What Dostoevsky can teach you about a growth mindset

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov

“This was the point, that I blindly believed then that through some miracle, some external circumstance, all this would suddenly extend, expand; suddenly a horizon of appropriate activity would present itself, beneficent, beautiful, and, above all, quite ready made, and thus I would suddenly step forth under God’s heaven all but on a white horse and wreathed in laurels. A secondary role was incomprehensible to me… Either hero or mud, there was no in between. And that is what ruined me, because in the mud I comforted myself with being a hero.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

The Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is widely viewed as one of the greatest writers of all time and one of the greatest psychologists in world literature. His novels, including Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground deeply explore themes of psychology, philosophy, religion, literature and family, shining a light into the darkest depths of the human heart, whilst also gazing up in awe at our capability, despite everything, for transcendence through our love for each other. For Dostoevsky the good life was a kind of embodied, reciprocal exchange, with this reciprocity between self and other, being the foundation for grasping any kind of truth or understanding.

The passage above refers to a sense of superiority. A retreat into grandiose and delusional fantasy, a fantasy whose carriage is a warped kind of rationalism. A vision in a vacuum, dissolving on contact with reality and experience. The anti-hero of the novel holds a preference for the perfect conception of himself, over a potentially stained one in reality. A fixed conception that results in a fear of life and so a retreat from it. A burrowing into a solitary invention, one in which he is the hero, or will soon be. The abyss between his flawed self-conception and the inconvenience of reality, is filled with a despairing envy and hatred of those he encounters, as they represent a hammer to the mirror of his intellectual invention. Unwilling to let go and accept the contradictions and hypocrisies that are involved in living, this individual festers like a bad seed, his potential growth cut off by an unwillingness to expose himself to the fertiliser of experience.

The narrator of Notes from Underground is a disheveled, shambolic, and completely isolated individual, who views himself as a kind of messiah, someone who, if only the right moment would present itself, would be able to demonstrate his genius. Of course there is no such moment, and the narrator’s fixed, warped notion of himself, leads to a belief that the world should present itself to him “beneficent, beautiful, and, above all, quite ready made”, rather than presenting himself to the world in all the messy reality that entails.

For Dostoevsky, so much of his writing dealt with the dangers of pride and the limits of rationalism. Whether it is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, calculating the personal and moral necessity of the murder of his landlord, the cold and calculating Ivan in The Brother’s Karamazov, or his unnamed anti-hero in Notes From Underground, a detached, cold and prideful way of thinking that carved the world up into fragments and calculated each step out of context with the reality, was persistently shown by Dostoevsky as being a pernicious and ultimately disastrous way to live. Richard Pevear in the foreword to his translation of Notes From Underground reflects on Dostoevsky’s writing as a whole that;

“The one quality his negative characters share…is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life…. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony in this life. What moves may also rise.”

Pevear refers to ‘inner fixity’ like a kind of narrow mindedness, or blindness, resulting in a spiritual ‘death-in-life’ or the death of potential. In these books we live in the minds of his characters and are shown, through their examples, the catastrophe’s that await us when we let narcissistic pride prevent us from connecting with others. Dostoevsky was very sceptical that we would be able to think our way to a better world and was vehemently against the utopian ideals of the day, including both capitalism and socialism. In The Brothers Karamazov, he captured the utopian thinking of socialism at that time, saying that the socialists wished, “…not to go from earth to heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth”, prophesying that this would lead to disaster. Referring to capitalism, consumerism and the increasing isolation he believed this was causing he said;

“For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in peoples help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles, lest his money and his acquired privileges perish.”

These warnings relate to how the development and over reliance on a kind of wobbly rationalism, stripped from history and context, with a blank slate, a year zero, the projection of a new kind of reality ‘free’ from the constraints of the past would ultimately lead to further division and death. This solitary focus on our own idea of the world, or of our blinkered, solo pursuit of material possessions ultimately would isolate us, disconnecting us from each other and life. Redemption for Dostoevsky’s characters came through an authentic, even vulnerable embrace of life, a dialectical exchange where a kind of embodied (not just intellectual) truth is mutually constituted by the interaction between self and other.

What does Dostoevsky have to do with a growth mindset? Well, Carol Dweck, a Stanford Psychologist, renowned for her work into “mindset”, motivation and how people succeed defined a growth mindset as a belief that our capacity is not fixed and that we can develop our abilities and skills over time. Dweck showed in her research that our fixed conceptions of ourselves had to be constantly updated and transformed by the growth that comes from experience and the insights it yields.

