Friday 3 January 2003

Pic of the day: Hmm, should I come up with some deep truth that connects this random winter picture to the text, or should I leave that as an exercise for the reader?

Burden of awareness

There are some drugs that drastically alter your awareness, giving you experiences utterly unlike those you have in ordinary life. Not that I am recommending these "psychedelic" drugs: The experiences are not necessarily good, and once the trip begins you can not be sure to control it. The human subconscious is like a vast dungeon filled with traps and treasures. Using mind-altering drugs may teleport you into a random section where you were not meant to be until you had years of experience with mystic introspection. It may go well, and your life may be enriched. Or it may go horribly wrong, and you'll be scarred for life. Or mad. Or dead. Or guilty of some crime. I advise against it.

Other drugs simply increase your awareness, sharpening your senses and keeping you awake. Coffee seems mostly harmless, but there are less savoury substances that overclock the brain with little consideration for its natural limits. Some of these substances were legal in the past, but have later been banned because of the harm they did. (And because of a general trend toward protecting people from themselves, and the concept of victimless crimes. But I digress.)

But probably the largest group of mind-altering drugs, certainly if we include alcohol, is those that reduce awareness. Drugs that make you less sensitive, less aware. This can be a blessing if you are in pain and fear. But it also keeps your from thinking clearly, feeling clearly, living fully. In a state between sleep and wakefulness you drift through time, wearing shades over your mind's eyes. Why do so many people choose this?

***

When I was younger, I was quite enthusiastic about meditation, and I tried to introduce others to it. But I learned that many people are uncomfortable with silence, and with aloneness. It makes them restless, even afraid. It creeps them out. And people who like alcohol, seem to particularly dislike meditation. I wonder if there isn't a connection there. Perhaps they use alcohol as a form of self-medication, to tune down an awareness that is too high for comfort.

In the silence of meditation, you may start to sense the soft babbling of your own thoughts. You may start to become aware of how your thoughts and emotions come into being. You look at the pond in which they grow before they crawl up into the daylight as fully grown thoughts. Ordinarily you say "I think", and that's all there is to it, if your awareness if fully directed outward. You don't question where your thoughts come from, or how they come into being. You just think, and there they are.

But I suspect that many people are not quite that well focused. Some part of their awareness strays inward, and there it picks up the things that shall not be spoken of: The birth of thought and feeling. Our society clearly defines this as a non-issue, except for a few select researchers. And even these prefer to be armed with electronic instruments and approach it all as fluctuations in the electrochemical balance of the brain. To actually stare at the larvae of thought as they squabble in the mind's pond is considered unspeakably rude, it seems. Like sex was forbidden to even mention a couple hundred years ago, so is the processes of the mind still taboo to us today.

This is not necessarily such a bad thing. Many processes in the body work at least as well when we don't think about them. We don't direct our heart to beat, our lungs to breathe, or our guts to digest. The operating system of the brain takes care of all this. (Remind me to write about our operating system if I forget it.) Our civilization, and the cultures that came before it, were largely built by men and women to whom thoughts just were there when you needed them. If it isn't broken, why fix it? There is, after all, a tendency of introspection with some forms of psychosis. In these cases, people turn from the outer world and into themselves; they disappear eventually from the normal life and are lost.

On the other hand, some awareness may be in order. To a small child, urination and defecation may come as a big surprise, and so these things tend to happen whether it is appropriate or not. In a similar way, many adults are still taken by surprise by their own emotions, and thoughts they cannot explain or control. It may be a worry that you know is ridiculous, but it keeps riding you like you were a horse. It may be a feeling of fear or depression, or a suspicion that you know is just dumb. But you cannot let go. It just is there, you don't know from where. Because your awareness doesn't extend that way.

Of course, once it has come that far, you are probably not very eager to turn around and meet these things on their home turf. And I won't draw any conclusions for you. We are different, and we cannot live each other's lives. But I urge you to at least think twice before you enlist chemicals to hide your own thoughts from yourself. Perhaps you have a friend you can talk with? It could be that it is not quite as strange or abnormal as you think. Or if it is, perhaps you can order your life to counter it rather than flee from it. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste."