Psychology, or;  Keeping the Mind Alive

The Hard Swallow

I will not mince any words: things are bad. Objectively. They are probably worse than most of you know, or could bear to know. Every system that we rely upon to maintain a safe, ordered and livable world is in crisis. What’s more, nothing is being done about any of it, at anything like the scale needed to make any headway on these problems. The best you can ask for right now is that a few million hopeful gestures might add up to more than just hopeful gestures.

Does anyone think that the institutions of society, at any level, are going to somehow untangle their organizational failure enough to do what they are elected and appointed to do? No, I don’t think so either. Not until things get a lot worse than they are, and maybe not even then. The activist situation ‘on the ground’ is not appreciably better either. My close up experience with the occupy movement shows that while there are large numbers of people willing to become engaged with issues in a meaningful way, the well of social discourse has been so poisoned and polarized by decades of culture war that even there, the only things that can be agreed upon are nebulous affirmations of good feelings, and, perversely, that things are also really fucked up. This is as good as it gets right now, unless you happen to be a builder/hacker/innovator of some kind, and then you have the privilege of standing around with perfectly good ideas that cannot get any lasting traction in a toxic environment of meandering social dysfunction and calamity.

I do not say this to make you feel worse. Quite the opposite, I do this to point out the necessary condition for you to begin to feel better. It is a relatively recent historical phenomena for standards of living and social complexity, let alone moral progress and reason, to predictably increase for any length of time. Many of us grew up/are growing up in the tail end of a period where things were ‘getting better’, and so it was relatively easy to feel good about the world and yourself in it, just by looking around, even if that looking was rather selective in its scope.

That option of general optimism, however, is no longer on the table, and it is time to dust off some very old facts of life: sometimes shit happens. In fact, shit is usually what happens, and if you hitch your psychological well being to that, you might as well just check out now. Working ( and I mean ‘working’ in a way that is probably a bit foreign to most of you) to survive is going to be the new normal, and that’s just how it is. Being happy and healthy in your mind, is going to have to be a subjective matter, or it won’t be on the table at all. If you’re looking for the return of social optimism, ‘market growth’, political progress, reasoned discourse, accountability, safety and certainty, then my friend, I fear you are simply out of luck. Your ancestors knew that life was inherently precarious. They had to have, or they wouldn’t have survived. Now you need to know it, too.

The good news is, we now understand more about how to actually be happy than we ever have, even if we don’t apply this knowledge very well. Knowing how to do something is not the same as actually doing it, of course. It has generally been simpler to trust the clergy,  buy some new shoes, watch tv, or smoke a fatty, than take responsibility for your psychological stability. You didn’t need to know how to do this, so you didn’t bother to learn and master it. Okay, fine. Now you do need to, so you better get on with it.

For simplicity’s sake, I will assume that you are not insane. If you are, or fear you might be, or you are simply so far down the road of neurosis and rampant social psychosis that you don’t feel able to engage your own psyche in a meaningful way, then you probably ought to contact a qualified professional to at least help you stabilize enough to do some of the things I am talking about. FYI, the success rate of freudian and jungian analysis, or psychiatric committal is pretty dismal, but that’s realistically the only way to access certain kinds of meds that will stabilize things like psychosis and schizophrenia. Better to go on your own terms than not. At the milder end, you’re better off with some manner of cognitive/behavioral therapy or some other variety of results-oriented treatment than will help you get yourself under control. At the mildest end, low grade depression and anxiety can be helped rather a lot through herbal remedies that won’t have potentially very bad side effects. Research carefully. If you can read my words without wildly hallucinating or going into psychotic rages, however, then chances are you can look at my recommendations and start to shift yourself in a more positive direction.

This perspective on psychological health is organized along three lines, in steps of increasing overall importance.

Positive Sensation

The fact is, you are a mind that is embodied in a network of nerve tissue, and that nerve tissue is there to receive signals from its environment. If the balance of those signals are painful, your mind will begin to withdraw from the environment, to escape pain. If,  due to unremitting pain, fear or anxiety, your mind withdraws too far from the senate world, then you are no longer functional. Further, inability to escape or relieve negative sensations, without any other mitigating factors, will progressively lead to mental and physical breakdown. This phenomena is easy to observe amongst the chronically injured or ill, or even the advanced elderly to some degree. Yes, people cope with constant stress, pain and fear, but they need a powerful reason to do so. Absent a powerful reason, you will die, or lose your mind.

Dealt with strictly on this lowest level then, psychological health is about creating and amplifying positive sensation, limiting negative sensation, and keeping the balance shifted as far in your favor as possible. When you feel good, purely on a sensate level, you can at least count on your body not to quit on you, and your mind not to retreat from reality, and sometimes that is as good as it gets.  This is what drives a lot of drug use, for example, but the problem is drug use eventually takes on a life of its own, and isn’t helping you get by anymore. There are undoubtedly people who are reacting and will continue to react to social crisis by getting high, but this is not what I’m proposing as a long term solution, since anything that impairs your ability to engage the real world in a crisis is a non-starter.

From the outset, keep in mind that most of my earlier recommendations directed towards physical health also serve the dual purpose of warding off pain and thus warding off the erosion of mental stability that pain causes over time. Adopting a good strategy towards physical health is also much of the way towards a strategy for psychological health as well. We will build upon that.

The body is to a large degree a mechanism for accumulating and discharging tension. You experience the discharge of tension as pleasure, unless you are conditioned in a fairly unusual way, which some people in fact are, but this is not average. So, the best and most sustainable way to give yourself positive sensation is to afford yourself opportunity for discharge of tension, as often and as completely as possible. Things like hot baths and showers, physical idleness and relaxation, sexual activity, recreational physical exertion, massage, or, at the exotic end, bliss states from skill in meditation, all healthily serve this function to greater or lesser degree. We often categorize these things as luxuries, but I suggest you make a certain amount of positive physical sensation a priority both now, and in difficult times. Learning a bit of acupressure and therapeutic massage is a very sustainable and low maintenance way of going about this, and also will help keep you physically functional if you learn how to address sprains, bruises, and other low grade muscular-skeletal complaints. It is also a pleasurable social activity that doesn’t have all the possible gender connotations and emotional baggage of sexual intercourse, which is probably most people’s go-to form of discharge, but may not be workable in a number of different crisis scenarios.

Mental Engagement

The simplest way to express this is ‘not being bored’, which right off the bat tells you that most people are failing this a lot of the time. The same way the body atrophies from lack of activity, the mind deteriorates from not getting things to do that command your full attention.

