Free Time

I've never liked the phrase, "Time is money." We all have a finite amount of time on Earth and, like money, we can spend time or waste time, save time or invest time. So maybe the phrase should go, "Time is like money." But to equate the two is to devalue time, because money is an artificial construct.

There was a time when there was no money. There was nothing but time, and it was always free. Our time had value when we used it to get food or make love. That was all we were about as we evolved as proto-humans. Food and sex, like most animals. But, eventually, we started to trade things we did with our time for things others did with their time. I spent my time hunting this deer which I'll trade you for those wool blankets you made. We had to decide how much hunting equaled how many blankets. Things and time began to have value.

Then our symbolic powers evolved enough to say that a symbolic object such as a coin was worth a given amount of work or goods. Looking back through history we can see that monetary value is arbitrary because a dollar now is not what a dollar once was, or a pound or a shekel or what have you. Once, a day's work may have been worth a dollar, but that dollar would buy you a lot of things. If you worked 8 hours and slept 8 hours that left you with 8 hours of free time. If the work was worth a dollar, then the time must have been worth a dollar. But you weren't earning a dollar for it, so we considered it free time. We were also free from the enslavement that our jobs might have been. 8 hours to be free. It was as if we had a gift of time.

Until recently I felt as if I had very little free time. My work hours were such that on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, I got home too late to use any time. I had Thursday off, but I was teaching a class in the middle of the day and the evening's were devoted to couples time, which, while pleasant, was not free. My Saturday off went all too quickly, because that was when I painted and wrote and made music and worked out and went shopping and did laundry, and there was always so much to get done, that the time never felt free and I always ran out of it before I could do all that I wanted to do.

Now, all of a sudden I find myself in a new job which has an odd schedule, and I find myself inundated with time. I deliver express mail in the morning and then have 4 1/2 free hours until I have to do the reverse route in the afternoon. I stop at a truck stop, so my options are limited, but the time is such a gift! I read a bit, study for the MCAT because I still have the idea of medical school in my head, have my lunch, and then I write. I've already finished the second draft of a novel I'd been working on for a long time. And now I'm working on my philosophy book, writing down all the things I think about the process we call life. I'm not sure what its eventual fate will be, but I realized that I've been in conversation with myself about the nature of reality all my life and I've come to certain conclusions. But they just exist in my head. I feel like they will never have a value unless  they're expressed and I guess writing them down is the first step. If I just die and never express my thoughts then what was the good of thinking them? So it feels like I'm getting paid to have a few hours of structured writing time 6 days a week. That's like a dream!

And then, I'm home by 5:30 or six every day, giving me even more free time. I'm finding that I can now choose what to do with my time - a luxury that I don't remember ever having. Time to me is worth so much more than money, so I feel like a rich man. A person needs time to reflect. When we are so busy with life that we don't have a moment to even appreciate time, we become mechanical. I see so many people who live for their jobs because they can't see how to survive otherwise. And then they squander whatever little time they have. Stop right this moment and be aware of it. Take in your surroundings. Feel the air, hear the sounds, really look at where you are. Check in with your body, your breathing, your pulse. Calm your nervous energy for a moment. Relax. Just for a moment. Doesn't it feel right? That moment can be so valuable - worth so much more than money. It is beyond price. That time you just took is my gift to you. It is a gift you can claim again and again. And it is free. A moment of real awareness is worth many days of hard work. If you step out of the stream of time for just a moment and appreciate all of creation, you will be rich too.

Money is just an idea. But free time is worth so much more.

Epiphanies

Life is full of epiphanies. Sometimes they hit you subtly, sometimes with a bang to the head. Childhood is chock full of them, as everyday brings a new wonder. But we didn't see them as revelations then - we were just filling up our empty heads with whatever came our way. As adults, the epiphanies are more spread out and poignant. When you just instantly know something or realize it in a new way it can be transforming. I've had several life-changing revelations lately, if I can call them that.

