Transcending the Mundane

By now we are all familiar with the idea of living in the so-called “Information Age.” Computers have crawled into almost every aspect of our daily lives, and our very identities have been reduced to sets of information that can be stolen and used to others’ profit.

In a way, our computer-driven Information Age has blinded us to the age of information that has existed throughout human history—the information that exists all around us, waiting to be sensed and decoded.

There is something that smacks of New Age philosophy in the suggestion that the Universe takes enough of an interest in us to initiate communication, to open a dialogue with those sensitive enough to hear the call. The question, then, grandly rhetorical and philosophical, would be whether the Universe is a communicator and whether we lowly creatures are hearing anything it is saying.

Fortunately, I think the situation is much simpler. I believe that the disposition of the Universe is unimportant as long as we are sensitive to the information it imparts. After all, a book can be a repository of information, but the book itself takes no interest in its reader. And as for the information it contains, only a reader fluent in its chosen language can possibly extract anything of its intended message.

True, a book is prepared by someone with the desire to impart information, and the book is merely the capacitor for that information, storing its energy to be released at the right moment. Nonetheless, the book retains its power to inform long after its author has died and no longer maintains the task of informing.

To use such an analogy when discussing communication with the Universe is perhaps dangerous. For if the Universe is our book, who is its author? Another way, if our lives are books, are we or the Universe filling the pages?

Perhaps a better example is found in the mundane. We know our five senses as well as we can, for we try to use each one to experience pleasure and avoid suffering. We fill our noses with perfumes, slather our tongues with sweets, massage our bodies with oils, soothe our ears with fine music, and decorate our surroundings to please our eyes. There has been considerable debate for many years whether there are senses outside the five so familiar, and the idea of our obtaining information that should be outside our reach is often described as extrasensory perception, or ESP.

While the idea of ESP is attractive, efforts to confirm its existence have been confounded within laboratory settings. Still, the idea remains compelling, especially considering the information our surroundings impart outside the normal parameters of our familiar five senses.

The sensation of temperature, while highly subjective, is the way our bodies relate to the flow of heat, whether out of our bodies (when we feel something cold) or into our bodies (when we feel something warm). We are able to feel this flow even at a distance, interestingly enough with our sense of “touch.” The same mechanisms that allow us to feel pressure and pain—or even a light caress—enable us to feel heat flowing one way or another. In some ways, we feel this to be a fairly pure experience of the phenomenon of heat, yet it is easy to show how subjective it is.

Try a little experiment: Set up three buckets. In one, place a mixture of ice and water; in another, place hot (but not scalding) water; in the third, place water at room temperature. Then place your left hand in the ice water, and your right hand in the hot water. Let them soak for a few minutes, then remove them both and place them together in the room-temperature water. You’ll notice that your left hand senses the water as warm, and your right hand senses the water as cool, though intellectually, you are aware that each hand is experiencing water at the same temperature.

In matters of heat, it turns out that another sense would perhaps provide a better measure. If our sense of sight were tuned to be sensitive to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would get a very good idea of the heat content of things simply by looking at them. After all, we are able to feel heat flowing due to the phenomena of radiation, conduction, and convection. When objects give off thermal radiation, that transfer shows up in the infrared region of the spectrum.

Our eyes don’t see in the infrared region, though. So, clever beings that we are, we have invented gadgets that take infrared information and convert it into a color-coded scheme well within our visual range, enabling us to use the information. These gadgets prove to us that the information is there, despite our inability to see it otherwise.

I don’t think a hot object cares about informing its surroundings that it is hot, but it does so anyway, merely as a byproduct of its being hot. In that way, information about our environment exists independent of its interest in conveying that information.

Even within the normal range of our senses, there are considerable differences among humans. In matters of taste, for instance, not only are there huge differences in our likes and dislikes for certain flavors, but also differences in our very abilities to taste and detect chemicals. About 70 percent of the population detects the chemical phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) by its bitter taste, while the remaining 30 percent—I among them—cannot detect it at all.