The low end of mental engagement is simply being distracted. Any novel situations and information will function as that, so social interaction or surfing the internet are  how most people manage the mental engagement issue. This is pretty weak nourishment, because mental engagement only really takes off when we are using our capacities at or near their full extent, and most people do not pick friends on the basis of being challenged and pushed to evolve their limits, nor do they surf the internet in anything other than the repetitive browsing fashion of an ungulate animal. In uncertain times, of course, one cannot even be sure of ‘hanging out’ with friends, let alone hitting boing boing for the latest tidbit. This is compounded by the likely prospect of having to do a lot of repetitive, arduous, yet necessary, tasks to maintain your existence, like intensive gardening, maintenance to home and household items, or just plain foraging around.

Boredom dilates the experience of time, and doing monotonous  things in a boring way under conditions of dilated time will gradually erode your psychological condition in a similar way to outright negative sensations like pain and fear. Conversely, high levels of mental engagement can almost erase your awareness of time passing altogether, in addition to being inherently pleasant in and of itself, and psychologically salutary. This is what is often referred to as ‘flow’, and is nothing more than using your competencies at a high enough level to stay interested, but not so high you are at risk of catastrophic failure. It is in this narrow band or ‘zone’ that the mind operates in an optimum way.

The most consistent way of approaching this is to first of all have a good idea of what your skills and strengths actually are, the things in which you can operate at a fairly high level without undue effort, and then to shape your daily activities in such a way as to use your strengths as much as possible.

I suggest you take a loose view of what is a strength, in this sense, as to fit it to the greatest number of possible activities. One of the benefits of a large complex society is the division of labour which lets more people fit themselves to their strengths than they might otherwise, but you cannot count on being able to survive a social crisis by making ornamental candles or writing star trek fan fiction on a google adwords site. You might however apply the same skills to making ordinary candles, or other related practical craft items, or break the different steps into their applicable areas and afford yourself more mental engagement that way, or find ways to apply your imagination, creativity and writing skills to something that serves some survival purpose. Failing all that, which you may well, you can keep your hobbies in reserve for down time to get at least some of the psychological benefits of flow states.

Looked at from the other end, the more you learn how to involve your mind and become interested in what you end up having to do, the less it will seem like a burden. There is a certain zen that can be found in austerity, simplicity, humbleness… chopping wood, carrying water, right? The more you can fit your mind to your circumstances, instead of rebelling, then the more engaged your mind will be, and the healthier and saner you will stay. Which is not to say that you should accept your circumstances, however benighted, but even working to improve your situation will involve a lot of things your aren’t used to doing or all that interested in, necessarily. The better you can absorb yourself in the grunt work of stabilizing your daily living, the less it will seem like grunt work at all.

Meaning and Purpose

Positive sensation and mental engagement are both beneficial to the mind, but there is really only one essential thing the mind actually needs in and of itself, and that is meaning. In the broadest sense, meaning is the ability to discern ordered patterns in the world, to make sense out of what is happening to you, to see a reason and purpose in what is going on, to feel like you understand what life is, and why it is what it is, not just in some abstract sense, but from day to day, moment to moment.

One mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that all meaning is good. It often is not, but the point is that it’s there. Even if your understanding of life and world is that it is all pain and suffering to be endured, you will endure it, if there’s a reason for you to. It is the reason that makes the difference. Imagine a life of pain and suffering that had no purpose, no escape, no reward, no redemption. Such a life would be extremely short, simply because the mind would reject purposeless meaningless pain, and would find a way to die. Simple as that. But as I’m sure you well know, people endure the most horrific circumstances on the strength of the thinnest threads of hope, and that is all a matter of finding something meaningful to hang onto.

The mechanism behind all this, if you care, is basically that not being able to understand your environment well enough to succeed, escape pain, make discernible progress, or assume even the most minimal control induces depression, progressive biological shutdown, and death. Perhaps you have heard of the ghastly experiments where lab animals were subjected to arbitrary punishments with no way to escape  and no discernible pattern. Eventually they just lay down and take the punishment until they die, because their brains simply can’t figure a way out of it, or see that there even is one. You are not that different.

Meaning is a big deal, and what it comes down to is understanding what is going on, and seeing a point to going on with it. It is easy to lose track of what is really meaningful to us, in the blizzard of distraction, consumerism, superficial sensation and polished inauthenticity that passes for ‘culture’, but my whole point at the beginning was that culture is not your friend right now, and even at the best of times, it isn’t very good quality meaning. The best kind comes from within, is measured from within, and sustained from within. Relying on the world to explain itself to you, to reassure you of your success, to provide you with achievable goals and ways of meeting them, is setting yourself up for grave disappointment, especially in times like these.

There are literally as many ways to have a meaningful life as there are people, but the best ones are about something that transcends your own limited and selfish perspectives. The love for others is classic. Specific people is good, humanity in general is better. Unconditional love for the world is about as good as it gets, for three specific reasons:

-it is entirely self generated

-it is independent of changing external conditions

-it is concerned with giving, not taking, and so is not tied into the success or failure of your ego.

To whatever degree your meaning incorporates those three features, to that degree your meaning will be more durable, and to that degree you will find a way to keep going when things look bleak.

Postscript

We don’t get to know how things will be, we just have to take the ride and see for ourselves. One thing is for sure; the world may not be going good places right now, but the only way it ever will is if enough people of good will remain to guide it there, which is why you need to take care of yourself. It is natural to look at things now and feel sad, sick, angry and overwhelmed. But our ancestors walked naked across the desert, huddled in glacial caves, struggled with millennia of the most abject ignorance and fear, threw off monarchy, slavery, human sacrifice, pharonic death cults, genocide, and plagues or disasters beyond number. They made it, so can you. I firmly believe that everyone, in their psychological growth, must sooner or later come to terms with the fact that living only for yourself is a doomed endeavor, and the shortest road to madness. Despair is just, at the end of the day, another kind of self destructive egotism. You have no right to give up on yourself, or anyone else, when the mind contains all possibilities. No one can ever open that door for you, but the door is there.

Hygene:

This is a blanket heading that deals with a number of things that can loosely be described as ‘pathogenic’ in your environment. Toxic chemicals, bacteria and fungi, and some of the side effects of same.

