I know I said I wouldn’t do more opinion pieces, but it turns out I have a few more of them in me. I enjoyed writing the month+ of serialized fiction, but it’s a difficult format to maintain long-term, as spur-of-the-moment decisions that cannot be revised slowly begin to hem the writer in and continuity errors inevitably compound and weigh on the narrative. That said, I’ve toyed with the idea of El’sha’s story serving as a lead-in to the novel I’m currently working on, so future visits to her world may be slanted in that direction. There’s a lot more happening on Earth in the year 3263 than El’sha realizes.
Today, though, I’m going to write about myself.
As a child, I was tormented by an extremely boisterous inner voice. Not schizophrenia, mercifully; merely the unbidden thoughts we all have moment by moment: What am I going to have for lunch? I shouldn’t have said that to her yesterday. Should I apologize? I can’t wait for the game this Sunday! I’m really dreading calling my doctor about this rash. Does he notice me? Am I a good person? Am I boring? Do I talk too much? Do my friends like me, or are they just tolerating me because they’re too nice to tell me to fuck off? Here’s a song I heard on the radio yesterday, and I’m going to be singing the lyrics for the next three hours! Now I’m counting my steps: one, two, three, four, five…
Until fairly recently, in my late twenties, I had no idea everyone experienced this to some degree or other. I was, shall we say, an unusual child, and painfully aware of my own non-conformity, so perhaps it was natural for me to assume my over-active mind was a phenomenon unique to my own experience. By my early teens I had decided enough was enough: I began verbally abusing myself in an attempt to silence these unwelcome thoughts. “Shut up” I would subvocalize over and over, beating my psyche into submission with a tirade of intentional noise, drowning out the background chatter. Peace would emerge from this abuse, but only momentarily: the thoughts always returned eventually.
I only have a few concrete memories of doing this to myself, most prominently of actually speaking the words out loud in the shower, over and over and over, when I could be sure no one else would hear the tirade, but in writing this it has occurred to me that I must have practiced this verbal self-abuse daily, perhaps for years. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for the miraculous changes this seemingly harmful practice brought about.
One day, my mind was still.
It was effortless. Unless I intentionally directed my mind to a topic, there was no background chatter. No shameful memories. No worries about tomorrow. No naïve, half-baked theories of physics, or agonizing over awkward exchanges with strangers, acquaintances, or even crushes. I could choose to ‘turn on’ and engage in whatever lines of internal exploration I wished, but the background level of noise had dropped to near-zero, and when stray thoughts did spring to mind, I could dismiss them easily. I thought I had cured myself of some undiagnosed condition, but there was no pride in it, merely immense relief. How can one feel pride in achieving what one believes everyone else possesses without struggle?
It was perhaps four or five years ago, when I first flirted with Eastern philosophy, that a podcast I was listening to rekindled my interest in this topic. The interviewee was discussing yoga and meditation, and how a silencing of the inner monologue, or voice, was one of the ultimate goals of meditation. It was like a switch got flipped in my brain, and my entire childhood and early teens were recontextualized. I started asking friends and family about their own inner monologues, breathlessly recounting the story of how I’d long ago silenced my own. This was earth-shattering stuff for me, but the most common response I got was “huh, weird. Good for you?” I had to accept, once again, that this was a highly personal topic, and that what’s good for the goose is rarely good for the gander.
Writing this and reflecting back on my journey has given me new insight into what I experienced. As I mentioned, my actual memories of forcibly quelling my inner monologue are extremely sparse, and that scarcity seems incommensurate with the power of the effect I achieved. The way we remember the past isn’t the past, though, and it’s a truism that we forget more than we retain. My assault on my own unconscious must have been constant and absolute and unrelenting. What’s more, while telling oneself to ‘shut up’ over and over again seems unhealthy at first blush (and is certainly emblematic of the antagonistic relationship I used to have with my own mind), on another level any sound emitted repeatedly and focused on can be a meditation aid.
