Eat a feeling sandwich!?

The human mind is a complex thing. We have many emotions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, judgement, opinions, positions, desires, cravings, ... I don't know about you, but, it is safe to say that unless we are on top of all that, life could be a scary roller-coaster. A wise person, therefore, said, and I quote: "The mind is the best of the servants and the worst of the masters." 

How do we master our minds? Arguably, that's why we have the new things called psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and even the rather old things called religions, the non-organized kind, mind you, say what Buddha talked about at the Deer Park. 

Buddha famously called himself a doctor of the mind. He simply said that he found out the cause of all suffering. And, he found out how to end it. Don't you want what he wanted and what he got, too? The secret is out. 

Or course, Buddha said, the root of suffering is desire. We suffer because we desire, we crave things we don't have. So, is the solution simply to not desire things? That would be unacceptable to most of us. So, that can't be what Buddha meant, can it?

You can also object to Buddha, and seemingly rightfully so, by pointing out that you suffer a lot more from your fears and anxieties, not your desires. Nightmares, not dreams. Yet, nightmares are dreams, too. Our desires tend to turn to anxieties and fears. I wanted my father to buy me a bike. The desire was almost overwhelming. After a year or two, he capitulated. Then, I acquired the fear of someone stealing my bike! Don't get me wrong, I wasn't that neurotic as a 10 year old. I did enjoy that bike tremendously. But, the fear would rear its ugly head from time to time. Yet, only now, I realize, it wasn't fear at all! I was misguided into misinterpreting what I was feeling. It was the love of what riding a bike was getting for me. A sense of freedom. And I thought losing my bike would mean that I would lose my freedom. How sweet and childish. Yet, we can't judge children. It takes a lifetime to realize that the kind of freedom that matters is the inner kind. And that lifetime is mostly spent in search of freedom of the financial and social kinds. Let's talk about freedom on another page lest we don't get to the bottom of it. 

At the bottom is a slice of bread. It represents a thought. The deeper kind. In the middle we have all the vegetables, cheese, and if you'd like pastrami, representing a bundle of emotions. And at the top we have yet another slice of bread, representing another thought, the surface kind. Here is a simple example. Top-slice: My little brother is the source of all my troubles. The emotion underneath: fear of loss of the attention of my parents, and a significant chunk of my inheritance! The deeper thought: I am in need of the attention of my parents and in need of financial support. Here is a more sophisticated example acquired after serious social conditioning: Top-slice: Immigrants (or refugees, or the uneducated, the poor, this minority or that minority) are failing this country. The emotion underneath: fear of loss of resources in this land. The deeper thought: There are not enough resources to go around and I am in need of them. 

Do you see how the top-slice, the surface level thought is fueled by the emotions underneath and those emotions in turn are a by product of the more basic thoughts just one level deeper? 

You might say, oh, but, I have many feelings and emotions that are more fundamental than any thought, they are biological, say, feeling hungry, or worse thirsty. You would be right, of course. However, we only need to go one step further and identify the unconscious processes of the human brain to realize that all those emotions and feelings with a biological basis come from the conditioning of the animal organism through millions of years of evolution and have a complex, yet, purely mathematical, even logical foundation. A tree doesn't feel thirsty. Yet, it also has biochemical processes that ensure that it can tap into water deep under the earth and bring it all the way up to its leaves on top. Of course, biochemistry is a complex form of chemistry - manifesting thanks to a process also known as weak emergence. And, chemistry, we know is the physics of the bonds atoms make to connect with each other as in water, two hydrogen atoms bonding with one oxygen. And, as many theoretical physicists would attest to, all physics is a very successful model made out of mathematics that matches all the observations and measurements we have made so far. 

We came to the ground of it all very quickly, but, I hope it is clear to you that we find, at the bottom of all biology, a kind of logic. What is logic? The foundation of how we think. 

As the Nobel prize winning mathematical psychologist Danny Kahneman wrote, we can think of two kinds of thinking: slow and fast. The slow kind is how we multiply numbers and how we plan our weekends. The fast kind is how we can tell a tree from a wooden electric pole and the voice of our little brother from that of our fathers. As you can see, the latter kind is something we all do unconsciously. Yet, we do it all the same. With an amazing ability. 

So, when you feel really thirsty, it is your unconscious mind being aware of imminent danger, no water no life. And, you get a ping. Of course the brain processes are involved - many neurons fire as well as biochemical processes, the complex metabolism in your digestive organs and specialized cells of the body. It is a whole body affair. Yet, in your mind, you get the news that it's time to walk up to that fountain or stroll to the kitchen. The fast thinking and slow thinking are working hand in hand to keep you healthy and get going. 

And now you feel hungry for that sandwich. Maybe :-). So, whenever a thought, a superficial, surface level thought comes to your mind like the troubling examples we talked about just before hunger or thirst, look for the emotion or the feeling underneath. And if it is tainted with fear, dig one more step down into the thought underneath, the bottom slice and find the logical error in it. It will help you transmute the imagined fear into love, just like my fear of losing my bike simply being a shadow of my inner drive for, or the love of freedom. Bon appetite.