We are in constant battle with microorganisms. They live on our skin, on surfaces, in our bodies, in our food and water, in the nooks and crannies of our homes, and we maintain a very delicate balance with these things that is very easy to upset, and would have dire consequences, if not for the huge infrastructure and weight of consumer products designed to protect us from things like giardia, toxoplasmosis, ringworm, hanta virus, dental carries, or simple infection of trivial wounds, which in prior ages often led to septicemia, gangrene and death. It is water purification, penicillin, bathing with soap, ammonia and bleach, doing laundry, flushing toilets, and brushing with fluoride toothpaste that keeps most of this at bay. Don’t take it for granted, because it may not always be there. It’d be pretty stupid to have your stored food and your community support group in place during an economic collapse, then die from stepping on a nail, or an abscessed tooth that closes off your windpipe, or contracting some hideous parasite from your ‘organic’ vegetables.

Half the solution is making sure you have the simple and cheap amenities to manage these problems. The other half is USING them, which a lot of you don’t even do now. If things get out of hand now, it’s easy to thump the difficulty with some prescription or a visit to a professional and consider yourself chastened. Not so when life gets turned upside down and you don’t have a job, the shelves aren’t being stocked, the care delivery infrastructure isn’t being funded anymore,  or the whole shebang is just being overloaded by sudden catastrophe.

So: things you need to be doing now-

Brush your teeth. At least twice a day. I carry a kit with me to school and do it during the day. At the very least, rinse your mouth out with water after eating or drinking something with sugar in it. Floss daily as well. These little jobbies are cheap, durable, and quite easy to use. 

You can even re-use them for a while if you absolutely need to. Invest in any deferred dental care you might have piled up. It may be scary and expensive, but not as scary as it will be when the dude next door is yanking your wisdom teeth with a leatherman and nothing but an icepack for anesthetic.  Untended teeth are basically ticking time bombs in your head if things break down in society, and while it’s easy to save toothpaste and floss, dental surgeons aren’t likely to be readily available.

Keep your skin and hair and clothes clean. I assume most of you shower or bathe or do laundry on something like a regular basis, but it can’t hurt to emphasize that bad things multiply on your body if you don’t keep it relatively clean. Things like scabies mites or head lice are an absolute nightmare, and they multiply rapidly in groups of people with bad hygiene. Bacteria and viruses spread in large part from people who fail to wash their hands regularly. Do your part to keep them under control. At a bare minimum, if you lose access to running water or soap, you can trim your hair as short as possible, keep your hands relatively clean with soap substitutes, or just wear gloves, and air out your clothes, rinse them in running water or partially disinfect them with UV light on sunny days. You only need to contract a fungal infection on your skin once to understand the importance of staying somewhat clean and dry. This will also reduce the risk of infected wounds from just being generally dirty.

As far as toxins go, this is mostly a matter of education and prevention. The body is pretty good at handling low levels of poisoning as long as it isn’t overtaxed. A cleansing fast or some herbs like milk thistle to clean your liver will shore you up in this area. Long term low level toxicity from food additives usually shows up in autoimmune disorders like allergies, food sensitivites, or in general lethargy. In my experience, dark circles under the eyes are a good indicator that your liver and kidneys are being overtaxed in some way. Water intake will help, as well as herbs, cleansing and elimination of problem items from the diet. If you really screw up and have to cope with heavy metal poisoning or major toxic exposure, and there’s no help in sight, eating activated carbon, milk thistle, or bentontie clay is about all you can do to mop these things up, or draw them out of the body.

Wash things that grow in and on the ground before you eat them. Fruits and veggies that flower more than a couple feet up are okay, but anything else needs to be washed in the sink, with a few drops of plain chlorine bleach ( the same kind you would use to disinfect drinking water) or some food grade hydrogen peroxide. There’s just too many things in the dirt, or in animal droppings ( especially urban cats or raccoons ) to take the chance. You do not want flukes, worms, amoebas, nematodes, bacteria or viruses taking up residence in your body by way of your organic garden. There are actually some good points to industrial agriculture and pesticide spraying. Saves us having to worm ourselves a couple times a year, for instance. Never mind the odd chance of brain abscesses from toxoplasmosis. An ounce of prevention and all that…

In all the years I have been educated in this area, I have yet to meet someone who was not suffering some of the negative side effects of bad posture and movement habits. This can run the gamut from annoying, all the way to crippling, and is completely in your power to alleviate, avoid or even reverse in its early stages, so pay attention.

Misalignment of the skeleton and the damage it does to your soft tissue is classifiable as a kind of trauma. You are HURTING yourself by not being mindful of how you sit, walk, sleep, and work. Bad movement makes the dozens of bones in your body grind around in ways they aren’t made to do, which wears away on your joints and nerve fibers, constricts blood flow, and trains abberant patterns of muscle tension into your body. You are probably experiencing this as some kind of ‘stiffness’, soreness, tingling sensations, aches in your muscles/joints ( particularly the neck, shoulders and lower back ), outright headaches that can go all the way to migrane intensity or nausea from impinging nerves at the top of your spine, distortion of your appearance from not standing up or walking fully erect, and of course the dreaded ‘repetitive use injury’.

Depending how far down this road you have gone, it can be an easy fix, or an involved one. They both require you to look at the way you hold yourself, and be MINDFUL of it. ALL THE TIME.  Once you’re back in a healthy pattern of balance and tension, you’ll have more leeway to think about other things, but it is always a pain in the ass at first. By the time I stopped doing this professionally, I had seen a large number of high school kids evidencing problems that don’t generally appear till the onset of middle age, like sciatica, early-stage kyphosis, back spasms and loss of lumbar curvature, or chronic tension headaches.  Computer culture and desk work, I guess.

-The first thing to know is that your skeleton is made to balance without effort. There is a line that runs up the center of the body that connects the ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, and ear/top of the the spine, and crown of the the head. When standing, if you are in this spot, there should be almost no muscular effort needed to maintain it.

-The quickest way to adjust this when standing, is imagine a string attached to the crown of your head, at the point in the image above, and try to follow that string upwards to touch the ceiling with your crown. This will lengthen your spine and tilt everything at approximately the right angles. Then go to a mirror, and try to adjust things laterally, like the tilt of the shoulders, ears, the set of the head in relation to your center line. DON’T strain or exert muscular tension on this. It is really really really important not to force yourself into what feels like the right place. That will only make it worse. The trick is to look at yourself in a mirror so you can do subtle adjustments by sight, to feel the relaxed balance in your body, and let your bones do the work.

Be especially mindful of the angle of the chin, the rib cage, and the set of the eyes. This ties in with a lot of emotional and self image issues with people, but you just need to get over it. Stand up straight, look people in the eye, relax your shoulders back and down, tilt your ribs back and your solar plexus out. Be fully erect, and fully engaged with the world, in a relaxed and balance posture.

