I’m not particularly distressed by their suffering—there’s no point in my suffering over something that isn’t likely to change. Most people in the world suffer from the illusion of responsibility, and I’ve long since made peace that.

The problem for me is that, in interacting with them, I have to take them seriously. They take themselves very seriously, and are deeply concerned about being taken seriously by others. They are sensitive to the slightest disregard, and react with varying degrees of anger, fear, and discomfort.

I have to pretend to take them seriously in order to keep the social machinery operating smoothly, and at the same time, I have to pretend to take myself seriously. If I were to start laughing at myself the way I do when I’m alone, they would want to know what’s funny, especially if we’re in a hospital room where someone may be dying. (More about laughter: “Who Is Laughing at Whom?”)

So there’s a lot of pretending going on, which takes a lot of energy, but more than that, I miss my own amusement. I feel like a kid who’s been told he can’t laugh and play in church—it’s no fun being serious like all the grownups.

If I’m given the opportunity to repeat the experience, my current intention is to decline. How will I explain my refusal? Send them a copy of this post? We’ll see…

Does this post have any connection to reality, or am I just concocting an elaborate rationalization to flatter myself for not enjoying the experience? The actual processing that went on in my brain during the whole affair is beyond conscious scrutiny. All I really have access to are the feelings of unpleasantness, and my verbalizations are just attempts to make sense of the emotions. Naturally, my “interpreter” is going to come up with something that makes me look good within my personal frame of reference. It sounds good to me: I’m cool, right?

(From an earlier post: “I would like to keep the level of my ignorance clearly in mind. I would like to remember that I’m floating along in a sea of neural processes that are beyond my comprehension, just guessing at where I am and how I got here.”)

If I were to take it all seriously, I’d be giving my conscious self more credit than it deserves. Wouldn’t that be funny?

Vast Implications

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At one point, I found occasion to hold forth on my attitude toward death, which consisted of my telling stories about Chinese Zen masters who had voluntarily died—sometimes sitting, even standing—with no great regard for the end of their lives, and how I had come to identify with that tradition. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but I was thinking about it this morning, and realized I had failed to mention another facet of my view of death that might be more broadly available, more helpful.

When Eve and I lived on Mandana Boulevard, the kitchen and dining rooms of our house had views of the sidewalk from a slight rise, and there was a lot of foot traffic with people crossing back and forth between Grand and Lakeshore. Eating or washing the dishes, my human-being-alert module was frequently activated, and I would look up to watch whoever was passing by. The spectrum of humanity was fairly broad, but the less fit were deterred by the height of the hill they had to climb in either direction, so that the majority were young, from babies in strollers to trim middle-agers.

The spectrum of emotions displayed was broad, too, from toddlers picking up fallen magnolia petals in wonder, to verbally violent arguments, and everything in between. My empathy module got a considerable workout, powered, perhaps, by mirror neurons, and I came to the conclusion that, to the extent that we identify with other human beings, we will live on as long as our species survives; as long as babies laugh or forsaken lovers cry. The joys and fears that have propelled us through life will propel those who remain, generation after generation: echoes of ourselves. Our immortality only requires that we de-emphasize those accidents of our personal histories that make us unique, and place greater importance on our commonalities with everyone else.

Who am I, after all? That’s a question I’ve struggled with most of my life, and everything I’ve written on this site is about the answers that have evolved. Biologically and neurologically, I am a fairly typical human male. My conscious experience is the result of chance encounters and forces beyond my control, and I have come to see claims of ownership or authorship of anything related to me as nonsensical.

The path to that realization was tortuous and difficult, but it is perhaps more difficult to incorporate that realization into my moment-to-moment experience. I’m engaged in an ongoing process of monitoring each thought and noting whether it is consistent with the truth of my existence, or a mindless incorporation of social convention. It’s easier when I’m alone in my apartment; more challenging when I’m surrounded and involved with others, as on the recent trip.

