The Social Animal (52 page)

But wisdom is the sort of quality that eludes paper-and-pencil tests, and Erica felt that she possessed skills in pseudo-retirement that she did not possess even in middle age. She felt she had a better ability to look at problems from different perspectives. She felt she was better at observing a situation without leaping to conclusions. She felt she was better at being able to distinguish between tentative beliefs and firm conclusions. That is to say, she was better able to accurately see the ocean of her own mind.

There was one thing she didn’t experience much—a sense of being vividly alive. In the early days of her career, she’d be flown out to some Los Angeles hotel, put up in a suite by the client, and walk around the rooms giggling at the grandeur of it all. In those days, she would book an extra day in nearly every city she visited to experience the museums and the historic sights. She could remember those solitary walks around the Getty or the Frick, and the feeling of being transported by art. She remembered the special energy of her exalted moods—a night spent getting lost in Venice with a novel under her arm, or touring the old mansions in Charleston. Somehow that didn’t happen anymore. She no longer booked the extra sightseeing days at the end of her trips—there was no time.

As her career got more demanding, her cultural activities got less so. Her poetic, artistic, and theatrical tastes had dropped from highbrow to middlebrow and below. “By the time we reach age fifty,” University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew B. Newburg has written, “we are less likely to elicit the kinds of peak or transcendent experiences that can occur when we are young. Instead, we are more inclined to have subtle spiritual experiences, and refinements of our basic belief.”

In addition, Erica’s work had dragged her in a prosaic direction. She had a great talent for organization and execution. This had pulled her, over the course of her life, to become a
CEO
and a government official. It had pulled her into the world of process.

The number of her acquaintances multiplied over the years as the number of her true friendships diminished. The Grant Longitudinal Study found that people who were neglected in childhood are much more likely to be friendless in old age (in this way the working models submerge and then surface through life). Erica was not solitary. But sometimes she felt she lived in crowded solitude. She was around a shifting mass of semi-friends, but was without a small circle of intimates.

Over the years, in other words, she had become more superficial. She had been publicly active but privately neglectful. She had, over the course of her career, reorganized her own brain in ways that were perhaps necessary to professional achievement, but which were not satisfying now that her drive for worldly achievement had been fulfilled.

She entered retirement beset by a feeling of general numbness. It was as if there was a great battle she had never noticed before, a battle between the forces of shallowness and the forces of profundity. Over the years the forces of shallowness had staged a steady advance.

And then of course the river Styx was coming into view—death, pegging out, the final frontier. Erica did not think this would happen to her or Harold anytime soon. (Surely not. They were too healthy. They each could point to relatives who had lived into their nineties, though of course in reality such comforting correlations mean almost nothing.)

Nonetheless, her older acquaintances were dying at a regular rate. She could, if she chose, go on the Internet and find her morbidity odds—one in five women her age gets cancer; one in six gets heart disease; one in seven diabetes. It was a little like living in wartime; every few weeks another member of her social platoon was gone.

The effect was both terrorizing and energizing. (She seemed to live permanently in a state of mixed emotions.) The rushing presence of death changed her perception of time. Slowly a challenge formed in Erica’s mind. Retirement would liberate her from the forces of shallowness. She could design her own neural diet, the influences and things that would flow into her brain. She could turn to deeper things. Now she could embark on a glorious lark.

Being Erica, she had to write out a business plan for herself. In the final chapter of her life, she wanted to live more vividly. She took out a legal pad and wrote a list of different spheres of her life: reflection, creativity, community, intimacy, and service. Under each category she wrote down a list of activities she could pursue.

She would like to write a short memoir. She’d like to master some new art form, to do something difficult and achieve some competence. She’d like to be a member of a circle of girlfriends who could come together every year to laugh and drink and share. She would like to find some way to teach the young. She’d like to learn the names of the trees so that when she walked through a forest she would know what she was seeing. She’d like to strip away the bullshit and find out whether or not she believed in God.

In the first months of retirement, she had an urge to reconnect with old friends. She had not kept in touch with anyone from the Academy, and almost all of her friends from college had fallen away as well. But Facebook allowed her to remedy all that, and within weeks she was happily exchanging e-mails with friends from decades gone by.

Renewing these old friendships gave her pleasure beyond all reckoning. These contacts aroused parts of her own nature that had lain dormant. She discovered that one of her old college roommates, a southern woman named Missy, lived not twenty-five miles away from her, and one day they arranged to have lunch. Erica and Missy had lived together in their junior year, and though they shared a room, they had not grown particularly close. Erica was frantically busy in those days, and Missy, a premed student, had spent all her time in the library.

Missy was still thin and tiny. Her hair had gone gray, but her skin was still smooth. She’d become an eye surgeon, had a family, recovered from a double mastectomy, and had retired a few years ahead of Erica.

During lunch Missy excitedly described the passion that had transformed her life over the past few years: mindfulness meditation. Erica felt her stomach drop, expecting to hear stories of yogis, spiritual retreats at ashrams in India, and Missy resplendently getting in touch with her inner core—the normal New Age rigmarole. Missy had been the hardened scientist at school, and now she’d apparently gone to mush. But Missy talked about her meditations the way she used to talk about her homework assignments, with the same cool rigor.

