Deep Thinking and Spiritual Awakening
Every day each of us thinks about many things, but these everyday thoughts are superficial. For a normal person, superficial thinking is enough: they are healthy, work goes well, life is happy, and they have no interest in thinking; they do not need to think for a living, and they can be happy without much thinking.
In fact, such people are very fortunate. Needing no overthinking means not straining the brain; this is the best state in life, the state of a young child whose brain has not yet matured, the state of returning to simplicity. A few people reach this state through later training, shutting down some functions of their brain and returning to life itself; they live more happily.
But life cannot be perfect, and everyone inevitably encounters misfortunes; most people sooner or later must think about deep questions of life.
Deep thinking in the life sciences is important for two kinds of people: those who suffer mind-body pain, and those who help others resolve their mind-body pain — the latter are usually the former as well, just as the old Chinese saying goes, a long illness makes a good doctor. Every healing art for body and mind was originally invented by people trapped in disease. Those who suffer mind-body pain need to liberate their imprisoned souls; they awaken their souls through thinking, which helps them be reborn and regain health.
Deep thinking differs from everyday thinking. Deep thinking requires the thinker to concentrate, and even to use literature and deep observation of particular phenomena to make difficult judgments and logical inferences. Not only that, but afterward one must rigorously calculate and argue for one's conclusions. Without this process of calculation and argumentation, thinking tends to produce not correct cognition but specious talk or new prejudices. That is why some people become more stubborn and extreme the more they read, though this is relatively rare; for most people, reading is beneficial. A person who is stubborn and extreme may simply not have read enough or broadly enough, and various parts of the brain have developed unevenly.
Most of our diseases and sufferings come from erroneous cognitions. These wrong cognitions lead to many bad thinking and behavioral habits, which eventually cause our bodies and spirits to be plagued by disease.
Take a brilliant writer like Hemingway, who mistakenly believed he was worthless and his life had no value. This led him to suffer terribly from depression; even after electroconvulsive therapy he could not free himself from the entanglement of this false cognition, and ultimately ended his life with a pistol. Medically, Hemingway had fallen into delusions of worthlessness, related to damage to his thalamus. Many depressed millionaires who are rolling in money believe they are poor and worry that their descendants will have no food to eat, sparing no effort to accumulate wealth, even begging in the streets; medically this is called delusion of poverty.
People addicted to alcohol find all kinds of reasons to drink. They persuade themselves that drinking is not without merit, saying it helps blood circulation, even quoting Chinese medicine that "wine is the chief of all medicines"; they also try to convince their nondrinking companions. Not until they develop cirrhosis or liver cancer one day do they heed the doctor's warning and stop drinking.
Smokers, too, can find all sorts of reasons to defend this bad habit; for instance, they will say that if they did not smoke, things would be even worse — that troubles accumulating in the heart, without cigarettes to dispel them, would turn into depression.
In fact these wrong cognitions and behaviors arise because they have developed addictive behavior, the result of damage to their hippocampus. They cannot escape cigarettes and wine; they may well know the harms, but cannot quit, and so they find ways to rationalize their behavior. Pure logical thinking is always prone to error, which is why we say practice produces true knowledge. One can always find a plausible justification for any wrong conclusion. The debating skill of addicts and psychiatric patients is sometimes formidable; they can leave a normal person who speaks clumsily speechless.
Usually it is exhausting to communicate with people who have brain damage. Unless you are a professional psychiatrist who understands the thinking patterns of various brain-injured people, you will find dealing with them painful. You will also feel wounded, because their speech is sometimes aggressive, and they may show a lack of empathy and emotional flatness.
The process of deep thinking is a process of finding one's own problems and awakening one's soul. Generally, people do not easily notice their own problems; they need someone beside them to point them out. But many people lack the quality of being open to good advice; they have not been trained to accept others, so they react defensively to correction. Any criticism sends them into fight-or-flight mode; when they hear criticism, their adrenaline surges and they easily fall into heated argument. Many times in life we see this: the well-meaning advisor feels deeply hurt because their good intentions are misinterpreted, and may even be attacked. This leads many people, as adults, to become increasingly taciturn, taking silence is golden as a mantra.
If we wish for our souls to awaken, we must consciously address our excessive defensiveness. This can be done through training. Before talking with someone, prepare yourself mentally for possible criticism; people are better able to accept bad things they have anticipated. Then, when a critical voice actually arises in the conversation, we will not react so strongly. This is a very simple cognitive-behavioral training method that can be used to address all kinds of psychological problems; the cognitive and behavioral therapies of psychological counselors are built on this principle.
I engage in deep thinking periodically. Every year there are one or several stretches of days when I become obsessed with thinking through a problem and read extensively; during these periods my writing flows freely and the articles I write are noticeably deeper. Because there are diseases I cannot solve, I need to read the literature to understand them. This concentrated reading helps me form a comprehensive and deep understanding of a problem; the cases I have encountered in real life are chewed over once or several times in my mind. I cannot say that such deep thinking necessarily finds answers, but compared with everyday superficial thinking, it does bring me closer to the truth.
I also analyze my own behavioral habits in depth, using the literature to study and know myself more deeply. When we know ourselves, we can predict our own behavior better and have greater discernment of possible errors. When we know ourselves more deeply, we can identify the mistaken prejudices accumulated in our minds and sweep them out, becoming a new person.