Some of her most impactful research, which investigated praise and its impact on motivation amongst fifth-grade students, showed that those praised for effort started to value learning opportunities, whilst those praised for intelligence were more interested in demonstrating their existing ability rather than stretching to improve. Dweck showed that the reinforcement of an existing way of thinking or viewing your own abilities as fixed can have a detrimental effect over time, leading to stagnation, frustration and a loss of potential.

Growth often involves stretching beyond your existing potential, which often means discomfort and effort. But as Dweck mentions in a revisiting of her initial publication, effort without actual learning is pointless. It is not simply about encouraging effort or resilience but also the encouragement of developing a personal insight into what works, a repertoire of techniques and strategies to learn and grow. In other words, a willingness to fail, which gives you the opportunity to update your understanding of what works by testing your concepts against reality and using this insight to transform skills and understanding. A fear of failure can often lead to the restriction of experience and develop into a kind of perfectionism that over time, if coupled with a fixed-mindset can become restrictive. Dweck, herself a recovering perfectionist, stated in a talk at The School of Life a number of years ago that, “I had to start shrinking my world in order to maintain [perfection].”

The shrinking of the world to match the conception you hold of yourself, as opposed to transforming your conceptions to match the world, would have been a thread of thought that Dostoevsky would have admonished. What is interesting about Dweck’s personal insight along with her extensive research is how it shows that in order to even maintain our abilities we need to keep challenging ourselves and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. A fear of looking foolish or ridiculous, leads to a retreat from experience and a constriction of action. A true growth mindset appears to involve a willingness of being the fool before becoming the master.

Burnout: The long shadow of idealism?

In order to burn out, a person needs to have been on fire at one time
Ayala Pines

COVID-19 has shone an overdue light on the indispensability of workers that we often take for granted. Nurses, doctors, social workers, taxi drivers, cashiers, cleaners and many others. Whilst many of us have had to adjust to the comparatively mild inconveniences of working from home, these workers are often putting their health at risk to deliver essential services and care. As this emergency and lockdown continues, these workers will need access to comprehensive support to stave off and manage the effects from burnout. The term burnout is most commonly used with reference to those who exert significant “emotional labour” in their work, which refers to the requirement of managing emotions and feelings whilst dealing with people (i.e patients or customers) with the term becoming ubiquitous across not just healthcare but also professional services occupations.

Burnout, more than just exhaustion

A recent definition by Christina Maslach of the University of California, who originally coined the term and Michael Leiter, currently at Deakin University, provided a concept of burnout as:

“…the index of dislocation between what people are and what they do. It represents an erosion of value, dignity, spirit and will – an erosion of the human soul. It is a malady that spreads gradually and continuously over time, pulling people into a downward spiral from which it is hard to recover.”

For Maslach and Leiter there is a dislocation of what people are and what they do, causing a split where actions no longer reflect values. This split leads to a chasm of meaningless that in turn can become a downward spiral of rumination, self-doubt and eventually depression. The dislocation means that the underlying values that supported an initial devotion or idealism have shifted or dissolved, usually as the result of some perceived or actual failure or a head-on collision with a difficult occupational reality.

What is interesting about the above is the inclusion of words such as values, spirit and soul. This definition by Maslach and Leiter alludes to the fact that burnout syndrome, cannot be viewed simply as exhaustion but as something related to existential loss of meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl, the late psychiatrist, holocaust survivor and founder of Logotherapy could have the key to understanding why burnout is becoming more common. Frankl’s overarching philosophy of the “will to meaning” suggested that to avoid depression and existential despair, one had to authentically live out one’s underlying values by paying attention to what is meaningful. These values are not necessarily moral, but are related to a deeper sense of what attracts your attention, focus and sustained, conscious action; an integrated embodiment of an individual’s orientation toward and action within their framework of meaning.

For Frankl, he believed that the decline in spiritual and religious life, what he referred to as the noetic dimension, had led to a vacuum of meaning which had been filled by a new kind of devotion to work and it is this devotion, which can sew the seed for burnout. In research published last year by Norbert Riethof and Petr Bob, in Frontiers of Psychiatry, the initial stage of burnout actually involves very intense experiences of meaningful life and work, a kind of idealism or devotion that by the end of the burnout process has been lost following a perceived failure to live up to impossibly high expectations.

