What’s A Broken Head
As a society, we have a far easier time wrapping our heads around the concept of physical health than we do the subject of mental health. The reason is two-fold (and might just be three, maybe even four!). First and perhaps foremost, physical health is obviously tangible in a way that mental or psychological health is not. Sure, there are external manifestations of poor mental health that are tangible; “behavioural correlates”, as in posture, speech etc. Given the nature of human consciousness, however, we simply cannot see/know/understand how it really is — that is, how it really feels — to actually be someone else. When it comes to our mental lives, we really are islands unto ourselves. That we can even attempt to understand how someone else feels is itself an amazing fact about our kind. We call this act empathising, of course. And as beautiful and astounding as this feat is, there is an entirely irreconcilable difference between empathising with someone and in fact knowing what it is like to be that someone. Although it may be rare, for all we know, one may be amidst the throes of agony on the inside, and yet appear outwardly “OK”. Suffering happens on the inside, after all, and the only inside we have access to is our own. Second, mental health is a concept that has only recently come to popularity, at least here in the West. As recently as a single generation ago, the very idea of mental health was almost wholly alien. As you may have heard your parents or grandparents say in astonishment with respect to depression or anxiety, “Back in my day, it just wasn’t a thing!” The truth is, mental health and its absence has of course always been a “thing”. Ever since we’ve had minds they’ve been giving us trouble. It’s just that it’s become more of a thing, or at least a more recognised thing, most surely the consequence of recent cultural developments (which we’ll explore later) that have placed unprecedented stress upon our psyches thereby rendering the subject unignorable. But even though the psychological plight of modernity has brought the subject of mental health to the fore, we remain grossly underequipped — as individuals and as a culture — to address, deal, and otherwise interface with psychological ill-health, whether that be our own or others. Since the health of our heads is prerequisite to our flourishing in the world, we require further tools — both wisdom-based and technological — in order to deal with the trials of our time and those that invariably await us.
Before we seek to explore how we interface with the subject of mental health (and how we might better) we should ask, What is it? Mental health is the term we have adopted to refer to the qualitative state of our minds. But what is good and what is bad mental health? And how do we know our own, let alone that of others? Poor mental health could be defined, in accordance with our common sense understanding of the concept, as a mind that is characterised by negative emotions — fear, anxiety, torpor, melancholy etc. — for prolonged periods of time. Of course, there are also additional behavioural factors that form part of our framework for assessing mental health, some that are grounded in facts about human flourishing and others that have more to do with cultural norms, customs and particular ethics (“social adjustment”) than the actual physiology of our brains.
When we’re talking about the health of our minds, what we are ostensibly talking about is the health of our brains. Very rarely, however, do we speak of the health of our minds in the language of neurophysiology. Rather, we speak in the language of human experience — emotions, feels, vibes, narrative. We speak, in other words, about happiness rather than serotonin, love as opposed to oxytocin. In recent years, however, as our understanding of the brain has advanced in leaps and bounds, for better and worse, we have in fact begun to reduce mental phenomena to neurophysiology, shifting from a mind-based approach to mental health to a more brain-based one, so to speak. Rather than the Freudian or Jungian analysis of old, we are increasingly treating psychological ill-health with pharmaceutical chemistry. On one hand, this represents progress of a sort. The fact that we’re learning about the brain and establishing correlations between the balance of specific chemistry and particular phenomenology is cool, a good thing. On the other hand, however, it poses a certain danger. Reducing the human experience to chemistry is seductive, for chemistry is far more readily manipulable than such amorphous things as emotions. But while the human mind may, in the end, be nothing more than chemistry, it remains remarkably complex chemistry. In reducing subjective phenomena to single molecules or combination thereof, we are no doubt oversimplifying something that we ultimately don’t understand, substituting epistemic humility for the pretence of understanding. While it may not always be so, the fact remains that the most fruitful level at which to explore and understand the health of our minds is at the level of individual phenomena, that is the level of our particular experience in the context of our particular lives. Granted, there is undoubtedly instances where psychological ill-health truly is caused by a simple chemical imbalance, a broken serotonin pipe or what have you. However, these instances are surely most rare. Nearly always, mental health — good and bad — has very little to do with “chemical imbalances” and everything to do with the nature of one’s relationship to the world. In reducing mental health to chemistry, we therefore run the risk of conflating symptoms of one’s ill-health — i.e. specific chemical imbalances — with the ultimate cause, whatever it may be.
The term mental health can be slightly misleading, for it can be seen as implying that ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ health are separate things, two wholly distinct forms of health. In Reality, there is no such physical vs mental health dichotomy, there is only the one thing, after all, the Primordial Substance aka cosmic legostuff and its infinite configurations. At a lower level of philosophical abstraction, there is no clean distinction between the mind and body for there to be such thing as mental as opposed to physical health. Mind and body are not distinct entities but rather one and the same, two parts of the same whole. Poor mental health is very often but a symptom of poor physical health, and vice versa. So does that mean it’s an entirely erroneous distinction? Not at all. While the mental/physical dichotomy is on slippery metaphysical footing, it nevertheless has a certain pragmatic cash value. It is true that one can be physically fit, by most indications physiologically healthy, and yet psychologically less than well. It therefore makes sense to distinguish the two.
