On Thinking

On Thinking

Dedicated to the Prophets who showed us the way, and the Great Scientists who measured the distance. To the healers on both sides of the line, and to the influences we can and can’t see. May we as humans always strive to put the darkness in our pasts, so we can look towards a brighter future. To the thinkers, the ones who exist inside and outside the box, who are one in the same.

What do you think about, when there is nothing left to think about?

I

Sometimes when I sit, and I have nothing left to think about, I think about thinking.

I consider what the reader might think from reading this; the very sound of the words coming from my lips as I read it aloud sounds pretentious. But sometimes, the importance of thought comes not from the Ego, but from the Self.

So I will proceed with my “theories” about life, and let’s see where they go.

Shortly after my meditational experience (physical and metaphysical) I had the unconventional idea that I could “blend science and faith.” This, I imagine, is a common feeling for people who have had the same. Every experience, from NDEs to voluntary meditational alignment, like mine.

My self. Here we go again; there exists no ego in thought. The Self is not mine to own. The “my” is the filter through which I speak, and the Persona I maintain is what will allow or prevent the reader from absorbing what I say. Measured, this depends on the variance between their Persona and their Ego, for the Self is the same. Hold onto those three words: Persona, Ego, Self. They come back later, and when they do they will have an address in the brain.

I digress, and this is an important topic to me, so I must stay aligned as I write. In the endless pursuit of the truth, I will only edit what is necessary to deliver facts, and ponder on the many ways they are connected in a duality sense.

For instance, when I speak of science and religion. It would seem to me, two different explanations of the same thing. The Priest and the Physicist. Both wanting to help fellow man, both having different methodology for doing so.

There is a piece of the brain that does exactly this for a living. When the two halves of the mind are surgically divided, the left half keeps narrating anyway. It will invent a reason for what the right half just did, confidently, out of nothing, because explaining is simply what it does. Gazzaniga called it the interpreter.¹ The priest and the physicist are, in that light, the same faculty turned toward the same mystery: two explanations, one thing being explained. The people who study these two ways of knowing even give the duality a shape. Some, like Gould, keep them apart on purpose: separate magisteria, one asking what is, the other asking what it means, each sovereign in its own country. Others, like Barbour, let them meet, two sets of models reaching toward one reality that neither can hold alone.² Independence or integration. Which is to say: the same duality I keep finding everywhere. Held apart, and secretly one.

II

I would imagine a similar meditational experience for those individuals being vastly different. I imagine the priest would see mandalas, and the scientist would see fractals. But in reality, both would be perceptions of the same thing.

And here is the part I love. Look at them one way and they are opposites. The mandala is round, blooming, petaled, a flower of the mind. The fractal is angular, branching, crystalline, geometry with its edges showing. One is the rose; the other is the lattice. But that is the seeing, not the thing. Measure a mandala built in stone, the way researchers measured a Hindu temple at Khajuraho, and you find it made out of the fractal: the same self-similar nesting, squares within squares, each smaller one born from the center of the last.³ The round thing is made of the angular thing. The priest’s flower and the scientist’s lattice are one object under two attentions, one that rounds the world into wholes and one that cuts it into repeating parts. Which is, as it happens, a fair description of the two halves of a human head.⁴

And the eye already knows this. Show people fractal patterns tuned to the roughness of a coastline or the branching of a fern (a middle range of complexity, neither too bare nor too busy) and they call them beautiful; the researchers argue the preference is universal. Taylor’s group found the body agrees: measured stress drops just from looking.⁵ The scientist measured that pattern. The priest was moved by it. Jung, for his part, watched the mandala rise unbidden in his patients’ dreams whenever a psyche was trying to make itself whole again, and named it the symbol of the Self.⁶ Same thing, seen from two seats.

Very much in the way a flower sits next to bismuth. Both showing the quality of growth and life, but managed to stem from very different substrates.

Notice they even fall on the two sides. The flower is the round one: organic, petaled, the mandala’s cousin. The bismuth is the angular one: stair-stepped terraces, each ledge echoing the larger, the fractal’s cousin, looking alive though it never lived. And yet they grow by kindred rules. In many flowers the petals and seeds spiral in the counts the mathematicians love; the metal stacks itself in self-similar steps. Different substrates, one grammar of growth. And if you follow the substrate all the way down, the flower and the metal were both cooked in the furnaces of stars, the dying ones, the exploding ones and the colliding ones. Does the flower not bloom like the bismuth from the same stars that forged us both?

