What It Takes to Be Sane(ish)
I’ve long recognized (especially as I get older) that being a human, a deeply responsible and integral human being, takes a lot of work.
It requires an uncommon passion, one uncommon enough that we’re where we are.
It’s not enough to be nice (though as a minimum, it’s a fairly innocuous default), to live an ordinary life, receive a basic education, and to not question one’s own mind, feelings, and the status quo.
We also have to develop our intuition and then question it too many times, as it’s influenced by all our past fears and pain.
For starters, we are an evolutionary hodgepodge that was never organized or networked into a cohesive whole . . . which is the bulk of our work to intelligently sort through, to build the new networks so that we can minimally squeeze by without destroying the world and each other.
Primitive survival needs of the reptilian brain, the emotional and often over-reactive needs and fears of our mammalian midbrain, all overseen by a (hopefully) self-aware neocortex — along with all the problems that can arise due to biological error and trauma — and we begin behind the eight ball.
Maybe this is what is meant by being born into sin! — though it’s a horribly unskillful and ignorant way to describe it, beginning the impoverishment created by unnecessary guilt.
What’s more, each of these parts of our brain vies with the others for perspective on reality. Intellect thinks it knows everything and shuts down new information. Emotion can cloud the whole window leading to the errors and dysregulation of emotional reasoning. And we can think our survival is at stake when it’s truly not.
Crucial is critical thinking that helps us sort through all the overreactions and defense systems built into our nature. We also have to act and think counter-intuitively more than seems intuitively appropriate. We have to practice not assuming things about the world or one another, be open to truly learning new ways (though not treat each bit of data with equal weight), and finding the myriad ways our emotions and mind can actually work together to uplift us and the world.
If we cannot bear and befriend pain, none of this is very possible. Why? How many people do you know that are comfortable with admitting they are wrong, making amends, humility, deep listening, and genuinely working on themselves because they are passionate about growing beyond their comfort level?
See what I mean?
Therefore, underneath our willingness to do the work we need the ability to bear emotional pain — in fact, to welcome it as a necessity to sanity and better days. This paradox escapes too many. It is the hallmark of shadow work, and it is our shadow that bludgeons the world and one another. All shadow work requires us to feel emotional pain to some degree. It is the rare person that accepts this pain in the short term because they know it makes them better and more joyful in the longer run.
And here’s the rub: our wonderful nervous systems interpret physical pain along the same pathways as emotional pain. This means that when we feel emotionally threatened — which is required for the growth I’m describing — we recoil as if our very lives were threatened.
See the problem here? It’s why it takes a certain intelligence and emotional resilience to welcome the pain necessary for deep integration.
This is the neuroscience behind a simple statement I made last year: “Challenge someone’s beliefs and you might as well be holding a gun to their head.”
Society could be organized in humble recognition of the conundrum we are born into. To this end, our education would be founded on learning how to think well and deeply, how to accept and work with emotion, loss and trauma (though there would be a lot less of it under this design), how to become truly compassionate, and how to take care of the natural world.
Yet, because humanity has been running from itself forever for a fear of facing the failing side of life, our history and our deep framework has created the truly defunct and dysfunctional system we all struggle with today. Grokking all this, the proper response can only be to live radically, in a way that goes against most all of what society does, for which one would be locked up.
And this is our dliemma, for which we can all step outside the box, join together, and find a semblance of sanity in a world gone mad and almost off the cliff.