Practically speaking, there are three categories of mental health issues, three sources of psychological unwellness, as it were. The first is physiological, in the narrow sense (as opposed to the broad sense in which all mental health problems are fundamentally issues of physiology). Whether it be a genetic abnormality, like bipolar or schizophrenia, or environmentally influenced dis-ease, physiological defects can and often do trigger psychological defects. As we deepen our understanding of human biology, we should expect to improve our ability to deal with such forms of mental health issues. If one’s psychological ill-health is the result of some physiological malfunction, that should be the easiest to correct through various forms of intervention (especially when the malfunctioning is the result of relatively simple underlying physiological causes such as excessive inflammation). At the moment, our embodied understanding of the human condition, the relation between mind and body, is primitive and so too are our tools for affecting the interplay between physiology and psychology. Moving forward, however, as our diagnostics improve and our models of What We Are become increasingly sophisticated/honest, we should expect our interventions to be far more efficacious. The second category of mental health issue is emotional. Perhaps the most common form of psychological ill-health is the sustained presence of ‘negative’ emotions that are logical or natural responses to our environments. The important point to understand here is that, most often if not always, the prolonged presence of such emotions as anxiety, depression, angst, or fear have something important to tell us — either about our physiology or our relationship to the world. Often, they’re signals that we’re unwell on a physical level (aka the first category of issue). More often, however, they’re signs that there is something about the way in which we’re interfacing with the world, the way in which we’re living, that is problematic. When we’re otherwise physically well, very rarely do we experience negative emotions for no good reason. Generally, emotions contain information, valuable feedback concerning how what we’re doing in the world is affecting us. Negative emotions, specifically, are physiological tells — warnings — that our actions in the world are bringing us — or about to bring us — harm. The evolutionary logic that underpins this particular mechanism should be clear enough.
One of the problems, therefore, with our current culture of mental health treatment — and medical treatment generally — is that rather than examining what our minds (or bodies) are telling us, mining our experience for insight, we dismiss them as “problems” to be fixed, generally by way of pharmaceutical intervention. Instead of inquiring into the ultimate cause of our anxiety or depression, we seek to smother them with various forms of exogenous chemistry. The problem with the way we manage mental health today is not one unique to the practice of medicine but rather reflective of a deeper trait that afflicts the human condition: the desire for a silver bullet and an unwillingness to engage frankly with realities that smell of anything other than roses. Of course, there are commercial dynamics at play here. That is, it’s markedly easier to sell a pill than introspection. But to assign the problems of our health care system to the profit motive alone would be a gross simplification. The unfashionable truth, or at least some element of said truth, is that we largely choose to believe that our psychological torment — our skeletons and shadows and demons and other such eery motifs — are beyond our control. Indeed we place hope in the idea that the underside of our humanity can be cured with a pop of a pill twice daily. While it’s not always the most comfortable reality, our prospering in the world depends on our intentional, active, effortful engagement with our own lives. Emotions, above reason, are our guiding lights in this world, parts of our selves that, when paid the appropriate attention, can and reliably do lead towards our betterment. While they mightn’t always deliver the news we wish to hear, very often it’s the news we must hear. And so it is that we ignore, or suppress them, at our own peril.
The third category of psychological ill-health has to do with our old friend Enlightenment, the insight at the heart of Buddhism and the myriad branches of mindfulness practice. That is, that the primary source of human suffering and all psychological dis-ease is the sense of Self that we bring to bear upon our moment-to-moment experience of the world. While our mental health issues are products of gene-environment interactions — brain-world interfacing — they’re fundamentally based upon the ultimately mistaken sense that we are things that experience happens to, rather than experience itself. Right in front of us there is psychological gold, the Great Perfection that is consciousness itself, and yet we’re too busy lost in thought to notice it. On the very surface of awareness is Nirvana, yet we find ourselves drowning in the discursive duality of Samsara. Hence our suffering. This is not to deny the reality of our suffering, but just to point out that the liberation of our suffering is never a new car, better partner or lifetime of struggle away. Instead, it’s always lying just in front of our nose, in the diamond eye of the present moment. It sounds like a load of esoteric nonsense, I know, but it really is the best news you’ll hear all week, the single most hopeful fact about what it is that we are. At this point, one might ask, ‘Doesn’t this notion, that the cessation of our suffering (and contact with the universal bliss of existence to boot) is but an insight away, contradict the earlier claim that our psychological flourishing depends on our effortful/intentional/sometimes uncomfortable engagement etc. etc.?’ The answer is, yes and no. While our emotions very often contain highly valuable information concerning how we could better move through the world, the improvement of our experience is not necessarily dependent upon our embodying that information. Rather, the improvement of our well-being has all and everything to do with how we are connecting to the present moment, for our well-being is never contingent upon our actions in the past or future. To be clear, this is not to say that our actions in the past or orientation towards the future have no bearing upon our well-being, for they can and do. It is simply to point out that well-being is a present moment thing and that the present moment is contingent upon nothing other than the preconditions to experience itself, whatever they happen to be. In other words, while our broader flourishing in the world may be conditional upon our following the wisdom our emotions are embodiments of, our psychological well-being is not. We are either sufficiently concentrated on the nature of experience, or we’re distracted by the current of ephemeral sensations that stream through our field of consciousness (that vast, luminous, oval shaped screen where our head’s supposed to be). This is where the distinction between health and well-being is again important to bear in mind. Well-being, remember, is nothing but a reference to the qualitative dimension of our experience — how we’re feeling moment-to-moment. Health, in contrast, includes well-being but extends beyond it to encompass the impact of our minds on those of others, as well as the concept of worldly capabilities or freedom.
