The Mental Core

[draft chapter for a book whose direction has changed]

The Mental Core

Brains are crazy--some more than others. The craziness of my own brain led to many struggles in life. I have since learned how to correct some of the more hindering aspects of my brain and I would now like to share those experiences and lessons learned. I have plenty more to learn, of course, but if I waited until I was complete, I would never start to write!

What I am about to share in this first book is the foundation of mental stability. It is the starting point and the most important aspect to keeping our wits about us. If this cannot be mastered, the rest hardly matters. We must live with ourselves wherever we go, and this book is meant to help us do just that. To do this, we must first understand the brain… just a little.

Imagine a simple 9-piece jigsaw puzzle for toddlers with the giant face of a cute little kitten in a 3 by 3 grid of pieces. The top corner pieces each have an ear, the center piece has a nose, attached at either side of the nose are pieces with whiskers, and so on. Instead of physically pushing these pieces together to make the kitten, however, I want you to imagine leaving all nine pieces in random places on the table as if you just dumped them out from a box. Leave them exactly as they lie, but for each pair of pieces that are meant to fit together, imagine that we instead attach the ends of a piece of string to them so that they are connected to each other via string but do not physically touch. All the pieces simply lie on the table in disarray with multiple connections of string.

How does the result look? A bit of a mess, of course, but if you pick out one piece, you can know what it connects to by following the strings attached to it. If you follow the string from a whisker piece, you will find it connects to a nose piece even if it is not clear at a glance. All the necessary information about the puzzle is there, but there’s no simple picture. You cannot see the overall beauty of the kitten even though you know exactly what connects to where unless you rearrange the pieces and fit them together.

A brain works in much the same fashion as a puzzle but it has far more pieces and far more complex connections. We get various points of data in our lives in no particular order and things get connected as they come in to make a massive jumble of ideas and thoughts. All that data and all those connections can sometimes lack a cohesive picture or overarching idea without some good ol’ house cleaning and rearranging. It’s a mess of facts without actually comprehending them. It’s knowing that whiskers connect to noses but not knowing that a particular arrangement of whiskers, nose, eyes, and ears makes a kitten.

To make matters worse, many of the connections in our brains truly should not even be connected. The only reason such connections were made is due to other poor connections that didn’t belong which were also due to other poor connections and so on. This either prevents seeing a bigger picture or perhaps creates a picture of a kitten that walks on its ears and uses whiskers to taste for yellow. When you check your logic by tracing the strings, you see the ears connected to the legs and the feet connected to the head and you prove your overall concept right. But the ears never belonged in the legs to begin with. They are not true facts and should not have string connecting them.

Getting to a more practical example, when we were young, we may have stolen cookies from the cookie jar. For this, some parents might have scolded, spanked, yelled, or even ignored the incident. Whatever the outcome, we have a few data points in our brains: sugar, stealing, cookies, happiness, etc which get connected with each other along with reactionary data points like parents, mean, unhappy, bad, unloved, hated, ignored, or even success and reward. It’s a bit of a conundrum when our brain connects happy with unhappy, but it is also bad if we connect stealing with success. If such things happen too many times in various ways, this could very well be cause for a desire to be unhappy, being unhappy with pleasure, or stealing for the thrill of it. This is, of course, an extreme over-simplification. Nobody gets screwed up over a single incident of stealing cookies.

When a brain gets too many incorrect connections, it gets lost in the jumble and it cannot make sense of what is happening around it. Getting lost often elicits emotional responses of fear, anxiety, anger, or depression to name a few. While there are certainly medications, drugs, foods, and even infections that can remove such feelings, the true solution to the problem lies in identifying poor connections, reorganizing the data in the mind, and reconnecting things properly. We must get the whiskers out of our mouths and stop stepping on our ears.

But how does one go about untangling the mind when the mind is tangled? It is no easy feat, to be sure, but for most people who are capable enough to read this book, there is a good chance the brain retains enough sanity to detangle itself if one so desires. If there is one thing to learn from this book, the most paramount take-away lesson to be had, it is that we must seek to understand the world around us for the way things truly are and not simply the way we perceive them to be. Without such a desire, we get stuck repeating and eating the same trash day in and day out.

Such a pursuit is what I call a pursuit of wisdom, although the word is perhaps far too misunderstood or cliche in today’s culture. I now believe--and have experienced--that wisdom is indeed the key to untangling the mind and finding composure where before all manner of daemons ran amuck. Wisdom is what will help us overcome our own crazy minds and further help us to achieve greater goals and enable greater understanding.

