WHAT IF YOU STOPPED THINKING ALL THE TIME?
Experience and knowing. Non-Duality. Evolutionary Mismatch.
I
One winter day, years ago, I walked to the gym. It was mild when I went in. But when I came out an hour later it was 10 degrees colder and snowing, and I had no jacket.
Yet as I walked back to my room I did not feel the cold. All I could do was put one foot in front of the other, walking and breathing.
I saw each breath that passed through me evaporate like a spirit into the wind. In that moment I realized that the separation between me and the rest of the universe was purely an illusion. In that cold and silent wind.
Your skin is not a barrier that separates you from the universe. Rather, it is a portal to sensation and experience. It is how you encounter the world. Science has demonstrated that your skin doesn’t even really contain everything that makes up You. Your body is constantly radiating heat, bacteria, pheromones, electrical signals, skin cells. Your body and your senses do not stop at your extremities – you occupy far more space than you could ever know.
This is why some great and charismatic people have been said to have a presence that fills a room.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty called this the “Halo of Being”. Buddhists understand this perfectly and extend this logic. We are not separate beings wandering around on earth. Every human, tree, animal, insect, and fungus, participate in a great web of inter-being.
It is why humans crave touch so much. When you close the distance between yourself and the world, you are literally allowing the world into yourself, while pouring yourself into the world’s Space.
This is something words can not communicate to you. The answer that you seek is not always in books.
Beyond the intellectual Knowing you get from books, there is the Knowing you get from pure feeling. Pure Experience.
You are the book. You’re writing it every minute. Only those who have passed through the gate of experience can truly understand.
Your body is like a crystal reflecting and endlessly refracting the energies of the universe.
Pure immersion in the flux.
II
Some time later I discovered the works of the venerable Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. The phenomenon of immersion with the world I had experienced, the insight I had received, was a glimpse of what the Buddhists call ‘non-duality.’
“When we want to understand something, we cannot just stand outside and observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it in order to really understand.
If we want to understand a person, we have to feel his feelings, suffer his sufferings, and enjoy his joy.
The word ‘comprehend’ is made up of the Latin roots ‘cum’, which means ‘with’, and ‘prehendere’, which means ‘to grasp it or pick it up.’
To comprehend something means to pick it up and be one with it. There is no other way to understand something.
In Buddhism, we call this kind of understanding ‘non-duality.’
Not two.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
III
It might be helpful to look at mental disorders from an evolutionary viewpoint.
Our current “environment” is a radical mismatch with 200,000 years of evolution1. See the work2 of psychiatrist Emily Dean.
Why is depression and suicide so prevalent in the developed world? A few reasons come to mind:
Physical causes: lack of broad spectrum light (SAD), lowered vitamin D, chronic or heightened inflammation due to stressors
Lifestyle causes: lack of physical exercise3, lowered testosterone, etc.
Societal causes: breakdown of family and communal structures, social atomisation caused by chronic rootlessness, fake-work jobs, lack of religiosity leading to nihilism
Keep in mind that one of my central beliefs is that:
The default state of the human organism is to be vigorous and happy.
Our bodies were honed and perfected in conditions far grimmer and more inimical to life than the sterile, safe surroundings we have created for ourselves. In times long past, if you could not walk to hunt or gather, you went hungry. If you spent too much time philosophizing or wallowing in your thoughts, you’d get eaten or fall off a cliff. Some contemporary anthropologists find that hunter-gatherers and people living on the edge of subsistence report greater happiness than high-income city dwellers.
If you have the time and literacy to be able to read this, if you have money in your bank account, if you have a roof over your head and at least one change of clothes, you are living more safely and comfortably than just about every human being prior to 1750.
What does this mean?
Modern life makes us unhappy not because it is difficult, but because it is easy.
The hormonal pathways of homo sapiens have been optimised over time to reward us for doing difficult things, for overcoming struggle. Today there is an absence of struggle, and yet our bodies have not caught up to the historically novel circumstances we have created for ourselves.
Introducing controlled bouts of discomfort and pain is a free and universally available preventive medicine to safeguard your mental and spiritual health. There is a reason why you feel so good after a gruelling hike, or a punishing workout. Your body’s struggle is nourishment for the mind and soul. You feed something ancient and vital inside you.
So it seems to me that a substantial proportion of disorders of the mind and heart could be resolved by deliberately making life harder for yourself, exposing yourself to a measure of chaos and pain. This is counterintuitive to most modern minds – after all is not the point of life that your work should make it feel easier over time? But, is this really any more extreme than taking antidepressants (which have many side effects) and possibly being dependent on them for life. I mean…
If you feel better, you’ll be jacked and save thousands on therapy and medication.
If nothing changes, at least you’ll be sad and jacked.
Sounds like a win either way.
Until next week,
Stay Solar.
To find out more about evolutionary mismatch, get started here.
Daily meditative practice helps with this.