On losing our minds

A blue cottage and a conversation about dementia

One interesting thing that happens when you come to discover deeper aspects of yourself is that the fear of losing your mind becomes much weaker. We come to see that inhabiting simpler and earlier levels of being has a certain concreteness to it—a certain stability. If we’re able to relax our stuckness to abstractions, letting go of our flimsy narratives, we find life much more peaceful. We see that existence without the activity of the mind is possible.

A few years ago, I met a sweet and bouncy grey-haired lady while I was inspecting a small cottage on Tambourine Mountain. Tambourine is a rainforest range near my hometown. It’s known for thunderegg geodes that line its creeks and many waterfalls as well as everything from platypus to two-meter-long goannas—a type of lizard popular for eating among indigenous Australians. Right atop the mountain, across the street from a popular base jumping and sunset spot, the grey-haired lady owned a complex of cottages that she designed by her own hand.

Each cottage was entirely bespoke and tastefully themed either as hunting cottages, monasteries, or tiny homes with white picket fences. The one that interested me was a replica of the first church on the mountain built sometime in the 1800s. It was blue, on stilts, with a small loft for a bedroom and stained glass windows that reflected rainbows along the sturdy, thick, wooden walls. It even had an authentic altar near the entrance. She told me that she had picked every single stone that lined the floors herself. It had a huge antique bathtub. When I met her, we had a nice conversation about why she was selling and she said that she was quite tired of all the work. She said her son was meant to take over but had other plans. I thought to myself that this would be a nice place to write this book.

She also shared that someone very close to her was losing their cognitive functions due to dementia and this was consuming her. She felt that it was the most horrible thing. She knew a bit about my work and so she asked what I thought about the whole thing—the fact that we could lose our minds as we aged. I didn’t know what to say exactly so I told her a bit about how the mind works. I told her how the mind is made in levels of abstraction. How we value very much our stories but that the richness of the present, where most animals live, is something actually quite alive, and profoundly beautiful. I explained how the things that we think we are can sometimes overshadow our capacity to really see. I said that I imagine that some who begin losing their complexity through neurodegenerative diseases—as my grandfather did—they actually begin to inhabit these simpler ways. They may discover these older ways of being. That is, if the mind can relax, let go of fear and incline towards the now.

My grandfather, a rare case perhaps, became increasingly joyful as his disease progressed. He seemed to be in a kind of innocent rapture. His eyes always met the moment as if it were brand new and worthy of awe. I suggested that it is both sad and terrifying, but we shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to gain something when so much is lost. There is this possibility—even if it’s only a small crack in the tombstone—of inhabiting different ways of being that are equally, and in some cases more so, alive and real. That was just my perspective, but I didn’t expect it to impact her the way that it did. The lights came on in her eyes and she expressed real gratitude for this new way of looking at her friend’s situation, as an opportunity to perhaps experience some qualities of life more directly. It is a small glimmer in the darkness, but a glimmer nonetheless.

Contemporary theories in neuroscience tend to assume that our most fundamental levels of self are embodied, narrative, or perspectival (involving subjects and objects). They presume that our sense of self and the abstract functions of the brain are predominately in service of representing, protecting, and nourishing the body, hence there is no reason for there to be anything beyond the body and our thoughts about it. Under this view, when our ability to represent the ego and the body dissipates, all experiences of value dissipate with them.

In other words, most contemporary theories don’t recognise that there are earlier and more foundational levels, such as our capacity to witness the body and even to let go of the witness: To go beyond. Overlooking these less abstract levels of self is understandable, given that most people do not have sufficient personal experiences with things like meditation, or they have not read widely enough. But today, these insights into our deeper layers of self are readily observable in the laboratory. Thousands upon thousands of people report them. And anyone with some practice, or the right stimulus, can taste them. So we cannot ignore these deeper layers of self in our theories, neither in consciousness nor disease.

Thanks for reading,

Ruben

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The above was a short excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book.

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