The first I wrote about previously in a post entitled, "My New Religion." It struck me like a thunderbolt that my beliefs were not the beliefs I grew up with. The change happened over decades, but the realization was instantaneous. I was brought up Catholic and went through 12 years of Catholic school. I was an altar boy and always did well in my religion classes. I was pretty immersed in what Catholics believed and though I questioned a lot of it, even as a child, if there were such a thing as a Catholic test, I would pass it with flying colors. But then I had the epiphany that outside of the general morality of Catholicism, I really shared very little with Catholics in terms of belief. I don't believe that Jesus was God except in the way that everyone is part of God (see earlier post). I don't believe he rose from the dead. I don't believe in a Father in heaven or that Mary was free from sin or was a virgin. I basically don't believe any doctrine of Catholicism at all. I wholly accept Catholics, as long as they are loving people, but I share very little with them.

My second recent epiphany was that I want to become a doctor. It was an early ambition of mine, but was squelched by this and that, and overshadowed by my strong desire to be a creative person. I don't know why those two things had to be mutually exclusive. And my mother didn't help with saying often, "We're not the Kennedy's" whenever I had some grand design.

(I was doing some research on Brian Boru, the first king of a united Ireland from whom all O'Brien's descend and I found out that his father was from the clan of O'Kennedy. So, mom, you might not be a Kennedy, but I am, in name and spirit).

So my ambition to become a doctor came directly from the epiphany about religion. The only thing I know about what a God might possibly want is that He wants life to continue. It's the only theme that is present in the world. All life, from microorganisms to the great whales, wants to continue. It is programmed in us. We'll never know why, but I want to be a part of that. We want our own individual survival and we want the survival of our species. Some of us further want the survival of every species because we see how interdependent we all are. But sometimes I wonder, if the polar bear were to go extinct, that would be sad, but it wouldn't affect our survival. Maybe the grand design doesn't need every species. Obviously, many didn't make it. No one misses the dodo. Or the mammoth.

So, as a doctor, I see myself helping life to continue. I'm thinking about psychiatry, since it has already had a profound effect in my life. Since I didn't have kids, and am not helping life to go on in that way, I want to help other people live the best lives they can, be as happy and healthy as they can be and be a richer part of the world we're in.

My most recent epiphany stems from the first two and has had such shock waves that I'm still in awe of what I've found out. All my life I have felt the need to make art. In school I used to draw all over my desk all the time. I would draw in text books and on scraps of paper. And musically I felt I wanted to perform at every chance, from school plays to church choirs to writing my own music to playing in bars and clubs. I felt the need to create so strongly that I never questioned it. I didn't know why I had to, I just had to. As an adult artist there came a time when I decided that I would make a point to paint every day. It would not be just a hobby, it would be like a religious practice. My identity was cemented when I made that decision. There were times when friends would want to go out and I would say, "No, I've got to paint." It was my vocation, my reason for living. I was always searching for ways to make my work better and settled on the idea that it was a life-long quest, and that I would always be learning.

But then last week, I had the epiphany. I no longer have the need to paint. I still have the desire to paint, because I thoroughly enjoy the quest for better expressions of myself. But I don't have the need. I think my need was for people to pay attention to me, to think me intelligent and talented. I grew up fourth in a family of five kids where I didn't get that much attention. So as I grew, I craved it and the itch was scratched by art. It became part of my identity and I felt a sense of self-validation when I would do something I considered worthy. But that need for attention is gone. Painting doesn't really help anyone - it's just entertainment. I will still paint, but my painting will be different. It will be more intentional. I used to think that everything I did was so brilliant, but I just don't see that anymore.

We all have genius - we just have to recognize it and nurture it. My genius is not about painting or writing or music, as I thought it was for so many years. My genius is in communication. And in my life, I don't use that genius enough. I have amazing dialogues with myself, but so rarely do I have them with anybody else anymore. What good is a head full of knowledge and novelty if it isn't shared? So psychiatry seems to be the avenue where I can put my knowledge, and hopefully the wisdom it has engendered, to good use.

