Digestion

I have been practicing lately treating my mind as I do my digestive system. My conscious mind, my ego, is involved in the process of eating up to the point of swallowing the food—I plan when to eat, choose what to eat (and this choice is partly influenced by previous communication with the rest of my body). But once I have swallowed, my conscious mind can do very little. My body takes over. And this is for good reason—my conscious mind is not designed to accomplish the intricacies of the digestive system (okay villi, now do your thing, now you secrete some gastric juices, move this here, now here, etc.). In a similar way I am beginning to treat the flow of experience in the same way—as a constant process of, mainly unconscious, digestion. And this alleviates, for me, so much worry. Am I doing the right thing? Am I processing this experience properly? Am I reflecting enough? Just as my digestive system knows much more what to do with my food than my ego does, my Self, my bodymind, knows much more what to do with any experience that passes through me. It knows how to extract what is good and to eliminate what is bad. And different experiences take different time to digest. But again, my body knows what to do as far as digestion goes. And when it is unhappy about something, it communicates that to me through pain, indigestion, nausea, etc. Emotional states, in particular, I have begun to treat this way. Emotions can move through me, as everything must move through me. And even in the darkest emotional states, my Self is extracting what it needs to extract and eliminate what it needs to eliminate.

Reading provides a clear illustration of this process. There was a point right after I graduated college when I read much of Ken Wilber’s oeuvre, and I noticed after devouring several of his dense books that I would feel different in the weeks following. I would reflect on them consciously, but not to a great extent. I would still think about a lot of other things. But I noticed that as my conscious mind read and understood the long strings of words, they would vanish into my larger Mind, and go to work on tensions and issues that I was often unaware of, and largely apart from my control. In other words, my conscious mind would do the work of selecting the book, focusing attention on the text and trying to understand it, similar to the process of arriving at a meal, but after swallowing word after word, the substance of the text would be digested by processes largely untouched by my conscious mind. And any conscious reflection on the texts would come naturally—I never felt a need to remind myself or force myself to reflect. It would be as natural as the passage of food through my gut.

Conscious, rational reflection has its place, and reading Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion has offered much insight into the relation between reflection and the emotions. And I am treating rational reflection more and more as a tool, instead of my master or the best way to handle a situation. Reflection has its limitations just like anything else.

In meditation lately this has been my goal--to place my conscious, rational mode of thinking more in the position of a servant, rather than the master (terminology introduced to me through reading Ram Dass). My rational mind is usually on autopilot, and even when I don't feel like reflecting, it just keeps finding more and more things to think about. But, as it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, and this applies particularly to my rational mind. The more I direct my meditation towards this end, the better I am able to use rational reflection as a tool.