After nearly two weeks in the foothills near Yosemite, we returned to the Bay Area Sunday. Toward the end of the visit I was feeling discouraged, as my posts made clear.

My lack of purpose after the demise of the acupuncture business was hitting home. The book project softens that a little, but the right formula eludes me. So far the prose sounds like my least successful blogging: too wordy and intellectual. Lyrical description of the richness and lessons of my experiences may be beyond my ability.

Recent essays expressed remorse about my relationship with my father. Through writing here and after corresponding with my aunt, I eventually moved past that. But there remained a shadow of sadness.

The neck pain and the bad news from the recent MR scan weighed on me. I felt lonely, too.

In short, I was stuck in the familiar place of self-criticism, fear, and discouragement.

Then, on one of our last nights in the forest, something shifted inside. Peace returned.

Whenever I feel defeated the same phrase comes to mind: “God, help me.” This must be the most common human prayer, and although I don’t often believe the cosmos listens, I say it anyway. The words feel comforting, despite their futility. This time, to my relief, I heard a voice speak in a loving tone near my left shoulder: I’m right here!

Maybe I was half asleep and slipping into hypnogogic hallucination. Maybe my own thoughts rose to audibility. Regardless, I felt reassured. Why question the source? Whatever conscious presence exists in the universe, I’m convinced it arises from the depths of matter. It is not something separate from life; it is something integral to it. So if it shows up at all, it must come by way of ordinary neural pathways. Why distinguish between a dream, a thought, or the voice of God? If it feels divine, I choose to accept it as such and not worry about its provenance.

In the calm aftermath of that simple phrase uttered by something that cares, my sense of purpose became clear. I decided that since the material world no longer seems to cooperate with me, I might as well focus on the spiritual. I could even interpret the way the cosmos has frustrated my plans as God pushing me to commit to the mystical path. At times over the years I’ve glimpsed truth and entered resonant states of mind. Why not quit trying to achieve in the human sphere and instead seek awakening with all my heart and soul?

In truth, I’ve run out of options. I will either find relief through higher consciousness, or find no relief at all. And yes, I’ve been working toward realization for a long time, but not as my primary goal.

Writing still feels important, but I’m viewing it as a means to an end. It helps me make progress toward grounding in life, love, and meaning. It isn’t a project in the usual sense of the word, whether I’m working on the blog, the book, or my poetry. Writing is the road rather than the destination.

Deep down, I know with utter conviction that peace awaits, provided I get serious about taking the needed steps. This means abandoning striving for success. Instead, I will concentrate on taking care of my body, building my meditative skills, and healing my heart. It is time, at last, to journey inward toward the Light.

The last post bemoaned my failure to love my father properly despite his faults. In fairness to myself, I must emphasize that he did not make love easy. But although that’s a reasonable excuse, with increased spiritual grounding I can no longer fall back on it. At the same time, there’s no point in wallowing forever in remorse.

Soon after writing that piece, I prayed under the stars for an hour, begging forgiveness for everything I’ve done that’s hurt anyone, ever. I understand God as something that arises from within, not without. So with genuine remorse, praying may not be necessary. But it can’t hurt. Gazing at the stars shining out of the clear mountain night, I tried to recall as many missteps as I could. In addition to the times I hurt loved ones, I also feel terrible about the patients who were injured by my mistakes. Errors were especially common during medical training, but also cropped up occasionally in later practice. My list of sins was painful to behold, but the ritual helped me feel freer. With that release I hope to quit beating myself up about what happened with my dad or any past error. I did the best I could. It wasn’t that great a performance, but it was all I could muster at the time. I believe it’s OK to move on.

The next morning I received an email from a reader, Trabel, who offered an interesting take on the book my dad gave me at that last visit, a text about corruption within the medical establishment. Her analysis makes sense to me; I share an excerpt with her permission:

There could be another possible interpretation of this last encounter with your father. Taking into consideration the title of the book he offered to you, it may be implied that he wanted to give you a warning about the deadly abyss of the medical system to which you were heading right in …

He had an empirical, realistic way of thinking, I can imagine; he also witnessed how your mother lost herself in the “health care” system (he saw not only her, maybe) – and by giving this book to you, he may have wanted to tell you “Do not let yourself get lost in this system! Don’t rely on them – find your way all by yourself!”