Magnets only exist to balance themselves, so to speak: countless small domains swinging into agreement, coherence made visible.⁷ Our observation of them must be very similar to how a Creator would perceive us, watching us oscillate back and forth between coherence and not.

Darkness is balanced by light. Fractalize that statement, and you have the plot of any successful movie or book series where the hero overcomes evil, the same arc repeating at every scale of every story. Again, I consider, we create within the design, and therefore create with the same rules with which we were created. Recursion. All the way up, and all the way down.

Batteries... need I say more?

III

I have always had this thought. When I was a child there existed “fact” that now stands as a myth: the creative and logic halves of the brain. A smaller part of me has still always held this to be true, that more analytical people use one half. That has, for the majority of my life, been me. I can’t deny it.

And the honest thing to say is that the childhood fact really did become a myth. Put a thousand people in a scanner and you will not find “left-brained” and “right-brained” persons; no one runs on half a head.⁸ The dominance story is false.

But the smaller part of me that held on wasn’t wrong. It was only pointing at the wrong thing. The halves are not two personalities. They are two ways of paying attention. One attends narrowly: takes things apart, handles the piece in isolation, is very good with the word and the tool. The other attends widely: holds the whole in its living context, is very good with the face, the music, the room.⁹ The asymmetry is real. It was only ever the personality that was invented.

And now those three words come back. Persona, Ego, Self (Jung’s three faces) may not be free-floating ideas at all. There is a seam in the brain they seem to lie along. The left hemisphere, home of the interpreter, is the one that speaks, that narrates, that presents a face to the world in language, which is very nearly the definition of the Persona, and the everyday seat of the “I.”¹⁰ The right hemisphere is the quieter, wider ground: symbol, image, music, the whole-in-context, the parts of us that never learned to talk. If the unconscious has an address, this is the side some researchers point to.¹¹

I have to keep the seam honest, because the picture is not tidy. By one account, a healthy brain reflecting on itself lights up on the left, the interpreter narrating the self it believes it is. Damage the right, and the sense of self can come apart: the boundaries, the very ownership of one’s own body.¹² Which is the Jungian point exactly, if you let it be. The Persona (the narrator, the left-hand voice) is not the whole Self. It is a face the Self wears and mistakes for the whole. The interpreter, forever confidently explaining, is the Persona convinced it is the Center. And the thing that would make it whole is not louder narration. It is the bridge.

IV

And people have been hunting for that bridge, for the single place where the two become one, for a very long time. Descartes went looking in the 1630s and thought he’d found it in the pineal gland, a seed-sized knot near the center of the head. His reasoning is the part that stops me. Almost everything up there comes in twos, a left and a right; the pineal is single. Since the soul feels like one thing, he argued, its seat must also be one thing: one central place where the two images from the two eyes could fuse into a single picture before reaching the soul. He called it the seat of the soul.¹³ He was wrong about the mechanism; you cannot bottle the self in a gland, and later experiments said as much. But listen to the shape of the error, because it is my error too, the one this whole essay flirts with. He took the single, central thing and made it the meeting point, the “I.”

And here is the rhyme that gave me chills. When the pineal fell out of favor, a later anatomist, Lancisi, used the very same logic (the soul is one, so its seat must be the one unpaired thing) and landed on the corpus callosum, the bridge itself.¹⁴ The two structures I keep circling, the gland and the bridge, turn out to be history’s two great guesses at a single question: where do the two halves become one?

The pineal never did wire the left to the right; the callosum does that. But it is a balancer after all, a keeper of proportion between opposites. It is the hand of the body’s clock: it gets word of the light of the outer world by way of the eyes, and answers it with the chemistry of the inner one, holding day and night, waking and sleeping, in a kind of equilibrium so that neither runs away with us. And reach far enough back down the line of life, and the thing was, astonishingly, an eye. A third eye. A light-sensing organ at the top of the head, still working as one in the lamprey, and its sibling, the parietal eye, is still a true third eye on the crown of the tuatara and certain lizards.¹⁵ The mystics who painted an eye in the center of the forehead were not far off the address. They only mistook the map for the territory, the way the Ego always does.