There were many occasions when I found myself reacting from old habit, especially during the first few days, becoming annoyed with situations or people to whom I was bound in close and continuous contact. When I felt my irritation rising, it would prompt a smile at the thought that I had momentarily “taken birth,” as Howie would say, as a conventionally defined person. As that person, I would fail to realize that none of the people who were annoying me had  any control over their behavior. I held them responsible, blaming them for my reaction to their slights, taking their disregard personally, etc. The frequency of such reactions diminished over time, returning me to my more usual equanimity.

Fortunately, I had no such relapses in another area: the conventional reactions to bodily functions and effluvia that characterized my earlier life did not return; they’ve long since disappeared. As a result, it was my job to get Leon to the toilet, clean him up afterwards and apply barrier cream to his poor butt, abused by continuous sitting in a hospital bed. He was apologetic about not being up to the task, despite my continual assurances that I didn’t mind in the least, that I enjoyed helping him.

No one else seemed to have made much progress in getting past their aversion to human messiness, or seemed to think such progress was possible or even desirable. They hadn’t had the kind of life that would bring them to see their squeamishness as imprisonment. Fortunately for Leon and I, the universe has been more generous to me.

It has been generous in providing me with people and information that broadened my perspective, that gave me ways of looking at life and my self that have been wonderfully freeing and rewarding, and it has given me the opportunity and motivation to pass that information along. I hope it has been generous to you, as well.

The Leaves Come and Go… The Trees… The Universe…

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Having nipped this particular conversation in the bud, I started thinking about a strategy that I came up with years ago when I first discovered this kind of habitual behavior. I would say to myself, “There’s no one here but you.” But this morning I realized that that particular strategy was flawed in that it reinforced the idea of my self as an ongoing entity that could be alone or not.

If the social self is seen as an ongoing, constant, reality—as who I really am—then when it finds itself in the kitchen with no one else around it may trigger the feeling of loneliness. This is not a pleasant feeling, and it can motivate going out to find some other lonely human being to keep the social self company.

But the social self is not the only self that’s capable of taking over my brain. There are other selves that are totally content to be puttering around by themselves: watering the plants, reading, listening to music, playing with the computer, etc.

Loneliness is not the only option this brain has when it is physically alone, and all it has to do to escape loneliness is to activate one of its non-lonely selves. Having imaginary conversations is not conducive to remembering those other options.

So how might I better spend my time than chatting with people who aren’t here?

What happened this morning was that all conversation disappeared for a while. I became the actions that my body was performing, the sensory inputs it was processing: hands and arms moving dishes from the drainer to the shelf, body pivoting, bare feet on the floor, counter top, refrigerator, gurgling of the coffee pot… A stream of sensations that weren’t being experienced by “Norm”—this organism’s brain-constructed social identity—but that occurred without reference to any overriding entity.

There is a delectable sense of freedom that comes with this untethered flow of sensation. In contrast, conventional experience seems to happen inside a box, constrained by the bonds of language with its concepts and definitions.

Of course, as I’ve said, we can’t live in a social world without language, but it is possible, I think, with practice, to be aware that it is only a tool; to pick it up and use it only when needed. Like any tool, a certain level of maintenance is required–a little sharpening and lubrication, perhaps–but it needn’t be a constant preoccupation.

There is more to life than social encounters, and we don’t have to give up the joy and freedom of that life just to be ready for our next conversation.

Just This from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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This transformation has been building for a couple of years or so, but so intermittently that I hadn’t noticed its trajectory until a new neighbor moved in upstairs. I can hear her footsteps on the floor above me, interspersed with the odd thump now and then. She’s not that heavy-footed, but her steps are audible, and being somewhat hyper-sensitive to sounds of human activity in my vicinity—a result of my particular history—I notice. She’s a very busy person, and I wonder, abstractly, what is it that she’s so busy doing. What could possibly warrant all that moving about?

I find myself smiling, chuckling even, thinking, “There she goes again. She certainly is busy.” I feel a warm sense of affection for this human being that I know so little about.

Perhaps because I hear her so frequently, and experience this warm, fuzzy feeling so frequently, that it has become more readily available. Now I find that when my next-door neighbor has a “music day,” and cranks up his stereo, I feel the same smiling affection that I get with the overhead footsteps. Noticing the music is not new, but while I once neutrally accepted it, now it brings a smile. The same is true when I hear the rumble of my downstairs neighbor’s sliding open her closet door. Every moment of awareness of other people seems to bring a new dose of joy.