The inability to detect PTC is a recessive trait, and the taste test is a fun little experiment to try in a genetics class. Does PTC have a bitter taste? From my experience, it has no flavor at all. Yet this flavorless thing on my tongue would taste quite disagreeable to seven out of ten people I meet. The chemical’s inherent nature is the same, but the information it imparts is different for me than it is for the majority of others.

Considering the variation in sensitivity of our familiar senses, it is tempting to assume the existence of other senses that measure things we don’t quite have the words for.

I imagine a number of people have felt “the air go out of a room” when an off-color remark has been made, or when a story has outstayed its welcome. It is a distinct sense of the emotional state of the room, and not a personal reaction. It is also something that is evident as a distinct moment, a distinct event, and not a general trend toward an emotional consensus. Even without an audible gasp or the sight or sound of a fidgeting audience, it is possible to detect offense and discomfiture in a group even without sharing that offense. I think this goes beyond what is known as empathy, and, in my opinion, is a major contender as an extra sense.

If this type of empathy is an extra sense, it is a curious thing. For the five senses that we hold dear are useful in relating to the inanimate world, while an empathic sense would allow us to relate to the animate.

But even the inanimate world is a dynamic one. Wind rushes as fluid masses of gas move according to pressure gradients, rustling leaves in trees and jogging memories of fall in our ears. Water from a recent rain runs downhill, following a path of least resistance, devolving into chaotic flow amid a field of so many variables. On a small enough scale, is even chaos a simple matter of cause and effect?

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would have you believe otherwise. In quantum mechanics, it has been established that the observation and measurement of a system disturbs the system sufficiently to alter the results of its measurement. It is therefore that the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be simultaneously known without error. If left undisturbed, though—which is to say unobserved—is cause and effect maintained?

Expanding that microscopic idea to our macroscopic lives, the suggestion can be made that, when it comes to receiving messages from our surroundings, our “measuring minds,” or our logical brains, work toward creating errors in the messages we receive. The more we view information from our environment as cause-and-effect messages in ordinary language, dissecting it and trying to determine its motivation, we work to lose the message.

We then should perhaps live without seeking any particular message, but remain confident in knowing that information is all around us, and only our sensitivity determines our experience of it.

Our conscious minds are the workhorses of logic. It is here that we plug away at problems and try to break them down into their fundamental parts, hoping to find all the connections and paths to a solution. But our logical minds would not serve us well if they were all we had. The acts of standing, walking, chewing, breathing, and maintaining a heartbeat would be impossible tasks, with each one occupying more conscious thought than we could muster if it were a matter of procedure to maintain. Luckily, our hindbrains are able to keep things steady, moving, and beating without our having to give them any thought.

Our brains are always calculating—contracting our muscles just right in order to position ourselves to catch a baseball, locating and scratching an itch without any visual cues, stepping around obstacles first detected in our periphery—and important information is sent to our conscious minds when direct attention needs to be paid. As a result, we may sometimes get impressions that seem to have come extrasensorially.

It is my belief that when useful information is gained from the environment without the usual cause-and-effect channels of ordinary sensory communication, it is because the logical mind is not looking for the message, but an overall awareness exists that such messages are available. If those messages are a product of the subconscious mind’s processing available information on the fringes of our sensory abilities, then the subconscious mind must be allowed to experience that information without the filter of our logical minds. That is made possible by simply being in the moment, in a process known as mindfulness.

If, on the other hand, the Universe takes an active role in our lives, it is also essential to greet it mindfully, trusting that the message will reach us as intended. And if no messages are sent at all, we have done ourselves no harm by practicing mindfulness.

Outside of placing ourselves in peril, no action taken as the result of an insight—the decoding of a message from either within or without—should cause us harm. If our gut tells us to take a left instead of our usual right on the way to work, very little of that decision imperils us, provided we arrive safely at our destination, regardless of whether that destination is the one we had in mind when we set out.

