Strengthen the Self, Accept the Outside World
As Heaven's movement is ever vigorous, so must the gentleman cease not from self-improvement. As the earth's condition is receptive devotion, so must the gentleman carry the world with broad virtue.
— Book of Changes (Zhou Yi)
Lately I have been absorbed in reading works of psychiatry and medicine, and because of years of exposure to clinical cases, this reading is very efficient: I can corroborate the various viewpoints in the books with the cases I have encountered. As I read, door after door of psychological and mental illness is opened, and with each door I seem to hear the wailing of many people.
Psychological and mental illnesses are mostly caused by a combination of genes and early-life psychic trauma. Some traumatic stress syndromes are caused by adult experiences, such as war, rape, abuse, terminal illness, the death of a loved one, traffic accidents, earthquakes, and other major unexpected events. Behind every patient with psychological or mental illness lie many heartrending life stories.
So reading works of psychiatry is not a very comfortable thing; the true cases we see in them are deeply moving. Everyone wants to live like a normal person—normal joys and sorrows, normal loving and being loved. But for many people, for various reasons, the brain has been injured, and pretending to live normally is exhausting.
Most of those long trapped in anxiety, depression, impulsivity, anger, grief, sorrow, mourning, fear, and other negative emotions began life in darkness. They all have a hard shell they cannot break through—a particular primitive defense mechanism that makes them inflexible in adapting to the real environment, readily hurting others or being hurt. Moreover, patients are mostly unaware of this, and doctors must laboriously pry open that shell layer by layer.
Healing them is extremely difficult; they need love and care, and sometimes medication. Merely reading their stories is enough to move a normal person to uncontrollable sorrow; the suffering borne by the patients themselves is even more imaginable.
These diseases have high prevalence in the population, often from several percent to over ten percent. My public account has nearly a hundred thousand readers; by that percentage, the actual number of sufferers of each psychological/mental illness among my readers is considerable. Many have cancer comorbid with these diseases, making their lives even worse.
I first became interested in psychology and psychiatry because I myself went through a painful period. Later, after specializing in cancer, I found that over 50% of cancer patients suffer inner pain. Some patients' psychological/mental illness is secondary, caused by the cancer; others had it before the cancer.
Some patients' psychological/mental illness greatly affects the progression of their cancer. At first I did not pay much attention to this phenomenon, but later clinical practice showed that such cases are not rare. Two lung cancer patients I saw both died within a week of diagnosis from panic attacks triggered by the diagnosis—what we call being scared to death. Some extremely emotional cancer patients, in a state of severe anxiety and depression, see their tumors progress at a visible rate, advancing noticeably each day.
There are also counterexamples. The most typical is a breast-cancer patient with brain metastasis I saved in 2012. She was intensely and emotionally unstable; at an anniversary gathering organized by Sina's cancer-friend circle, overcome by emotion, she suddenly fainted and rapidly neared death. I used a large needle to acupuncture her Shaoshang (LU-11) and Shangyang (LI-1) points and brought her back.
Five years later, in 2017, we met again at a cancer-circle anniversary event in Tianjin. She told me that after being rescued she went back to Beijing for tests and was found to have a large metastatic tumor in the brain. For five years she had received no treatment at all; merely by chanting the Buddha's name daily and controlling her emotions, she had kept the disease stable. Had anyone else told me this, I would have thought it a fairy tale. But she was deeply grateful and sincere to me; after all, I truly owed her my life-saving debt.
As of October 1, 2023, this patient was still alive and still liking posts in my WeChat moments. We do not communicate often, but I imagine she has since had little treatment, controlling her tumor's progression simply through emotional control. When I saw her in 2017, she was a different person from 2012. In 2012 she swung between extremes of grief and joy and was the most emotionally intense person at the event; in 2017 her face was as calm as an ancient Buddha, sitting quietly alone in a corner. The change was astonishing.
So now, from my own direct observation, I have indeed found a relationship between a person's mental state and cancer progression. Usually, these patients with wildly fluctuating emotions have not only been struck by cancer; deep within they also carry many traumas, most from early life. The reason people do not possess an inherently sufficient soul lies in innate genes combined with an unsatisfactory early upbringing. Such people need physical and mental healing together; otherwise they can hardly achieve long survival and good quality of life.
A strong inner self is confident and calm; a fragile inner self swings between inferiority and arrogance. Those who treat others with kindness have received much kindness while growing up; those who treat others with malice have suffered much emotional abuse. Some people are morally corrupt and break the bottom line of humanity, usually the combined result of genes and environment. Some can be saved; others cannot be saved even by all of modern medicine and religion, and can only be kept at a distance, forcibly controlled when they act antisocially.