Back on the bus, the guy behind me has become quiet since his audience got off, and the new focus of my attention is the two early-teen boys with skateboards sitting across from me. I haven’t listened closely enough to hear what they’re talking about, but their excitement and amusement are coming through loud and clear, with “fuck!” and “shit!” punctuating their talking and laughing. I have the idea that their lack of parental supervision is making them profanely giddy, and I’m giddy with their giddiness.

Next, a gorgeous young woman puts her bike on the rack at the front of the bus and sits down with her back to me. She’s dressed for summer, and on the back of her bare neck and shoulders are a couple of random squiggles from a ballpoint pen, as if she might have been holding one while scratching an itch. Again, loving warmth sweeps over me, at what? Her basic humanness? Her vulnerability?

It was a warm day for San Francisco, sunny and fog-free, and the park was packed. I had come mainly to hear Beethoven’s fifth symphony, rather than for a social experience, but I could not avoid social distractions. The human high point was watching a teenage girl devour a huge submarine sandwich a few feet in front of me, often munching with her mouth open, leaning against the back of her mother’s low canvas chair and facing me instead of the orchestra. She seemed oblivious to the music, and to the sandwich as well, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine while her surging metabolism fed itself.

This affection for humanity is arising more frequently, it seems, but it isn’t altogether new. A few years ago I pulled up to an intersection behind a guy on a Harley. Waiting for the light, he put his boots down on the pavement, stood up, lit a cigarette, and surveyed his domain before sitting back down and roaring off into the wide world, king of it all. I grinned, enjoying his supremacy with him.

When I told Howie about it, his first remark was, “Right out of central casting,” which he followed with pointing out how the attitude inherent in such a public persona inevitably leads to suffering. There is a separation of oneself from the rest of the world, a posing before the audience, that will likely lead to a feeling of isolation, and to desolation when age and infirmity make the pose no longer sustainable. I agreed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t vicariously enjoy the feeling of that moment.

Delusion is an unavoidable part of being human–it is built into the organism. The limitations of consciousness mean that we can never experience the truth of what we are. Like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, we can only guess at the nature of the real world, and yet we go on, making the best of life that we can, given our limited information.

Knowing that we are inherently, unavoidably deluded offers the possible relief of humor. We can learn to laugh at our pretensions and our bumbling. The most malevolent among us are in the same situation as the saints: we are all made what we are by the circumstances of our lives. We are all equally deserving of love and compassion.

There is a kind of tangential connection between all I’ve just written and the video that’s available below. In the long run, as the song says, what seems bad at the moment may turn out to have wonderful consequences. One of our great limitations is that we can’t foresee how the interplay of myriad circumstances will shape the future, and so, as always, we act on limited information; doing what seems right at the moment, hoping for the best.

In the Long Run from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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Admittedly, it would be awkward to say things like, “The brain I live in did an excellent job of analyzing the situation,” although it would be more accurate than saying, “I did an excellent job of analyzing the situation,” since “I,” as the conscious self, is the outcome rather than the initiator of brain activity. Still, it’s possible to use conventional language while being aware that it is shorthand, and this awareness can affect how we relate to the behavior of ourselves and others.

The result is that we don’t blame anyone for their behavior, we don’t take pride in our own actions, and we don’t respect other people for actions over which they have no control.

All this is old hat to anyone to anyone who is familiar with the tenets of naturalism, and if you’re not, Tom Clark does a fabulous job presenting them at naturalism.org. If everything I’ve said so far is unfamiliar to you, Tom’s site will fill in the details, and then some.

Our conscious experience is a tiny fraction of what the brain does, and there is evidence that the brain can negotiate the physical world perfectly well without the conscious experience of sight, for example. There’s even a recent video that shows a man who has no conscious visual experience, and yet he can navigate an obstacle course.

