A friend and I were walking down the street when he noticed my cellphone doing a serious peek-a-boo out of my pocket. The conversation went something like this:
He: Hey, you should zip up the pocket. Your cellphone is gonna fall out, or someone could grab it."
I: Hm...I never even thought of that (zipping pocket).
He: I think about that all the time. What DO you think about when you're walking down the street?
I: Nothing, really.
Turns out I am totally wrong, that in fact, when I walk around thinking I'm thinking about nothing, my brain, the unconscious, abyssian part of my brain, is doing all kinds of cartwheels on my behalf. I just finished Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. You know when you think you have an "a-HA!" kind of moment, and then you're so proud of yourself for coming up with a long elusive solution? Think again. Turns out that when you hit the wall with a problem, your brain continues to recruit cells which in turn are recruiting more cells which in turn are hammering away at your problem, millions of little minions working away in the sweatshop of your brain. Then when you're washing your hair in the shower you think "Hazzah! I'm a genius!" Er...nope. You're not. Turns out your minions solved your problem and then delivered it to you on a silver platter.
Today was a little different. I was wandering midtown with a brain full of stuff and I started thinking about Joseph Campbell, who for some reason started me thinking about the Buddha, which reminded me of a Facebook status I had seen earlier, which in turn led me to the journal section at the Borders where I saw a journal that said on its cover "Happiness depends on ourselves (Aristotle)," which led me back to the Philosophy section where I mulled over which Joseph Campbell to buy. Turns out I bought The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Something that has come up so frequently in my recent readings is the idea that our human experience, though we are completely egocentric whether we want to be or not, is shared. Every bit of it. Campbell points out that we (walking around with our cellphones glued to our heads and our Ipod cords stuffed in our ears) are composed of the same DNA and biological desires as our IPhone app deprived brothers and sisters of 30,000 years ago. Graham Hancock, in his book Supernatural, brought this to my attention first: In France, cave paintings from 30,000 years ago are composed of essentially the same images of caves in Africa and Mexico and 10,000 years later. Without the aid of airplanes, how could this have happened? How can people in Africa copy the cave paintings of the ones done millenia earlier in France? Hancock posits that these images are released from our DNA through the Spirit Molecule (DMT) by partaking of hallucinogens such as ayahuasca.
From wiki: "Campbell's term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world. Campbell expressed the idea that the whole of the human race could be seen as reciting a single story of great spiritual importance. As time evolves, this story gets broken down into local forms, taking on different guises (masks) depending on the necessities and social structure of the culture that interprets it. Its ultimate meaning relates to humanity's search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return and is considered to be “unknowable” because it existed before words and knowledge. He did believe, as he clearly stated in the Power of Myth, in a SPECIFIC STRUCTURE THAT EXISTS IN THE PSYCHE AND IS SOMEHOW REFLECTED INTO MYTHS (caps added).
We all know the Christian/Hebrew creation myth, so I won't bore you with that, but looking for commonalities I stumbled upon a site that listed 20+ creation myths. I read the Hopi and the Huron. Basically the same story with a different cast of characters. So, who made it up? Who's the copycat? Is it possible that they're all correct, that ultimately, it doesn't even matter?
So if I get this right, what I'm hearing is this: Genesis, the Hopi, the Huron, Roman and Greek mythologies, the cave paintings at Lascaux, images and stories from all over the world are all eerily similar?
The first of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths is this: Life means suffering. You may have been neglected by your parents and suffer from low self-esteem, may be compelled to gamble away your savings, may compulsively look at pornography, may cheat on your spouse, may eat waaaaayyyy too much when you know better, may have an eating disorder, maymaymaymaymay....pick a may, any may.
But that's the good news, right? WE ALL SUFFER! How wonderfully liberating to know that we are not alone, that though we feel in the big part of our brain that NO ONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD HAS EVER FELT LIKE THIS that you're wrong. Very wrong. There are millions, perhaps tens of millions or more that have experienced or will experience what we are going through right now.
Now back to Eagleman. He spoke of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and how he wrote Kubla Khan while high on opium. Coleridge claimed that he didn't really write it at all, in fact, many artists, poets, composers, etc. have said that their creations had nothing to do with them, that they were merely vessels for something bursting out of them, with or without the aid of opium. So, who wrote it then? Coleridge or the opium? Eagleman goes on to say that really, we (the we that we think we are) don't really have much control over anything, from the mates we choose to the jobs we pursue. The lizard brain is running the show.
What we do have, however, is veto power. As in the case of Anthony Weiner (heheheh...weiner), a seemingly bright, dedicated politician put it all on the line to send pictures of his well...weiner...to women he followed on the internet, putting his career and marriage in serious jeopardy. I thought to myself, "how can a such a smart guy, who has been in office a long time and is clearly adroit in the political arena do something so effing stupid!?"
Call it lizard brain versus conscious mind. Conscious mind equals veto power. There is so much going on in these cranial domes of ours (the neurons that activate neurons that activate neurons are so numerous as to be more than all the stars in any galaxy we are aware of) that we need the veto, we need our illusions, we need our myths to be a primer for survival, a map for our journeys.
Then I saw the journal that said "Happiness depends upon ourselves." And I bought it with a gift card given to me for my recent birthday. My big mind vetoed putting it on my credit card.