-When sitting, this holds from the hip level upwards. No slouching at your desk, compressing your neck and lower back and shoulders. BAD. You know it’s bad. Quit doing it.

In general, avoid allowing your curve in your lower back to flatten or go outwards. This is a recipe for misery if you let it go too far. Most chairs and couches don’t support the lower back at all. Get an ergonomic chair, or roll up a thick towel and put it in your lower back or get a firm sausage shaped pillow to put in there. Preferably, just get an ergonomic chair, or demand one from your employer. Stop letting your head hang forward or down, as this will un-stack the vertebrae in your neck and trigger all kinds of tension in the muscle bands in your neck and shoulders. If you need to have your face closer to the screen, sit up straight and sit closer. If you must sit on a couch, make sure you’re bridging your lower back in a way that protects the curve. It’s quite easy with some practice.

-When walking, the main thing to know is that you need to protect your knees and ankles. The way to do that is to make sure that 1) your body mass is always moving in the same direction your knee is pointing ( which ever knee is planted, that is) and 2) your knees should always be pointing in roughly the same direction as your big toes. Knees don’t flex side to side, so any lateral forces on them will stretch out your ligaments, wear on the bursa and meniscus, and eventually tear, inflame or otherwise blow out.

The easiest way to align your knees is to stand in a relaxed position, feet shoulder width apart, and scrunch up your toes, then relax them. As your relax, your knees should settle into approximately the right spot relative to your feet. Preserve that as you move, as much as possible.

-That old saying about ‘lift with your knees, not your back’ is true. As long as your alignment is good, your legs are much stronger and much more able to extend under heavy loads than your back. Get lower and use your legs.

-If you’re really messed up, shop around for a good massage therapist. Preferably one that also does bone adjustments. A good chiropractor will do in a pinch, but be careful to avoid lunatics who just want to crack you and shove you out the door. It’s important to have the soft-tissue therapy at the same time as the skeletal manipulation. If you can find one that does both, so much the better.

-For lesser problems, take up some remedial yoga, tai chi, feldenkrais, or some other kind of movement based therapy or methodology. The three I mentioned have the highest recommendation. Once you internalize the feeling of relaxed balanced movement, it will stay with you forever. Good investment, one would think. Plus you will learn practices that can keep your going when there’s no doctor, no painkillers, and no option to sit around and do nothing until it stops hurting.

BREATHING

The good news is, if you fixed your posture and movement, you are 90% there in fixing your breathing as well. So much of it has to do with holding your body so as to let you inflate your lungs to full capacity. If you don’t deal with one, you’ll have a hard time with the other.

I probably don’t need to tell you air is important. But, the degree to which you oxygenate your body, and how you do it, makes a difference. Your breathing pattern regulates the acidity of your blood, brain activity, endocrine function, nervous system activation, both sympathetic and parasympathetic, and the movement of your lymph system.

There is much I could say about this, but I’ve no room for a pranayama text. The basic guidelines  are breathe SLOWER, FULLER, and SMOOTHER. Take some time to look at how other people breathe. Mostly pretty shallow, pretty fast, and usually not to full capacity due to how they are holding their chests.

Take a watch that registers seconds and figure out how many breaths you take each minute, in a relaxed state. Now, sit up straight, look slightly up at the ceiling, just to make sure your chest is open, and breathe by relaxing your stomach outwards. Place one hand just below your belly button; you should feel this press outwards as you inhale, then pull it in as your exhale. Do it as slowly as you can without feeling like you’re holding your breath or straining at all. With a bit of practice, you should be able to feel your diaphragm move as you breathe, which is what you should be doing all the time, but a lot of people actually don’t. It probably won’t be too hard to slow your breathing down to about half of what it was per minute, or even less, with no loss of ‘wind’. You should actually feel at least a little bit calmer and clearer, since you are getting the same amount or air, or more, but activating your stress mechanisms much less to do it, and flushing your body of CO2 and lymph more effectively.

The range you can change this in is pretty incredible. Most people are in the 13-16 breaths per minute or more range. With a bit of practice you can get this down to 4 sitting around, or even 1 laying down or meditating.

This is another thing to be mindful of all the time, but much easier to practice, and much quicker to pay off. Just remember;  SLOWER DEEPER SMOOTHER. If need be, doing a bit of cardio like running or bike riding will help keep your breathing pattern from getting too weird and dysfunctional. Other than that, have fun and watch the good effects roll in.

NEXT: Hygiene, Exercise, Psychology.

From the very beginning of this blog, I have addressed a spectrum of concerns that can now be grouped under the heading of collapse and resiliency.  I’m not afraid to say I helped introduce peak oil and economic upheaval into a particular corner of the culture, back before oil hit 100$ a barrel and before the economy tanked in 2008. I was talking about the implosion of government before Katrina, before the Tea Party, and before Barack turned fecklessness and moral cowardice into a spectator sport.  The point is not to feather my nest, but to acknowledge I am no longer a prophet crying the wildness. I am part of a movement. My prior speculations are now the mainstream of discourse. Peak Oil is now just part of the landscape, everyone knows the economy is screwed, and government is approaching a singularity of uselessness. There are now transition towns, conferences, blogs to the heavens, and really really smart/dedicated people giving these problems their whole minds and hearts. So when my hunger strike drew me into the orbit of people like Vinay Gupta and his circle of collaborators, I was moved to think what sort of contribution I might make to this community, however loosely that might be defined.

What I have noticed, is a potentially disastrous blindspot in the conversation about ‘resiliency’, by which I mean that range of adaptations that make one more resistant to shocks and disruptions, along a socio/politco/economic/resource spectrum of possibilities. In short, while there is certainly an awareness of needing reliable sources of food, water and shelter in a crisis, the question of ‘health’ appears to have gone missing. There is more to staying alive and being physically/mentally able to keep society going through your efforts, than simply eating enough rice and drinking enough water and keeping your core temperature in a safe range. Especially when the people I’m talking to are often high-performing obsessives and fringe characters who are prone to ignore the less obvious elements of their long term well being.  It occurs to me that those who are trying to save the world from its self-destructive tendencies, will often have self destructive tendencies of their own, which ought not to be ignored. So: a crash course in staying physically and mentally healthy, both before shit hits the fan, and after.