A bright burning candle casts a long shadow and the shadow of idealism appears to be burnout.

There is a counterintuitive element here, which is that burnout appears more likely to affect those that demonstrate a higher level of idealism in their work. Idealism can be a valuable trait for an individual and the organisation they work for as it motivates people to make a difference and go beyond what is asked of them. However, the resulting excitement elicited by this acute sense of meaning, can lead to excessive dedication (perfectionism), a lack of clinical or personal detachment and an obscuring of insight into the knowledge of one’s own limitations. A bright burning candle casts a long shadow and the shadow of idealism appears to be burnout.

Excitement and stress are two sides of the same coin with both of these emotions releasing the stress hormone cortisol, which the body uses to prepare for action. The secretions of these hormones build up over time and if behaviours and work practices aren’t changed, they can have a serious effect on physical and mental health leading to a potential breakdown and in the most extreme cases, suicide. In the United Kingdom a 2018 study found that the probability of doctor’s committing suicide was five times higher than the general population, with a significant factor being the pressure that doctor’s are under due to a lack of resources.

The difficulty with the term “Burnout”

The trouble with managing burnout partly comes from the difficulty in its definition and diagnosis. In a recent survey of intensive care health professionals the overall number of those categorised as suffering from burnout ranged from 3% to 40% depending on how the syndrome was defined. Part of the difficulty of “diagnosing” burnout is due to its interaction with other mental health issues like depression, begging the question, how much is the term ‘burnout’ simply a socially acceptable label for someone actually suffering from depression? Some of the key descriptions of burnout; loss of enjoyment in things you used to find enjoyable (such as work), persistent fatigue, apathy and cynicism are actually key diagnostic criteria of the American Psychological Association for major depressive disorder. In addition to this, 2017 research in the Journal of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, found that there was no distinction between the biological markers in the brain of those diagnosed with burnout compared to those diagnosed with major depressive disorder.

The ubiquity of the term ‘burnout’ leads to a number of issues. Overdiagnosis of the syndrome leads to a perceived normalisation of this as a necessary occupational hazard, resulting in acceptance and no urgency in developing the appropriate support frameworks. This resulting lack of support can lead to declining levels of work productivity, job satisfaction, employee engagement and increasing levels of stress and depression. Finally, it appears as though using the term is becoming a euphemistic veil for what is actually depression, something which could prevent someone seeking help due to a normalisation of this as a facet of professional life.

Beyond burnout

Mindfulness training has recently received a lot of attention from researchers and organisations as a technique for reducing physical and mental stress. Mindfulness meditation, leveraging present moment awareness, can help to create space between thoughts, emotions and actions. This “space” can help to improve cognitive empathy, otherwise known as detached concern, whilst learning to manage and not get caught up in emotional empathy, or taking on the emotional states of other people (patients, customers). This awareness can also provide an insight into an individual’s limits, informing them of when to take a step back and some time out, whilst also providing a positive perspective on purpose and achievements. The practice can act as a kind of ‘reset’ of the mind, a process that un-conceals values and brings awareness of actions, allowing a restoration of meaning through integration of both.

Beyond personal practices, a broader shift in how workplace mental health is dealt with, including the communication and support for those with occupationally specific depression could also have a significant impact. A comprehensive review of burnout treatments in 2010 found that a combination of personal and group interventions provided by organisations had the largest effect on managing burnout in individuals. This was partially due to a greater level of acknowledgement about burnout and its potential as an occupational hazard, in turn providing people with support and also an implied understanding that those suffering weren’t alone in how they were feeling.

Bringing it all together

The after-effects from the strain of this crisis are likely to be felt most acutely when the lives of most of us go back to normal. The present moment is a critical opportunity for us to re-evaluate the importance of these individuals, putting in place the proper resources and support to ensure that we protect those that are under so much strain at this time. By developing the adequate support structures for those in critical care industries, organisations can reduce the number of workers lost to burnout and workplace depression, in turn maintaining continuity of standards, care and service for those that rely on them.

