Thinking Doth Make It So. Not.

When Hamlet's old chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, come to find out what’s troubling him, Hamlet tells them Denmark is a prison. They say that if Denmark is a prison, then so is the whole world. He responds, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking doth make it so.” I would argue that it’s feelings, generated by your entire body, that govern whether an experience is good or bad.

The brain is the mouthpiece of your ego, the one you put up in public places, to speak a highly processed and edited version of your truth. A comparison comes to mind from a time when I considered becoming a Catholic so participated in the initiation classes. I asked the priest if the Pope is closer to God than me. The priest responded, “ No, he just has a job to do.” The brain is an administrator, perhaps in some ways a leader, but like any successful leader, must listen to the murmurs of the surrounding system, and deliver good judgment that supports and empowers what the system is doing anyway.

Many years later, I woke up one morning after several years of disruption in my life, with a motto in my head, which I promptly wrote down on some cheery tiny notepaper. It read, “ The heart leads – follow it. The head delivers – do it.” The best leaders I know, in fact, deliver service to the people who believe in them.

Self-deception: We are inundated with variations of good advice on social media to BE positive. I feel one doesn’t just BE positive. In other words, I am not sure WE, the “we” inside our heads, control this whole ship of experience. In my experience and observation, I don’t believe you just tell yourself, “Have a good attitude. It will change everything.” Your gut is an intelligent and sensitive child, and knows you have little doubts lurking down in there.

These aphorisms that abound also imply that things must change, that there is something wrong with the way they are, or, more often, the way we are.

What if we take the position that everything is alright, and we are perfectly fine individuals? Suddenly, our gut, our system, looks up expectantly. “ You finally get it.” Can our brain then choose actions that support us, just as we are today? I am beginning to think it is our job to be happy - way down in the gut, in how we spend our “one precious life” as Mary Oliver aptly captions this sprawling saga. When I was growing up this construct was ridiculed as self-indulgent tripe. Perhaps that is why it has taken me so long to become at ease with myself and as Oliver writes in the same poem, “my place in the family of things.”

When things are not right inside or out: We learn the really big lessons of life not from proverbs or memes, but from experience. We find ourselves in an intolerable work environment or a suffocating relationship, and can name all kinds of external causes. Ultimately, it is our reaction to the situation that aggravates us. Someone else may be perfectly at ease in the same situation. While Buddhism offers the idea we must detach our thinking, I feel the relief from angst is not in the head.

For example, in “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex”, Woody Allen and Louise Lassiter, a couple, tell their respective therapists about the frequency of their sexual relations. It’s the same sex, the same number of times, but the relating of it is fraught with emotion and reaction. This idea is crystallized by Maya Angelou who writes, “ People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Attitude originates in feeling, not in thought.

As for problems and dis-ease within, we have a propaganda machine inside us that inundates us with subliminal messages like, “you really are not up to the demands of this job”, “ no wonder you aren’t respected by your partner, you don’t respect yourself AND YOU KNOW WHY”. The only way to stifle the deluge of negativity is to soothe your entire emotional autonomic nervous system. Do what makes you happy. As St. Augustine wrote, “ Love God and do as you will.” I’d rephrase this in a less metaphysical way, to accommodate this physical body that holds us – “Make adjustments in your actions, ‘til your gut says you have it right.”

This may involve lying on a beach, but tell your inner parent to relax, this isn’t forever, that you will get to work. Once you have calmed yourself, you will want to go and grow again. I heard a funny phrase called “spiritual re-parenting” which refers to treating yourself as your inner child requires to flourish. Treat that kid nice.

There are a lot of proverbs and quotes out there, and I actually remember and refer to many of them. They’re based on collective wisdom, experiential big data, millennia of lessons learned. They’re true, but we still have to add our own data points to human history. I’m suggesting that our contributions are not going to come from our heads, that the head only voices what the body knows. My variation, on my assembled chorus here, my solo note in response to Hamlet’s cry that it is thinking that confines or frees us is, “The heart leads, follow it. The head delivers, do it.”