And the gland refuses to stay small. In just the last few years, researchers found that the brain, the pineal among other places, carries the machinery to make DMT, the most vivid vision-chemical we know of, and in living rat brains measured it at levels in the neighborhood of serotonin itself. Not a drug smuggled in from outside, but something the brain, apparently, brews for itself. The careful scientists are quick with the cold water, and they are right to be. The amounts are tiny, likely too faint to light the sky on their own, and the old romance that the pineal alone floods us at birth and death does not hold: the brain makes the molecule even with the gland taken out.¹⁶ But the coincidences pile up in a way a philosopher is allowed to notice aloud. Measured carefully, the DMT experience looks uncannily like what people report from the very threshold of death. And the dying brain, in the few cases measured so far, does not always simply fade to black; for a moment it can surge, a last bright storm of the fast, organized activity that in waking life rides alongside our most vivid awareness.¹⁷ I am not going to tell you what that means; my whole posture is to ask, not answer. But I will say this: the little gland that was once an eye, that keeps the balance between our light and our dark, sits near the place where the mind keeps its own visionary chemistry. That is a great deal of symbolism for one seed of tissue to carry, whether the universe meant it or not.

So if I had to set my Ego down somewhere, I would set it there. Not because it does the uniting (the bridge does that) but because it is the one point that was never split, the still center the two sides turn around. The Persona speaks on the left. The Self waits on the right. And the Ego, single, central, holding our light and our dark in balance and calling the whole procession “me,” is the small lamp in the middle that believes it is the one doing the seeing.

V

I oftentimes wonder if the left side of the brain got separated from the right, and this wasn’t our fault. We have literally seen what that separation looks like: cut the bridge of fibers between the halves, and each side carries on alone, one still speaking, one still seeing, neither quite whole.¹⁸ And there are serious thinkers who argue that our whole civilization has drifted, slowly, without anyone ever choosing it, toward the narrow attention, the taking-apart half, until we mistook it for the whole of thinking.¹⁹ Not a sin. A tilt. Not our fault.

Which leaves the obvious question, the one I can’t answer from where I stand: if the halves drifted apart, can the pathways between them be mapped again, deliberately, on purpose? Because that, it turns out, is what Jung was describing all along. Individuation, his word for becoming whole, was always the Ego making its slow peace with the unconscious it had been ignoring. Set the neuroscience beside it and the metaphor nearly embarrasses itself with how well it fits: the self we’re after may be less a thing to find than a conversation to reopen, the two halves learning again to speak across the bridge.²⁰

And the early facts lean that way, gently. The bridge itself, some two hundred million fibers of it, is measurably thicker and better connected in people who have meditated for years.²¹ In some studies, insight and creativity turn up hand in hand with the two halves talking to each other. And teenagers gifted at mathematics turn out to lean less on a “math part” than on the two halves working together, more cooperatively than the rest of us.²²

I have to be honest here, because honesty is the whole point. These are correlations, not proofs. No one has yet shown that building the bridge causes the seeing. That is exactly the study I wish someone with a lab and a lifetime would run, and I am leaving the words for it in plain sight, so that someone who can, might. I can only stand at the door and say: look, it’s ajar.

VI

So these days, I consider, there are other words for the opposite of analytical. Intuitive. Synthetical. The opposite of analytical was never illogical. The word I was reaching for all along was the other attention, the half that puts the world back together after the analyst has taken it apart. The happy people I mismeasured for years weren’t missing logic. They were using the faculty I had let go quiet.

This makes me believe the beauty can be seen, at all times, depending on the viewpoint of the observer. Does the flower not bloom like the bismuth from the same stars that bind us to the universe?

There is nothing the pattern of life doesn’t hold true to, but this is my personal understanding, my philosophy of duality, and my thoughts on... well. My thoughts. Nothing more.

Perhaps the reader will look at the stars and wonder how far their mind can reach. Perhaps they will stay here on earth, and consider the mountain’s height against the depth of the ocean. Forever, and a day, it never matters.