Moving away from the fatal shore

To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death – a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence.
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding

We cling anxiously to the edge of this continent, terrified of what lurks within. A land of incomprehensible vastness and mystery, of lethal creatures, wilting heat and awe-inspiring weather. The ocean that we have collectively grasped toward since 1788, presents a symbol of potential salvation, promise of connection to the outside world, a respite from scorching sun and desolate dry, however even the ocean brings with it the threat of inundation along with apprehension of the other.

We are precariously placed on this rock, an experimental utopia with no anchor point either to the original people’s of this land, or to the people’s from which we are descended. It has been up to us to determine the values, dreams and myths that can unify us together and provide a guiding light, however these are still fledgling. By destroying the culture of the people that first called this place home, we have not only committed a spiritual murder of the indigenous population, we have also cut ourselves off from any sort of spiritual connection and knowledge of this place. By cutting ourselves off from the original people of this land we will never be free. We will always feel apprehensive, adrift and fearful, trembling in the face of imagined threats, of a foreign land that we do not really comprehend and often seems to us hostile and foreboding.

This anxious grip permeates our lives, driving us to seek control over whatever we can in order to reduce these existential feelings of isolation, loss and alienation. Without integrating the wisdom of the people who understand this land, without finally unifying around an inclusive, collective vision of Australia, we will always be a prisoner of our ignorance and resulting fear. To be a truly great nation we need to reconcile with our original sin, rehabilitating the spiritual essence and wisdom of one of the world’s oldest cultures into a collective and unifying vision of Australia, building a bridge to the past so that we can confidently navigate the future.

Straddling Order and Chaos: Psychedelics and The Entropic Brain

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of the earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The exploration of the mind is the final frontier. We seem to have exhausted our horizontal expansion and so, we must look further inward and upward, to the deepest depths and the highest heights of our psychological experiences and wrestle with one of sciences greatest mysteries, the brain and our conscious experience.

Michael Pollan, in his bestselling book How To Change Your Mind looked to do just that. This book was a sweeping review of the history of psychedelics, charting their surprising history that began with their early embrace by the psychiatric community, their eventual demonisation in response to the counter culture of the 1960’s and their eventual rehabilitation by researchers at the end of the 20th Century. The book, whilst focusing on the history of the drugs and the authors own experiences also delves into the neuroscience behind these molecules, heavily referencing researchers at Imperial College London by the name of Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt, both of whom have been studying the effect of Psychedelics on the human brain.

Dr Carhart-Harris, is Head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and in 2014 he laid out a theory called The Entropic Brain. Entropy is the level of uncertainty or surprise in a system, a high entropic system having a large degree of uncertainty/surprise, a low entropic system a smaller degree. There is a point of criticality in any entropic system where it is balanced between order and chaos and it appears from neuroimaging data that this point of ‘criticality’ in our own consciousness occurs in a more archaic or ‘primary’ state, a consciousness sitting below our normal waking experience. It appears as though our normal waking consciousness actively represses entropy, pushing the system into a more sub-critical state with less chaos and more rigidity. The paper focuses on how psychedelic states appear to return our conscious experiences to a more primary state, a state of greater entropy and connectivity, a less ‘repressive’ state.

The brain is a hierarchical system with consciousness being described by some as an emergent property resulting from the ‘self-organised criticality’ of the system, or in other words the brain being more than the sum of its parts, with consciousness emerging somehow from the interrelationship of neural structures. Carhart-Harris, with a background in psychoanalytic theory, discusses Freud’s theories of the ego & the id in the context of his entropic brain theory and proposes that the neural correlates of the ego have been found in something called the default mode network.

The functional centrality of the default mode network is not shared by other neural systems. Current research implies that the default mode network is the highest level of control in the brain. The default mode network serves as a conductor of the orchestra, the executive of total brain function, being relatively removed from sensory processing and predominantly engaged in higher-level, metacognitive tasks such as self-reflection, theory-of-mind (attributing mental states to yourself and others) as well as mental time travel (reflecting on the past, imagining the future). Essentially the default mode network is the centre for the creation of the narrative-self, what Freud described as the ego.

This narrative self is responsible for how we orient ourselves in the world, along with determining our goal directed activity that allows us to survive and thrive, what is called our normal state of consciousness or ‘waking/secondary consciousness’. It appears as though this state of awareness is responsible for filtering out the experiences that are superfluous to our survival, repressing more primary or entropic states, that are representative of what Freud called the id. This repression of entropy, it is proposed, is what allows us to focus on that which is immediately important for our evolutionary success, but it also blocks out many different states of consciousness that are lurking beneath our normal waking veneer.