These are the benefits deep thinking has brought me. For a period I was tormented mentally — specifically, in late adolescence, when physiological and psychological factors mixed together, I experienced many mental abnormalities. For example, in high school I had a persistent delusion that I was burdened with terrible sin, and I fantasized that I had killed someone. I kept telling my classmates and friends that I was a murderer, and suffered greatly over it. Later I saw the same case in Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, in which a person who is not the murderer voluntarily goes to the police and confesses to having killed the old pawnbroker woman the protagonist killed. Later, after I studied psychiatry, I learned this is called delusion of crime, a distorted psychology arising under excessive mental pressure.
Fortunately, my relatives, friends, and teachers all loved and cared for me. They simply thought my thinking and behavior were strange; and I think most of them actually understood that I was experiencing mild mental derangement under excessive psychological pressure. I say mild because this derangement did not greatly affect me: my grades were excellent, and I was especially good at solving difficult math and physics problems. Most of the time I communicated with classmates and teachers without trouble.
My mentor told me at the time that after going through life's great joys and sorrows, I would achieve great enlightenment. He was always sparing of words and unwilling to say more, knowing that only I myself could unlock the difficulties in my heart. So every week he carefully selected a dozen books, sometimes dozens, carried them to the classroom, and placed them on my desk. He also brought extracurricular reading for other students, but he brought me the most — I alone took over 90% of the extracurricular books he brought. He never dictated what students should do; he simply let us choose from among the books he brought whatever we liked to read. He was the best teacher at teaching I have ever known; afterward I met many good teachers, but none so skilled at instructing and inspiring students to think deeply. I can now say that I am simply repeating, again and again, the method he taught me.
In my career I have met many psychiatric patients, or people plunged into mental distress by major illnesses like cancer and stroke; sometimes I chew over my own life experiences for inspiration. I am fortunate that at the age when I nearly slid into the abyss I met a good teacher, who opened the door of wisdom to me, pushed me into the hall of wisdom, and let me find my own way to liberation through deep thinking. Aristotle said, "I love my teacher, but I love truth more." For me this should be reversed: I would say, "I love truth, but I love my teacher more." Truth is endless; today most of the truths Aristotle discovered have been proven wrong. He thought he loved truth, but he loved only prejudices. What truly helps us more is the guide of our soul; toward truth we may need to maintain lifelong skepticism, but there is no need to doubt sincere human love.
It has been more than twenty years since I left university. One day a teacher from my university said to me: Zhiyuan, knowing that you are doing well now makes me deeply relieved, because he had long worried that I would not be able to live a normal life. For a period I was indeed puzzling; my university teachers could not understand why this student, who was not untalented and loved reading and writing, should become mentally deranged. Now I know this is because, in the rapid development of the brain, under the influence of real-world factors (such as poverty and disease), development fails to proceed in balance.
The causes of most psychiatric disorders are related to this. If, during upbringing, they can receive good care — wise guidance and sincere love — even if they are once in a dangerous state, they will eventually integrate, and may even become geniuses. Unfortunately, many people in this world lack such opportunities, which is why some ultimately self-injure or die by suicide due to mental derangement. Those who burn off their own fingers to offer to the Buddha are such people. I believe the Buddha, so compassionate a figure, would never have wanted anyone to burn off a finger or cut off an arm in worship of him. As for the mass suicides of monks that Xuanzang recorded witnessing on his journey west, those were even less what the Buddha would have wished. These people who self-injure or kill themselves are, in modern medicine, mostly moderate or severe depression patients suffering from delusions of sin.
I am full of love for this world and compassion for the suffering of all living things. Einstein said the beauty of the universe lies in its being comprehensible. When we think deeply regularly, accumulate profound understandings, and grasp the logic behind the behaviors of this world, we cannot help but develop compassion, longing for a world full of love and peace. We can hold an attitude of understanding and compassion toward ourselves, others, and the world, and ultimately reach deep reconciliation with self, others, and the world.
Human mental development has something in common with mathematical calculus — Feynman called calculus the language of God. But I should note that Feynman was an atheist; when he said God, it was only a metaphor. What he really meant was that calculus is the language of the universe.
Calculus has two steps: division and integration. Division simplifies complex problems; in mathematical terms, it involves infinitely fine subtraction to quantify the differences between parts — this is differential calculus. Integration, on the other hand, combines infinitely many simple problems into complexity; it is the infinite addition of mathematics, integrating the divided parts back into the original whole — this is integral calculus. Our brains also develop in blocks, asynchronously or synchronously, eventually integrating into a coordinated whole; the principle is no different from calculus.
If I were not studying medicine now, I might be a mathematician or physicist, because in middle school those were the two subjects I was most interested in and best at, essentially scoring full marks, and my math teacher even mistook me for a math prodigy. Looking back, my performance in math in high school was indeed such as only a few mathematical prodigies could attain.
Now that I study medicine, I find that the development of the human brain may ultimately be solvable only through calculus, if we are to find the correct answer. Do not be surprised: many laws in biology are simply mathematical problems. For example, Mendel's laws of inheritance are simple math problems involving one-half raised to the nth power. Because we humans, as sexually reproducing organisms, are diploid, we inherit half our genes from each parent; when these alleles combine, it is like a permutation and combination problem in mathematics.
The complex neurons in the brain keep firing, producing magnetic phenomena and chemical reactions; the laws governing their operation must conform to mathematical laws. It is just that in this field no genius like Maxwell has yet appeared, so we cannot yet reveal the ultimate rules of human brain development.