August 04th, 2024

The Atemporal Apple: Abstraction as Adamic Sin, or

​                   at least the Cause of Ulcers

There’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while called, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by primatologist Robert Sapolsky. You can probably guess very roughly what it’s about based on the title alone, without even having to read the summary. Notwithstanding that, here’s a very thumbnail sketch of the book, as summarized in another book I’m currently reading about meditation: When we lie awake at night—or when we’re walking or standing in line—and we worry, say, about getting a disease—stress hormones are released. These are the same hormones released when animals face down a threat, the famed “fight or flight” hormones designed to help an animal escape or defend itself.
These hormones are obviously necessary to help keep one alive. In the crude formulation of boxing trainer Cus D’Amato, “Fear is what helps the deer cross the street.” Fear might also be “the mind killer,” as per Frank Herbert and his famed creation Paul Atreides, but sometimes the mind needs to be killed, or at least shut off. Or at least parts of it need to be turned off.
The only problem with this response is that when it’s constant, it begins to have deleterious physiological effects on a creature. It isn’t as simple as saying that if we worry too much about getting cancer, we’ll get it, but there is a correlation between worry and ill health. One’s predisposition to this is affected not just by genes or environment, but the interaction of both, in ways we don’t understand.
So far as we know, this ability to worry about a threat even while it’s not present is a uniquely human feature. There are ultimately limits to what ethologists can do now to understand animals, though that could change in the future. So far as we know, though, here is the state of affairs regarding the distinction between us and the other animals:
A zebra (probably) cannot be grazing among its fellow zebras in a dazzle on a safe patch of Serengeti then suddenly think, “Crap, I hope no leopards show up.” The leopard must show up first for the stress hormone to be released. The African who drives a jeep full of tourists through that same Serengeti can, however, can think “Crap, I hope some leopards show up,” because he gets better tips on those tours where they do. And the thought alone can give the driver ulcers, or at least contribute to their formation.
As much of a pain in the ass as is this atemporal abstraction is—a uniquely human one—I think it’s also a uniquely human blessing. It’s all in how one uses it, controls it or allows themselves to be controlled by it. One can think about what can go wrong before giving a presentation, tie their stomach into knots and end up bombing as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. One can also put that faculty for atemporal abstraction to work, catching a telepathic buzz as they read a book about a fictional protagonist written by a long-dead author. The foregoing is actually kind of miraculous if you stop and really think about what’s happening.
This is not to say that we’re the only ones capable of tricking ourselves with our imaginations. The “mirror neurons” we know are involved in everything from jump scares when we watch horror movies to arousal when watching porn were first discovered in macaques.
But even as regards the motor neurons, the stimulus must be before the eyes of even our closest cousins whereas we can induce arousal solely via imagination. According to Colin Wilson in his book, “Origins of the Sexual Impulse,” humans are the only animals who masturbate without external stimuli. Monkeys masturbate all the time—as people who work at zoos will tell you—but it’s while the target of their amorous intent is within sight. The only exception Wilson made (in his admittedly outdated and unscientific study) was for the stickleback fish. Wilson claimed that if the female was not around to perform her portion of the “waggle dance,” the male would perform both male and female parts. After this, he would commence releasing millet and hope that it passed downstream to land on the receptive roe of some female.
That’s a far cry from us, though, who can use sex as an end in itself, completely untethered from its reproductive purpose. Wilson talked about this, too, in “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders.” Here, he argues we can use this abstraction not just to cop a boner, but to use said-boner to transcend body and even mind, though there’s something Thelemic about that latter supposition. Sex not just as “intellectual rocket fuel,” as Wilson termed it, but as tool of religious ritual and even moral transgression.
The point, though, is that this faculty can be used as much as we can allow it to use us. And whether it’s used for good, for neutral ends, or evil purposes is also all on us.
Many times while meditating—actually every time—I find distracting thoughts intruding. Rather than trying to clear the slate of my mind (which never works), I begin to observe and catalog the thoughts as they come. I notice that when I taxonomize them in this way, they tend to lose some of their sting.
During the day, while walking or driving, I might get hit with the thought, “You’re a failure as a writer,” and it will lay me low. The same thought can come while meditating, and rather than experiencing the attendant emotion, I simply watch the thought passing by. “There’s the ‘You’re a failure’ thought floating around in the old brain box,” I’ll think.
This practice is certainly holistic, reducing the thought from something that strikes like a tattoo needle etching into my skin to a mere palimpsest written on a blackboard. Does this practice lower my chances of cancer? It might, but there’s a limit to how much good it can do if say, I live near a toxic dump or my genes predispose me toward cancer, anyway.
I’ll try not to worry about it, and if worry I must, I’ll try to “watch” the worry while meditating rather than just letting the worry shove me around. One meditation guru likes to say you can either think your thoughts or have your thoughts think you. Objectively and without context, that sounds crazy. Considering what we’re talking about here, it only sounds crazy like a fox.
I have my work cut out for me, especially now, where even the most cursory meditation—simply removing temptation to stimulation and distraction—is everywhere. There’s mounting evidence that our myelin sheaths—controlling neural message strength and connection, and thus thought—are becoming thinner. This is especially deleterious for attention spans, making it much easier to allow us to be driven by our worries rather than to examine them and thereby neutralize them.
Whether it’s just blueshifting light from our various LEDS devices bombarding our suprachiasmatic nuclei or whether it’s something more or something else is debatable.
I’m not going to tell others to abstain from using the internet or fiddling around on their cellphones, as I know that’s not going to happen. Try to limit the use to certain times, though, and counteract it with at least some meditation, whatever modality you prefer.
It could ultimately keep you from getting cancer, or at the very least get more and more meaningful work done throughout the day.