The authors desire to integrate psychoanalytic theory into the study of mind is motivated by the gap in our scientific understanding of the unconscious, partly created by the consensus of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology focuses on the thoughts and subsequent actions of someone in mental distress, seeking to reduce maladaptive behaviour by creating tasks and coping mechanisms to redirect thoughts and action. The authors view is that whilst managing maladaptive thoughts and behaviours relating to mental distress via cognitive & behavioural psychology is very important, this approach only deals with the symptoms of a deeper, more intractable problem. The psychoanalytic viewpoint has been left behind by the scientific consensus of the psychology field, due to the previous inability to test these assumptions using the scientific method. The hope of Carhart-Harris et al. and others is that by examining the effects of psychedelics on the brains of both patients and ‘healthy normals’ we will be able to examine the unconscious mind and devise therapeutic methods to treat previously intractable psychological problems.

Based on neuroimaging, the administration of psychedelics appears to decouple the hippocampi region, the region responsible for the regulation of emotion and development of memory, from the Default Mode Network. This could mean that the brain is no longer repressing the signals emanating from the hippocampus, allowing access and insights into memories or emotions that we suppress or have forgotten. This hypothesis reflects the subjective reports of many people who have taken psychedelics, particularly in a therapeutic setting, reporting vivid childhood memories, forgotten traumas and visceral emotions. It is hoped that by gaining access to this deeper wellspring of mental life, and through the right integrative therapeutic approaches, this primary state can serve as the catalyst for individuals to engage with psychological issues at their source, rather than just their symptoms.

Depression is one of the most pressing of these psychological issues today. The SSRI drugs, which showed so much promise for its treatment when launched in the 1980’s do not work as well as they did and access to adequate mental health care is lacking for most. It is proposed that the hyperactivity of the default mode network (an overactive ego) leads to a narrow and intense introspection which is characteristic of depressive symptoms. An overactive ego leads to more introspective metacognitive tasks, leading to an over emphasis on maladaptive self-narrative and an increase in negative, rigid thinking characteristic of depression and anxiety. This rigid thinking and excessive order is characterised as the ‘tyrannical’ ego, an incessantly critical voice that obscures perspective, filtering out or repressing outside experience that could potentially break pathological patterns of thought. The authors discuss how mild depression may have been evolutionary adaptive, with it potentially being a form of reality testing that allowed us to successfully and efficiently navigate our ancestral environment. However, for those suffering from treatment resistant depression, it appears as though this potentially adaptive trait has become overactive, no longer serving the individual and potentially putting their lives in danger.

Extensive research has demonstrated the astounding positive results of psychedelic experiences in improving the psychological outlook of those diagnosed with terminal cancer and people struggling with addiction and treatment resistant depression. It appears that psychedelics break the neural patterns of thought that lead to excessive rigidity of thinking, ‘rebooting’ the mind through a return to a primary consciousness that increases connectivity between different parts of the brain and allows a kind of cognitive reset.

Psychedelic therapy could possibly be a major breakthrough in the enhancement of the existing efficacy of psychotherapeutic techniques. By silencing the ego, clients or patients of therapists may be able to feel emotions that have been previously unavailable to them, recollect and come to terms with long-forgotten memories and face down demons locked deeply away in their unconscious, gaining a new sense of perspective and laying new ‘tracks’ of thought. The narrative and explanation of the ego being located in the default mode network may yet prove to be to simple, however as neuroscience and our understanding of these compounds develop, the potential for significant breakthroughs in mental health treatment could be revolutionary.

Kaleidoscopic journey through light

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type… whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
William James

Yesterday I went to a workshop held by MIND, the European Foundation for Psychedelic Science. I have been interested in psychedelic states since having a profound experience of unitive consciousness whilst practicing transcendental meditation. That experience had such a significant effect that I have been investigating what happened to me ever since and as a result have been curious about altered states in consciousness in general.

The workshop was focused on creating hallucinogenic experiences through Flicker Induced Hallucination, using stroboscopic lamps. This phenomenon of hypnagogia induced through light has been scientifically documented since the early 19th century and the invention of this machine is entwined within the fabric of the renaissance of scientific research on psychedelic experience that has taken place over the last fifteen years.