So far we’ve skimmed over the nature of mental health, touched upon its various causes, and made brief allusions to some of the ways in which we might manage to keep our heads on our shoulders (or, if it’s already fallen off, fix it back on). But for those that are currently struggling with underlying mental health issues, What to do? If it’s as easy as listening to our emotions, applying a bit of elbow grease and attaining Enlightenment, Why’s it so damn hard? Why is it that, despite our best intentions, we find it so hard to look after ourselves? And for those that aren’t themselves struggling with mental health issues but are surrounded by those that are, What to do? How can we effectively help those around us help themselves?
At the outset, I think it’s important to note — as I’ve already touched upon — the unique psychological context which we now inhabit, the particular environmental/cultural framework within which our minds presently exist. Most of us, most of the time, live in a world that is almost wholly discontinuous with the world we have occupied for the majority of our human history. That is, the very context of our existence is radically different to that of our deep past. The foods we eat, the things we do for work, the ways in which we communicate, the ways we spend our spare time. And yet the way we are constituted, biologically, remains largely the same as when we first came down from the trees many hundreds of thousands of years ago. This fact reflects the varying speeds at which culture and biology evolve, with cultural evolution moving at speeds orders of magnitude above the biological variety. And so it is that we find ourselves with lives that are modern and brains that are very much not.
To be sure, there is nothing intrinsically the issue with our brains being far older than our cultural context. In fact, it’s precisely the coming together of the old with the new that makes many elements of modern culture so enriching. Ancient structures of the brain that evolved to serve certain adaptive functions are now tickled by products of our own creation that bestow pleasure beyond our ancestors’ most lucid fantasy. Consider the pleasure of the humble Pop-Tart, or the entertainment value of Game of Thrones. The problem is that, as it stands, the relationship between the old and new, our brains and the world, is such that our brains are consistently coming off second best. Having the world’s information — a bona fide supercomputer — in your pocket is great; dangerous, however, when it serves as little more than a filtered window into the lives of others, an attentional slot machine we keep on us always. Instantaneous communication is pretty great; less than so when it supplants genuine face-to-face interaction as the primary means of relating to one another. Supermarkets filled with hyper-pleasurable food is a remarkable achievement, utopia realised; rather more dystopic, however, when the effect of its consumption is little short of utter biological devastation. One could go on, but you get the point. We live in a world, in other words, that is fundamentally at odds with our biology. Biologists refer to this kind of thing as an evolutionary mismatch. And mismatched we well and truly are. We roam the earth with brains that evolved for hunting game, foraging berries, swinging from trees and partaking in tribal orgies, with Tinder in our pants and fridges full of what we call food but is more akin to edible crack. Through this lens, the physical and mental health crises we are presently afflicted should hardly surprise, for they are natural and perfectly logical consequences of the world we’ve created.
While there are many factors that have contributed to our collective psychological demise, the underlying issue is (I believe) one of excessive stimulation. On some level, our brains are simply overloaded with sensory data of every kind. From the moment we lift our heads off our pillows til the moment we lay them back down, we are bombarded with highly stimulating sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Many of which — foreign to the ancient structures of our brains as they are — we unconsciously interpret as either threats to our well-being (if not existence) or opportunities to procreate. As such, our baseline level of arousal is through the roof. The biology of this is interesting. As it happens, our nervous system, the CPU of our brain and body, effectively has two modes. There is the sympathetic system (also known as the fight-or-flight response) which kicks into gear whenever shit gets real, basically. It’s what keeps us alert and energised whenever we need alertness and energy. Then there’s the parasympathetic nervous system (also known as the rest and digest state) which is tasked with chilling, pretty much. It’s what’s responsible for, well, resting and digesting. If you were to personify these two systems, the sympathetic nervous system would be a sort of strung-out-punk-rocker-samurai-ninja-warrior, constantly on edge ready for shit to hit the fan. The parasympathetic system, in contrast, would be more like Snoop Dogg (the Lion variety), easy as a Sunday morning.
