The Eternal Chaos of the Unfolding Mind
Our deepest questions don’t have answers, and they may not have goals either.
“I'm always anxious thinking I'm not living my life to the fullest, you know?”
— Clementine Kruczynski, from the 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Duality
The essential nature of contradiction makes liars of those who call themselves “non-dualists.” I listen to these pseudo-philosophers and wonder at their sophistry. Rupert Spira and his friends speak the cornflakes Buddhism of television gurus. The fact is that we live for contradiction, and we’d be lost without it.
What sets humans apart from other animals is our compulsion to grow our minds. It even seems this is a recent trend. If you look back over the last 4,000 years, you won’t see a lot of growth in thought or culture.
Religions are examples of “old thought,” and are a force against change. Technology makes attitudes appear to change but the changes are superficial. Governments, cultures, corporations, and legacy institutions work to preserve old ways of thinking. The path to progress lies with what they’re selling, or so they tell us. This is the result of three things:
Ignorance in managing change.
Fear of change.
Excessive exploitation of opportunities.
Despite the desire to retain power, we’re drawn to change like moths to a flame. The human brain thrives on novelty and dies in boredom.
Repetition
Our primary mode of progress is repetition. Our repetition is a combination of habit plus change. It’s what distinguishes living from nonliving things. It’s also what we disparage, in our munificent arrogance. We consider repetition the province of the dull minded, yet we all live habitual lives.
We think we’re moving forward toward insight, but we never leave everything behind. We move around in circles of habit. If we’re lucky, we spiral forward altering our routines slightly. Quite often, we spiral backwards.
There is really no alternative because it’s only through the force of habit that we know how to move at all. Yet we somehow don’t recognize this: we disparage the inevitable repetition and extol blundering into areas of novelty, where we have little idea of what we’re doing.
Do we want to remember what we did before in order to recreate the situation more successfully next time, or do we want to forget the path to the mistakes we made in order to find better paths? Would we be better off forgetting everything or remembering everything? Clearly, we need both without being predestined to either.
There is an Answer, and It’s Not This
Clearly, you want to remember what you did in the past. You also want to remember which things were right and which were wrong. Remembering without discernment will lead you to doing things the same way you did them before. But forgetting will only lead you back to the same starting point and, with the same thoughts, recreate what follows as you did before.
If you cannot learn, then you cannot change, but does learning require remembering new insights or forgetting old errors? You might say, “remember what’s right and forget what’s wrong.” But if things didn’t work out last time, how do you know which are the right decisions and which are the wrong ones?
“Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.”
— Alexander Pope, from the poem Eloisa to Abelard
To do the right thing next time, you need to know more than just what was right and wrong the last time. You need to distinguish between good and bad opportunities, good and bad decisions, and good and bad outcomes.
This is like telling yourself that you should remember the right and wrong turns you made while you’re lost in a maze. If you’re still lost, how would you know? You can’t know.
We don’t think we’re lost in a maze. We think we have a few confusing choices along the right path. The real world is not one maze with one goal. It’s better seen as smaller, linked, and overlapping mazes. Some of these mazes represent simple goals, others are unrealistic, and some of these goals don’t exist at all.
The point is, if you need a basis for judging right from wrong, then you need to know how things work. The solutions to problems lies in understanding them, not in wishful thinking and blind faith.
Wishful thinking has it’s place. It creates a goal and suggests a path, but it provides no insight. The Law of Attraction, which claims you make things happen through faith, has no external reality.
Ask a Different Question
People like goals, but without paths they won’t reach them. In order not to get lost, you need to understand these paths. Don’t aim for ultimate happiness, aim to learn how things work. Rather than say, “This is what I want, how can I get it?” Ask, “What is making me want this, and how can I reconcile my different feelings about it?”
We repeat ourselves, and that’s okay. Repetition is the rhythm of footsteps and the mechanism of motion. In addition to repetition, it’s the choices we make that create change. You want a repetitive pattern that takes the least out of you. Onto this pattern, add the resonances that make the positive things better.
I’ve written a book I’ve titled, Operating Manual for Enlightenment: Rebuilding Your Mind. It’s based on the idea that you’ll successfully resolve issues when you understand how your mind works. It explores the disparate forces within you that work at cross purposes when they’re not coordinated.
There is more to yourself than just your thoughts and feelings. Your emotions have a greater role in guiding your understanding than you give them credit for. You are a constellation of these and other abilities that help you understand the world in different ways.
You are resolved when your abilities to understand the world are in agreement, and unresolved when they are in conflict. In addition to your thoughts and feelings, these abilities include your sensations, perceptions, needs, memories, culture, spirit, and sense of self.
Why Is There No Manual?
It is by design that none of our perceptive abilities speak the same language. Their breadth and differences create separate windows onto the world. By combining these into our personality, we try to balance and represent the world accurately, recognizing their separate insights and incorporating their voices into our character.
When you ask each of your abilities the question of what path is best to achieve your goals, you see these as limited questions. Each of your abilities understands your goals differently.
Consider partnership. What your mind needs is different from what your intellect wants. What your spirit accepts may conflict with your memories. What your culture dictates will shape what you see but may conflict with other cultures.
The more confused we are, the more intellectual we become. Intellect offers deduction, certainty, and a step-by-step plan. This may help us decide which way to turn, but doesn’t give us the big picture. We rely on our intellect when we fail to integrate our other abilities.
The Operating Manual takes a different approach. It goes beyond reconciling mind and body to include sense, perception, memory, culture, self, and spirit. The intellect provides a tool, but it cannot create the whole map.
Different questions are suited to different times. Young people don’t worry about their mortality, while elders won't waste their time with childhood abandon. Maybe there is no path for all times, and when that’s true, you should understand it.
Our deepest questions, such as pertain to love and meaning, don’t have goals. They don’t have single answers. Each of our abilities answers these questions differently. Whole answers require multiple intelligences.
I’ve created a Kickstarter campaign to gain support and attention for the Operating Manual for Enlightenment. The campaign goes live on Monday, April 1st. You can see it HERE.
Great points in there, I'm very much looking forward to this work of yours (and see how the Kickstart campaign shakes out).
The correlation between intellect and level of confusion hits home, same with young people not worrying about mortality vs. older people not worrying about childhood abandonment. Well done.