My digestive issues sorted themselves out for the most part. No more trouble in the engine room, at least for now. Trying to remember to take things slow and careful, but it’s not easy when you are accustomed to eating in front of Netflix and not thinking about it.

So I end up inhaling my food. Apparently, that is my default form of eating. If I remember, I can eat like a human being, if not, I might as well be the vacuum cleaner elephant from the Flintstones. Harsh.

I will do my best to chill with the food Hoovering. I just have to pay attention to what I am doing.

That’s the thing about being an introverted and introspective kind of dude. I have such a strong preference for inner life versus outer life that I try to do things, actual physical things, with as little thought as I can possibly get away with so it doesn’t sap those precious, precious mental clock cycles.

As a result, we are clumsy and uncoordinated and dreamy and absentminded and distant. A lot of the endemic problems of being a dreamer can be traced directly to this deep prioritization of inner life.

It is also, of course, the source of our greatest strengths. It takes that kind of inner focus to big a great thinker. An extroverted and extrospective person is too busy experiencing and processing external reality to have the mental space free for the sort of deep contemplations, that grand process of slowly integrating all you know together in search of fresh connections, that are required in order to create original visions.

There are the thinkers, and there are the doers. The world needs both. Without the doers, nothing gets done.

Without the thinkers, a lot gets done but it’s all stupid.

And me, I am very very much a thinker. I think it was my way of escaping reality as a child. I retreated into my mind. But not in a Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes or Walter Mitty way.

I just thought about things. To this day, I find it hard to describe the inner workings of my mind. If I am left to my own devices, in a situation where I have nothing to occupy my mind and I just have to sit and wait, my mind definitely turns inward. And I have an inner monologue like everyone else.

And like everyone else, it cuts in and out depending on what my mind is doing at that point. Must people don’t quite realize this, but a mind at rest shifts between what we might call subverbalized thought and periods of no verbal anything at all.

These are the times of truly deep contemplation. It is this state of mind that various forms of prayer and meditation access, as well as a few of the really good drugs. It is often referred to as a clear mind, a blank mind, a mind without thought, and so on.

But that is mistaking the tip for the iceberg. A mind without thought would be dead. Literally… a flatlined EEG is the legal definition of death in most of the civilized world.

What we are talking about instead is a state of no conscious thought. Without the burden of conscious thought, the mind can devote all its CPU to the sort of deep integration that our chattering, nattering conscious minds often make impossible.

Thus, the mind is able to resolve a lot of the conflicts within it, defrag the mental hard drive, clear orphaned processes out of its RAM, and finish processing the backlog of emotions that the conscious mind won’t let it process because they are unpleasant. If the process ever truly completes, the backlog is eliminated, and in my opinion, that’s when you achieve Enlightenment.

That’s why these sort of consciousness free can make a person feel so much better. Sudden you have a brain that works so much better, like a computer with a fresh install, and this, of course, makes you incredibly loyal to the method by which you achieved it. Addicted, even.

Which is great if what does it for you is Thoreau style communion with nature in solitude or transcendental meditation or hours of prayed and fasting.

Not so great if you are doing it will alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk behaviour, or other destructive means.

This is also the secret behind The Zone,. The reason a human being is happiest when they are operating at their full capacity is that this occupies their entire conscious mind and lets the subconscious mind sort things out.

When we operate at full capacity, you reach a state of neurochemical balance between arousal (adrenaline etc) and calmness (oxytocin etc). Happiness, in this case, is having both of those systems turned up to 11, but still in perfect balance with each other.

Back to introversion. Having read this far (thank you!), you might be tempted to think “Well fuck the conscious mind, let’s all just sit down, blank out, and get happy. ”

But that would not work. The mind still needs things to process, after all. It needs stimulation or it goes dormant, as anyone who has been stupefied by a really boring lecture can tell you.

And despite what us introspective types may think, the mind cannot begin to provide enough stimulation for itself. It needs constant input from the five senses in order to stay alive, even if that input is largely ignored by a conscious mind that is too busy exploring its own contents to pay attention to, you know, reality.

Remember, all you strict rationalists, that even stimulation via reading is stimulation via the senses. Even if you lead a cloistered life of Internet and video games like I do, all your stimulation is still via the senses.

So, you know, we still need reality for that.

For now, at least.

Coming to you from his nano-sealed brain chamber, this is your faithful (ish) blogger signing off for today.