While there’s nothing wrong with sort of strung-out-punk-rocker-samurai-ninja-warrior vibes, too much of a good thing is nevertheless too much. The great majority of our modern lives are lived from this space, in a state of fight-or-flight. And it turns out that, physically speaking, this is not so good. The inability to switch into the parasympathetic nervous system — aka chill out — has rather serious physiological ramifications — chronic inflammation, for instance. The sheer physical impact of contemporary culture on our minds is, it would seem, the proximate cause of our current mental (un)health epidemic. However, beyond the physical stress of the modern world upon our ancient brains, there seems to be more subtle flavours of psychological tension between the world of things and the experience of our humanity. For instance, there is a very palpable sense in which time has sped up. While this particular organ of consciousness (me, I) admittedly doesn’t have all that much history to compare or contrast with, it doesn’t take going back in time to realise that time moves faster now than before. Indeed, one only needs to take a trip through space to places where time moves markedly slower. If you’re skeptical, simply take a trip to a small country town (anywhere in northern Tasmania will do).
That time feels as if it’s moving faster is not the only problem. If time were in fact moving faster, it likely wouldn’t be the biggest deal. We would surely adapt. After all, the rate at which it does flow (if it does indeed flow at all) is entirely arbitrary anyhow. We’ve learnt to live with it because we’ve had no choice. The more serious issue, it seems, is not that time feels to be speeding up but rather that we have become pathologically oriented towards the future (which just happens to be ever faster approaching). With very little exception, we are mortgaging our well-being in the present for expected/hoped well-being in the future to a degree that seems, and might just be, unprecedented. We sacrifice sleep, meaningful relationships, our health, for “productivity” so that we might — for instance — get the academic credentials that will get us the job that will in ten-to-twenty years get us the car that will, surely then, make us happy. That the future we are oriented towards is flying towards us only makes matters worse.
Compounding the anxiety of a world wherein time appears to be accelerating is the belief — whether conscious or otherwise — that the world is watching our every move, that we have an audience in our pockets constantly assessing the quality of our lives. As a function of our growing attachment to “social media”, we have shifted towards a culture wherein we are all burdened with the psychological pitfalls of celebrity — the sense that our lives are on display for all to see — while very few of us are enjoying its attendant perks. While we have long (if not always) felt the need to perform for others, that life is perhaps a superficial game we are forced into playing, the weight of this experience has grown increasingly heavy over time, as a function of technological/broader cultural trends — social media being just a particularly flagrant offender. Keeping up with the Jones’ is not a new phenomenon, in other words. It’s just that now we’re instead Keeping up with the Kardashians, and that somehow seems to be a fundamentally different, and far more perverse, game to be playing with our minds.
This sense that time is running out, that there’s not enough hours in the day, that our well-being is contingent upon our suffering in the present, that the future is somehow more valuable than the present, and that everyone is watching to boot, is enough to induce even in Snoop Lion a gnawing existential angst as he combs through his notifications. Combine these realities with the physical stresses of our current level of stimulation and you have the dynamics of the psychological experiment that we’re all unwittingly engaged in.
For those that are currently battling the demons of poor mental health, I suggest this is the first thing to understand: you’re neither alone nor at fault. We are all, to greater or lesser degrees, feeling the pinch of a world gone mad. We are all, to greater or lesser degrees, participating in a culture that is — on many levels — wholly antithetical to a healthy mind. The second thing to understand: you are not helpless. Fortunately, there are things one can do to mitigate the harmful psychological effects of our day. It’s all the usual stuff: less time on your phone, more time in nature, meditation, breath work, exercise, nutritious food, plant medicines, meaningful moments with family and friends etc. When it comes to cultivating good mental health, there’s no silver bullet per se, although meditation comes close. Rather, it’s about using a variety of tools, whichever is most suited to where you’re presently at. Start with improving your diet, if that’s where you find yourself most motivated. Meditate if you feel the cushion calling. Simply meet yourself wherever you are.
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that while it may take time to alleviate the underlying physical condition/s that are likely contributing to one’s mental unhealth, there is peace/equanimity/tranquility/joy available in every moment. That’s the unique power of meditation, or mindfulness more broadly. Regardless of how physically compromised we happen to be, consciousness is already and always bright, clear, spacious, and luminous — all one needs in order to recognise this fact is the requisite focus. Instead of looking through the window of your mind at the world of phenomena, rather pay attention to the qualities of the glass itself, the intrinsic nature of consciousness. Mindfulness training, specifically non-dual forms, is the practice of connecting to the centreless nature of present awareness. It is without doubt the most powerful tool for reliably finding inner freedom in the vastness of the moment, the ultimate technologically for cultivating purity/health of mind. Follow the white rabbit (read: Quintessential Dzogchen, Flight of the Garuda, Self-liberation through seeing with naked awareness, Mindfulness by Joseph Goldstein, On Having No Head).
