The Magic of Underthinking

We must finally transcend our stories to navigate the meta-crisis.

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I saw this in the New Yorker:

“On a long walk during the first pandemic winter, Kyle Chayka was struck by a thought: Did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through the Dark Ages?”

He goes on to speculate on possible names for our unique Age and shares three: “The Age of Unhingement? The Omnishambles? The Assholocene?”

I started to imagine this going viral.

The debate begins. CNN picks up the winning name and people chime in with their opinions. It goes viral and advertisers are elated. Experts point out that the “Kali Yuga” has been known since ancient times.

And so it goes. A mental trip with a life of its own.

I don’t think the naming and labelling thing is helpful. 

We don’t have to name our Age to know we’re up against it.  As Joe Martino asked in his piece, “If No Wants This Why Are We Doing It?” or Gabor Mate suggests in “The Myth of Normal” we are ensconced in a world that seems to work against us – or at least a society that is trying to wring out our last dime.

But a lot depends on your circumstances – if you’re in Gaza, Ukraine or living under a bridge these are certainly the Dark Ages. If you own a yacht and a personal jet, not so much. 

But even the billionaires eventually get sick and eventually die.

We Create Most of Our Suffering

And all life is impermanent. A big problem for humans is we know it and can fear it. With the fear comes the Darkness. And the stories of “what if”.

So the big mental challenge seemingly is Death. We are taught to fear nonbeing and that fear fuels all the others.

I remember my father when he was 86 and disillusioned with the state of the country and the world and sometimes angry even though he would also say “There’s nothing you can do.” Being 37 at the time I thought, “Well he’s near the end so there’s anger at what he can’t change and what’s coming.”

Is My Age Now Influencing My Perspective?

Now I’m 74 and I am facing significant impending challenges and I am inundated with the media. I’m disturbed about what many are facing, but I also wonder whether the slowly deteriorating shape of my body is what is making me a pessimist.

Just trying to get to a doctor’s appointment or driving through traffic and getting groceries extracts a heavy price in energy. 

But I have found if I really observe my organism objectively with some detachment as a humorous curiosity, I can detach from analysis in some cases by laughing at my situation.

A while back I brought my magnifier into the kitchen because I wanted a hot dog but I was afraid the ones I had in the fridge had expired. My stomach is fragile these days so I want to protect it.

As I turned the plastic wrapper of the franks over and shone the light on it and I couldn’t find the expiration date anywhere.

And I thought: “Do I risk my life for a hot dog.”

And the absurdity made me laugh out loud. This is me at 74. I often wonder how this organism is still alive. 

I think it is the energy of humor that has been a big part of my survival.

The Need to Manage Energy

What I have learned to appreciate in my older age is Energy is a reality, not an abstraction, like the name we might choose for the time we live in.

It goes back to connecting with my body – which I was forced to do during a long recovery from a concussion.

And I think this insight was one actual positive about my brain injury (can’t believe I just wrote that.) I had to really scale down and minimize activity and conserve my energy.

I knew if I didn’t scale down dramatically the increasing complexity of my outer life and my injury along with the insane stuff on the “news” would consume me. So I withdrew even as many urged me to do things I no longer could. I embraced my solitude.

A lot of seniors in my community, and some friends I love and respect, have hung their hat on being busy, busy, busy. But it wasn’t until I learned to shut up and rest, and put myself down like a toddler, that my cognitive energy finally started to come back.

That’s when I started writing again.  I recovered just a bit of my old identity, and it energized me more.

And I needed “topics” – like how would we name the time we are presently living?

The Mind Is Always Judging

Of course, the “Age” itself – the span of time just a projection of our communal minds – time is mental.  In fact, that is what our minds are always doing, generally in a binary fashion – judging Good or Bad, Right or Wrong and so on. Judging the present moment.

And from these constant judgments and the influence of our culture come our beliefs and convictions.

Eckhart Tolle calls it Ego and says it’s a necessary step in our evolution, but we need to see through it. He says to accept the present moment, and even welcome it, as it is.

How, we may ask, in the throes of media that hypnotize us both consciously and beyond any doubt unconsciously. A new car will solve everything. Then why do I still feel so sad?

Again, it’s our very tendency to constantly judge – and to defend and insist that we know things we don’t actually know that is creating most of our suffering.

Silence and bodily connection can lead to the understanding that we are the Energy we’ve been looking for – just feeling the aliveness of this moment through our organism. That being the case, allowing that energy to flow organically along with Life would seem the key to our survival, mentally and spiritually. The ancient and indigenous cultures understood this.

Human beings were an integral part of the living Being of the planet and presumably the universe. There was no separation in that universe between the human heart and the Sun and moon.

Those mysteries have been replaced by the apparent Knowing of science.  But at what cost?

Eckhart Tolle says the price we pay is that we live entirely in our heads, listening to our thoughts.

Our identification with our thoughts has created a sense of ourselves as separate protagonists in our personal stories and we live in a mental movie which we narrate endlessly in our skulls.

It takes us away from what IS and we are soon lost in what IF.

We need to rediscover silence and reawaken to the totality of our connection to Everything

The problem at this point is also restraining those voices that are coming at us from all sides and are sure they know the truth.  I remember when Eckhart Tolle pointed out how even the Dalai Lama is willing to say “I don’t know”.

It is so helpful to let a deep “not knowing” surrender to the bodily presence and Silence – and care for the body-mind that is being buffeted by so many forces.

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(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)