When seeking guidance in life, we open ourselves to messages, whether from fellow people or from our sense of spirituality, which seems to sense information from within and without. At the very least, we interact with our surroundings using our five senses. We are aware that we become desensitized with continued exposure to a stimulus. Therefore, a life without variation, or a life spent without mindful attention, is a life desensitized to sub-sensory information. The same job, for instance, and the same path to and from that job, offers the least chance for experiencing new information and new ways of thinking.

Most people stay highly localized to their workplaces and homes. Only new surroundings—or the conscious decision to view old surroundings in a new way—can create the sensitivity needed for new experiences and new messages in one’s life.

A slight change in perspective can even alter our experience of our usual environment. Consider that our visual sense is our “quickest” sense, gathering information that travels at the speed of light. Once that information hits and then passes our eyes, it travels more slowly through the optic nerve, where it heads to the brain for interpretation. While the speed of light is blindingly fast, it is finite. What this means is that even our quickest sense cannot impart any information to us of an instantaneous nature. The visual field is really a panorama of the past, with the sights from greater distances coming from farther away in space and time. As we look to the horizon, the effect is subtle; as we look to the firmament, the effect is pronounced. But at any distance, no information we gather through our traditional five senses gives us an experience of the present moment. We always live in the past if we rely on traditional sensory data.

Transcending those five senses is the ultimate sense, the mindful awareness of thought itself, the state of conscious being. It is the only opportunity for presence in the moment and our prime opportunity for communication outside the mundane.

Lessons from a History of the Recently Deceased

When I left South Florida for Southern California, I had to shake off 27 years of inertia and many of the possessions I had accumulated throughout the first part of my life. I noticed even at a young age that I was attached to the things I owned, and, as they say, what I owned began to own me. I would often become uncomfortable if away from home for any long stretch, and I would start to think about things I wanted to look up in my books, the music I wanted to hear, or—when young enough—the toys I wanted to play with.

That feeling also kept me from being particularly generous with my possessions. A strange phenomenon would occur if I lent anything out. Though it might be something I had neither touched nor thought about in years, as soon as it entered my mind as a possession I had to keep track of, my brain started chewing on it behind the scenes, finally thrusting something out of my subconscious. If it was a loaned book, it would be a question about something I could only look up in that book. If it was a loaned CD, it would be a song that I just had to hear. Before long I was no longer a lender, though I was an occasional borrower.

So, come moving time, the effort was great to rid myself of my attachment to my possessions. It was a simply practical matter: I could not afford to ship and store everything I owned, nor could I fit even a quarter of it in my little Volkswagen Jetta. It came time to play God with my possessions. What stays, and what goes? As my deadline approached, I became more brutal, and I was able to give or throw away many things that had made the cut several times before.

One thing that didn’t make the cut at the last minute was my computer. I had gotten the thing in mid-1998, and at the time it was a top-of-the-line model, a nice custom-made Gateway. It had served me admirably—though not perfectly—through the years, housing my personal files, writing, music, and whatever smut I could fit on it.

It was only when I was packing my car that I realized that there was no room for the thing. So, just as a practical matter, I took out the hard drive and gave everything else—the CPU, monitor, and printer—to my friend Paul to give to his dad.

Thankfully, Paul never got around to it. So when he moved to California last October, he brought the computer’s guts and body with him, at my urging. Once I rebuilt the machine, I took on the task of searching its memory like a cultural anthropologist, and a lot of material remained on the computer for me to sift through. Among that material were my sporadic journal entries from the end of 1998 and beginning of 1999.

Once I came down with major depression at the end of 1995, and especially once I became heavily medicated for it, a lot of my life became a blur. I remember certain events, but I don’t always remember in what order they occurred, or in some cases even in what year they occurred. It was my hope to nail things down by looking through some of those old documents.