I feel free from the shackles of my own making. I used to feel that if I didn't keep painting, I would lose my identity. And some day, I felt, if I kept learning, I would truly make a masterpiece. Now I see that painting is just one of the tools in my box. Just as music is. And writing. If I were suddenly unable to do any of these things, I wouldn't lose my identity. I suppose that is what the epiphany was all about - that my self-identity is fully formed. I know who I am. I know what my tools are. And I know what to do with them. I know what I believe. It has taken 49 years, but I know who I am. And I am pleased to meet me.

Identity

Who are you? On a high school retreat, we paired off with a partner and were asked to write 1) how we perceive ourselves, 2) how we think others perceive us, and then our partner would write how they actually perceived us. Needless to say, these descriptions were not identical. It is safe to say that, though there are generalizations about us on which everyone would agree, we are perceived differently by each individual with whom we come in contact. So, in addition to working on our inner selves, we must also work on our public relations or no one will ever know who we really are.

When we meet someone, we size them up without thinking. We take in their clothing, their hairstyle, their general appearance and demeanor, their stance, their speech, their sexuality, even the shape of the muscles on their face which tells us what mood they're in and how their facial habits have affected their affect. We can sense if someone is an angry person, a joyous person, a serene person, an anxious person, and we approach them and treat them as such without any consciousness of it. There are people who draw us in and people who push us away.

I am reminded of this as I think about the way in which I think my co-workers would describe me. I think my boss would think that I am absent-minded and flighty. The people I used to supervise would see me as self-assured and implacable, even in the tensest situations. People in other departments might see me as quiet and thoughtful. My current co-workers would know me as creative and friendly.

I am all of these things, but if I were to write a description of myself, these are not the things on which I would focus. How do I want you to know me? I am a person who feels very intensely his own presence. I am living consciously and celebrating each moment I'm alive. Even when there's pain, I am thankful for being able to experience it, thankful of having the human experience of it. (Don't get me wrong - I'm thankful for pain relievers too!) I feel the connection between all things, and understand that all I know about matter is what I can perceive with my senses. I think there is more to reality than what we can sense. I feel that the arts are a way to transcend the prison that our mind and senses create. In making art, music, dance, writing, we are allowed to take what is otherwise un-sayable in our minds and give it manifest form. When we do this, we allow others into our minds and can more fully share our experience of being human.

If you were to listen to some of my songs, read some of my stories, or sit with some of my paintings, you might get a better sense of who I am than I could ever tell you. When we visit museums, we don't get descriptions of painters' day-to-day existences, we get the nuances of their souls. If a painting is good, it's because you know how the painter felt making it. And better still, how they felt about life - what it was like in their mind. If you looked through my oeuvre, you would see a mind that has never been at rest, a mind that has had explosions of energy and emotion, a mind that saw the world with new eyes every day. This is what I want you to know about me. That I am not a static, describable being - none of us are. I am a process that has continued for almost 49 years and continues to unfold every day. You can never know me, you can only know what I have affected.

So our identity is defined by what we affect. Like with the energy that we call light, we can't see it, we can only see its effect on matter. Our self-consciousness is built by the reactions we see in other people. We cannot judge any action good or bad without the reactions of others. We see negative reactions and we may change the way we act. We see positive reactions and we may repeat whatever action brought it about. From the time we are little, we are constantly seeing ourselves mirrored in other people's eyes and building the thing we call personality. We are an accumulation of all the reactions we've gotten. We think we can choose who we are, but we are largely a series of forks in the road - good reaction, one way; bad reaction, another way. It's why no two personalities are the same. They diverge as soon as we take our first action and then follow their own unrepeatable route.

I'm picturing an infinite game of Pachinko, where God drops a chip and it plinks and plunks its way down the pins of our lives, sometimes bouncing left, sometimes right, ending up making a path that is uniquely ours, and no other can follow it in the same way. Where our chip is dropped is our genetic predisposition for certain things, but where we go from there is a zillion decisions of right or left, yes or no, and random bounces based on where we've been so far.

Who am I? It is impossible to say. But you are invited to watch which way I bounce.

Discovering Color

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the canvas ...

Actually, my painting style has gone through so many changes (as have I) through the years that one can hardly keep track. As far as galleries are concerned this is artistic suicide. Most galleries want artists who have a signature style that they do well and can keep producing in the same vein. But I am a complex organism, not a machine, and so my output changes as I change in the world.

