Author’s Note: It’s a bit of an outdated practice these days, but I still like to give attribution to people who influence a particular post. This post was influenced by the works of Alan Watts and C.S. Lewis, both of whom will have ideas represented herein.
Mostly you don’t notice your little toe.
Right? I mean, when’s the last time you thought about it?
Women maybe think about their toes more than men do I guess. What with the painting of the nails and so on. Other than that though, I’d say the pinky toe is probably one of the more underappreciated body parts.
And that’s probably fair.
I mean, after all, it doesn’t do much. The pinky toe isn’t like a hand or a mouth that we use all the time, nor is it one of those parts that we’re overly worried about making presentable in public. Personally, I go ages without cutting the nails of my pinky toes, and I’ve never once had a pedicure… even though I often wear sandals. I simply don’t think my pinky toes matter that much (sorry little guys, I love you but it’s true). They’re not like thumbs or anything you know, I mean, goodness, imagine how awful it would be to lose a thumb. Picking up teapots, holding hands, hitting the space bar, telling gladiators whether or not they should kill their defeated opponents… We use our thumbs for everything.
Thumbs are important. Little toes though? They’re just… I mean they’re just there. Hanging out on the end of the foot and allegedly helping you stay balanced although, truth be told, they’re really not very important even for doing that.
But you know…
Now that I think of it, we don’t really notice our thumbs very much either. Do we?
Strange because we use them literally all the time and yet the thought, “Hey! Look at my cool thumbs!” just rarely crosses our minds. We just think grab cup, and it happens. BAM! As if by magic. Look, I don’t know how all my muscles and sinews and bones work. Haven’t the foggiest. All that complicated neurology necessary for those fine motor movements of picking up a cup? Couldn’t begin to tell you how it goes. I did take an anatomy class one time and I know there’s something called a sodium-potassium pump… but that’s about as far as I’m getting. Even anatomists, people who know the body inside and out, they’re not using that knowledge to perform tasks. It would be impossible. The motions of our bodies are mostly an entirely unconscious phenomenon, where in we walk, breath, speak, and pick up cups without the slightest idea of how we do it. All that complicated stuff is invisible to us. It just happens, and we aren’t consciously aware of any of it.
Just like we’re not consciously aware of your little toe. (You’d already forgotten it from a couple of paragraphs ago, hadn’t you?)
And it’s weird because surely somehow, somewhere deep inside us, when we go to pick up a cup, our bodies are performing incredibly complex computations about the exact positioning of our muscles and bones in order to get our hand just so in order to make that happen…
And yet we have no knowledge of it.
As it happens, our intelligence is not at all limited to the conscious mind. In fact, the conscious mind may well be the dumbest part about us.
Pause for a second and consider the biomechanical complexity involved in holding a pencil or threading a needle, things that you can do so effortlessly that writers can write while listening to music and seamstresses can sew while engaged in conversation. Consider likewise that a dog catching a ball is in fact solving a complex physics problem that many computers would fail to accomplish, all without any concept of math. There’s an intelligence happening “under the radar” as it were, intelligence on a level that our conscious attention can safely ignore.
And there’s something to that.
I’ve often considered that maybe in a similar way God doesn’t know how he does things. Just as your or I don’t know how we hold a pencil or produce saliva or digest our food, perhaps it is that God, whatever God is, just makes universes… without really being able to describe how it happens. You think to yourself grab cup and it just happens and maybe God thinks to himself make marmoset and it similarly just occurs. At this very moment you know I’m growing my fingernails. Don’t know how though, and likewise don’t for the life of me know how to stop if I wanted. Maybe that’s God. God just Loves. He doesn’t know how to stop, even if he wanted.
People have pushed back on me here when I’ve brought up the fingernail thing though. They’ll tell me that, actually, I’m not growing my fingernails, my cells are, as if somehow my cells were separate from me. There’s this idea that unless we’re doing it consciously… we’re not doing it. Something else is.
Strang notion in my opinion. I think you have to have a very weird conception of self in order to deny that a piece of living tissue attached to your body and possessed of your DNA isn’t you.
Ah. But that’s just the problem.
People think they are their Minds.