If the brain can function without conscious experience, what is consciousness for? I think it’s a product of social life, a way for brains to communicate with each other. This man, who has what is called “blindsight,” can negotiate the maze, but he can’t tell you what he’s trying to avoid; he can’t communicate.

As a result of consciousness and communication, brains produce images of themselves and the results of their interior processes, and that is what we experience as our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. As a further result of these processes, we experience thoughts about ourselves, and these thoughts are for the most part erroneous, based on antiquated concepts that don’t take brain function into account. Brains don’t inherently understand how they work, and it has taken neuroscience to explain brains to themselves.

Thanks to science, I now have a much more accurate conceptualization of who I am, but no amount of scientific understanding is likely to alter my conscious perception of being myself. MRI’s and cat-scans only externalize brain function—they give me new ways of thinking and talking about myself—but otherwise they don’t alter my internal experience.

I am no better at experiencing the full complexity of myself than I was before science told me just how complex I am. I still feel like the same old me, and somehow that bothers me. My inability to incorporate understanding into experience leaves me feeling like a shadow of my “real” self. It’s an unpleasant perception, and I have been trying to find a way to deal with it for years.

Awareness of the limitations of our self-conceptions have been around for millennia among esoteric groups of human beings—long before science—and some have developed alternative ways of thinking about and experiencing themselves. The experiential side has consisted primarily of depressing the linguistic processes of the brain so that other areas of perception become dominant. How this alternative perception is described varies with the cultural millieu, ranging from “oneness with God” to “the true nature of mind,” etc.—none of which is very scientific.

These non-linguistic modes of perception are all very interesting, and in some sense evade the boundaries imposed by conceptual (linguistic) thought, but it is impossible for any of them to completely encompass “things as they are.” The brain did not evolve with the capacity for such an experience. Brains that gave a more useful chart of the world had an evolutionary advantage, but total accuracy was not required. Whatever we might imagine an accurate perception of reality to be, there is one thing we can be sure of: our ordinary, everyday experience of ourselves and the world is not it.

While I don’t give awareness without language  any special significance as “truth,” or your “true nature,” I do think it is worth pursuing. I have an analogy:

Imagine linguistically-constrained reality as the house you live in: it protects you from the elements, and aids your survival in a hostile world.

But there is a world outside this house. Stepping outside won’t give you any greater perceptual abilities than you had when you were inside—color, touch, sound, etc., are still the same—but you’re in a much bigger space. You’re still incapable of perceiving reality in its incredible depth and complexity, but at least you’re outside the box.

The closest we can come to seeing things as they are is to stop seeing them the way they are not. Which is not to say  that you should give up your house, only that it might be worthwhile to step outside once in a while.

My Self Behind Bars

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Zen Buddhism, according to Chip’s sources, proclaims that the self is “the arch delusion… a malignant growth which is to be surgically removed,” and I would agree, given a particularly narrow definition of “self.” 

But Zen comes in a variety of flavors, and the self is not always so limited or regarded with such disdain. Dogen, a famous Japanese Zen guy, famously said, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe.”

The self as an independent initiator of action is an illusion, and studying our own experiences will reveal that. With that illusion out of the way, we can see the self as the accumulated history of a particular human being—all the memories of its interaction with the universe. The universe is the author of who I am, and who everyone else is, and no one is in charge of any of it; no one is to blame. Actions still exist, and they still have consequences, as the Buddha said, but they arise from previous actions going back to the big bang, rather than from some out-of-the-blue act of a freely willing self.

The former Zen monk that Chip writes about was abused and abandoned as a child, and his pursuit of Zen was an unsuccessful attempt to deal with that abuse and its consequences. His narrow experience of Zen had brought him to a feeling of love for an abstract idea of “universal life,” but had given him no positive feeling for the particularity of individual lives, including his own.

By the end of the piece, his experience with his Zen-sympathizing psychoanalyst had brought him to the realization that what he wanted was to love the life he had been given.

“What he felt was joy. Not the unbordered joy of enlightenment, but the vernal joy that comes after the wintry work of mourning: the joy of a man with a life of his own.”

I’m glad the guy has found some joy, but what has he been mourning? And what does it mean to have “a life of his own”? It sounds like he’s still entangled in the vines of psychoanalysis.