For our new CD, "Dreamtown," my co-writer, Bob Elliott, asked me to look through some old paintings to see if we could find any images to use. He talked about some figures I had done in trippy colors. I looked at what I had been doing recently and realized that I was not painting in trippy colors anymore. I was painting in perfectly sane colors - true to life colors. Colors that were appropriate to the color and intensity of the light from the sky. This had not always been the case.

When I started unrolling some of those old paintings, I was a little startled. They were done in my manic phases where the paintings weren't so much about subject as they were about paint! They were explosions of color - very expressionistic. I was obviously feeling intense feelings while I painted and exploring my emotional attachment to all the various colors. There was hardly a color that I did not use.

Then, I went through my MFA program and really learned to paint all over again. First, I limited my palette. Gone were the intense cadmiums and cobalts and quinacridones. I started looking at Rembrandt, and noticed the almost complete lack of any bright color. He used basically lead white, charcoal black, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber and a few others. He always worked on a dark toned ground. I found this appealing at the time. I took my landscape palette down to chromium green, Van Dyke brown, yellow ochre, venetian red, titanium white and maybe a little cerulean for skies, though most of my skies were gray made from Vandyke brown and white. There was such a balanced consistency to the whole scene. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we do not have a lot of bright blue skies, and gray and dark green are pretty much the extent of our natural palette. I've been living here for about 11 years, and I'm sure the lack of color has influenced my painting. Look at painting from Cuba or Ghana, or Jamaica and you will see a different palette. Look at Van Gogh in Arles and compare to his paintings in Holland. The light we live in affects our painting.

I had learned to harness color to make it do what I wanted. I had learned to limit color by graying it out with its complement. I had learned to portray the light of the Pacific Northwest. But that was not what was in my secret heart. I used to intentionally place bright complements next to each other for their vivid effect. If I saw a little blue in a shadow, I would intensify it to a deep ultramarine. I might see straw-colored grasses on a bright day as stripes of cad yellow and dioxazine purple, strewn with dots of cad red light and cad orange flowers. Everything screamed colors. That is what I noticed when I unrolled those old paintings.

And so I looked at what I was currently working on - some small 8x10 landscapes which were all very proper and unremarkable. I suddenly realized that no one needed to see these places I was painting. Who would care? It was just another tree among billions, another road, another mountain. My painting had become pedestrian. I exerted so much control over the light that they had lost the intense emotion that made me love paint in the first place. So the first thing I did was get rid of the blue sky. We've all seen enough blue skies in our life - I wanted to paint the sky vivid yellow - not just a sunset glow, but a happy yellow that had nothing to do with a color the sky could actually ever be. The light of the sky changes everything. So if this was the light from the sky, how did that affect the trees? The path? The meadow? So, just that suddenly, my painting style changed. I looked at everything as containing the colors of my emotions instead of the color of my eyes.

I went back in to several of the small works I'd been making and completely painted over everything, keeping the good compositions, but cranking the color knob to 11. Shadows were once again deep ultramarine and grasses, cadmium yellow. There were no more gray rocks, but blue or lavender ones. The ground was not longer neutral - it jumped out at you with a pink soil stabbed with ultramarine shadows and flecked with color. I realized that I had been a reporter, when I longed to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But now, I had left my manic tendencies behind and was in control of my painting again. Painting is manipulation, in a good way. I can not only force your mind to think of a tree where no tree exists, but I can force you to feel the feelings I want you to feel about that tree. Think of it - You can't look at a good picture of a tree and see it for what it really is - molecules of pigment which reflect certain wavelengths of light, arranged by the artist in a more-or-less two dimensional pattern - you see a tree! And yet there is no tree. You could see it on the moon, in the Sahara Desert or in the Antarctic and you would still think of a tree. The artist forces your mind. He creates thought patterns based on our life's experience of a tree.