These two seemingly contradictory views of the path (as a linear, gradual progression on one hand, and something that can be realised instantly moment-to-moment on the other) illustrate the differences between the Eastern vs Western models of psychology. In the West, we take the notion of the “self” rather seriously. Realising psychological health, under the Western scientific rubric, is a matter of cultivating a “healthy sense of self”, about ascending a “hierarchy of needs” towards the ultimate aim of “self-actualisation”. The premise is that psychological health is contingent upon certain external conditions, a function of ticking certain boxes, orienting ourselves towards an extensive criteria of positively self-reinforcing activities and experiences. In other words, about stroking the voice in our heads, puffing up the Ego. In the East, conversely, there is a long and deep contemplative tradition that asserts that psychological health and the alleviation of suffering are predicated on cutting through the “illusion of the Ego” entirely. The basic insight here is that the voice in our heads, the peculiar sense of self that we bring to bear upon experience, is the ultimate source of psychopathology. Moreover, not only is the Ego and our entanglements with it the primary cause of our suffering, it’s also fundamentally illusory. That is, it doesn’t exist. Contrary to our conventional experience, there really is no self, no thinker of thoughts, no homunculus between our ears pulling the strings. This insight can be appealed to by way of logic and neuroscience (i.e. where exactly, in terms of the structures of our brains, would such a self be located?) but is most powerfully revealed directly, by way of experience. Where is this thing you call a self? Is it the thought you just had? The emotion that arose and passed away? How is it that you know? Who is it that knows? When you look for the one who is looking and find nothing, there is a realisation that experience is empty, that there is no self-centre, that consciousness is impersonal. All there is is consciousness and its contents, sensations and their knowing. The self is a projection, a conceptual layer that is applied on top of experience, a thin film which obfuscates what it is that we are.
When we identify with the self, when we take ourselves to be commensurate with our thoughts and emotions — i.e. the contents of consciousness — we place ourselves in a bind. We find ourselves craving those thoughts and emotions we find pleasant while avoiding those we consider unpleasant. Given the nature of things, however, even when we realise our objects of desire, there is a fundamental unsatisfactoriness (“dukkha”) that flavours the experience. This is due to the impermanence/transience/ephemerality of worldly phenomena. Since the sense of self — even a “healthy” sense — is made of phenomena, it is therefore also impermanent, unstable, insubstantial. If what we are searching for is a deep, satisfying and lasting engagement with our own lives, as the East has been telling us for millennia, we need a more dependable base than such flimsy things as phenomena. What the various Eastern traditions (predominantly Buddhist and Hindu) realised was that such a base exists. The most reliably fulfilling means of living is to be connected to the selfless nature of things, to be grounded in the emptiness of existence (right view). By repeatedly breaking this conditioned and habitual pattern of self-identification, by training our awareness so as to be attuned to the way things really are, we can transform our experience of things, and in doing so, transform the quality of our minds. This process — and it is a process though it may begin with a single moment of insight — is the so-called process of “waking up”. To become fully awakened, if such a thing is indeed possible, is to become a Buddha (an awakened one).
*A word of caution: For those that have neither engaged with Eastern literature of this kind nor tasted the variety of experiences that hint at or attest to such insights, this must surely sound like a load of mystical/poetic garbage. Nothing but fluff. I assure you, however, that it’s not. While language can only scarcely convey the forceful Reality that lies at the centre of the contemplative world, experience delivers it with complete unambiguity. The challenge inherent in the Enlightenment project is really the challenge of communicating insights that are fundamentally non-conceptual in conceptual terms. It’s like attempting to describe the taste of an apple to someone who’s never had an apple. You can appeal to analogies, “Well, it’s kind of like a pear but crunchier” or “It’s kind of like a watermelon but different, less watery…” Ultimately, however, there is no substitute for tasting the apple. And so it is with the experience of selflessness. That words often fall short of doing the Thing justice reveals the limits of the words, not the Thing itself. So if none of this makes sense or reads as pretentious mysticism, I implore you not to be dismissive or discouraged. Instead, practice. Sit with the words. Examine their meaning carefully. Meditate. Take psychedelics.*
The differences between the Eastern and Western models of mind illustrate that there are many ways to skin a cat; multiple ways to cultivate a healthy mind. In this case, at least two. The Western model is fundamentally premised upon the idea that the self is a non-negotiable Reality of the human condition and that a healthy mind depends upon conditioning a healthy sense of self. Hence Mazlow’s hierarchy. Again, it’s the view that a healthy mind is dependent or contingent upon certain external circumstances — a healthy diet, loving family, good friends, the ideal partner, a respectable job etc. The East, in contrast, tells us to get out of the self business entirely, that it’s a fool’s game. We are warned that so long as we take our well-being to be dependent upon anything other than the underlying, unchanging condition of our minds themselves, we are destined to be disappointed. One tradition tells us that the answer is outside of us, the other tells us to look within.
It’s easy to dismiss the insights of the East as little more than the poetic sentiments of mystics. The kind of thing you might remind someone when they’re feeling down, or bring up in conversation to demonstrate your fluency in the language of all things esoteric or New-Age. But of very little pragmatic value, on the whole. And so it is that West has largely failed to imbue its culture with what in fact amounts to bona fide wisdom of the highest order. However, while the wisdom of the East is something that can only be understood through experience, the central insight can nevertheless be appreciated by way of logic. What the various contemplative traditions revolve around is the insight that all there is and all there ever will be, at the level of subjective experience, is Now. Although time may flow from past to future at the level of physics, chemistry and biology, there is no directionality to our experience. There is only the ever-present moment. Accordingly, the key to human well-being couldn’t possibly be contingent upon certain past or future circumstances. It must, therefore, have all and everything do with how we are relating to the Now, the only time we will ever know directly. Meditation, within this context, can be understood as the practice of plumbing the present for what its worth, of coming into closer contact with bliss that lies in every moment, closer acquainting ourselves with the intrinsic condition of consciousness.