Who am I, and why you should listen to me:

First of all, I was raised in a family of doctors and nurses. I actually had textbooks of medical pathology in the living room when I was a kid. I’ve had to cook for myself since I was 12 or 13, and been healthy and active my entire life. I’ve suffered a number of chronic injuries to my neck, back and other joints and completely rehabilitated all of them. I can run miles in hot weather. I’ve done over a decade of martial arts training of a fairly high impact variety, and have managed to bounce back from all kinds of physical abuse. I have conducted long periods of fasting on nothing but water. I’ve taken years of courses in chemistry and biology, supplemented by my own reading and interest. Most importantly, I have been schooled the last ten years or so in a comprehensive system of buddhist medicine that goes back 2500 years, and is sourced in ayurvedic traditions that go back thousands more years before that. I have worked in a massage/physio/chinese medicine clinic for a couple years and successfully addressed dozens of unique problems, from headaches and muscle injuries, all the way up to chronic diabetes where the guy’s limbs were practically rotting off.

I am a long term meditator, and have proven year in year out on this blog that I know something about the mind and how it works, and how to sort yourself out on a number of levels. I have, documented on this blog, gone about as close to the edge of nervous breakdown from anxiety and paranoia, as anyone you are likely to encounter, and I pulled myself back to being, not just happy and healthy, but functioning in a higher register of psychological stability than most humans on earth. I wish it weren’t true, but I am probably saner than most of the human race, by almost every metric there is.

That said, I am NOT a medical professional of any stripe, and I am NOT dispensing  professional advice. I cannot be responsible for knowing what is or is not safe for you in particular, I can only speak from my own experience, and in generalities drawn from the literature and received wisdom.  You must take responsibility for your own decisions, and check my facts to whatever degree makes sense to you. Good enough? Good enough.

Ok. Getting healthy and staying that way… We’ll break this down into a few broad categories. Within each, we’ll talk both about how to build yourself up in good times, and how to keep it going when things get bad.

HYDRATION:

Arguably the biggest survival issue, apart from keeping your core temperature stable so are aren’t dying of exposure, is getting sufficient water. Humans are mostly water. Your body needs it for everything. You lose it from exhaling vapor, moistening your mucus membranes, urinating and defecating, regulating your body temperature through sweating, and transpiration in dry climates. The eight glasses of water a day people are often told to drink is not usually enough, even if you were using it well, which you often aren’t, or actually drinking that much, which you often aren’t. Losing as little as 2% of your weight in water will be massively detrimental to your physical and mental abilities. So for a 160lb person, about 4lbs of water loss is crippling. No water for more than a couple days, and you are entering the danger zone, but ongoing low grade dehydration will debilitate you physically and mentally just as surely. One of the things that causes long term impairment to alcoholics, for example, is prolonged dehydration that damages the brain. If your lips chap, or your urine is significantly darker than the water you drink,  you are dehydrated. If you are unambiguously thirsty, you are dehydrated. If you are hungry, chances are you are actually thirsty, because your brain doesn’t differentiate the signals of hunger and thirst very well. If you are getting muscle cramps, constipation, headaches, lethargy, or  severe hangovers after imbibing, chances are you need to drink more water.

The short version is most people don’t drink enough water, period, and what they drink, they often don’t absorb very well. The reason for this lack of absorption is electrolyte deficiency. When they give people IV fluids in the hospital, it is never just plain water, but what they call saline, which is basically a weak solution of water and table salt. This is because your body is heavily composed of  ionic solutions and requires salts and other minerals to work properly. Your blood has a certain concentration of salt in it, and if the water you drink isn’t a little bit saline, or made so by your body, you can’t take it up into your blood from the intestine very well, or do much with it, so your body pees it out. Most people get around this by just drinking a lot of water, but it’s not very efficient. You can only absorb about eight swallows of water every fifteen minutes, give or take, so  just chugging is of limited use.

In the normal course of events, this is an easy fix. Get a water bottle, keep it full, sip at it constantly. A liter size is probably ideal. Each liter of water should have a pinch of table salt added to it, so your body can take it in better. You probably won’t even taste it, but you might have to play around to get the amount exactly right. Aim for 2-3 liters a day. You can add fruit juices to the fluid total or even non caffeinated pop, if you must, but nothing like coffee, caffeinated tea, or alcohol, as these are diuretics that will take water out of your body, not add it back. Each cup of something like that you drink requires another cup of water to break even. Gatorade and powerade are decent electrolyte drinks, but the food coloring and excess sugar are not desirable, long term. You probably won’t get to 2-3 liters right away, but you won’t be dehydrated anymore, at least. Again, it might take a while to find the right amount for your size and activity level, but if you take a drink every time you think you feel hungry, and every half hour or so, you’ll probably lose some excess weight and feel better in general.

If you’re really gung ho, buy some off the shelf electrolyte mix from a health food store and use it. You’ll probably reach a good equilibrium pretty fast, and won’t have to use them very often after that. It’s relatively cheap for what it does, and stores well. There’s nothing quite like rehydrating with electrolyte solution when you’ve been out of whack for awhile. It’s worth just experiencing how your body reacts to fluids it can really use, as this will help reset your awareness of what water is actually for.

When things get crazy, just make sure you have access to lots of clean water and some table salt. A pinch/liter. Drink a little bit all the time. Carry it with you. If we’re working on the assumption that a post collapse lifestyle is going to be more physically intensive, you can’t afford to dehydrate, or you’re in trouble. Without water and electrolytes in something close to the right amounts, your muscle function and ability to work will suffer greatly before long. With water, you can live a long time without food. Without it, you’re wrecked in a couple days, and dead in less than a week.

NUTRITION:

From an evolutionary biology perspective the basic dilemma of ‘resilient human nutrition’ is the same as it’s always been:

We have to play the calorie game to live. That is, if we don’t get at least as many calories from food, as we burn just staying alive and doing stuff, we lose excess weight and then go into rapid catabolysis of our own body tissue, leading to degeneration of vital functions and eventual death. In a survival situation ( ie; 99% of human history on earth) we can’t afford to ignore this fact, and long term balance of nutrients is not something we can make top priority. The problem is, we live a lot longer now ( usually) and just stuffing yourself with calories in any form that tastes good, is not really the same as keeping yourself healthy.We’re evolved to crave salt, sugar, and fats, because our evolutionary history had a relative lack of those things, which agriculture rapidly changed.  Now, it’s actually easier to get a diet that’s composed entirely of salt, sugar ( in the form of processed flour, or corn syrup) and fats, rather than foraging for roots, nuts, berries, succulent leaves, or hunting wild game, which is what we’re built for, and is more likely to give you a good balance of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and various micronutrients that will regulate your body functions in a healthy way, especially with the accumulated herbalistic knowledge of most traditional cultures, which is largely gone now.

