robustly settled into a more peaceful and accepting frame of mind. We will have found enduring Grace.

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No Attachments, No Regrets


Barnacles have it easy
They live by just one attachment
They stake their lives on a piling
Rooted deep in Bay mud
Or on a whale’s flank
Sluicing its way through the brine
Or on the hull of a wooden ship
Headed into the sea’s hungry maw
Heeling to leeward
Gaff sails reefed
Taking away my attachment to
Everything
I learned
All my needs were fictitious
Save food and water
All my desires were encumbrance
Save to be free of lies
All my loves were dependence
Save affection for love itself
That ship
With its barnacle encrusted lines
Dragging the waters of memory
Has left me standing
On a pier suspended over waves
Watching my fate leave without me
As whales breach far off shore
Free to swim where they will
At last
I too am empty of burden

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