The West, however, has been operating under a very different set of assumptions. Namely, that the present is worth the future. That if enough hurdles are jumped through and preconditions met, then we will realise satisfaction/meaning/happiness/joy. Rather than pursuing a connection with the underlying condition of consciousness, the West has been tacitly advocating the pursuit of the modification of its contents. And so we strive and so we suffer. For given the impermanence of things, the answer cannot possibly lie in the contents of consciousness. For that which has the nature of arising shall also pass away. The key to human well-being cannot, therefore, be a matter of contingency. It cannot depend on the configuration of certain external parameters, for such parameters are constantly in flux. If, for example, our well-being is held to be contingent upon the love of our significant other (or others if you’re really about that New-Age life), what then if they happen to pass away? Again, if we are to avoid the unsatisfactoriness of things, we need a stable base from which to derive our value. The contents of consciousness are ephemeral, insubstantial, undependable. Consciousness, however, is constant. The ultimate hidden Truth. The infinite well from which we must learn to draw our nourishment. Our source of equanimity amidst the flux of existence.
None of this is to deny that one can become supremely content/happy/satisfied with the contents of consciousness, without ever coming into contact with the selflessness/emptiness of experience. On the contrary, it’s surely possible to realise truly impressive levels of well-being without ever cutting through the illusion of the self. Enlightenment is not, in other words, a precondition to a good life. However, it is, I suggest, the most reliable means to it.
Nor is any of this a denial of the value of a “healthy sense of self”. Issues of semantics aside, a healthy sense of self is indeed perfectly healthy. It just so happens, however, that the healthiest sense of self is no sense at all.
There is also a popular misconception that thoughts are the enemy of meditation, and by association, the whole Enlightenment project. Thoughts, however, are themselves no problem. They’re equivalent with any other appearance in consciousness, as good as any other object of mind. The enemy is thinking without knowing you’re thinking, of being lost in thought, distracted and deceived by the drama of our inner lives.
One final thing. Contrary to common expectation, cutting through the illusion of the self, and even stabilising in that awareness, does not imply a certain way of life, though it will invariably influence it. Indeed acquainting oneself with the ultimate nature of awareness does not, in principle, necessitate renouncing all material possessions or worldly ambitions, although it will inevitably change one’s relationship to said things. It simply creates a different space from which to live. Once one has had the central insight and elects to live in accordance with it, the question becomes, What to do with all this world?
< Back to it
Of course, knowing what to do when fighting any kind of psychological ill-health is only half the equation (and arguably much less than). The real challenge is in embodying that knowledge, doing what you know you should. Wisdom, they say, is the ability to follow your own advice. And while most of us are rather adept at dishing out advice to those in need (which is always a pride-inducing experience), few of us are equally adept at walking the walk, so to speak.
Doing what we know we should in order to improve our mental health is particularly challenging, for the thing we need to direct wise action is of course the thing that’s in a state of disrepair, the thing we’re attempting to heal. Our minds, the source of our Being, are also the source of our will-power. And when our minds are compromised, generally speaking, so too is the strength of our will. That’s why, even though we might want nothing more than to improve our state of Being, we so frequently find ourselves hopelessly incapable. Because we are fixing what is broken with what is broken.
For those not personally familiar with the challenges of a challenged mind (if such a person indeed exists), it’s important to bear this in mind. In order to effectively interface, and ultimately assist, those that are dealing with anxiety or depression or any other manifestation of poor health, it’s essential (yet admittedly very difficult) to bring to the table as much empathy and compassion as humanly possible. From the outside, one’s predicament and the solution to it is always as simple as anything. Remember, however, that one lives on the inside, an inside that you don’t have access to. So while it might be patently obvious to you what one must do in order to improve their plight, understand that there are two very different realities coming together: yours and theirs. Although one may seem as though they aren’t interested in healing themselves, indeed they may appear to be acting entirely contrary to their best interests, appreciate that this is an unavoidable symptom of the underlying issue. We all went to heal, we all want to be healthy; our will-to-life, our will-to-health, is innate. Some things are simply easier desired than done.
In terms of dealing with this particular dilemma, the Californian poet-philosopher-king Kendrick Lamar said it best: respect the progress of a baby step. A step forward, however small, is a step in the right direction, a step towards self-liberation. Moreover, when it comes to the mind — and life generally — seemingly small or modest action can and often does result in disproportionate outcomes — it’s the ol’ Butterfly Effect phenomenon. As a non-linear system, the mind — like the world — is amenable to complete transformation by the mere flap of a butterfly’s wings; a single insight, shift in perspective, or new idea. For many, the challenge of getting well can seem like an impossible mission, a long and tortuous journey through the valley of self-discipline. When you’re standing at the base of Everest, the notion of a baby step can seem not only disheartening but genuinely insulting. When you understand, however, that the goal is not to make it to the summit or peak of Everest but rather to make contact with the steps themselves — that the path is the goal and the goal the path — the project of liberation all of a sudden appears far more attainable.