The problem is, the easy diet will imbalance your body chemistry and kill you early. The healthy diet is harder to do, doesn’t always taste as good, is often more energy intensive to acquire, is less dense in easy calories, and takes time you may or may not have. But in the larger perspective, you will live longer, and function better. You need to balance these two things to be truly resilient. You gotta win the calorie game and stay alive in tough times, but in a way that gets you all the often neglected little things in the right balance so you can function at a high level if you need to, and live a long productive life.

First of all, forget those stupid food pyramids, and forget most of what you are told about healthy diets. Most people eat too much, and what they do eat is garbage. Even mainstream middle of the road groceries are mostly crap. The resiliency demographic probably skews towards vegetarianism/veganism, organics, whole foods, raw foods, and other niche considerations. Most of these are luxuries that you’ll have to forget about in a crisis, and all distorted in their utility by the fact that people are just flat out eating TOO MUCH to be sustainable and doing TOO LITTLE to reflect the real energy demands of crisis survival.  A vegetarian diet is only really viable in a crisis if you’ve access to large quantities of fruits, legumes, grains, and root veggies like potatoes. If you need to walk around a lot, work hard, and regulate your temperature in varied climates, heal the occasional minor injury quickly, and not get rickets, scurvy, or contract endless rounds of flu and colds, or become riddled with parasites due to a weak immune system, you need dense sources of calories containing vitamins/minerals. Growing cucumbers and kale in your garden is nice, but not really going to cut it in terms of density. Ever notice how a lot of vegetarians are either fat, or sickly looking? There are exceptions, but this is generally because of three things: lack of vitamins and minerals, lack of protein, and overload of processed /high glycemic index carbohydrates.

There is a case to be made that things like diabetes, heart disease, and obesity didn’t really exist before intensive farming of grains in asia and the fertile crescent was developed. The reason is, we are not adapted, genetically speaking, to a diet composed primarily of dense carbohydrates. When they form the backbone of your three meals a day lifestyle, they screw up your insulin levels and put you on a roller coaster of snacking, getting hungry, and snacking again. You get a short boost of energy, then crash, then need to eat again. Long term, this leads to all kinds of problems, not least of which is, you end up a fat lethargic slob, because you’re biochemically kicking yourself in the teeth.

This is tricky, because those dense carbohydrate sources are necessary in a crisis. You will probably need that 50lb bag of rice at some point, yes…BUT they suck if you’re going to live like that right now, and will not form the basis of good long term health. You are not an agricultural laborer. You can’t afford to live on bread and rice. Even the people who are living on bread and rice, because that’s all there is, CAN’T AFFORD TO LIVE ON BREAD AND RICE. You are not working hard enough to burn that effectively without messing yourself up. Even if you were, you’re probably a bit vitamin and mineral deficient from processing all that nutrient-devoid flour and sugar and white rice, which is part of the reason you’re hungry all the time. The harder you’re working, the more your body can tolerate this kind of diet, but unless you’re training for a marathon, back away slowly.

Conversely, for the vegan holiness contingent, your quinoa salad and organic rice chips are okay if you’re just at the keyboard all day, and hitting the yoga studio twice a week. But when it’s really cold, really hot, you need to build or repair stuff with your own hands, things are getting stressful, and grocery stores are emptying out, you’re gonna have to let go of the luxury foods and embrace a healthy staple diet.

Either way, certain adjustments are in order. I’m going to assume you’ll want to switch to something that you can maintain all the way through, and be in optimal health. This will be a general framework. Your mileage may vary.

-Minimize Grains, Starches and Processed Carbohydrates in general(rice, bread, pasta, potatoes, sugar, flours of any type) as much as possible and replace them with green vegetables  first and fruits second. Keep the dense carbs in reserve if you really need them, but greens will give you the fiber, vitamins and minerals, you are missing, and fruits will give you a better source of quick energy. Both will also give you water. If you want to grow something, grow green beans, broccoli, peas, and whatever fruits will take to your area, like strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes etc. Leafy things like spinach or lettuce are not much for calories, but they’re kinda like taking vitamins. If you have space left over that won’t work for anything else, grow some potatoes, but you can always store those and some rice in a dry place for awhile. If your area just isn’t made for growing, buy fruits and veggies fresh and look into canning and jarring. In a lot of areas you can forage for wild berries like blackberries and they will be common as dirt, and mostly neglected in urban areas. Just rinse em really well to get rid of particulates that might be landing on them. You can also plant things like carrots and just eat the greens poking out of the ground. This is not as calorie rich as eating the carrot itself, but the real micro nutrient value is in the green part, and better yet, it will keeps growing back. You can also, in a real pinch, simply chew up most forms of green grass stems/leaves and spit out the indigestible fibre, swallowing  the chlorophyll and other cool stuff your body likes (wash it first- you don’t want to get toxoplasmosis from cat droppings or something). It’s not much for calories, but it will give you vitamins and minerals you need, then you can bust out the emergency kraft dinner and kool aid.

-Lean Protein and Good Fats. You want them. Chicken and fish are probably best, but you can fudge with mixing rice and beans to synthesize proteins if you really must. Wild game is a good idea if you can get your head around it. A deer, moose or elk can see a couple people through the winter, depending on the size of the animal.  If you’re in a coastal region, there are probably places you can buy whole fish off the dock. Learn how to clean them, and freeze for long term use. Fish oils are an example of good fat, so are olive and flax oils. You need the omega fats from fish or flax for all kinds of things. You need protein to keep your energy levels up and keep your brain clear and working. If your total volume of food is going to go down, which it probably will if things get sketchy, you need to have protein to keep things going effectively. Fats and proteins will also help you build muscle mass and strength, and regulate your appetite on a hormonal level, in a way that carbs just don’t. Try becoming obese by eating just meat, and oil. It won’t work. You’ll puke first. Keep the greens for minerals and vitamins, but the animals are where it’s at, when it comes to staying alive and strong , as long as you think it through a bit, and don’t abuse your fellow creatures in a way that is unconscionable to you. Life feeds on life. That’s just how it is.

-Strongly consider introducing a good quality multivitamin. Pick one that doesn’t have the waxy coating on it, that your digestion can’t break down very well. A brand that has chelated minerals your body can absorb better is also good. Should say on the label. Most people in fast food cultures are vitamin and mineral deficient, and suffering the symptoms accordingly.  Dealing with this ahead of time will save you grief in a crisis situation. Stocking up and keeping them in a dry place will save you chewing up a lot of grass later.