“I sit cross-legged and upright on the floor,” Missy was saying. “At first I concentrate on my breathing, anticipating the exhaling and inhaling, and then feeling my body fulfilling my anticipations. I feel my nostrils open and close, and my chest rise and fall. Then I center my thoughts on a word or phrase. I don’t repeat it over and over again, I just keep it in the front of my mind, and if I find my thoughts wandering, I bring them back. Some people pick ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’ or ‘Buddha’ or ‘Adonai,’ but I just picked ‘Diving within.’

“Then I watch to see what feelings and perceptions and images flow into my brain, letting the experience unfold naturally. It’s like sitting still as various thoughts emerge into consciousness. Often in the beginning, I lose focus. I find myself thinking about my chores or the e-mails I have to answer. That’s when I repeat my phrase. After a little while, most of the time, the outside world begins to fade back into the shadows. I don’t even have to repeat the phrase anymore. I don’t know how to describe it. I begin to be aware of awareness.

“My identity, my ‘I-ness’ fades away and I enter the sensations and feelings that are bubbling up from down below. The object is to welcome them nonjudgmentally, without interpreting them. Just welcome them as friends. Welcome them with a smile. One of my teachers compares it to watching clouds drift into a valley. These puffs of awareness float by, and they are replaced by other puffs and other mental states. It’s like having access to processes that are there all along, but are usually unseen.

“I’m not doing a good job of putting it into words, because the whole point is that it is beneath words. When I try to describe it, it seems so stale and conceptual. But when I’m in that state there is no narrator. There’s no interpreter. There are no words. I’m not really aware of time. I’m not telling myself a story about myself—the play-byplay announcer is gone. It’s all sensations happening. Does that make any sense?”

Apparently Missy had found a way to directly perceive Level 1.

“When I come out of the state, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Siegel says it’s like you’ve been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly you turn off the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light on the narrow spot. But gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can suddenly see the whole scene.

“I used to assume that my emotions were me. But now I sort of observe them rising and floating through me. You realize that things you thought were your identity are really just experiences. They are sensations that flow through you. You begin to see that your ordinary ways of perceiving are only a few vantage points among many. There are other ways of seeing. You develop what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind.’ You see the world as a baby sees it, aware of everything all at once, without conscious selection and interpretation.”

Missy said all this briskly over a salad, spearing her asparagus. Her description of mindfulness meditation suggested that in fact it is possible, with the right training, to peer beneath the waterline of consciousness, into the hidden kingdom. The normal conscious mind might see only colors in a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, but perhaps it was possible to widen the view and suddenly be able to see the rest of the actual world.

In fact, neuroscientists—who are generally a hardheaded lot—have profound respect for these sorts of meditative practices. They’ve hosted the Dalai Lama at their conferences, and some of them make their way to monasteries in Tibet precisely because there is an overlap between the findings of the science and the practices of the monks.

It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions.

Andrew Newberg found that when Tibetan monks or Catholic nuns enter a period of deep meditation or prayer, their parietal lobes, the region of the brain that helps define the boundaries of our bodies, becomes less active. They experience a sensation of infinite space. Subsequent research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.” The different religious practices produce different brain states, each of which are consistent with the different theologies.

Brain scans don’t settle whether God exists or not, because they don’t tell you who designed these structures. They don’t solve the great mystery, which is the mystery of consciousness—how emotion reshapes the matter in the brain and how the matter in the brain creates spirit and emotion. But they do show that people who become expert at meditation and prayer rewire their brains. It is possible, by shifting attention inward, to peer deep into the traffic of the unconscious, achieving an integration of conscious and unconscious processes, which some people call wisdom.

Missy glanced up from her salad from time to time, just to make sure Erica wasn’t looking at her as if she were nuts. She was matter-of-fact, but also made clear how much these experiences meant to her. She kept apologizing for the inadequacies of her descriptions, her inability to really put into words what it felt like to perceive things holistically instead of deductively, and the feeling of expanded awareness. She wasn’t sipping on some organic carrot shake while she was talking about all this. She hadn’t gone all Yoko Ono. She was a surgeon, who still practiced part-time, who drove a gas-guzzling
SUV
and drank white wine with lunch. It’s just that she had found a scientifically plausible way to access a deeper level of cognition.

Toward the end of lunch she asked Erica if she would like to come to her next session and try out this mindfulness-meditation stuff. Erica heard her mouth saying, “No thanks, it’s not really for me.” She didn’t know why she answered this way. The idea of peering directly inside herself filled her with a deep aversion. All her life she had been looking outward and trying to observe the world. Hers had been a life of motion, not tranquility. The fact is she was afraid of looking directly inside. It was a pool of dark water she did not want to plunge into. If she was going to live more vividly, she’d have to find another way.

Over the next several months, Erica became something of a culture vulture—diving into the world of the arts with a voracious hunger and her characteristic drive. She read some books on the history of Western painting. She bought some poetry anthologies and found herself reading them in bed before she drifted off to sleep. She bought a CD course in classical music and listened to it while driving in her car. She began going to museums again with friends.

Like most people, life had given her one sort of education. She had gone to school. She had taken such and such management courses, worked her way through various jobs, and learned such and such skills. She had come to possess a certain professional expertise.