Here, there is a balance one must find between showing themselves compassion, accepting where they’re at and what little (if any) progress has been realised, and merely justifying the continuation of whatever behavioural/psychological patterns they find themselves stuck in. If one finds themselves ridden with shame as they struggle along the path, perhaps a little more compassion is called for. If, however, one finds themselves content in the face of only the most marginal change for the better, perhaps a little more discipline/effort is the key. Where exactly one fall on the continuum here is something to be assessed through introspection, with perhaps some consideration as to what others are perceiving from the outside. Exactly how much compassion/acceptance vs discipline/effort is necessary is impossible to say, being as it is contingent upon the singularly unique context of an individual human mind. As with mind as with life, there are no hard and fast rules. It’s more of a listen to yourself and see what you find kind of thing.
When attempting to help someone manage their well-being, whether family or friend, there is an instinctual and perfectly understandable inclination to offer rational suggestions or advice — ‘you should try this…’, ‘you should try that…’, ‘Well Joe Rogan reckons…’ Sometimes, this is an effective form of counselling — especially when the person in question is genuinely unaware as to what remedies or tools exist. All too often, however, these well-meaning suggestions are met with nothing but disinterest, frustration or worse, resentment. This is because when one is suffering, the most essential response from the world is not practical advice — though a practical course of action is always necessary — but rather loving-kindness, compassion, empathy, warmth. While it mightn’t be as abundant as would be ideal, when it comes to psychological health, practical knowledge is very rarely the missing ingredient. Rather, it’s all the warm and squishy stuff — the positive human qualities that are the base of any good mind. Although it’s a fuzzy notion, on some level, all psychological ill-health (with very little exception) really is a function of embodied negative emotions. If we’re to help others, in any capacity, it really requires our bringing positive emotions to the mix, rather than further compounding whatever emotional complexes that are the issue. In theory, this renders the notion of psychological support a rather simple one: just lend a compassionate shoulder to cry on. In practice, however, it’s not quite so effortless. That’s because a) being a good human is just plain harder than it sounds; and b) most of us are embedded in a culture that values above all else the intellect, Reason. As such, we live in and from our heads. What helping others requires is not so much our heads but our hearts (if you’ll excuse the metaphor). Learning to act from the latter, like any skill, requires effortful practice. Though it’s little appreciated, compassion, loving-kindness, empathy, patience — all the Good stuff — are learned or cultivated traits. If we understand this, we can view the role of helping others with their mental health as an opportunity to refine or bolster our own, to further cultivate these most wholesome — and unfortunately, all too rare — qualities of mind.
In order to create a culture that serves as a more effective psychological support system, it’s important to understand what currently hinders the better angels of our nature. Perhaps one of the most substantial impediments against the display or expression of compassion, empathy and understanding towards those that are suffering, I suggest, is the largely Christian/common sense ethic of good and evil and the notion of free will that underpins Western culture. Rather than viewing manifestations of psychopathology for what they are — manifestations of ill-health — we tend to interpret them in moral terms of good and evil, casting judgment rather than lending a helping heart. We see expressions of anger, laziness, depression as moral failings rather than as the result of impersonal forces beyond our control, products of fundamentally random processes. Underpinning this moral framing of things is the common sense and ultimately mistaken notion of free will. That is, we cast judgment upon others for failing to look after themselves — or for acting less than desirable — because we take it as a given that they could have (provided the same prior circumstances) done otherwise. Our entire criminal system of retributive justice is premised on this very notion; that we are the thinker of our own thoughts, the ultimate do-er of our doings.
Moreover, when we feel ourselves to be solid, there is an inclination to contrast the negative behaviour of others or their lack of psychological resiliency to the outstanding quality or strength of our own. Not only are we then casting judgment upon others but we are also indulging in self-righteousness and reifying our own sense of self. The solution to this particular issue is to grasp the fact that were we to trade places — atom for atom — with one who is suffering or displaying symptoms of mental unhealth, we would in fact be that person — with all of their attendant pathology. While we feel as though we have the ability to exercise control over our own lives, and in some narrow sense we do, in a far deeper sense we are not at all in the driver’s seat. Instead we’re all just floating debris the result of a cosmic explosion that happened billions of years ago. We did not decide to be born, nor did we decide when or where or to whom. We simply inherit the circumstances that condition us. If we ourselves throughout the course of our lives have happened to stumble upon certain ideas or insights that we feel have shaped the “superior” quality of our individual humanity, understand that these too are conditioning circumstances as fortuitous and utterly out of our control as any other.
This is where the idea of Karma, the idea that our circumstances in life are the result of actions in both past and present lives, is a particularly powerful one. When we frame the perceived shortcomings of someone in terms of consequences of past lives, plain bad luck, some amount of empathy and compassion should follow. There is, however, also the potential danger of viewing one’s unfortunate plight as cosmic/karmic justice, or alternatively, of using our perhaps entirely arbitrary good fortune as a means of further inflating our ego, attributing them to our enlightened conduct in former lives. Fortunately, though, there is no need to believe in the notion of karma in order to appreciate that the circumstances of our lives, both good and bad, are reflections of forces well beyond ourselves. On some level, we are all but pawns in the great game of cosmic chess.