Finally, consider cutting some things out completely:

*Milk – is generally problematic for all kinds of health reasons.  It’s another one of those things some ethnicities have evolved a genetic tolerance for, but in general we just aren’t made for drinking milk beyond childhood, and certainly not the milk of another species. Certain things like fermentation can help this, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth, and broccoli is a better source of calcium anyway. Diabetics should definitely stay away from the milk, as the proteins possibly interfere with the normal function of your pancreas. If you have a cow, then go ahead and milk the thing, otherwise, let it go.

*Caffeine- is a bad bad way to boost energy and alertness. It has all kinds of problematic side effects, and causes withdrawals when you come off it. It’s also a kind of diuretic, which will mess with your hydration. Ginseng and ginseng-like herbs are a better and healthier way to get the same results, with little or no comedown, no side effects to speak of, and significant boosts to stress adaptation and recovery speed. Buy it in tablet form or maybe in herbal teas if you have draconian supplement laws that keep you from getting it in the bottle. The kind of crap that is in energy drinks like red bull is often outright poison or just excessive sugar and caffeine.  It’s another one of those things that come into our culture to mask the fact you’re over-stressed, under-nourished, and not getting the rest you need. Time to get real.

Next: posture, exercise, breathing, and psychology

first my skype  sit down with resiliency and disaster swami Vinay Gupta. a little wooly for the straight activist crowd, but quite fine here.

second, a pretty extensive audio interview with a local volunteer journalist, who despite being overworked, and sincerely inept, at least gave me free reign to speak my mind. very comprehensive.

and lastly, the laugh riot that was my appearance at a chilean torture ship in the local harbor, and ensuing podcast interview. I  got invited to submit to a local ‘street’ newspaper off the back of this, so turned out okay.

things will make more sense having digested all that.

just gathering experimental data at this point.

You know something strange is happening, when you have to check each day to find out how many wars, declared and undeclared Barack actually has going on. Apparently if you call it a peace action or a humanitarian intervention, dropping cluster bombs on civilians is okay. The funny thing is, he seems to have figured out, that if you don’t call it a war, then the markets don’t freak out as much. They do still freak out, but they don’t go into a tailspin of fear about losing access to oil and gas or something.

This is a good example of how I see the current world situation: I used to think that we were engaged in some inexorable slide into the abyss, and that a renewal would come from those who cannibalized the old order to build a new one. The prevailing narrative was apocalyptic and grandiose and seemingly oblivious to the rot in the floorboards.

Now in some ways, it’s worse. There is no longer any forward looking narrative, apocalyptic or otherwise. NASA is about to be shut down, budget cuts will gut every progressive project before it can get off the ground, there is no serious talk about how to grow the economy, harness new resources, or even repair the collapsing infrastructure. There is increasingly no sense of a future, no sense of ‘going’ anywhere, no sense of meaningful change of any kind. Lots of translation, tons of translation, but no transformation. We have entered a period where the only thing that happens is navigating an ongoing crisis, and our only preoccupation is not losing any more than we have already.  Governments get elected and re-elected on the basis that they won’t make things much worse. People increasingly make decisions about how to stay in the same place most effectively.

This is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a civilization in the accelerating stages of entropic breakdown. If we are indeed on the backside of the peak oil curve, as I think we are, this mentality can only dominate mainstream thought more and more. We don’t have leaders, because there doesn’t appear to be anywhere for them to lead us to. All we can do is position ourselves in the crisis narrative the best possible way, as termites eat the less-vital parts of the house. It’s an ongoing and essentially permanent condition of triage.

In some ways this is worse than a fast collapse, because a catastrophic dissolution of some systems would at least get the trauma over with and allow people to focus on building something new in the cleared space. But if the overwhelming concern is simply avoiding the trauma, period,  a lot of people with positive ideas will be banging on the door fruitlessly, because they aren’t playing along with the idea of a permanent crisis where the only growth is from looting other parts of the system on your way into the black hole, where you will inevitably be looted yourself. You could lose a whole generation of creative people that way, or pour their energies into half-ass repair jobs that were only meant to last until the next election, or the next shift in the crisis narrative.

The main characteristic of a permanent crisis narrative is that nobody knows exactly what anyone else is doing, and frequently don’t even know what they themselves are doing. There is no ability to think beyond the needs of the moment. This is why Barack appears to have no coherent policy about anything, ever. He would probably like to, but is constantly getting pulled in opposite directions, to net effect zero. Lots happening, no progress.

This is why we kill terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but try to install the exact same people as the government of Libya, even though Ghadaffi provides the highest standard of living in Africa, and Afghanistan is a corrupt hellhole littered with IUD’s where you can’t even get electricity most of the time. Hate to break it to anyone, but you don’t get a crowd of a million people in the streets firing AK-47′s into the air, unless you have popular support. Especially if you’re the one GIVING them the AK-47′s.

This bullshit with debt/default in the states is a great example: how many times do the tea party lunatics get to use the encroaching debt ceiling to shake down the white house for genocidal spending cuts? They’re not going to fix the spending problem and they’re not going to default. It’s just going to be a way for the rich to loot the poor for as long as that story holds together, then they’ll go back to raising the ceiling quietly, just like they always did, because the alternative would be catastrophic. Barack is likely to go down as a tragically gifted politician who just couldn’t find the courage to challenge the logic he was embedded in.

My house is a great example too. The land lady is apparently so in fear of her finances, she can’t do anything but the most critical repairs to the place. The basement floods, the deck is falling apart, the staircase is peeling away, there are five layers of shingles on the roof, and she hires the cheapest, dodgiest people to patch it all together when need be. We could take her to the authorities for having an unsafe house, but that would only bankrupt her with repairs she can’t afford and force us to find somewhere else to live that we might not be able to afford either.

I went into school to get away from the front lines of social decay and the toll it was taking on me. I consented to huge debts, hard study, and frequent stress and boredom, with no promise of anything on the other end. I benefit from greater understanding, but from a resource point of view, I’m just navigating the crisis too. Sooner or later I will need to pay those debts, make some money, and invest in future security. The problem is, there may not be money to be made, or security to be had, at least not in the normal terms.

There has to be a change in our view. We need to stop clinging to a way of life, and a view of the world and ourselves, that is bankrupt in every sense of the word. Economically, morally, intellectually. We have to stop thinking like victims or bystanders. We have to stop patching things together as they fall apart and start really building again. We have to admit we are really better than this, that we can really do better than this, that we have a right to expect leadership from leaders, that there is more to living than not dying.

