Who is that Needs More? The Bell Rings by Itself

I just finished publishing my new book, The Unborn Mind. And it got me thinking, we spend our lives accumulating. Money. Degrees. Titles. Houses. Experiences. Recognition. And now, increasingly, years.

Recently I read a National Geographic article about the rapidly expanding science of longevity, and not too long before that I attended a Deepak Chopra Peak Living conference here in Lake Nona, where much of the conversation revolved around optimizing the body—biomarkers, supplements, peptides, restorative therapies, sleep, exercise, biological age.

I find the science fascinating. I am a physician; of course I would rather prevent disease and live twenty additional healthy years than not. But somewhere amid all this optimization, I noticed a wonderful irony. We can become so concerned with living longer that longevity itself becomes another source of stress. Measure the sleep. Check the glucose. Improve the VO₂ max. Take the supplement. Consider the peptide. Check the cortisol.

And then worry about the cortisol.

There is a point at which longevity can become a rather extraordinary Pyrrhic victory: accumulating more years while becoming increasingly preoccupied with preventing their loss. We risk spending our lives trying not to die. 

But perhaps longevity is only the newest version of a much older human project. We accumulate wealth, accomplishments, possessions and experiences because somewhere beneath them lies the promise: When I have enough, I will finally be secure.

Yet enough never quite arrives.

Zen asks the question we almost never ask:

Who is accumulating all of this?

We instinctively answer, I am. But who is this I that can never quite have enough?

That question lies at the heart of my book, The Unborn Mind: Brain, Self & Stillness. Through medicine and neuroscience, something peculiar becomes visible. Change memory and the continuity of the self changes. Alter dopamine and desire changes. Change culture, chemistry, stress or attachment and the person we confidently call “me” changes with them. What appears to be a fixed owner begins to look more like a process assembled moment by moment. As I write in the book, perhaps doership is “less like a commander and more like a conclusion.” 

Mansucript Final.pdf

And that suggests a more unsettling reason why there may never be enough.

We are endlessly trying to satisfy and secure an owner whose existence we have never stopped to examine.

Zen does not tell us to stop living. Make money. Accomplish things. Travel. Love. Exercise. Take care of the body. And if science safely gives us another twenty years, take those too.

Just don’t ask any of these things to make you permanent.

Because there would be something terribly ironic about extending life while forgetting to live it—a man so busy lengthening the road that he never notices the landscape.

In the epilogue of The Unborn Mind, I end with a Zen image: “The bell rings by itself.” Life is already happening before the narrator arrives to say I am doing this. 

Perhaps, then, the most consequential question is not How much can I accumulate?

Not even How long can I live?

But:

Who is it that needs more?

Do not answer too quickly.

The silence before the answer may be what you have been looking for all along.