I didn’t really have any expectations prior to the session, despite the fact that the other participants coming into the room after their own experience had this dazed, wide-eyed look of wonder on their face. The experience itself was one of the most awe-inspiring internal experiences of my life.

Lying down on the bed under the light head with my eyes closed, I expected to see blobs and swirls, the likes of which you see if you have accidentally looked directly at the sun and then immediately closed your eyes. What actually happened was extraordinary. When the lights first turned on I initially saw some vague red and purple blobs and then all of a sudden it was like I had been dropped into a kaleidoscope. I was seeing spinning, fractal, geometric shapes of amazing complexity, predominantly made up of crystalline-like diamonds and triangles, with incredible colours starting with tangerines and oranges before shifting to obsidian black and emerald greens. The shapes and the kaleidoscope were moving fast enough that I felt as though I were being propelled with increasing velocity through this fractal atmosphere, the planes and spirals and funnels enveloping me until it felt like I had broken free of the orbit of that world and was now floating in a misty blackness, surrounded by stars. I soon felt a physical sensation of falling back into my body, a similar feeling to when you are lying in bed and have that falling feeling that jolts you awake, and as I was falling the geometric, fractal shapes returned. As I was falling back into this geometric plane there was a bright, white light sitting at the apex of this visual storm and I had this urge to move toward it, a feeling as though I could move toward it, like I could will myself there despite the fact that I was stationary. That bright light felt like it was positioned at the point above and between my two eyes and reminded me of what many spiritual traditions refer to as “The Third Eye”. That sense of wanting to move toward that white light was probably the most profound during this intense experience.

What was incredible to me was the fact that these were simply white, strobe lights, rhythmically pulsing in front of my face and that was enough for my mind to project the most incredible visual complexity along with giving me a sense of motion into the infinite blackness created by my closed eyes. It gave me an insight into the scaffolding of our visual perceptions, how our brain has this innate sense of geometry that it uses as one of the building blocks for us to understand the physical world.

I had noticeable physical reactions to this experience. My heart was thumping from the intensity of the visual experience and my palms and fingertips were sweating. Throughout the experience my breath was deep and purposeful as I tried to breath my way through the anxiety generated by this powerful experience. There was a constant sense of mild fear that I was breathing through and trying to let go of, knowing that I wasn’t in any physical or mental danger; this feeling was mirrored by a feeling of exhilaration as I was propelled through this vast unknown.

The first session only went for three-and-a-half minutes, after which we had a pause and the instructor then placed some headphones over my ears and started playing some instrumental folk music. By the time the second session started my body was shaking, particularly my legs. I tried to calm the shaking by placing my hands on top of one another and resting them on my stomach, paying even closer attention to my breath, trying to let myself fall further into my body, allowing my weight to sink into the bed. The second session with the music was more relaxing than the first, partly due to the music and partly due to getting used to the experience; much of my shaking was partly a residual effect from the mild shock and intensity of the first session.

Once the experience was over I sat up and had a brief conversation with the instructor, my voice and hands were mildly shaking. I had a conversation with a couple of others who had been through the experience, whilst speaking to them I had physical jitteriness similar to when you drink too much coffee. Once I left the workshop, walking down the stairs I suddenly felt this rush of euphoria, which was accentuated as I walked into the cool, foggy, night air of Berlin, jumping on my bike and cycling at full-pelt through the empty streets toward home.

It was such an awe-inspiring experience that showed me for the second time this year, the first being my unitive experience through meditation, how many other realms there are available to us, and how through the right approaches, we can open the gate and ‘the world’ is completely transformed through the dissolution of our day-to-day perceptions.

When the wave rolled back

We were all but proud of our drunkenness, debauchery and bravado. I would not say we were wicked; they were all good young men, but they behaved wickedly, and I most of all. The chief thing was that I had come into my own money, and with that I threw myself into a life of pleasure, with all the impetuousness of youth, without restraint, under full sail.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The passage above is from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and is the account of the elderly monk Zosima’s youth, recounted by the protagonist Alyosha. This passage struck me when I read it last night and I wrote the section down as the first thing I did this morning due to it reminding me so much of my own approach to life in my ‘youth’.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been increasingly thinking of past behaviour and how hedonic and aimless so much of it was and how all I was interested in over the course of many years was where I could find fun and pleasure. It is interesting to me that it is only recently, during the last couple of months, that my own opinion of my old life has so rapidly shifted, shifted to a point where I sometimes find it difficult to recognise the motivations of that old self.

