The Doldrums

Odds and Ends (misc. thoughts)

I think that sometimes ideas can go viral on the internet in a subtler way than media does. One day you’ve never heard of some concept, and then the next you’ve heard a few people mention it and you have a vague idea of what it signifies, then you start seeing it everywhere online, and then eventually you hear it discussed in real life. I feel like I’ve observed this happen most obviously with Gnosticism during my time on the internet. Maybe people were always discussing it and I just wasn’t aware. Hard to say. I think it’s indisputable that more people than ever are talking about it.

Gnosticism isn’t the viral idea that I want to discuss here, but it is in a sense closely related. The notion I have seen spreading as of late is the idea that mere consciousness is a cross too heavy to bear through life. In order to achieve some vague self-actualization, the burden must be lightened or removed altogether. An end to thought. An end to verbal thought, at least. I won’t bother with specific examples because most annoy me too much to revisit. If you think nobody’s talking about this and you don’t know what I mean, feel free to ignore this.

An ancient and often revisited observation: the lack of something is typically more painful than the possession of it is pleasant. To be full is to feel nothing. To be really hungry is debilitating. The pleasure of any drive’s satisfaction is rarely greater than the pain of the drive itself. It makes sense then that thinkers have, time and time again, asked if the key to life is not to satisfy drives, but to eliminate them, to cease to desire so that you can never be disappointed. This ideal I broadly think of as “enlightenment.” That is, the idea of life without personal will.

The silent mind idea I see as an incarnation of the theme of enlightenment. There is certainly a connection at least. We have all heard of monks of various faiths seeking to silence all thought in pursuit of enlightenment. Why? Because verbal thought is will. It is the weighing of cost and benefit. It is the mode by which we seek out what we desire. It is key to the conception of alternative possibilities to our present situation, such as those where we have what we currently do not. To the enlightenment-seeking pessimist, it is a means of self-torture. The will can be held back from manifestation if thoughts are suppressed.

“Just stop thinking.”

I am very skeptical of this idea. Of enlightenment itself, and of the silent mind even more so. There is a basic paradox at the heart of enlightenment: you must find but not seek. How can you will yourself into the absence of will? In the silent mind case, how can you think yourself into an unthinking state? It’s an absurdity, as the thinkers acknowledge. It is why the path to enlightenment can never be fully communicated. There is a step which is, by its nature, beyond the bounds of reason.

You could call this issue a mystery. It is a truth beyond words only grasped by those wise men who then try to guide by example, parable, or through the use of aesthetic imagery, for direct instruction could never do their knowledge justice. You could also call it an intellectual catch-22, a thought-terminating cliche, or simply a lie. It is a way to avoid having to explain a concept that was invented to provide solace. I’m tempted to advocate some middle ground, but I definitely lean towards cynicism as a matter of intuition.

It seems most likely to me that you can, if you crave silence, convince yourself that you can silence your mind without actually doing it. Maybe the words get ‘hidden’ somehow.

Belief in the silent mind also holds a certain type of mass appeal. So many people are depressed now. It is a rare soul that lifts itself out of depression through good, steady, practical work, and even if it is possible for you, isn’t the idea of a cure that takes full effect the instant of its realization more appealing than the idea of a slow, meandering climb? But such a cure would be too easy. The human mind couldn’t accept that if it did exist. If you’ve read Brave New World, how does the idea of soma make you feel? The efficacy of the book comes from our gut reaction to that. No. This day-and-night cure has to be something mysterious and ungraspable. It’s a horizon to sail towards forever but maybe never reach. This absolves the depressed patient of their own freedom.

My ideas here are just ‘suggestions’ and ‘intutions,’ not real arguments. I think this subject matter is inevitably a bit ‘fuzzy,’ but I hope that with further thought and more research I’ll be able to put together a more rigorous case.


I think it’s really interesting how memories of dreams tend to work. Many times this has happened to me: I wake up and I remember my dream. Then, later in the day, I remember that I remembered, and even that I found my dream interesting, but the dream itself is gone. The memory of the dream is more transient than a regular memory. Even if a new memory was built on top of it, it can vanish from underneath. The brain knows that the experiences it invented for you in your sleep are less important to hold onto than what happens in real life. However, if the dream is recorded in a dream diary or something, the memory is solidified. You have created a pointer memory to the dream that keeps it from going out of scope and getting written over. If you keep doing this, you get better at remembering your dreams. The brain, I suppose, starts to realize that those experiences are more important than it thought.


Were our ancient ancestors happy? A lot of speculation about the best way to live relies on the theory that being hunter-gatherer cavemen is our ground state, particularly when it comes to things like diet, exercise, sleep, community, work, etc. However, I wonder if it’s so hard to imagine that those people were completely miserable. Nature has no issue with making creatures for whom suffering is totally dominant even in the habitat they were evolved for. A lot of animals are just in pain constantly and spend their lives scrambling around in a dim stupor trying to reduce it however they can, or at least it would seem like it from what we can observe. I don’t think humanity is necessarily like that but it shows how naive it is to assume that, because we were built for a certain set of circumstances, we must have been happy or even neutral in those circumstances.

Alan Watts talks about how animals are happier than human beings because of their relative lack of foresight. In order to feel fulfilled, the animal only needs to be experiencing pleasure in the moment. It needs no guarantee of future pleasure like we do. This would seem to explain why suicide is unique to human beings.

Personally I believe that our learning to speak is a major part of what put us in this situation. Even if an animal has no reason to continue, it can’t ask itself “why go on?” It can never interrogate itself like that, demanding an answer and finding none. It will press on until it physically can’t anymore. As speaking creatures we can seek answers and understand that none are to be found, and find that the pains of our lives are fated to outweigh the pleasures, and feel almost compelled to act accordingly.