On occasion I have mourned the life I’ve had: if only my parents had been rich and educated; if only I had been born in the urban North instead of the rural South; if only I had never smoked pot; if only I hadn’t sold that cottage in San Francisco, etc., etc. If any of those things had happened, “I” wouldn’t be here: I would be someone else, and given the peculiarities of life, I might be miserable or dead instead of happy and alive. It is impossible to imagine who I might have been, even if only one tiny circumstance had been different—it’s called chaos theory.

So “mourning” results from a lack of understanding of the realities of existence: physics, chemistry, evolution, etc. If our personal history has given us any reverence for truth, then once the ignorance underlying mourning is dispelled, it tends to dissipate from the weight of its own non-sense.

 As for having a life of one’s own, how could you have the life of someone else? Your practical life is what you remember of the things you’ve been exposed to. (It’s also possible to have an experience in the “present” without any connection to memory, but while that can be fun and interesting, it isn’t practical and won’t pay the bills.)

My life simply is what it is, and any unpleasant emotional reaction to that is the result of ignorance of what is possible. I might as well be sad about gravity as sad about my life.

Emotions are the brain’s reaction to reality as it has learned to perceive it. There are some inherited reflexes, but most emotions are the result of acquired ideas of what is desirable and what is threatening. When those ideas are based on falsehoods or limited perspective, knowledge of the truth can alter them. The brain’s perception of reality changes with every new understanding and experience, and emotions will tag along, sooner or later.

So don’t mourn the past; it’s what got you here. What you do now will become your recent past, and will take you to a different and possibly happier present. 

Where I Live

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Speaking of Michael, a couple of posts ago, I wrote about an article in the March 2009 Discover magazine, which included comments by Gazzaniga and three other neuroscientists. What I didn’t realize, until Eve pointed it out to me, was that the article was a condensation from an event sponsored by Discover magazine and the National Science Foundation, and that there were videos that included much more information than the article.

In the segments featuring Gazzaniga, he talks about how determinism is affecting how we understand ourselves as parts of the natural universe, and how this growing understanding may come to affect our views of criminal justice, punishment, and retribution; all ideas that are familiar to anyone who’s visited Tom Clark’s naturalism.org.

Despite the additional info in the videos, my favorite consequence of understanding determinism—the way it can change how we feel about our selves—was not addressed. It is the understanding of my self as a fully determined part of the natural universe that has made the greatest contribution to my own happiness, at least according to my interpreter. (Gazzaniga gives a great depiction of the “interpreter,” and how his research led to its discovery, in the segment, “Inside Michael Gazzaniga’s Head.”)

Having evolved from a person who medicated himself for years by smoking large quantities of marijuana, to one who physically grins at himself every five minutes or so, without drugs, I would like—for who knows what reason, although again… I would like to promote the same behavior in everyone else. That’s the mission.

I would rather not be stuck with this goal, simply because it won’t be accomplished in my lifetime, and I would rather be doing something else—making 3D animations and writing music. Besides, the Discover article shows that other people—people with much more scientific credibility than I have—are moving in the same direction, so momentum is building. I think that my current point of view will come to be commonplace, simply because it is based on facts about how the brain works that are as real as gravity.

So my efforts are not crucial, and I could just sit back and watch the inevitable unfold, but my personal history compels me, and I have found a way to combine this mission with the activities that are most fun to me, which you can observe in the video below.

My approach in the video is more oblique than in this blog or in the audio-only Bare Brains podcasts (the first thirteen), but the idea is to nudge people toward looking at themselves in terms of “causes and conditions,” as the Buddhists say; as the natural product of the events of their lives, rather than something they somehow invented out of whole cloth. I have no idea how effective these efforts will be, but making videos is a lot more fun for me than typing out these words, so I’ll probably persist—in addition to the writing.