Look. Until I mention it a few seconds from now, were you aware of the feeling of your underwear against your skin? Probably not. Had you likewise been consciously thinking of the feeling of the collar of your shirt against your neck? Doubtful. Unless your underwear is giving you a wedgie or your shirt is much too hot, you’re unlikely to be thinking about either of them. That’s how things are supposed to work. If things are working well, we’re more or less supposed to not notice them. In the same way, our toes and thumbs and fingernails are supposed to be things we forget about. They’re supposed to just be there, outside our conscious attention, fulfilling their function so we can live our lives unbothered. In fact, like the underwear giving you a wedgie, mostly the only times you notice such parts of yourself is when they are in pain. When they’re causing problems.
When they’re sick.
You can go years without giving your pinky toe a second thought but the moment you stub it on a chair? Well, that little guy is going to be occupying your mind for days. Just like you can sew without ever thinking about your thumb until you accidentally prick it with a needle. This is natural.
We ignore things until they hurt.
This isn’t bad, it’s good actually. But it is something to be aware of. Body parts are supposed to be invisible to us, and they are if they’re working properly. You should be able to eat food without thinking of how you’re going to digest it or walk down the hall without considering your knees. You only can’t do those things if something is broken. If you have a stomach bug or if you’re old and have no more cartilage left below the kneecap. Good teeth? They won’t enter your mind for a moment while you’re eating. Bad one? It’ll remind you every time you drink something a little too cold. The paradox of Health is that if you have it you stop thinking about it. You know, like young people seldom think about their hearts. People over eighty though? Well, sometimes it seems that’s the only thing they can think about at all. In the same way that a good car just goes and it’s only a bad one that makes you stop and think about belts and spark plugs, things that aren’t broken should be invisible. They should be unconscious. You should be able to neglect them just like you do your little toe.
Alright.
Now apply that to the mind.
Teeth weren’t made to bite themselves, hands weren’t made to grasp themselves, and minds weren’t made to be the objects of their own attention. — Alan Watts. (I think. It’s a quote something like this)
You see you actually aren’t only your conscious mind. That’s just part of you, and a smaller part of you than you’re probably prepared to imagine. A lot of people are under the impression that they are their minds though, because that one small part dominates all of their attention. The thing to see though is that it only does this precisely because, like a broken pinky toe… it is messed up.
Listen, all the great problems in life are self-referential. They’re feed-back loops, analogous in every way to the feedback you get from a sound system when the microphone is too close to the speaker. That high-pitched squealing sound you hear is actually the sound system hearing itself and attempting to play itself back. The microphone picks up the hum of the speaker and the speaker, trying to play what the microphone has detected, starts playing its own sound… amplified. The microphone now hears this new louder noise and again sends it to the speaker, which, once more, tries to play itself, only even louder this time. On and on this goes very rapidly until the system maxes out and ceases to function, as anyone who’s ever been around a sound stage knows.
Feedback.
Self Referentiality.
The root of all problems and in fact The Fall that occurred in Eden.
After all. What is Anxiety? What is Depression? What is OCD? What is Vanity? What is Gluttony? What is Lust? What are all of the various mental illnesses and sins with which humanity is plagued?
Think about it.
Take OCD for example. The impulse to check and make sure of something is good in most cases. Sure. But OCD goes a step further. It’s the desire to make sure you made sure. It’s self-referential. It’s a tongue trying to taste itself or a nose trying to smell itself. Likewise Depression is what happens when you go a step beyond sadness and start getting sad about how sad you are. In the same way, Anxiety is a step beyond worry to the point where you’re worried about how worried you’ve become. Gluttony is when the desire for the desire of food overtakes natural hunger and Lust is when the desire for the desire for sexual intimacy replaces the urge to form actual pair bonds with another human being. The eyes are good and were made to behold beauty… to look out upon the snow-capped mountains or cloudless skies with a sense of awe and reverence. But what of the person who is trapped instead looking again and again into a mirror? What of Narcissus trapped looking within his pool? He’s stuck in a loop.
A loop where he will rot and die.
The fact that these things occur, the fact that we are so self-conscious and so self-aware, is in fact a sign that our minds are hurt. That they have been pricked with a sewing needle or stubbed on a chair. In Eden we didn’t know that we were naked. We simply weren’t self-conscious enough to notice, much less to mark it as a problem. Our energies were instead focused on admiring sunsets and flowers and bumblebees, on the laughter of our friends and the cool breeze of an autumn afternoon. At night our minds were filled with the beauty of the stars… not the ponderings of our own feelings. We were happy without needing to realize we were happy. We were joyful without needing to notice.
After The Fall though?
Well, after The Fall we made absolutely everything about ourselves.