The overwhelming majority are ordinary people—people with average psychological resilience who can adapt to basic social environments but not to high-intensity, abnormal interpersonal environments. Put with terminal patients, the mentally ill, or criminals, they cannot cope. Because almost no one grows up completely unscathed, the hearts of most people are actually incomplete, just not severely enough to develop mental illness.
But our living environment can hardly be made ideal, so most people inevitably must continually strengthen their psychological resilience to cope with an increasingly complex environment. Life, work, and interpersonal pressures exhaust many people; then some major life change and some collapse.
Natural selection, survival of the fittest. Nature and human society do not treat everyone gently. Living in this world, in the end we can only save ourselves. Strengthen the self and accept the outside world, and we can become a better-adapted being. I use the word "being" rather than "person," which may feel uncomfortable. But in the matter of improving adaptability, we must think at the biological level, not the human level. For many people, anxiety or depression arises precisely because they are constrained by the rules of human society, and many of those rules are absurd and perverse.
Since entering modern society, human alienation has worsened. For example, everyone craves success and fame, which has spawned a large population of narcissistic personality disorder patients, who in turn create tragedies in their families. Frustrated outside, they come home and lash out at their spouses or children; their unstable emotions directly affect their partners and offspring, plunging them into anxiety and repression. If we revere this perverse human culture, we are far from happiness.
Thinking at the biological level, we need only the basic conditions for survival; we need not achieve great success, need not force ourselves or our children to be outstanding, need not look up to the high-status, nor look down on the low-status. Piercing through the deception of this social convention takes only one sentence: everyone is just a living being passing through the process from birth to death in nature, an identical journey we all must take, no one higher than another.
The hierarchy concept is the very basis narcissists live on. Their children are often tormented by this hierarchy drilled into their brains from childhood; when they fail to meet parental expectations, they feel deeply inferior, yet sometimes become pathologically arrogant like their parents, swinging back and forth, emotionally unstable, having inherited some of their parents' traits. They may grow into narcissistic, borderline, or paranoid personality disorder patients. Without a good doctor to treat them, their psychic pain accompanies them for life, even driving them to suicide.
So humanity is a very foolish species, and much of human culture is pure dross; very few popular opinions withstand scrutiny. Only with a confident, strong spiritual core can we avoid being swayed by convention. Fortunately, almost everyone can develop such a core. For some it is innate; for others, good early upbringing gives a stable core for life. For those with flawed genes and poor early upbringing, later learning can reshape their cognition, and eventually they too can attain a stable, strong spiritual core.
The evolution of human civilization has produced a great many psychological and mental illnesses. A little anthropology makes it obvious that in many primitive tribes we mock as culturally backward, people are far happier than moderns. For instance, in some indigenous societies on the Pacific island of Samoa, crime is virtually nonexistent, antisocial personality disorder does not exist, and depression and suicide are almost unknown; people get along in remarkable harmony. The reason is that they lack the many discomfiting perverse cultures of societies that fancy themselves highly civilized—people are turned into demons by such perverse cultures.
I now pay little attention to online popular culture. With respect, over 90% of it can be regarded as spiritual garbage. If a person wallows in this garbage and feeds his soul on it daily, he will only poison his own mind. Deep reading and deep thinking are what truly foster mental growth; every day a person should converse with his own soul.
I have formed the habit of thinking while walking. Whenever I feel depressed, I walk along the tree-lined paths behind the park or my residential compound. As I walk, the depression dissipates. If a psychic blow is especially hard, I walk until my mood settles before going home. This method works well for me.
Setting aside time each day away from the crowd is essential; crowds are mad and ignorant. The French sociologist Gustave Le Bon wrote in The Crowd that once a person sinks into a group, he loses his reason. But long-term isolation is also undesirable; it makes us self-enclosed. To remain a clear-headed person in a crowd, one must cultivate the habit of observing the group independently.
These are the ways I raise my reason and happiness. I move through the secular world, but as the TCM classic Huangdi Neijing (Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor) says: "Let his appetites and desires accord with the world, yet harbor no resentment or anger. In conduct he does not seek to separate himself from society; in his bearing he does not ape the vulgar. Outwardly he does not weary his body in affairs; inwardly he is free from anxious cares. His aim is contentment and ease; his achievement is self-possession. His body is not depleted, his spirit is not dissipated." In short, this passage tells us not to be led by the nose by the secular world, not to be drained by convention. Only by not following the crowd, refusing to keep stimulating our desires and emotions, can we attain true inner peace. Otherwise, the restless outside world affects us at every moment.
We cannot expect the outside world to change for us; we can only strengthen our inner selves. But there is also no need to fight the outside world every day—that state of warfare only drives us into another extreme and madness. Accept everything in this world, let nature take its course, be an outsider and onlooker, do not eat the spiritual garbage with the crowd, do not go mad with the crowd—and we are light.