“Shut Up” was my mantra, and I meditated daily for years without realizing it.
I only understand this now, as I have come to understand what meditation really is. Westerners have a particularly myopic view of most Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice, and meditation is not exempt: we tend to picture a bald, robed man, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged on a woven mat, palms up, thumbs and forefingers lightly kissing. While this is a way of practicing meditation, and a particularly effective one, it’s not the only way to meditate. Any time one willfully focuses on something meaningless for a prolonged period, one can meditate on it. Any time one deliberately clears their mind of thoughts and bathes in the experiences that remain, one is in a meditative state. Meditation is simply a means of escaping the abstractions of thought and reestablishing our connection with reality.
These days, I find myself in that place more often than not. While driving, while cooking, while sitting at my desk at work, hell, even as I write these words. For most of my adult life, I chose not to exercise my ability to silence my mind, opting instead to engage in pointless mental chatter as a sort of entertainment and enjoying it because I knew I could turn it off. Its volitionality made it inoffensive. But once I realized how much I was missing by listening to my own thoughts rather than the world around me, I could never go back. Our thoughts are useful tools at best and a prison at worst, but mostly they’re just a distraction. Our thoughts about the world are merely crude representations of it, and they all-too-easily become a substitute for the real thing.
Ironically, my lifelong devotion to science and reason prevented me from understanding this sooner. In order to predict and control we divide and label that which has no natural divisions, and we do it so well and so automatically that it feels essential and inevitable. Yet, over a century ago, the foundations of physics themselves revealed reality to be composed of nothing more than pervasive overlapping fields, the excitations of which merely look like discrete entities under certain conditions:
“Electrons” are excitations of the electron field.
Light and electricity and magnetism are excitations of the electromagnetic field.
Even solid, visible matter, hard stuff, our own bodies, are merely the consequence of the subatomic particles in atoms interacting with the Higgs field.
Quantum Field Theory is what made smartphones possible, yet socially we’re still trapped in a Newtonian clockwork reality. Science, and more fundamentally thought, liberate us from superstition and and empower us with staggering predictive and manufacturing capabilities, but in the end we must concede that they are ultimately limited tools. They cannot reveal ultimate reality.
The first glimmering of this realization came to me when I was in college, my days filled with solving difficult mathematical problems that predicted the behavior or electrical charges and subatomic particles. I was awoken by my bladder in the middle of the night, and as I shifted my fleece blankets to climb out of bed, the room lit up with bright blue static sparks that danced over the folds and contours of my bedding. I had seen this phenomenon before and possessed a rudimentary understanding of its mathematical description, but for some reason that particular incident had a profound effect on me: I realized, for the first time, that the description of a phenomenon is utterly incommensurate with the experience of it. No equation, no matter how powerful or beautiful (by a physicist’s standard of aesthetics) could compete with the actual happening it predicts. Mathematics can never fully capture the richness and fullness of lived experiences.
Science and reason, in the end, can’t take us all the way. Despite the hubris (and staggering intellect) of the greatest minds in physics, any description of reality equations provide us with will be incomplete by its very nature. Even a fabled Grand Unified Theory that successfully combines General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory will still be incomplete. Stephen Hawking knew this (emphasis mine):
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”
My younger self felt despair in thoughts such as these, and viewed them with the skeptical eye of an inquisitor hunting for evidence of blasphemy. In my misplaced hatred of religion, even the whiff of metaphysics was enough for me to dismiss ideas offhand. The irony is no longer lost on me: another name for the inner voice is the ego, and it deserves all the vices it has been attributed over the years. I may have tamed my own, but I then willingly ceded control to it for over almost two decades.
The ego is not the self. I understand that now. The self is something that cannot be grasped at all, that doesn’t obey any equations or allow for any predictive laws, and that utterly defies the descriptive and reductive power of language. All we can say is that it is. Ultimately, the same is true for the rest of reality as well, and far from being an admission of defeat, that is the most meaningful and liberating notion I can conceive.