What I found was a series of journal entries simultaneously familiar and completely strange, written by someone in the absolute depths of despair. I am encouraged by how different from my current viewpoint those old passages now seem. In them are tales of staying awake until past sunrise, then sleeping until well into the afternoon or evening; predictions of death within a year; conclusions about my total lack of desirability, and the belief that anyone who came to know me would hate me.

Some of those passages were very difficult to read, and I resisted, as if the very words were tainted with a contagion, some kind of mental germ that would sprout inside my head, bringing me back to that old way of thinking and living.

Fortunately, though, it does seem that the person who predicted his own death in those journal entries did die. But I am convinced that the person I really am survived those bleak times and emerged armed with the tools to fight off the demons that haunted me for so long in my early adulthood. That is not to say that I don’t feel them rustling in my head from time to time, but at least I know they’re there—and that they’ve been there—and I think I’m better able to confront them now than ever before.

It is a fascinating property of the mind, its recalcitrance in the face of change. There is even a certain strange comfort in depression—crushing as it is—that is hard to shake. It seems as if recovery represents an enormous responsibility that the recovering depressive is loath to assume. After all, normal life comes with the expectation of normalcy, and the absence of excuses when things don’t go according to plan.

The mind also rebels at stillness. Sit for an hour watching television, and I’ll bet you barely shift in your seat. But try to sit for ten or fifteen minutes in silent meditation, and your mind will almost immediately begin to manufacture itches and tingles all over your body, defying you to sit still and ignore the satisfaction of attending to them.

I am not certain as to the mechanism of the mind’s resistance, but I have read many comparisons of the untamed mind to a wild elephant. I have also read descriptions of the mind as a lake cloudy with silt. Only silent meditation allows the silt to settle, and the water to again appear clear.

My effort now—the plan, at least—is to bookend my sleep with sitting in silence, thus building a bridge between my states of consciousness and reminding me through habit that effortlessness, at first, requires great effort. With practice, the ghosts and demons that haunted me in the past will fade even further from view, sinking in a lake that grows steadily clearer above them.

The Gremlin of Desire in the Architecture of the Mind

A central tenet of Buddhist philosophy—one of the Four Noble Truths—tells us that desire is a chief source of suffering in life. The argument goes that dissatisfaction follows regardless of whether we obtain the object of our desire. The satisfaction of one desire leads to another, while the failure to satisfy a desire leads to regret. The emotion of desire, if it can be called such, is an awareness of lack and dissatisfaction with the present moment. It is a hunger whose food does not sustain.

This idea stood out when I encountered it while researching different meditative techniques, and it has stuck with me ever since. In sporadic moments of clarity during a crippling depression, I had essentially come to the same conclusion. However, the idea of the extirpation of desire—or even the calming of desire—seemed to be impossible spiritual alchemy.

I have since gotten a little bit of meditation practice under my belt, and the task of calming desire has been upgraded from impossible to extraordinarily difficult. Reinforcing that difficulty, I’m afraid, is some advice given in the books I mentioned in my last post. The idea of those authors—and many others—is that the subconscious is a wonderful servomechanism, intent on and capable of achieving any goal put to it. But just as the body has a blood-brain barrier that keeps certain substances in the bloodstream from reaching the brain, the mind has a barrier that divides the conscious from the subconscious. This barrier is crossed, according to my understanding of their argument, by belief, emotion, and, most importantly, desire.

The success I want can be mine, or so the story goes. I just have to know what I want and believe I can get it. Beyond that, I should imagine my success as if I already have it. I should feel it, and it should feel good—and I should desire that feeling. The subconscious is waiting for my command. Desire it—in this special way—and it is mine.

So, according to one school of thought, to achieve satisfaction, all I have to do is apply the one thing that another school of thought says is the cause of all dissatisfaction and suffering. If my brain were the type of servomechanism that I am employing to write this post, such contradictory, but compelling, directions would have me in need of a reboot.