Norm’s Normal Life: Playing Doctor and More from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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Yunyan and Daowu are two of my favorite old Chinese guys, and on this occasion, Yunyan asked Daowu what the bodhisattva of great compassion does with so many hands and eyes. Daowu answered that it’s like someone reaching back for the pillow at night, which Yunyan then said he understood. Daowu wanted to know the details of his understanding, and Yunyan explained that it’s like hands and eyes all over the body. Daowu agreed that he’s close, but there’s more: it’s like hands and eyes all through the body.

My first impression was that this story isn’t about compassion at all, but about how the brain works, and in fact, old Wansong, who’s commenting on all these cases, hardly mentions compassion. Instead he tells the story of the blind fortune teller who was asked how he made it to the market place on muddy paths without soiling his white shoes. He answered that there was an eye on the end of his staff, which brings to mind a phenomenon noted by people who study the brain: 

It seems that when we’re using tools—a pencil, even—the brain models the sensory input to produce the impression that we feel the tool’s point of encounter with the object it’s being applied to, rather than just the sensations of our skin contacting the tool. 

The brain has evolved to produce models of our bodies, the environment, and interaction between them, in ways that simplify an incredible complexity of sensory inputs and convert them into something more manageable, something we can describe to each other in the shorthand of language. It makes a model of the hand reaching for the pillow, and of the pillow’s shape and location in space, and remembers them even in darkness.

The old Indian and Chinese guys didn’t have all our current science available to them, but they had paid careful attention to their brains and passed along what they’d learned, using the language they had available. Since part of what they were trying to communicate was the way that language and its simplifications mislead us, they had to avoid creating new language that would seduce us into further linguistic misunderstanding. They taught by asking their students to examine their own sensory experience rather than grasping through intellect; by asking questions and hinting at answers.

Here’s Wansong trying to lead us through the “tangling vines”:

“It is like willow-grown banks and flower-grown walls on a warm day in a gentle breeze—where is the spring? What shape is it?”

“I wonder—throughout the body, all over the body,  reaching back for a pillow—who is it? Inside the puppet stage there must be someone pulling the strings.” 

These two quotes are juxtaposed in the same paragraph in Thomas Cleary’s translation, and suggest that the “someone pulling the strings” is in the same category as “spring”: both are concepts that allow us to talk about complex phenomena in simple ways, but neither one exists apart from the myriad sensations they summarize. 

There is no spring apart from the blooming of flowers and warming of breezes, the turning of earth and shifting sunlight; and there is no puppeteer apart from the impacts of atoms and photons, the movement of waves and molecules.

That’s easy enough to say, but can you enjoy the shifting colors of light without thinking “flowers”? Can you reach for the pillow without feeling your self as the puppet-master? Can you live in a world without objects and edges? 

(Don’t try this while operating heavy equipment.)

I Can’t Make Heads or Tails of This

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There is a huge difference between how we are taught to think of ourselves, and the facts of how our brains work. It puzzled me, at first, that the people who know the most about the brain say so little—nothing, in fact—about the relevance of their work to how they think of themselves. They talk about brains—theirs and ours—as if what they’re saying had nothing to do with their self-concept, or with anyone else’s. It’s as if they were talking about the weather.

This was brought home to me again by an article from Discover Magazine, recently published online, called, “Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain.” The “top neuroscientists” interviewed included Daniel Levitin, Michael Gazzaniga, Sam Wang, and Rebecca Saxe, and they confirmed things I’ve been writing here for years, with a few embellishments. Well worth reading if you want the “official word.”

Michael Gazzaniga points out how different circuits are activated at different times, and how the activity of those circuits is what constitute our current mental state: “Consciousness is not a thing in the brain that information gets poured into and you’re aware of it. It’s the constant struggle of all these circuits to come up to the top and hold the stage for that second.” All our circuits can’t be equally active at the same time, so whichever ones are most active determine who we are at that moment.

I’ve written and talked about how the environment influences which circuits are active, and Rebecca Saxe elaborates on that idea: “One really interesting discovery about the brain is that one of the major ways it works is by generating all the possible responses to a situation and then inhibiting the ones that you don’t want.” She describes the behavior of patients with a particular kind of frontal lobe damage that reduces inhibitory controls and results in what are called, “utilization behaviors.” If you place an object in front of them, they will use it, whether it’s appropriate to the current situation or not.