And now, in addition to this manipulation of thought patterns, I am playing on all your life's associations with color. The tree can be red and blue and still you accept it as a tree. Yellow and red and blue light can play in the leaves and you may still see them as green. I don't have to report that leaves are green - we all know that. And I have learned my own color-connected emotional language. I know how an alizarin crimson is going to affect you as opposed to a naphthol red. I know when to use chromium green and when to use cadmium green. I know what emotions I connect with colors. It's like knowing when to use a minor chord to convey a slight sadness and when to use a minor 7th for a more serious color of sadness. Or a major 7 for dreaminess. Or a diminished chord for uncertainty. So a cadmium green is happy and optimistic, where an olive green (which is different mixes by different color makers) is subdued and sleepy. A chromium green is a strong adult, no-nonsense color, and a phthalo green is bossy. You can't just use every green in every painting or your head will explode with emotion. This is what I used to do. And that's what my head did.

Now I hope that I've learned enough about light, paint and color to manipulate the viewer in exactly the way I intend. I hope when you see a painted tree now, you will not only think of a tree, but you will understand exactly how I feel about that tree. You will understand why I had to paint that particular tree in a world full of trees. It's never really about a tree, it's about connecting what is inside of the artist to what is inside of the viewer. You can use a tree to do it, or you can use a figure to do it or you can just arrange color on a canvas to do it.

That is why abstract painting is hard for some people to do and hard for some people to look at. Amateurs think they can just splash paint around and call it an abstract painting, and they think this is what abstract painters do. But that is not unlike making a bunch of random utterances and calling it a language. Or making a bunch of unconnected noises and calling it music. Color is a language that has to be studied. The more you study, the more fluent you will be. You can write like a reporter, but you can also write like Marcel Proust. But you cannot write and you cannot read anything unless you know at least some of the language.

On Disappointment

A friend asked for a few words about disappointment and my first thought was - what an odd word that is. "dis" is obviously a negative, but "appointment?" So, of course, I had to look up the etymology. And oddly enough, the original meaning of the word was to remove from appointed office. One was appointed, and then, presumably from doing a poor job, one was disappointed. My friend holds no public office, so I know he has no fear of disappointment in this way.

So, obviously, we are talking about the frustration of expectation. There are three kinds of disappointment: disappointment in one's self; disappointment in others; and disappointment in the way things are. If you never expect anything, you cannot experience any of these disappointments. But our brains are conditioned to expect things. That is how we plan.

Let's look at them one at a time. If we are disappointed in the way things are, irrespective of what anyone has done, then it is likely that we are experiencing a form of depression. If the universe just doesn't seem fair, if it has rained too many days, if you are not as tall as you'd like to be and somehow you are disappointed by this, then your brain chemicals may be imbalanced. The universe is not fair - it is a very neutral place where things are not set out just for you to be happy. You can find happiness in acceptance of this. Someone told me a Buddhist saying the other day: When things are good, they are good. And when things are bad, they are also good. We cannot expect anything from the universe or from God. We make life what it is. Accept the bad. Strive for the good. Another saying: To have more, desire less.

But somehow I don't think my friend was alluding to this kind of disappointment.

So, what about disappointment in others? We like to think that we are all on an equal playing field and that others will do what is best for everyone. But we all have unique brains built by our own experiences - so every one is different. Every brain has its own best interest at heart, or the best interest of its offspring. I experience disappointment when I see selfish actions which do harm to other people, but the brain always thinks it is taking care of itself. We have all gone through emotional injury in our lives, and our brains have all built defense mechanisms to prevent the injuries from occurring again. So, sometimes our brain works without our consent and does what it thinks is best for the individual without ever consulting us. So what can we expect from other people's brains? Unless we're talking about your mom's brain, we can't expect other people to try and make you happy. If you expect someone else to make you happy, you very well may be disappointed.

But I think what really matters is that which we can do something about: disappointment in ourselves. We want to be the best we can be. We want happiness. We want to achieve this and that. We want love. We want acceptance from others. We want recognition. Some want money. Some want fame. Some just want to please their parents. Let's look at that.