“We were all but proud of our drunkenness, debauchery … they were all good young men, but they behaved wickedly, I most of all.”

This was what university and the emerging adulthood period of life was for me. There was a feeling of pride. A sense that what we were doing was right, smart even. That we knew we were ‘making the most of it’ by sewing wild oats and getting our kicks whilst we could, before it was too late.

I always thought when I was younger that I had to see and do as much as possible so as that I could stave of future regret and not have the chaotic mid-life catastrophe that eventually engulfed my father. I realise now how misplaced some of these notions were, how pursuing fun and distraction only drove a chasm in my own life, a void in which I lost a sense of meaning, purpose. My expediency regarding work and university led me to feel that whatever it was I was doing over those years didn’t really matter. There was no wisdom in the drunkenness, debauchery or hedonism but it did ultimately yield wisdom, wisdom of what not to do.

The move to Hong Kong was the apex and termination of this ultimately unsustainable trajectory. We went to Hong Kong out of boredom, chasing fun, status, money; and the pressure, heat and brightness of that fascinatingly strange place incinerated this old part of myself, revealing an old truth and an old vein of understanding that I had lost. During this painful process, one which is still unfurling, it was as though I rediscovered a part of myself which had been occluded by the fog off all that I had tried to distract myself with. I realise now that I was blinkered and blinded by the light reflecting off the wrong values, values which I had never really stopped to consciously consider.

What is likely true is that in desperately trying to not repeat the same mistakes as our parents we simply blunder on, smashing into things on the periphery of the tunnel vision that focuses so determinedly on avoiding their bad examples, instead creating our own.

The remedy for this appears to be living as truthfully as possible. Of not giving up the potential you know is within you simply because it is difficult and will jeopardise your security and comfort at that moment. Manifesting what you intuitively know to be right seems to me at this moment to be a bulwark against the future corruption of your psyche. The difficulty of course is finding that moment of clarity, a still moment when the fog has lifted and you can not only see, but know that truth. What this might mean is that in order to find it you first need to jump into that fog.

The universe in our heads

The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out
Julian Huxley

The universe is in our heads. The mind itself is our universe of experience with all the accompanying complexity, contradictions, wonder and awe. We create the ideals and meaning within that. Our mind within mirrors the vastness of the universe above. Similar to how we only know the small spec of space that houses our world, similarly do we only understand a small part of our minds. Our knowledge of experience is so limited to our immediate field of senses that we are blind to all the possibilities of different experience that lie latent within us. The complexity of the environment around us is filtered out through our evolutionary survival mechanisms, meaning that we only see a fraction of the world in our daily experience.

The brain has more connections between its 100 billion neurons and 40,000 synapses than the universe has stars. It is as though our brain is a small projector and all it requires for the universe to be fully rendered above us is an input that will illuminate this hidden wonder for us. All of the firing, connecting, suppressing, communicating, the storms and calm and synchronicity are the micro-equivalent of the cosmic weather that rolls above us. We have evolved over millions of years to be focused solely on what yields the most evolutionary benefit, filtering out all that is superfluous to our immediate gain, and as a result we have a very narrow focus on what the world is. It is a fascinating thought to realise that our lived experience is unique to us and that an aeon of experience is sitting, unbeknownst to us, within our minds.

Self-help & the religious impulse

The religious impulse and the enormous appetite for self-help must stem from the same part of the mind. If we can boil religion down to the search of and alignment with an ultimate truth that transcends our individual existence, then we can see how easily self-help literature can fill the gap of those who have left religion behind.

The fundamental essence of so much religious literature focuses on the way to live your life. Jesus offered his own life as an example for those who wished to enter ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’. The most salient message from Buddhism is the path to enlightenment, with Nirvana the ultimate goal. In Chinese philosophy Taoism (or Daoism) means “The Way” which is visually represented by the line that splits the black and white hemispheres of the Yin-Yang symbol, a symbol that encapsulates what is required to live a life that is balanced and harmonious with self and community.

These religions and philosophies are very different in how they manifest and have influenced the cultures where they have become dominant, however what unites them is their talk of “The Way”, the path you should follow if you wish lead a good life.