My father was indeed worried about the psychiatric drugs and their negative effects on my weight and clarity of thought. He did not like the way I was taking on the illness role and shrinking from engagement. And he did feel anger toward the psychiatrists who contributed to my mother’s decline and death. So it makes sense the book may have been meant as a warning.

Since I would have been resistant to his opinion stated outright, giving a book might have felt like his best option. A few years later I donated his present to our local library thrift shop without having read it—the book caused me pain just sitting on the shelf. I regret that decision and plan to track down the text and read it now, to honor my father and his last gift to me.

My dad made mistakes that caused lifelong problems for his children. The root problem was alcoholism. He knew he was an alcoholic, but he refused to seek treatment. He openly acknowledged that he drank to escape life’s pain; he could not imagine facing his demons sober. His fatalism in the face of his addiction may have been the most tragic fact of his life.

As I forgive myself for my shortcomings, I continue to work on forgiving my father. My recent writings have forced me to realize the scars remain more tender than I knew. Healing the past is an ongoing process, as perhaps it will always be…

Today’s post is just a (kind of) short addendum to yesterday’s treatise on conflict in mental health discussions. Mandy, my wife, pointed out another reason that people tend to cling tightly to narrowly defined solutions: fear of uncertainty. I agree with her that the discomfort we all have with ‘not knowing’ plays a role in the common scenario of debates about policy turning into heated arguments between adversaries who each are certain they have the right answer. Because uncertainty raises anxiety.

When quantum mechanics began to be elucidated early in the twentieth century, physicists started to see a fundamental role of chance in the structure and behavior of matter. The inescapability of uncertainty and randomness made Einstein uncomfortable. Even though his groundbreaking work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect helped usher in the quantum age, he still wrote (in a letter to Max Born) that he was “convinced that [God] does not throw dice”.

The idea of a non-deterministic universe strikes many as unsettling, to say the least. One of the objections to the theory of natural selection has always been that ‘believers’ insist that ‘God’ has orchestrated the creation of the universe, the earth, and life. Natural selection postulates that random mutations and probabilistic sorting of genes form the raw material of changes in life forms. If the mutations or gene combinations are advantageous, they get passed on to subsequent generations in larger numbers than if they cause the organism problems. With thousands and millions of iterations, these changes add up to dramatic alterations in living forms and ecologies. But the underlying engine of change, by that view, depends on haphazard events. This assaults the worldview of those who believe in a ‘hands-on’ God who directs events and answers prayers.

Some day I will write about how I believe how the universe may accommodate both probabilistic development, universal consciousness, and a certain kind of facilitated (rather than completely random) progression of history. My point right now is just that since the dawn of human self-awareness, people have had a strong need for predictability, and for a sense that they are not just adrift in a sea of chance. We prefer certainty over doubt, black and white over gray.

I heard an interview with a scientist who has written about why people need to be right. Despite a lot of internet searching I can find neither the scientist’s name nor the book, if it was a book, or I would reference them here. But the basic idea seemed to be that if you see a lion approaching, you need to ‘know’ without taking time to think, that the proper response is to flee. She who doubts hesitates, and she who hesitates is lost. Once decisions start being processed through cognitive and analytical channels, reactivity slows down, so that if an instant choice must be made one had better have a predetermined action pattern in place. There seems to be an innate demand for strong conviction.

So opening our minds to the possibility that our survival mechanism (whether medication, a specific kind of therapy, or a spiritual philosophy) might be fallible becomes quite difficult. We would rather hold tightly to the belief that our ‘answer’ is comprehensive, our world predictable, and our emotional safety assured.

So if I wrote yesterday’s post again, I would include our inherent uneasiness with uncertainty as another of the reasons why people become so bound to constricted views. A tightly defined, closed off ideology feels safer than one that is wide open, and leaves us aware of our vulnerability. We’d rather sit in a watertight box than risk feeling adrift in the random currents of fate.