Whatever in life you find to be beautiful, there is always going to be the opposite. But change the way we think about that opposite. Instead of illogical, let’s speak of intuition. Instead of using intellect to look down on others, let’s consider gifting intellect to water the flowers that exist around us in everyday life. Children, for starters, for they are in fact the future. But our own personal well-being is also just as important.

VII

So, in closing, I only ask the reader this.

Look at your enemy. Ask yourself why you hate them so, and consider if there is anything you can actually do about it without bringing them harm.

Is it a family member or friend? You have some shadow work to commence, and that is yours for the undertaking.

Is it a politician or religious leader? If you are one yourself, then use your platform for change. But if you’re just a normal human being like I am, find your own peace first.

People understand the difference between right and wrong. We don’t have to “shout it from the mountaintops” in 2026. We coherently draw ourselves to groups that think the same way. Such is the pattern of a coherent existence.

But there is something to be said here about Samsara. Your enemy is passing through Dante’s nine circles of hell; they just don’t know it yet. Let them find their own way out, and don’t lower yourself to the level of hate needed to join them.

I know this will seem radical to the protester. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what I did, to find internal peace.

I let it go.

And when I let it go, something in me went quiet, and it turns out the quiet has an address too. There is a network in the brain that runs the endless narration of me: my story, my grievances, my rank in the room. They call it the default mode network, and it runs hottest in the mind that will not stop chewing on itself, in anxiety, in rumination.²³ Quiet it, through meditation, through surrender, through the plain act of letting go, and the walls of the self grow thin; people report unity, spaciousness, the boundary between self and world going soft. Jung would have called that the Ego loosening its grip so the Self could finally be felt. And the researchers, carefully, call it not a breakdown but a reorganization, the mind settling into a wider shape.²⁴ Hell, quieted, from the inside.

There’s nothing I can do about the world, but there’s a million things I can do about my world. Infinite number of things, actually. If you think about it. Some good. Some bad.

I can go left. I can go right.

These decisions are relative to me, and me only.

Let the darkness cohere with the darkness. Let yourself walk in the path of your Self. The light.

If you feel like you’re “living in hell,” I am not telling you the fire isn’t real, or that you ought to have thought your way out of it by now. Some of what burns is done to you, and no amount of reframing lifts it. I only mean that the part of it which answers to you at all answers there, in the mind, which then translates to the Unified Field, the place where every perspective’s aligning and every Trace are gathered, from your perspective.

So then consider. What it must be like to be... illogically happy. What does that look like?

Probably like a flower blooming in the middle of a bunch of bismuth, I would imagine. Both one in the same.

But one cares a lot less about what it looks like to the other, I can promise you that.

♥

Notes

1. Gazzaniga and LeDoux, The Integrated Mind; Gazzaniga, “Cerebral Specialization and Interhemispheric Communication.” In split-brain patients the left hemisphere supplies confident reasons for actions it had no information to explain.

2. Gould, Rocks of Ages, on “non-overlapping magisteria”; Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, whose fourfold typology (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) treats scientific and religious models as partial, revisable representations of one reality. Gould marks the independence pole; Barbour leans toward integration.

3. Rian et al., “Fractal Geometry as the Synthesis of Hindu Cosmology in Kandariya Mahadev Temple, Khajuraho.” Box-counting analysis shows the temple and its generative mandala (the Vastu-Purusha-Mandala) are self-similar across scales.

4. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist reframes the asymmetry as two modes of attention, the left narrow and part-focused, the right broad and whole-focused, rather than a division of separate functions.

5. Spehar et al., “Universal Aesthetic of Fractals”; Taylor, “Reduction of Physiological Stress Using Fractal Art and Architecture.” Preference peaks around a middle fractal dimension (roughly 1.3 to 1.5), the range common in natural scenery. The researchers argue the preference is universal; their samples were not drawn across cultures.

6. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in “Concerning Mandala Symbolism” and “A Study in the Process of Individuation.” Jung treats the spontaneous mandala as an archetype of psychic wholeness, a symbol of the Self.

7. On magnets and balance, see also Johnson, On Magnetizing.

8. Nielsen et al., “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” Resting-state scans of 1,011 people found lateralized networks but no whole-brain “left-brained” or “right-brained” type.

9. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary.