When you are an infant, you are a blank slate. You have never done anything to either please or displease anyone. But as you grow, you start making choices based on whatever feedback you get from your actions. Since no one but your parents chastises you, you at first only please or disappoint your parents. They want you to be a certain way and this is based on their own childhoods and the childhoods of their parents and so on back down the line. No parents come to Earth wholly made, unaffected by their own upbringing. We are all products of a long line of human evolution and things that may have happened generations ago are still affecting your relationship with your parents. They are deep and mostly unconscious things. We transfer what our parents expect of us to what we think we expect of ourselves.

And what can we expect of ourselves? We are in competition with everyone in our society. We mostly enter the world in a weak position. Most people do not come into the world with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Those people probably are raised to expect a lot - and they get it. But the rest of us have to work our way upstream in life, against a torrent of limitations. We should first expect only that we will live, that we have the drive to continue eating and taking care not to get injured. In this, we are usually not disappointed. But then, we expect ourselves to do something called succeeding.

Another interesting etymology: to come after, or take the place of another. e.g. If Queen Elizabeth II should die, Prince Charles would succeed. Gosh, you'd think he was pretty successful already. But, again, back to our parents - to succeed in our parents eyes is to do better than they did. Our parents want this for us and so we think we want it for ourselves. In olden times, where your ancestors might have been peasant farmers, you might literally just follow after them, and that would be your success. But in modern times, our paths so often diverge from our parents' and how then do we measure success? How do I relate as a writer, musician, and artist to my fireman father? If I can take care of a family like he did, does that make me a success? I have no wife and no family - does that make me a failure? Not in my eyes. I have had to redefine success in my own terms, because the things I have come to value are different than the things my parents valued.

If we can divorce our own notion of success from our parents', we will more seldom be disappointed with ourselves. Of course, we can try things and fail, but if we tried our best, there's no reason for disappointment. If we did not try our best, we must look at the reasons why we were trying in the first place. Was it to please others? And disappointment is inextricably tied to the past. We cannot be disappointed with the present moment. In the present moment, everything just is. We can only be disappointed with the past, and the past is unchangeable. When we accept that fact, we learn a lesson about the past that can be applied to the future. There is always a lesson in disappointment. Take it with you or the disappointment will be without value. Be grateful for the failures as well as the successes. Be grateful that you are having the full range of human experience. It is a miracle that we think and feel at all.

Let us take a moment to step outside of our brains and look at them as observers. Our brain is an amazing machine, but much of what it does is automatic. Right now it is sending electric impulses to you heart to constrict and relax, pumping blood throughout your body. It is doing the same to your lungs to infuse that blood with oxygen which nourishes every cell. It is turning food into energy. It is making certain muscles and tendons constrict to hold your body in the position it's in. It is also storing nearly all of your life's experience. And it is making sense of some of the stimulus it collects through our senses. But somehow we think we are in control of it. For the most part, we do not use our brains - our brains use us. We can learn to control this amazing machine better by getting to know it.

When we experience a disappointment, we have to look at how our brain is processing that information. Disappointment makes us feel bad chemically based on experiences that we have had in the past which were negative. Our brains have pleasure centers which are stimulated chemically when things happen which are life affirming. These pleasure centers, when the brain is functioning properly, are constantly fed by neurotransmitters and our normal, waking state should be one of happiness and well-being. Of course, we do not always feel this. Some things threaten our sense of well-being. Our pleasure centers shut down and toxins from our environment and adrenaline are free to flood our bodies. We sometimes get rid of toxins by tears or vomit or sweat or urination or defecation. Sometimes we feel so threatened that our body goes into "fight, flight, or freeze" mode. Our automatic brain does the driving and we react "without thinking."

Awareness of the present moment and the miracle of consciousness can put all things in perspective. Before an event occurs is the time to think about disappointment. What will I feel like if I don't get that job? What will it feel like if I am rejected?  What will it feel like to be laughed at? And why will I feel this way? How is this coming experience like that of my childhood? What do I expect of myself? If you act consciously instead of reacting unconsciously, you will seldom feel disappointment in yourself. That is the only disappointment that you have any control of. If you're disappointed with others or with the universe - get medicated and seek therapy. Focus on your expectations. Remember, to have more, desire less. Accept what is. Not just take, but embrace the bad with the good. You are insignificant to the universe, yet the whole universe dwells inside of you. Is the raindrop disappointed that it has to fall? That is its nature.

