Lately, I am doing my best to reprogram my brain.

It’s more or less cognitive therapy that I am administering to myself. Cognitive therapy is, of course, the easiest sort for a fanatically cerebral sort like myself.

One might argue that something more based on emotion and the darkness between thoughts would more directly address my problems, and that is probably true.

But that sort of thing is mighty tricky to self-administer if you are the logical, rational, verbal sort like I am. We overgrown front lobe types refuse to accept as real anything which cannot be explained and/or understood my the conscious, rational mind.

This can be very powerful, and at the very least can make you sound very smart indeed because you are so articulate and fluent. The demand for rational sense and expressable thoughts creates a deep and powerful pressure in the mind for articulation and the development of a high live of capacity for creative expression. If that is the only way the feeling can get out, they will work hard to get out that way.

Even if you never share this articulated thoughts (or emotions, or ideas, or whatever) with anyone, just the need for them to pass through the barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds in order to find expression pressures the mind towards developing its expressive capacities.

In my case, that means verbal expression. Language. I have no talent for the visual arts and I lack the proper mindset for programming or technical jobs.

But boy, do I rock the wordsmithery.

However, being the meticulously thorough and honest philosopher I am, I am fully aware that, as dazzling as all this verbal jimcrackery can be, the restriction of conscious expression can be quite damaging.

Being unable to deal with your deeper, subverbal self without making it go through the slow and painful process of finding rational expression means it is very hard for someone like me to get at what is really going on inside this noggin of mine.

Consciousness is, after all, merely the shining, glittering surface of the waters of the mind. Most of who and what we are lives far beneath the surface and trying to deal with that from a point of view that says only the surface of the water is real is like trying to understand marine biology entirely based on what you can see from shore.

I could never let myself be so limited. I am the sort who seeks the truth of things over everything, and that means that I expand my find to fit the truth, whatever it may be, whatever the cost.

Most people, it seems to me, shrink the truth until it fits their mind.

So I recognize the truth of the limitations of the rational mindset, especially when dealing with one’s own mental issues, which are often far away from rationality and in some causes may ever be caused by it, or at least, an overzealous and ignorant application of it.

And for a while, I was stuck there. I knew there was far more to me than my rationality could hope to grasp, but I was still limited by this rationalist mindset and so it seemed like I had no idea how to proceed. All my tools were rational. I was stuck on the shore without a canoe.

There is simply no rational approach to dealing with irrational emotions (and that’s most of them). You have to set your rationality, with its externally defined realities and powerful incisiveness and blindingly bright light, aside.

You have to instead enter the murky, internally defined world of your own true emotional self. The person you would be even if you didn’t have that big bright rational mind dragging you around in circles. The person you were as a child, before all the bad things happened, before you learned to use your rationality as both sword and shield, before you hid yourself away from the world and learned to blinker yourself so that you never noticed how tiny and cramped your hideout had gotten.

And that’s not easy. For someone like me, all our instincts are wrong. This is not a truth that can be pursued down a long chain of reasoning and deduction like cops using dogs to find a criminal. It is not the sort of thing that comes from long rational contemplations that result in neat, encapsulated insights you can share with others and have them be entertained and informed.

It comes instead from just opening up your mind and your heart to find out what is there, and learn to accept it and deal with it on its own terms.

And I am learning to do that. It’s slow going but I am learning to accept my mystical, poetic, spiritual side. And that is vital to my becoming the more integrated, solid, together person I want to be.

Compartmentalization is the enemy. Integration is the goal. The walls have to come down. The waters have to be allowed to flow together and merge and find their own level, and this process cannot be controlled, predicted, or directed.

All you can do is let go and let it happen, with the only thing left to you is faith.

Faith that after the waters reside, you will find peace, inner harmony, understanding, and the calmness and stability that you have always wanted.

Faith that this unpredictable, uncoordinated, unplanned, uncontrolled process will lead to greater happiness in life.

Faith that only by letting go of control can you ever hope to truly live the life you want.

Faith is very hard for those of us who want to know where the road goes before we set foot on it. Our rational minds have always been our best protection from the world. To us, emotionally, the unpredictable is virtually identical to the negative because we always assume the worst.

But the world is not against us. Frankly, it doesn’t care about us.

And that means anything is possible.

Dive in. Let go. Find out who you truly are.