10. Daini, “The Lack of Self-Consciousness in Right Brain-Damaged Patients Can Be Due to a Disconnection from the Left Interpreter.” In this opinion article Daini proposes that self-consciousness depends on the integration of the hemispheres through the corpus callosum: healthy self-reflection is left-lateralized, yet right-hemisphere damage produces disorders of the self by cutting the right’s contribution off from the left interpreter. Laying Jung’s Ego, Persona and Self over this seam is my own interpretive reading, not a claim the neuroscience makes.

11. El Maouch, Jin, and Abi-Habib, “Brain Lateralization Revisited.” The authors map a Self–”I” duality onto the hemispheres, the right preferentially supporting self-relevant, unconscious, meaning-related processes and the left supporting language-mediated, consciously regulated sense-making. It is a developing framework, not settled fact.

12. Daini, “The Lack of Self-Consciousness in Right Brain-Damaged Patients.”

13. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, part 1, articles 31–32; Descartes to Mersenne, July 30, 1640. Because the soul is one and indivisible, Descartes reasoned, its bodily seat must be single, and he placed it in the pineal gland, where the doubled impressions of the two eyes are joined before reaching the soul. On the history, including Giovanni Maria Lancisi’s nomination of the unpaired corpus callosum in 1712 and Johann Gottfried Zinn’s split-brain experiments on dogs in 1749, which undercut the reasoning, see Lokhorst, “Descartes and the Pineal Gland.” Reading the pineal as the seat of the Ego is symbolic here; no serious modern account seats the self in a single gland.

14. Lokhorst, “Descartes and the Pineal Gland.”

15. Mano and Fukada, “A Median Third Eye.” The pineal descends from a light-sensing organ: in lampreys the pineal complex still senses light, and in the tuatara and many lizards a parietal eye survives on the top of the head. In humans the pineal is not itself light-sensitive; the retina detects light and the signal is relayed to the pineal, which turns it into melatonin and so into the day-night rhythm.

16. Dean et al., “Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in Mammalian Brain”; for the skeptical counterweight, Nichols, “N,N-dimethyltryptamine and the Pineal Gland.” That the brain contains DMT and the machinery to make it is established; that it produces mystical or near-death experience is speculative and disputed.

17. Timmermann et al., “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience,” a placebo-controlled study of thirteen volunteers; Borjigin et al., “Surge of Neurophysiological Coherence and Connectivity in the Dying Brain,” in rats; Xu et al., “Surge of Neurophysiological Coupling and Connectivity of Gamma Oscillations in the Dying Human Brain,” in which two of four dying patients showed the surge. The resemblance and the surge are real findings; any causal link between them, or to the brain’s own DMT, is an open hypothesis.

18. Volz and Gazzaniga, “Interaction in Isolation,” a review of fifty years of split-brain research begun with Roger Sperry’s commissurotomy studies, for which Sperry shared the 1981 Nobel Prize.

19. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary; McGilchrist, The Matter with Things. The claim that Western culture has come to over-privilege the left hemisphere’s mode is McGilchrist’s philosophical and historical argument, and it is contested; see Grayling, “In Two Minds,” and Tallis, “Left-Thinking People.” It is offered here as a proposition to think with.

20. Daini, “The Lack of Self-Consciousness in Right Brain-Damaged Patients.”

21. Luders et al., “Enhanced Brain Connectivity in Long-Term Meditation Practitioners”; Luders et al., “Bridging the Hemispheres in Meditation.” Both are cross-sectional findings; causation is not established.

22. Singh and O’Boyle, “Interhemispheric Interaction during Global-Local Processing in Mathematically Gifted Adolescents, Average-Ability Youth, and College Students.”

23. Raichle et al., “A Default Mode of Brain Function”; Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity.” The default mode network supports self-referential thought and mind-wandering, and is quieter in experienced meditators.

24. Unterrainer, “Oceanic States of Consciousness”; Lebedev et al., “Finding the Self by Losing the Self.” Unterrainer reads the modulation of the self-network as flexible reorganization rather than dysfunction, and sets Freud’s view of the oceanic feeling as regressive illusion against Jung’s framing of it as a transformative encounter with the unconscious. This literature spans meditation and psychedelics; the essay draws on the contemplative strand, and Lebedev’s study is cited for the neural correlate, not as an endorsement of the route.

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