Monkey Mind

I first read the phrase Monkey Mind in a column by Herb Caen, the late celebrated columnist for the S.F. Chronicle. His first sentence was ... Monkey mind, leaping from limb to limbo. He then went on to fill a whole column with leaps of thought that were truly acrobatic. Stream of consciousness is a great thing for an artist to possess. Monkey mind is a Buddhist idea of a person who can't stop his mind from going on its merry way, a restless, preoccupied person. It is the exact opposite of the ideal of a quiet mind.

The phrase enters my consciousness now because I watched a documentary about Jane Goodall, the chimp behavior expert and activist. I must declare that chimps are not monkeys. They are in the family of great apes, which includes the gorilla, the orangutan, the bonobo and man. The great apes are just a stone's throw away from us genetically. And watching the chimps easily makes one feel related. Are humans really the smartest of the bunch? This is not such a facetious question. We are, without a doubt, the most accomplished and have the most complex brains. But what do we do with our complex brains?

This idea occurred to me the other day when friends were engaging in idle chatter and I was noticing that it made me tense. It took a few hours of contemplation to figure out why. It turned out to be a justice issue. Here was someone saying nothing intelligent, cementing the idea in my head that she wasn't very intelligent overall, and yet I happened to know that she was thriving in her life - she had a good marriage, had plenty of money, supportive parents, a life she apparently enjoyed. And here I am making very little money, living a forced frugal life, renting instead of owning, not able to afford new shoes, but using my old shoes which were second-hand when I bought them, wearing second-hand clothes not because they're stylish, but because that's all I can afford. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. I value intelligence in others. Yet I am by no means thriving. I'm happy, but I don't have the kind of life that affords me a lot of choices.

So who is the intelligent one, really? We don't really value intelligence in our society any more. I feel as if I have become a master candle maker in an age of electric light.

And then there are the gorillas. Gorillas are monstrously strong, but they are vegetarians. I've been thinking lately that they might be a good model animal for the U.S. military. They don't have a very large territory and don't stray far on a typical day. They don't need to kill to survive. They hold their great strength in reserve in case they are attacked by a leopard, which is their only known possible enemy. And even then, the silverback male will put on a display of power before ever engaging, with the idea of scaring the possible predator away. They live a life of peace and ease. If that is not intelligence, what is?

Very few humans live such lives. Our lives are full of monkey mind.

Let me tell you another instance of monkeys in my consciousness. I am a songwriter and musician. I've been doing this for over 30 years. But my job is to buy art supplies, to check invoices to make sure we got what we ordered at the right price, to place new orders, to sell more art supplies. All day long I'm supposed to do this, and all day long there is Muzak playing in the supposed background. Sometimes there are good songs by classic artists. Sometimes there are terribly painfully bad songs which no one in their right mind would ever ask to hear.

But say I were not a music expert. Say I was a monkey expert. Say I'd been studying monkeys all my life. I knew everything there was to know about monkeys. I was an expert on monkey behavior. And the one day, someone unleashes a truckload of monkeys into the store. The monkeys are breaking things and biting people's ankles and scratching at their eyes. Some of them apparently have fleas. I know exactly how to handle these monkeys, how to make them behave - even how to rid them of fleas. But my job has nothing to do with monkeys. I'm supposed to ignore the monkeys and pretend they aren't even there. I'm supposed to go on checking my invoices while what I'd rather be doing is attending to the monkeys. It makes a job seem very mundane when there are monkeys about. Can you imagine Jane Goodall in the wild with the chimps trying to check an invoice? This is how out of place I feel at my job.

And yet the chimps live in large social groups, and have all they need. They are not perfect - they do kill, even their own kind and they do wage wars. But it seems the farther you go away from the human brain, the "happier" the animal becomes. Ignorance is bliss. Maybe monkey mind is the wrong phrase. Maybe monkeys don't do much thinking at all. Maybe they are like Zen masters who simply exist. Maybe it is the human's curse to have developed such a brain as ours, that worries and dreads and plots and schemes and is jealous and insecure and afraid and angry. Maybe Man Mind is the problem. I'll settle for Monkey Mind any day.

