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.

The California Academy of Sciences moved into its state-of-the-art museum and research facility almost exactly a year ago. My training as a docent was conducted in their temporary location near the financial district of San Francisco, in a set-up which I actually liked better than this impressive and environmentally responsible new structure. The designers had made the interim setting look a bit like the laboratory of a nineteenth century naturalist: varnished oak cabinets fronted by glass, exuberant displays of furred and feathered taxidermy next to boxes of crystal-encrusted rocks, and row after row of walnut-colored beetles the size of mice. Every specimen had a neat, penciled label gone sepia with age.

The new place is all steel and glass and concrete, topped by a ‘living roof’ comprised of an undulating carpet of native regional grasses. The broad awnings hold 60,000 photovoltaic cells. There is no traditional HVAC system; instead, the windows actually open. Award-winning and impressive, it no doubt helps the Academy move forward into the third millennium as a significant environmental research organization. But I miss the decorating style of Darwin’s day, when naturalists bragged about the number of ‘specimens’ they collected (read, organisms they killed and mounted). Not that I applaud the wanton destruction of life, just that there was something organic, musty, and mysterious that has since been lost. It almost seems as if, in an effort to compete with the sophisticated equipment and terminology of molecular biology and genomics, ‘natural history’ is editing out the dirt and repackaging itself as another gleaming, sterile technology.

Hopefully, this will help the scientific mission and mandate to rescue the planet from ongoing ecological rape. Perhaps the makeover will convince young women and men to enter the field, by making environmental science look cutting edge, computerized, and cash-rich. Still, I can’t help but feel like a steel and glass partition has been built that separates humans from nature. As a kid, when I went to science museums, it was the dark earthiness of the places that drew me in. The dim lighting needed to protect the exhibits, the smells of soil and fur tinged with formalin, and the sprawling display cabinets filled with dead things all spoke to me on some biotic wavelength that gets blocked by the flashy and hygienic new paradigm.

When the emphasis rested on dead specimens, the implication was: ‘there is such an endless profusion of life out there we can afford to kill hundreds of creatures to show it to you.’ Obviously, that lie has been exposed as a dangerous illusion many times over. But now the message has become, “here are a few living creatures that you can look at in a gigantic display case, but if we don’t do something soon this will be the only place these organisms will survive.’ A much more accurate and socially responsible communication, but it is also ineffably sad. Life has gone from seeming fecund and unstoppable, to something weak and in need of our help.

Life on earth is not weak. And it is not the earth that needs assistance, it is the human race. In fifty million years, chances are very good that humans will be extinct. After another fifty, life will be as luxuriant and diverse and breathtaking as it was a mere thousand years ago, before people began leaving widespread technological footprints on the planet. Flora and fauna will recover. What we risk is not life on earth, but the human spirit. We evolved in an ecological web of soil, and sun, and plants, and prey, and predators. The homo sapien heart has not forgotten this. The further we push the natural world out of our experience, whether by destroying it or simply staying indoors, the more lifeless our lives become, bereft of the inexpressible majesty we all recognize in the tiniest buttercup flower. By packaging nature in steel and glass, we are actually locking ourselves in the display case. We think we are free, looking at precious organisms carefully tended by automated climate control. But in fact, we are the ones under lock and key. Life just keeps evolving, and growing, and pollinating, and copulating, and dying, and rotting, and germinating, and giving birth. While we live in concrete boxes and eat microwave popcorn.

This blog has the tagline ‘Where Will meets Spirit’. Our human ‘will’ has brought us to this point. We have bent the forces of nature to serve our desires. But like anything that gets bent, those same influences patiently await the day they will snap back to their native form. Parts of the natural world will be irreparably broken before that happens, it appears. But the momentum of life is stronger, and older, than the human trajectory through earth’s history. Nature cannot be held back forever.

If you put a small number of bacteria on a fresh petri dish, at first the population will multiply and spread at an alarming rate. But the petri dish, like the earth, is a closed system. Sooner or later the bacteria deplete the resources, or a viral pathogen comes in, or some other counterbalancing influence stems the rate of population growth. Ultimately, the numbers crash, until once again the dish holds only a small number of living bacteria. Or none. Humanity sits on the steep upward ascent of the population trajectory. But most of us recognize that the tide must turn, the growth rate will slow, and in all likelihood a catastrophic drop in numbers will be suffered. Many scientists expect global diseases to strike and cause this, but famine or world nuclear war are other possibilities. Even more likely is a combination of influences leading to a sharp drop in the burden of humanity on the globe.

Nature will reassert itself, one way or the other.

In the same way that our global society is attempting (futilely) to crush and control the forces of life, it is also working hard to stifle the human spirit. We are enslaved by a cold and rational mindset that denies the importance of emotion and instinct. By locking the human mind into analytical modes, and trying to devalue or even ridicule sensitivity and feelings, those who profit from the current set-up attempt to guarantee their ascendancy. But by endeavoring to reign in the human pneuma, they are actually enclosing themselves in glass. Those of us whose emotional make-up does not permit us to live in a detached and predictable way remain free. We breathe more deeply, and live more richly out here in the fertile valleys, where moist, black soil is underfoot, and unruly vines cover everything.

We are told that because of mental ‘illness’, we are closed off from the ‘healthy’ condition of stability and dispassion. But like the viewers in the new museum, who eat candy as they look at terrariums, it is those in the hermetic glass houses who are trapped. The rest of us are free to experience the currents of stirring, lush, and earthy emotions. We remain more in touch with the human spirit, and by extension the essence of life on earth, than those who think emotions are atavistic and superfluous, like an appendix. Feelings are not an almost purposeless add-on, prone to abscess and treatable by excision. They are the heart of the human experience, and (for that matter) the human body.

We are the future. Sooner or later the poverty of denying the value and inevitability of emotionalism will be as obvious as the short-sighted stupidity of not living hand in hand with nature. The human spirit may stay bent for a long time, but eventually the organic forces in our hearts will assert themselves, restoring the balance. Let us recognize that we are the ones who have stayed close to our ancestral home, and be ready to welcome the wayward children back to the land.