Wisdom is often confused with intelligence, knowledge, or success, but I dare say it is only related and may not even need the others. Wisdom is seeing the kitten while knowledge is having the strings connected to the right places. One’s intelligence is perhaps the ability to find and attach pieces with little help, but even one of little intelligence or knowledge can still be taught what others have derived and thus see the kitten. The difficulty there, of course, is knowing who to trust.

With little emphasis or understanding surrounding wisdom today, it is no surprise to me that so many people, like I had, struggle with their mental faculties. The starting point of wisdom is recognizing the bigger picture that wisdom plays in our lives and deciding it is worth pursuing even if relying on the intellect and knowledge of others to do so.

I had personally struggled with depression and a form of anxiety for about 16 years. As of now, while I begin to write this book, I have gone one full year without either. I believe my previous record for sanity topped-out at three months while the depths of my despair could last anywhere from a day to months at a time with little respite. I struggled to enjoy anything in life and I quite often turned my frustration at my plight into rage against others. I was by no means a pleasant person to be around except, perhaps, at work where I would use every ounce of my being to pretend life was fine and that I did not go home to wallow in my failures.

I had a few different diagnoses of my potential problems such as depression, obsessive compulsion, post-traumatic stress, sleep apnea, and attention deficit. I also suffer from tic disorders to make matters worse. I tried many drugs for each of these to which most seemed to do something at first but quickly made things worse within a couple weeks. Some drugs turned me into a flaming ball of rage, while others made me jump at the tiniest of sounds like a mouse in a den of cats. Nothing worked for me and I quite often believed there was no hope for a normal life.

In short, everything began to change as I learned to dig out the truths of life and the nature of humanity and myself. In other words: as I gained more wisdom. Removing depression did not occur in the snap of a finger but gradually over a few years time with persistent progress and occasional relapse. There is no single source and no single solution to resolve one’s racing mind of conflict or depressive worldview. There will be many things needing changed over time, and even now I still have plenty of other things to make progress in. Patience is still a huge one for me, but at least I am no longer depressed about it.

I now strongly believe that most mental illnesses which are not due to injury, birth, or age, are merely a series of improper connections and understandings about life that simply need rearranged. The more we can find and correct inconsistencies between thought and reality, the more we can attain sanity, peace of mind, and success in what we do. The first goal is to quiet our own minds. With a jumbled mind, we can hardly accomplish anything greater and we will likely sabotage what we do succeed in. The core of Mental Arts is learning how to deal with ourselves.

To discover my own improper connections, I found it quite helpful to stop and analyze what just happened whenever depression reared its ugly head. The very moment I felt a twinge of “I give up and want to die now,” I would ask myself what just happened that led to this feeling. I quickly found many patterns. I simply paid very close attention to my feelings and discovered what things would trigger me: rejection, inferiority, purposelessness, and failure to name a few. Once knowing those triggers and learning the truth regarding them, I could obtain a strong defense against their poisonous barbs.

So now, I share my learned wisdom for two main reasons. First, I hope that it benefits others like me who may have lost hope. I want others to know that there is not only a means of staving off the monsters in their mind, but to eradicate them for good. Some people will relate with my own misunderstandings about life and the lessons I’ve learned, while others will need to determine their own. Every person is unique, but hopefully my experience can help bring at least a little more composure to the many out there who struggle for sanity.

Second, I want to provide thoughtful and wise instruction which can be beneficial to all people no matter their current state of sanity. While one may not be depressed or anxious, it is quite possible they have yet to reach perfection. If you are not yet perfect, then this book will likely help move in a positive direction toward that goal post.

As I relay the things I now take for truth, understand that merely knowing them does not solve anything and living them is much harder said than done. There may not be an appropriate order of lessons learned and it will likely take time and a combination of many truths to help succeed in whatever your mental goal may be.

The greatest source of help in one’s search for wisdom and clarity is to know that failures are expected and are a simple part of the process. It means nothing about who or what you are. It does not define you. Just keep on learning and keep on trying as that is what truly defines you. If you are improving, you are doing it right. If you are not improving, you are finding the ways that do not work which you can now avoid and seek new ways. If it is working so well that you have reached the end and have cleared your mind of all incorrect thinking, I dare say your mind is now empty entirely.

You may wish to read this book quickly for an overall idea of insights but then revisit each idea individually to ponder, reflect, and practice over time. No doubt you will learn, understand, or remember new things each time you visit. Good luck!

Seek after wisdom and what you will find is your life.