By Ted Edlich
If from an early age, you have felt a bit out of place, kind of a “stranger from a strange land,” not easily satisfied with glib assumptions about life, attracted more to those who raised difficult questions and struggled to find answers, and perhaps someone whose investigation of mindfulness meditation practice led to the discovery of a hopeful door into sanity, then head to your nearest bookstore and purchase Mind by Dan Siegel, MD.
Dan is foremost a scientist. He is a psychiatrist, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and postgraduate medical education at UCLA, a student of the brain and neuro research, the executive director of the Mindsight Institute, an author of a bookshelf of publications, and an international rock star speaker and seminar leader on the science of the mind. Siegel has spent a lifetime posing basic questions that at first blush seem obvious, but less so when you have to answer them: What is the mind? Where is it? How does it manifest itself?
His scientific journey at Harvard Medical School began with significant difficulty. He possessed this disturbing habit of being interested in the complexity of the inner world of his patients instead of settling on physical symptoms alone. Though virtually at odds with his professors, it was significant for him to know how people thought and felt, and to understand the inner world of his patient’s experience. After a shaky start, Dan took a year off from medical school. Regaining his footing, he returned and completed medical school training including a residency in psychiatry.
Seeking a scientifically based path toward understanding the mind, Siegel assembled a group of forty academics from a wide range of scientific disciplines and sought an agreement on a scientific based definition of the mind. While there was agreement on the task, the team struggled to find an answer that satisfied everyone.
Many days of discussion passed with no consensus. Fearing the group was on the verge of dissolving, Dan took a long walk by the ocean. Upon returning, Dan proposed that the mind is a self-organizing function of a complex system that monitors and shapes energy and information. The activity of the mind is both conduction, simply taking in what it is receiving, and construction, framing thoughts and concepts that communicate and shape/misshape the data and energy.
Siegel will add that mind has a subjective texture of sensations, images, feelings and that the flow of energy and information creates consciousness, but acknowledges the mind can also be impacted by energy and information of which it is unaware. The definition of the “what” of the mind had found support.
The next question and, perhaps the most significant, was, “Where is the mind?” Historically, the answer had been the mind is the organ inside the skull, the brain. However, since we know now that the information and energy of the mind also come from our body and our neurological systems in the body. Indeed, the body was often in ancient cultures considered the source of wisdom. Even today we speak of “gut” instinct and perceptions. So, Siegel argues that the mind is not only in-skulled but embodied.
Yet, the answer, though true, remained incomplete. Our minds are also monitoring and shaping energy and information from outside our body, in our contact with others and the environment. Strong or weak attachment to others as infants provides both information and energy that play a distinctive role in shaping our minds. The mind is not just in-skulled and embodied. It is also “in-between!” Indeed, the “in-between” is so important a part of our minds that Siegel later claims in his book Aware, that the in-between of the mind is “not just the icing on the cake, but the cake, the dinner, and the desert!”
The importance of this “in-between” is beautifully illustrated by the “in-betweens” in Dan’s life as he writes about: family members, mentors and father figures, scores of academicians and colleagues who contributed on a weekly basis to the understanding the human mind, co-authors and contributors to Dan’s long list of publications, mindfulness teachers Jon Kabat-Zinn and Jack Kornfield, audiences with Pope John and the Dalai Lama, the literally thousands of workshop and seminar attendees who utilized his Wheel of Awareness meditation and provided feedback and scores of clients he has counseled, and singular individuals who have opened up new avenues of inquiry like friend and mystic the Rev. John O’Donoughue who opened up the unanticipated path of the connections between science and spirituality. A rich “in-between,” indeed!
I am reminded of Hans Selye’s closing remarks in his epic book, Life of Stress: “Man is a social being. Avoid remaining alone in the midst of the overcrowded society which surrounds you. Trust people, despite their apparent untrustworthiness, or you will have no friends, no support. If you have earned your neighbor’s love, you will never be alone.” “…nobody want to attack and destroy those whom he depends.” In so doing one creates a “treasure of other people’s benevolence” toward oneself. (p.452)
Yet, the idea that the human mind includes a deeply important realm influenced by people and factors outside the human body is a radical idea in western society that is built on the notion of the sufficiency of the solitary self. Western philosophy was built on Rene Descartes axiom “Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).” Western civilization idolizes the Horatio Algers who are reputed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without help from others. The notion of the solitary self helps to explain why loneliness is a growing problem in our society given to families often reduced to their nuclear minimum and high levels of transiency can further reduce human contact even in the megalopolis where it is hard to be out of sight of others. It also explains how otherwise good people can behave horribly because of the “in-betweens” in their lives, either in the Stanford Prison experiment or the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
The notion that the “in-between” of the human mind plays such a critical role in human development suggests some clear social priorities: Here are but a few. It raises the stakes for the importance of social-emotional learning curriculums in all of our school systems that provide children the tools for enriching the “in-betweens” of their minds. It increases the demand for providing for public safety so that members of our society can connect with those they do not know without fearing that they will be gunned down by their fellow citizens. It increases the priority of diversity in all forms of education so that in a multicultural democracy students will have an opportunity to enrich the “in-betweens” of their minds by greater opportunities for association with others different from themselves. It also argues for providing greater economic, educational, and mental health care supports for families struggling to preserve the family structure so that the children’s mental “in-betweens” are well cared for.