Part  1

Part 2:

yes, that is me. might be a little strange for those of you accustomed to only hearing my voice. you can also follow this project on facebook if you use that. I appreciate any support, linkage or exposure you can give me. I  do have to keep my thoughts extremely concise there, but I plan for the blog to be more of the theory behind it, on any number of levels, plus some only tangentially related stuff. Two years of school and the ongoing deterioration of global events have upgraded my thinking in a number of ways.

onward and upward.

I guess the biggest thing that has  come with my latest round  of insights is how perfectly simple and obvious a lot of reality actually is. leading out of that, is a greater than ever puzzlement at how people seem to make the whole thing and the process of understanding it, into something needlessly complex. part of that is jargon, part of that is cultural disconnect, part of that is lack of interpretive framework,  and part of it pure foundational confusion.

for instance, allow me to recourse to Uncle Noam again: I was listening to one of his talks the other day and he made a good point: when human beings talk about our own higher mental faculties, we don’t apply the same standards, or the same fundamental assumptions, as we do to studying anything else in the natural world, like birds, or trees, or rocks.  As soon as you talk about consciousness, or even something like language use in higher primates ( us ), suddenly the thing diverges into metaphysics, and a lot of people assume you have to become a mystic to understand it.  To me, this seems like a defense mechanism to avoid actually facing what is clear and obvious when you look directly at the nature and capabilities of human beings. Close investigation of immediate experience starts to tell you things you don’t like, so you have to create whole new categories of reality and bring them into the conversation to avoid the simplest conclusions.

I’ve been taking a philosophy of mind course this semester, and the whole thing revolves around what they call ‘the hard problem’. how is it that out of the objective facts of brain and biology, do we get subjective experience, basically? How do you account for ‘being’? The short answer is a lot of what we think of as subjectivity is an illusion, and the rest is probably understandable in terms of brain science. And yet, even though good and simple explanations exist, many people in the mind sciences/philosophy insist that we must always account for our superficial intuitions about reality. it seems like we have a self, it seems like we have subjective experience of a very unified sort, it seems like we have agency of the ordinary kind, so anything that dis confirms these things must be wrong or somehow unsatisfactory.

the notion that we should be fitting our theories to match our undisciplined intuitions about reality seems like the exact opposite of the reasons why we invented science, philosophy, and contemplation to begin with. we wanted to go beyond the face value, the superstitious, the mysterious and ineffable. But for some people, a good explanation will never be enough.  makes you wonder what they were really looking for in the first place. truth? or just validation for their personal prejudices?

the enlightenment scene is rife with this sort of thing. the simple truth is not good enough, so there needs to be elaborate practices and metaphysics and mysticism in it’s place. there’s nothing wrong with being a mystic, I suppose, but that’s not really a collective human project, and it’s not really something that can or should get a lot of traction in the collective domain where better and clearer understandings exist. it would be kind of like praying for lightning, when a match will do just fine.

I don’t think it’s controversial that the basic question of enlightenment revolves around ‘dualism’. the way it is typically used in enlightenment culture is dualism of perception, or the relationship between subject and object, and collapsing the split between them.

but this is actually a fairly narrow and not always terribly useful way of approaching the problem. it is also an extremely narrow way of understanding what ‘dualism’ actually is, or what the historical philosophical dialogue around dualism actually entails. it’s a clear cut case of where veering off into mysticism confuses the issue, perhaps deliberately, when one doesn’t like the conclusions of simple reason.

If you are a ‘non-dualist’, in terms of your view on reality, that means you think there is only one fundamental substance. not subjective substance and objective substance. not matter and mind. not spirit and matter. not mind and spirit. not soul and body.  not self and other.  this philosophical term for the absence of dualism is ‘monism’, and I find it rather peculiar how enlightenment culture seems to go through all kinds of contortions to explain the non-dual nature of reality, when a single word will do. there may be the appearance of these many different substances, but that is a fallacy. there is only one ‘kind’ of stuff, and it presents itself in many possible ways, at least to our senses, leading to our confusion about reality. Sticking your hand in an open flame, or having sex, or listening to music are about as different as sensory experiences can get, but there is no doubt that they are fundamentally grounded in the same reality. no one should postulate a different metaphysical domain to govern music, or sex or combustion. same with our so-called ‘spiritual’ experiences.  There are no existentially or metaphysically ‘other’ domains or reality. it’s all one thing.

the whole question of perception is a red herring. perception will do what it will do, but it is inevitably constrained and constructed by your foundational assumptions. and if your foundational assumption is that there are really all manner of different substances, essences, or links in the great chain of being at work here, then you have little hope of ever really getting beyond dualistic thinking.

and for those who will immediately recoil at this apparent ‘reduction’, just keep in mind that how things appear to us has very little to do with what they fundamentally are. one can scream ‘materialist reduction’ all they wish, but even a cursory familiarity with contemporary physical theory shows that matter is not quite as material as it’s cracked up to be. the one thing at work in the universe is much more complex than billiard balls, but is also much simpler than dualistic schema of multiple separate domains somehow interacting with each other across various kinds of metaphysical divide. everything you think of as mind, body, soul, spirit, matter, energy, god, man, the finite, the infinite. it’s all just one kind of thing at work, seen in different ways. you are not a soul in a body, or a mind in a brain, or any nonsense like this. you are your body. you are your brain. you are your consciousness, and they are all aspects of each other.

“Ultimate Reality” does not mean finding some abstract realm or experience to abide in. or perturbing your senses so things look somehow different. You want ultimate reality? Look at your hand. look at the wall. Look at your thoughts. it’s all the same stuff. how could it possibly be any other way? you are this, and only this. there is nothing else to be, and nowhere else to go, and nothing here to be anywhere or do anything or go anywhere else. whatever you might mean when you think of mind or soul or reality, it’s right there, in your hand, right now. Seriously.

If you start thinking ‘oh it just can’t be that simple’… yes it can, and yes it is. If you’re hooked on thinking there has to be something more complex to it, it just means you’re in thrall to some idea that reality is somehow not exactly what’s in front of you. No, of course it’s not all there is to reality, but it is reality. Seeing everything there is to see is not the point, never was the point, never will be the point. It’s seeing what is, as it is, as being fundamentally real. Thinking that there just has to be something more to it, is the exact problem. there just has to be some self that I can’t actually find, some permanent unchanging thing to rest in that I can’t actually find, some other plane of reality where the real stuff is actually happening that I cannot actually find.

The reason you can’t find it, is:

because. it. is. not. there.

this is it. this is enlightenment. the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start to see more of what is really going on.