The Locus for Going Crazy

Sometimes silence on a blog means that the writer's life is so full of high adventure there's no time to stop and write it down.

And sometimes it means life is kicking your butt, you have nothing useful to say, and you're taking your mother's advice in such situations and keeping your mouth shut.

Excuse me. There is a yelling child on my lap.

That's better. Now we have a only mildly fidgety baby swinging in a mechanical swing nearby. You know, the sort of contraption you looked upon with a combination of suspicion and disdain before you came to rely on its mysterious powers? He calms down the minute his butt hits the seat.

My last post was written in haste, and the comment that was posted to it was better thought-out than the original post. Or so it seems to me. For days, I have contemplated thoughts to add. Did you know that London cabdrivers have enlarged hippocampi? The better to remember their ways around the warren of city streets? Perhaps the human mind is nothing more than the imagined self that arises from the fleshly computing of a billion neurons.

Perhaps we use the term "mind" too loosely, and miss having a discussion entirely because we talk past each other.

Perhaps the same is true of "God". Do we mean the divine mystery that emerges from a silent mind and open heart? Or a parental arbiter that rules our lives? Spend your time discussing one while your friend discusses the other, and you have no discussion at all.

Noticing that perception of the divine happens in a particular locus in the brain, does that make it "only" a neural phenomenon, and not real? Would we say that the streets of London are not real because the experience of them can be measured as a particular pattern of neural activity? If seeing my grandmother correlates with one pattern of neural activity, and having a spiritual experience correlates with another, am I allowed to diagnose one phenomenon as a genuine experience, and the other as some sort of artifact?

Do people really think it's an artifact? Or do I imagine "scientists" to be close-minded because it makes me feel better for not being one? Do I set up a conflict between science and Buddhism where, for the most part, there really isn't one?

I had these thoughts, and I also happened to have a major attack of the Inner Critic--that voice in the head (show me the locus...) that notices what is lacking, what is not quite right, what is hopelessly muddled. For who am I to discuss "brain" or "mind" or "holiness"? Having tried--and you might say, failed, if you were in a judgmental mood-- at being a scientist; having tried my darnedest at being a Zen monk, having tried to live outside the monastery and meditate a lot, where am I now? I have a baby, all the time in the world to not meditate in, and only a marginal idea of which way is up.

My mind, what's left of it, is the most unclear and conflicted it's been in years. I have some inkling that something called "hormones" is involved. That and a really stunning life change that has to do with the baby who currently lies asleep in a sling against my chest, after another half hour of loud complaining.

It takes me weeks to recognize simple things: that the songs playing in my head are an attempt to avoid feeling intensely vulnerable; that I need to have contact with other people, because as absorbing as this little person is, talking to no one but him and my husband will lead only to depression; that perhaps instead of really wanting to have a career, instead of fighting against fate for some way to provide for my little family, I should gracefully accept this very important job I'm actually doing right now.

It's time to ask for help. To get a massage, to get a babysitter, to think about therapy. I've weathered a lot of good fortune this past year, and now I've found the point of resistance. Thinking doesn't help, and feeling bad about it doesn't help.

I don't want to be doing anything other than what I'm doing now. I just want to feel peaceful doing it.