Truth and the Mind

Just finished reading an article about a severely burned Iraq veteran who found pain relief from a virtual reality game called "Snow World" in which he shot penguins and snowmen and mammoths with snowballs. Brain scans of the area called the pain matrix showed much less activity while he was playing. He rated his own pain a 6 out of 10 while on other days it had been 9's an 10's constantly. The hell that the pain caused him was alleviated by giving the mind something else to focus on.

Our brains are equipped with chemicals which regulate our physical feelings as well as emotional states. I'm no brain expert, but am moderately aware of things called endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Certain drugs, like opioids, affect the production of these chemicals and alleviate pain and promote feelings of well-being. I've heard that endorphins are three times as powerful as morphine. So our brains are equipped to manage pain, but unfortunately, most of us do not know how to manage our brains. If we did, pain would be a trivial message that something was wrong with our body that needs attention, and that's all.

Last year I had a weird, severe back injury while tying a shoe! Fear was my first emotion, because I had gone through years of back pain when I was younger that I now feel was tied in to my depressive/manic states. This time around, my bipolar disorder had been under control for about ten years with meds and therapy. The pain reached down through my nerves to the entire right side of my leg, feeling like a knitting needle were being jabbed into my joints. The trigger for the injury may have been a bulged disc pressing on the nerve that ran down that leg, but the pain, though severe, now did not affect my sense of well-being.

Like in the virtual reality game, I found a way to minimalize the pain using the power of distraction. Instead of focusing on the leg that hurt, I tried intensely concentrating on how good my other leg felt. Amazingly, the more I focused on the good leg, the less pain I felt. This told me that I was controlling the way my brain was processing its chemicals. I was able to produce endorphins enough to fill my body with a sense of well-being.

Lately, I think I've gotten better at producing these sensations at will. I have a sense of being high and my body feels wonderful. I feel lighter and a little less connected to what Eckhardt Tolle calls "the pain body." I also feel anchored to the present, and any baggage of all that I have been through in my life disappears. It is an amazing feeling. It doesn't last forever - life somehow always intrudes eventually, but it's a great skill to learn.

Meditation quiets the mind. When the mind is quiet, everything is perfect. In the present moment, everything is perfect. It is only the fear and anxiety of our expectations which are based on our past experience that take us out of the present moment. Some people say, you can't just meditate all your life, but they don't realize that you can quiet your mind during any activity. You don't have to be in a lotus posture, you don't have to close your eyes, you don't have to focus on your breathing. These are all things that might help you get there - they let you take control of your brain chemicals - but they are not the only way. If you are fully in the present, no matter what you are doing, you become the experience. You are no longer a person doing something, you are the entire world as your mind understands it. You exist in harmony with all of creation. Sounds nice, right?

You can be there right now. When we look for it, like the Tao, we will never find it. As soon as you stop trying to attain, you attain. You are the Buddha right now - you just have to stop trying to be the Buddha. But this is like the old story of the master saying that to attain enlightenment, you must not think of an elephant. The student then, of course, can only think of what he is trying not to think of. Stop seeking, and be the Buddha.

So the truth of reality is not what the mind tells us. Like in Plato's allegory of the caves, we only see shadows of reality and make our best guesses as to what it is. We are limited by our five senses. Reality is what we see, touch, hear, smell and taste. Could it be that there are other qualities of reality that we don't have the sense organs to perceive? Bats understand spatial reality by echolocation. Insects, birds and tropical fish see ultraviolet patterns that we can't see. Suppose we could sense magnetism, or density, or see gamma rays or electrical fields. There must be so many other aspects of reality that we cannot even measure.

So what is the truth? When your mind stops perceiving with its senses, it feels like truth. Truth is acceptance of all that is. Not judging, not comparing, not reacting, just accepting. Our brains are amazing machines that are built for judging, comparing and reacting, so that the organism of the body can successfully continue and help life on Earth continue. But we can control our brains, instead of our brains controlling us. We have the power to quiet our brains any time we want. And in doing so, we can experience the truth.