But are these systems contradictory? I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Perhaps there is no contradiction if there is a difference in the interpretation of what satisfaction is. For some, satisfaction may be the realization of all material and physical desires, whereas for another it may be the freedom from those very desires, a departure from the self, and a spiritual enlightenment.

If it is an issue of two concepts of satisfaction, which is more important? I will know I have made progress when the obvious answer becomes unequivocally my own.

One Mind in Many

I have long been fascinated by the mystery of consciousness. The fringes of my own used to be pretty easy to explore in my high school and college days, when a few dollars’ investment could initiate an inward journey without the discipline or patience needed for more licit approaches. But I got a little older, and the novelty wore off those easy methods. It also became a little harder to bounce back after a night of “inward exploration.”

I have since become a meditator. I won’t say much about it here, since those who have tried meditation won’t need to read much about it, and those who haven’t tried it should do so in order to understand it. It is not as simple as it looks, and it couldn’t look any simpler. Most common forms of meditation entail simply sitting in one place and letting the mind focus on anything or nothing at all. Its difficulties—a wildly wandering mind and a body suddenly given to itch everywhere, in my case—are part of its signal that it is “working.” After all, thoughts pass through our minds like fast-moving clouds, and we often don’t notice the flow of soft noise that whispers through our brains. Sitting in meditation, though, the whispers become shouts, and the mind seems to rebel at the very (dare I say) thought of sitting still.

Meditation is very much a practice, where perfect is never made. Perfection is, I suppose, a goal, if it is to serve as a synonym for enlightenment. As for me, I’ve got quite a ways to go, but I’ll keep working at it.

Meditation is not the only tool for poking at one’s own mind. I have also long been interested in hypnosis and autosuggestion. I’ve read a lot about it—techniques and such—but I suspect that I’ve been hypnotizing myself for some time.

You see, when we daydream—and I daydream a lot—we enter brain states that are very similar to hypnotic states. The conscious mind is quieted down a bit, perhaps occupied by the little midday reveries that help kill the time. Most of these reveries are innocuous, but I have come to believe that some are not.

I spent several long years in a deep depression, and I seemed to wallow in my ability to conjure depressing scenarios, built as daydreams, and ride them out, perhaps tweaking their endings this way and that, but never enough to create what anyone would consider a “happy ending.” I would find myself getting upset at the things I had imagined, angry with the people in my daydreams for slighting me, even though nothing in real life would support that anger. I would imagine anything that could go wrong going wrong, and I would rarely be disappointed. The depression I felt at having bad things befall me in reality was somehow attenuated by a sense of satisfaction with my ability to predict their occurrence.

I recently read a number of books on the subconscious and the psychology of success. As frequently happens with my reading choices, the books complemented one another in their arguments. In particular, Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich all seem to argue the same thing, namely, that thoughts and desires are imparted to the subconscious mind as programs, and the subconscious mind immediately acts to realize those thoughts and desires, whatever they may be. The books also go so far as to argue that things seemingly out of our physical control—in the environment around us, that is—can be influenced by our thoughts and beliefs.

Some years ago, I would have dismissed such a thought as New Age crap. I’m not so quick to do so these days. For one thing, I realize that what we don’t know about the universe—and our role in it—dwarfs what we do know to the degree that it makes our knowledge insignificant. Scientific knowledge, great as it is, is always undergoing revision. The mysteries of our minds, and whatever “paranormal” effects they can produce, cannot be settled by our inability to measure or replicate those effects. Whether these mysteries will be better addressed in future revisions is uncertain.

Perhaps we’re moving in the right direction, though. Princeton University administers a project known as the Global Consciousness Project. According to the project’s website, “The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement.”

It’s an interesting idea, the crux being that many consciousnesses acting in concert can influence the environment. But while we struggle to find the subtle effects of minds acting together, perhaps we can look inward and cultivate our minds such that our individual contribution will be a positive one.