Brain Secretions

by Jay Paul 

While meditating, I, like most meditators, frequently find myself lost in thought, perhaps thinking about an old girlfriend or about all the chores I have to do later in the day or my fear that my mental health symptoms will reappear. As I catch myself thinking like this, I most often simultaneously notice my breath. I feel myself inhale and exhale, all the way in and all the way out. My profound sense when this happens is that breath is much more grounded and connected to experience than is thought. What follows are some observations on breath and thought based on this experience and sense.

Breath is wiser than thought. Thought flits and flecks, comes and goes, rarely landing in a solid manner. Even the greatest of thoughts, such as Isaac Newton conceptualizing gravity when the apple hit him on the head, are superficial compared to a single breath. Respiration connects us humans to the rest of nature, to the way bats and rats and lions breathe. It connects us, in its rhythm, to the changing of the seasons and to the waxing and waning of the moon. Breath comes not simply from the lungs, but from below the foot soles, from the earth itself. Every breath is the culmination of conditions and processes going back before birth, to parents falling in love and eventually making the person who breathes, to the parents of parents, and eventually to the billions of years of evolution on this planet. Our breathing is usually effortless, and the effortlessness is the very source of its wisdom: it imperceptibly gathers all time and all space into its rhythm. It even gathers the future, in that a breath is partly anticipation. 

A thought is what Kosho Uchiyama calls a “brain secretion.” Just as livers secrete bile, human brains secrete thoughts. They lubricate and oil our minds. However, we can easily get caught up and entangled in these secretions. We may even stake our identity on them, and fight and die over them. Are they worth all this? Thoughts are to a human being what leaves are to a tree: ephemeral, multiple, and necessary—but not central. A central root and a trunk are much more important than a leaf, although it is, of course, necessary to have some leaves for survival. Humans need thought. Some of our thoughts need to not simply come and go, but need to be ceased upon as concepts, and used to guide us in gathering food, shelter, clothing, and social interaction. But we can take them way too seriously.

Everything in the universe, every being and thing, in every moment, is a culmination of time and space as rich as the breath described above. The whole universe reinvents itself each moment in everything, from subatomic particles to mountain ranges. This richness is beyond infinity and can never be adequately conceptualized. Even Newton’s notion of gravity ultimately proved inaccurate—Einstein showed that, and Einstein's ideas will, of course, ultimately prove inadequate, too. Our ideas are never enough. Our breath is always enough.

I don’t breathe from some idea of self. There is no center from which I breathe. In fact, “I” don’t do the breathing. I am breathed by some force outside myself that moves through me, a force that reaches throughout time and space and is beyond conception. Even calling it a “force” is too much conceptualization, but I need to start somewhere.

Since everything is a culmination of time and space and an anticipation of all future times and spaces, a thought, a brain secretion, is as well. However, what sets thoughts apart from other things is their tendency to turn to concepts and spread. Breath stays just breath. Thoughts can colonize.

Thoughts colonize nature, which I conceive as that outside human intention. To take one example, Niagara Falls has almost been turned into a faucet. 75% of the Niagara River, up from the falls, can be diverted into tunnels where it turns turbines, creating electricity. This is an example of concepts colonizing nature. However, thoughts cannot colonize the tendency of water to move downhill, from, in this instance, Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Thoughts can divert water flow, but they can never wholly refashion it. Only the earth can do this, in some sort of geological shift that would cause Lake Erie to no longer be higher in elevation than Lake Ontario.

Conceptualized thought has spread across the entire planet. City streets are often imposed by Cartesian coordinates in 90-degree corners, rather than conforming to the lay of the land. Agricultural fields, similarly, are rectangles. Because the human population has grown so large, we probably need industrial agriculture, with its massive amounts of fertilizer and irrigation in addition to its lack of biodiversity, in order to feed everyone. But the whole system is precarious. It’s not based on the “wisdom” of nature, which is without goal or intention. It is based on human ideas, which can be wise, but are never as wise as nature. 

Breath connects us to nature. Thoughts emerge from nature, but they have the capacity to alienate us from it. Like most human beings, I spend much of my time in a dream world of thoughts disconnected from the grounding of a tree’s central root and trunk. I mistake these thoughts for reality, when they are puny compared to it. All human conceptions, thoughts, and endeavors are next to nothing compared to nature. It reminds me of the poem “Ozymandias” by Shelley, where a traveler comes across the remains of a statue to a great king in the desert, with nothing around. The desert always swallows human conception and achievement.

Because almost all human beings today are economically and agriculturally caught up in a single, globalized web, humans are vulnerable like never before. Now, when civilization falls, there will not be others to take its place.

We may be thinking our way into extinction. Certainly, nature has its processes and forces, and is indifferent to human hopes, desires, and thoughts. Since nature doesn’t care for our merely human desires and dreams, and it is larger than us, it behooves us to live as much in harmony with it as possible. Nature is, I think, wiser than we are. But its wisdom, to the extent I understand it, is in no way anthropocentric. It is a nonhuman wisdom.

I would like to think that our getting in touch with the profundity of breath, either through meditation or other means, could stave off the dangerous predicament we find ourselves in. I doubt it, though. What I am articulating is a quasi-religious sense of the interconnectedness of all things, although I invoke no spiritual beings. Humans have historically used religion to divide up into groups and hurt each other. It is still going on today. Religion will probably not save us.

When I think over the last 200 years of history, it becomes apparent that the rapid growth of conceptual knowledge has given us one unquestioned good: medical science. Before it, half of all children died before reaching adulthood. However, I would be hard pressed to find any other good. Conceptual knowledge and its colonizing power have given us nuclear weapons, global warming, and the inanity of electronic entertainment such as television and much of the Internet. According to the Enlightenment, the truth, understood as conceptual knowledge, was to set us free. Rather, conceptual knowledge has made us victims of our own knowledge. We are more caught than ever before in webs and webs of dangerous calcified brain secretions. We are more and more rooted in the superficiality of brain secretions and alienated from our breath, which can ground us in nature.

Some argue that the only way to combat the excesses of technology is with more and better technology. They point to green sources of energy and artificial intelligence. They may be correct, but artificial intelligence can be no more than brain secretions on overdrive: no machine can connect to the breath of the universe. They create denatured thought. Human thought, no matter how conceptualized and formalized, has its source in the natural brain secretions that we can’t help but actualize. Artificial intelligence, rather, starts in mathematics, not nature.

Sometimes I think I have become so involved with meditation and my breath because I want to experience the fullness of experience before it is too late. I have the excruciating sense that civilization, at least, will falter some time in the coming decades, probably because of water and food shortages. After much death, perhaps the remaining humanity will break up into smaller groups go on in some fashion. I don’t know. This is pure speculation. Perhaps we will go extinct. Climate change seems to be quite harsh to larger animals.

Perhaps I want to see and be all I can be for myself and others. I am convinced that conceptual knowledge won’t get me there. For now, I have decided that a more bodily based approach may work. So far, I have learned a lot because of meditation, though I have a hard time articulating what it is. Much of it is only sensed and cannot cleanly be put into words and concepts.

There is more wisdom in a single drop of water from the Niagara River ithan in all human civilizations put together.

And what might this drop of water tell you, reader? That this essay is a group of organized and processed brain secretions and cannot be taken too seriously.