That’s how people can get to the place where they can make the (in my opinion) bizarre statement that I’m actually not the one growing my fingernails, or that I’m not the one growing my hair. Because the psyche, the soul, the mind, has collapsed in on itself, is only hearing its own feedback, and it tends to drown out everything else. Our personhood has effectively caved-in, crumpled into one single tiny aspect of our being. In a sense we’ve become disembodied, viewing the flesh, the body, as a kind of suit, or a machine that we are piloting, rather than being a real part of our actual selves. And of course, if we cannot see that we are our bodies then we cannot hope to begin to see that we are also all the things that go into them. That we are air, water, food, and earth.
You’re not as disconnected from The Cosmos as you might think.
But… you’re not going to be able to hear that with all the squealing going on inside your head.
Drugs can be helpful here. Prescribed, borrowed from a friend, cooked in a bathtub… I’m not here to judge. One of the reasons people are inclined to take drugs is that they can mute the microphone. They can mute the mind. Tamp-down that signal so it ceases to be constantly self-amplified. By all means, if you’re suffering from one of these disordered mental states, please, consider going to a doctor and getting meds. Because you have to realize that you’re absolutely never going to brain your way out of it. The Mind itself is the problem… more thinking can’t possibly be the solution.
Okay. But personally this is where I feel modern medicine falls short. I think drugs can help but I don’t think they’re a solution in and of themselves.
Not in most cases anyway.
Just my opinion. I’m not a doctor.
I think Medicine fails to give us a solution here because it fails to understand the problem. Often, instead of healing people, it just gets them stuck in another loop. A loop of lifetime reliance on medication or perpetual therapy sessions which never end. I believe this happens because we think that there is such a state as being “self-fulfilled” or “self-reliant” or “self-actualized” and that things like Depression or Gluttony or OCD are simply getting in the way. In short, we think there are bad ways to think about one’s self that are to be avoided, but also that there are good ways to think about one’s self that should be pursued.
I don’t think that’s the path.
I don’t think you were really meant to think about yourself at all.
Humility is not thinking less of one’s self. It’s thinking of one’s self less.
— C.S. Lewis
I don’t want to make blanket statements here because these issues are complex and certainly there are some people who have such a low view of themselves that some form of “positive thinking” is definitely needed. On the whole though, I don’t think you can be “self-fulfilled”. I don’t think you can be “self-reliant”. I think that’s a misunderstanding about what you are.
You’re not God.
You can’t create Meaning, you can only go find it.
You know, out there.
Personally, I think the meds and therapy can help… but the ultimate solution is Prayer.
You see, the idea that we can arrive at a place of Happiness on our own… is a form of Vanity. It’s nothing more than the psychological equivalent of the urge to look in the mirror and find ourselves beautiful. On it’s own this is fine, better than looking in the mirror and finding yourself ugly, certainly, but again, that’s not what your face is for.
You have a face to communicate with others.
It was never intended to just sit there staring at itself.
That’s why I’m against Meditation, because all too often Meditation is the Collapsed Soul’s substitute for Prayer. It is yet another attempt to go inward, to find happiness inside. It is the soul’s broken desire to listen to itself over and over again, the psychological equivalent of trying to bite your own teeth. It is as silly as trying to find nourishment through auto-cannibalism.
Introspection is Death.
You were made instead to look Out. To look Up. To set your gaze higher than your navel and behold the sun, moon, and stars.
To in fact commune with Heaven.
You were made to Pray.
For Prayer is not just asking for stuff. It’s not just repeating mantras. Prayer is fundamentally the focusing on The Mind on The Other, and not on ourselves. It is turning our minds to God, the beginning of the long slow process of turning ourselves right-side out. It’s how we start to return again to the place of being happy without ever needing to notice, just as a tree can be green without needing to be aware of its color. Looking Up. Setting your mind on the things Above instead of the things Within… slowly… slowly… you begin to get back to that state where your Mind is so occupied with the beauty of everything else that it no longer has time to think about itself.
Where it becomes, once again, like your little toe.
Something forgotten because it has finally decided to just shut-up and do its job.
Amor Vincit Omnia.
In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is presented as a tangible inwardly felt and known life, we pray in the Spirit, I could share a flood of verses but forbear.
One way I've heard the Fall described is that it resulted in a rift between the human spirit and the human soul - once fractured, the soul then turned inward on itself and became self-focused, with all the attendant misery that brings. When, through Christ, the rift heals, we lose the self-ward/inward gaze of the soul, and we instead gaze upon the beauty of God.