At the level of culture, there is much we could do to improve the external context of our mental lives. We could solve poverty, improve the quality of our food system, increase the availability of meaningful work, clean up our air supply, establish healthier norms around the use of technology, legalise the use of psychedelics, create subsidised contemporary/holistic mental health clinics, and the list goes on. Among the vast number of levers we could be pulling, however, none would be more impactful, I suggest, than embedding in our education system — from a suitably early age — some form of mindfulness practice. While there is already a movement towards this, with certain progressive elementary schools experimenting with such practices, the fact remains that, for the most part, nowhere throughout our formal education are we schooled in the nature of our minds. Indeed, it’s perhaps the central paradox of modern Western education that we are taught virtually everything under the sun, except for how to manage and live with the thing that we’re attempting to educate: that is, our minds. While this surely has much to do with the fact that mindfulness/meditation has historically been interwoven with certain religious traditions, the fact that there is no explicit emphasis on any form of introspective practice is also a reflection of the departure that Western philosophy at some point made from the pursuit of the “Good Life” or the attainment of “wisdom”, which was once it’s principle concern. Today, the notion of wisdom is taken to be little more than a quaint term we occasionally use — almost in jest — to refer to good advice. That it is actually something extraordinarily valuable, and something wholly distinct from our conventional view of intelligence (IQ) and the various academic disciplines in which we are instructed, is something that appears entirely lost upon us. It’s as if the West, with all of its intellectual/scientific achievement, observed the East (and its relative lack of such achievement) and concluded that there is nothing at all to be gained from introspection, dismissing it as a dead end. This is, without question, one of the great — and largely unacknowledged — tragedies of our intellectual history.
Now this is not at all to undermine the necessity for traditional education (neither is it an endorsement of how we presently do or structure traditional education). Our shared reality is that we live in a world that requires of us certain skills, literacy and numeracy among them. Moreover, we live in a highly imperfect world with real problems that depends upon our worldly skills for its improvement. Instead, it’s simply to propose that there is an entirely seperate branch of knowledge, one that we may loosely refer to as “wisdom”, that is equally essential (arguable far more so) to the project of human flourishing. To further this point, if one thing has been made clear by now, it’s that the relationship between technical skills/knowledge and human flourishing is by no means perfectly proportionate. While technical skills/knowledge and the technology that results from it is really cool and impressive on many levels, a better world is not dependent upon better technical skills or technology. A better world is, however, entirely contingent upon improvements in the quality of our humanity. And that’s of course the promise of wisdom, and the variety of practices that promote it.
To the point about the historical relationship between mindfulness/meditation and religion, this really is nothing but an accident of history. There is nothing at all, in principle, that demands these practices be performed within a religious context of any kind. Their value/benefit is not at all contingent upon the belief in various historical figures, nor mythological characters, nor life after death. They’re simply practices based on empirically verifiable insights into the nature of the human mind. They’re equally effective, therefore, regardless of whether or not you believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old or some number of thousands, whether Jesus really died for our sins or is simply one of the great protagonists of Western literature. In other words, the value is in the practices themselves, not the context in which they’ve traditionally been taught (although that’s not to deny that such contexts contain value of their own, either). What we care about here, at least primarily, is the baby — not the bath water. However, if you like your bath with water, that’s perfectly cool too. Whatever floats your boat.
All in all, the mind is a miracle — the ultimate source of value in the universe, that which breathes experience into life. As miraculous as it is, however, it is as we’ve all observed, all too susceptible to suffering. And while the causes of psychological suffering are numerous, so too are the means by which we may alleviate it — some of which are indeed more universally applicable and indeed reliable than others. If we are to create a world wherein human flourishing is the norm, rather than the rare exception, it will by definition depend upon our better understanding the nature our minds and creating the environmental/cultural conditions that are conducive to their good health. And although establishing the optimal external circumstances are an integral part of this project, it is however essential to understand that the external circumstances of our existence are but the mere contents of consciousness. The ultimate solution to our psychological suffering, as the Buddha himself discovered, is not improving our external circumstances, the contents of consciousness, but rather more deeply acquainting ourselves with the true nature, that is context, of consciousness itself. In aspiring to ease our pain, it is all too easy to overlook that the freedom or liberation we are searching for is right in front of our face, in the luminous field of presence. Paradoxically, this seems to be especially true for those that are seeking to cultivate a better experience. For when one begins to take an interest in the nature of human health and in doing so grasps the physical nature of things (or the relationship between the physical and the mental), there is a tendency to believe that, so long as one curates the “optimal” morning routine or has enough cold showers or does enough yoga or drinks enough lemon water or has grass-fed butter with their coffee, that all be well and our aspirations realised. That is, there is an emphasis being placed on the effects of our present actions on our future well-being, blinding us to the fact that, behind the trees of appearances there is already a forest of unimaginable beauty, in every moment, to be discovered. Right here, right now.