Which brings up the question of who decides what’s appropriate, with or without brain damage. Sam Wang talks about some ideas in research on decision-making and concludes that this process, though it is “…something that we might imagine being integral to our consciousness is in fact composed of components that are not explicitly accessible to us.”

For the most part, these ideas are familiar to anyone who’s listened to or read much of my stuff, as is the next question: “Given what we know, how do we think of ourselves?” Wang suggests that these ideas differ from what we might imagine about ourselves, but doesn’t suggest how we might correct our imagination.

While the neuroscientists don’t talk about it, some philosopher’s do, at least in terms of it’s social ramifications. Tom Clark’s naturalism.org offers some of the most insightful thinking on this subject, and in a much more organized way than the labyrinth you’ll find here.

My focus is more on how it feels to be inside this organism, and for me, the more I’ve learned, the more interesting the feeling of “being me” has become. To quote myself from the previous post: “By paying attention to the moment-to-moment surprises blossoming in our heads, we can get comfortable with the idea of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Life can become a perpetual surprise party, with each of us the honored guest.”

The question of who we are and how we think of ourselves is ancient, and I’ll leave you with a favorite quote from one of the old guys, Rumi: “When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, ‘This is certainly not the way we thought it was!’”

Many Veils

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There has been an evolutionary advantage in seeking out relationships with our fellow creatures—species that do leave more offspring. We have this impulse in common with all social organisms, from ants to antelopes.

The evolutionary advantage is real, and the emotions that have evolved to propel relationship-seeking are real, but we human beings have also evolved language, which we can use to think about and understand our predicament in ways that other social animals cannot. We can imagine a future in which our needs are not met, and our real troubles begin in this imagined future.

We cannot free ourselves from the needs of our bodies, or from the programmed pleasures that guide our behavior. We can’t stop breathing, or taking in nutrients. Sugar will taste sweet, no matter what we think about its nutritional value, and orgasm will thrill no matter how we regard the complications its pursuit gets us into. 

As long as we have bodies, we are stuck with the realities of bodies. We can be injured. We must breathe, eat, shit, piss, and rest. Our ability to imagine the future means that we can anticipate our needs and make arrangements to satisfy them—this is good. It also means that we can imagine the failure of our plans, and it is the imagined possibility of failure that begets the search for security. 

If we can find some kind of short-term security, we are lucky. There’s a roof over our head, food in the fridge, and no one is trying to break down the door to get in. But life on this planet is uncertain: the person we hoped would cherish us forever could be smitten by someone else; a fire could burn down our happy home; and ultimately, death awaits each of us.

The inherent uncertainty of life can lead to a great deal of anxiety and unhappiness, but it doesn’t have to. Oddly enough, with all the unpredictable possibilities stretching out before us—and the impossibility of preparing for even a fraction of them—there is one thing of which we can be absolutely certain, and that is uncertainty itself. 

I chuckled when I finished that last sentence, struck by the humor of our situation: blessed with the ability to imagine the future, we are cursed with the uncertainty of our imaginings. Our imagination fuels our anxiety, and the only reasonable respite from this anxiety is to become comfortable with uncertainty.

Uncertainty is, after all, our constant companion, so we might as well befriend it. None of us can predict what kind of thought or memory our brain will bring to consciousness in the next moment, let alone next week. I am constantly amused by the parade of memories that my brain produces without any obvious stimulus, with no apparent purpose. “Where did that come from?” my brain asks itself, and then gets on with washing the dishes after a moment of smiling wonder.

By paying attention to the moment-to-moment surprises blossoming in our heads, we can get comfortable with the idea of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Life can become a perpetual surprise party, with each of us the honored guest.

With enough practice, we can develop a very tentative attitude toward all our plans for the future, with a resulting lack of distress when they are altered by unforeseen circumstances. We may also come to find humor in our unrequited yearnings for security and certainty.

We can learn to enjoy our relationships without expecting them to save us from insecurity. We can enjoy all the pleasures the body offers without dreading their inevitable end. 

Our hunger for that which does not exist can fade away. 

Come On In from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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