The self-help guru steps in where the religious authority has departed (or was never present). They offer the promise of a heaven on earth through devotion to The Way they are proposing. The self-help author, whether it is fitness, business or the arts, talks in terms of a set of principles or a path that needs to be followed in order to begin achieving your dreams and living up to your potential. These stories are intended to be a collection of wisdoms designed to open your eyes so that you can see, find and then stay on the path to salvation (whatever that may be). No wonder the seeming inexhaustible appetite for self-help, these stories are ones that we have been telling ourselves since the beginning of time.

A response to Hunter S Thompson on meaning and living the good life.

This fictional letter was written in response to a famous letter written by Hunter S Thompson to his friend Hume Logan in 1958. The original letter can be found here on the wonderful Farnham Street Blog

Dear Hunter,

Your letter, of which I have re-read numerous times, has been an anchor to my thoughts over the past week. You write that only a fool would let himself give advice to another, I suppose only a fool would ask another man how he should live his life!

My letter to you is a reflection of my own dissatisfaction and so I took your suggestion and read up on Sartre; and Existentialism more broadly.

“Existence comes before essence.”

I suppose this phrase is an arc across what you wrote in your letter last week and which is the basis of, as you call it, your credo.

So, we have no core essence in us, no centring counterweight or default setting. We are simply the sum of our experiences and our perspective is coloured by all that we have known? Sartre found this a liberating thought as it means we are not constrained by who we THINK we are, or what we have experienced, rather we are completely free to invent ourselves and as such, carry a burden of responsibility to do so.

It is this burden on my shoulders, which has caused me to write to you and shamelessly ask for your help in bearing it! I have all the knowledge inherent within me to make a choice and yet I am asking you to help me!

I know you well enough to know you are convinced by Sartre’s belief and I want to be convinced by it too, however his nihilistic vision of humanity does leave me a bit cold.

This way of living requires an iron free will and the inner strength to be able to swim against the tide. If we are simply the sum of our experiences than that is our essence and our entire perspective, and the framework for which we make decisions is shaped by what has gone before. Whilst we have a certain freedom, we are not truly free because the decisions we make are based on the information we glean from the experiences we have and some of those experiences will have closed doors on us, for better or worse.

I like Sartre’s premise that we are unencumbered to choose our own morality, but I am not one hundred percent convinced that this individualistic framework for making decisions will allow us to make better ones. Isn’t that why I am writing to you? So your advice will allow me to make a better decision than the ones I have already made?

You say in your letter that a “man must choose a path that will let his abilities function at a maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his desires” and whilst I completely agree with this sentiment, I think that the handle for everything is in the KNOWING of what those desires are.

How can we truly know what we want? You say that the goal must conform to the man, that we must not adjust our lives to a goal which is ever shifting with our perspective, and yet our desires, the core of what pushes us to act as we do, is also constantly shifting. If we cannot pin down our desires, then we cannot set a path to achieve them and more worryingly, cannot maximise whatever abilities we have.

If we have no essence and are simply the sum of our experiences, then our self along with our desires is continually changing. The consequences of this is that any life we build for ourselves will be built on the shifting sands of our fluid perspectives.

This world view, depending on which side of the fence you sit, is a bleak one in my view. This hyper-responsibility that our true self is purely our own creation, ties in with the individualistic culture we live through. If there is no ‘essence’ to what it is to be human, then there is nothing for us to rally around, and yet we organise into collectives almost by instinct, because we want to be a part of something greater than ourselves.

It is because of this why I think we are more than the sum of our experiences. Our foundation is our heredity, all the way back to our ancient ancestors. I believe this heritage and the experiences of our ancestors and what they learned impacts how we behave in a way that is subconscious, but which we implicitly understand but maybe can’t articulate. Our desire to organize into collectives – religions, communities, families – stems from our universal ability to see a small part of ourselves in each other.

So, whilst we are free to choose and have a responsibility to do so, our choices do not exist in a vacuum and there are numerous factors which colour our judgement and constrain those choices. Despite this I know that we must make a decision, taking action despite the inherent uncertainty, otherwise we will be in the nightmarish scenario of having our decision made for us by circumstance.

Once again your letter has been a great totem for my thoughts and has allowed me to get these thoughts onto paper. I don’t plan on counting myself among the disenchanted for much longer, it is time to start connecting the dots.

Your friend,

Hume