Looking back over the extensive archives of this web log, I think one thing above all else is crystal clear: I am my own worst enemy. Except I’m reading a book now that provides a more interesting interpretation. “I” (that is, my consciousness) am not the problem; the “problem” is the way my mind thinks, and I am not my mind. My mind is only a tool of my consciousness, and I have evolved beyond the point where the mind is always a useful tool.

This is a relief akin to the plop plop fizz fizz of Alka-Seltzer. I know it sounds kooky, but that is exactly what I’ve been needing to hear for years. Tools can be shut off. They can be put away. They can be used as needed and not forced into action in every situation. All of my adult life, I’ve been using a buzzsaw to make peanut butter sandwiches. I’ve been using a hammer to clean my teeth. I’ve been using a roofing nail to write the Great American Novel.

It might seem rare that thinking too much is a problem, especially in George Bush’s America, a fantasyland where thinking is virtually illegal. Surely there are those (say, fifty-one percent of the electorate) who need to learn to think at all before they need to worry about what constitutes too much. But for those who have evolved beyond that stage, the mind can turn on a dime. It can be productive, focused, and helpful one moment and muddled, depressive, obsessive, and sabotaging the next. The author of the book I’m reading estimates that eighty-five to ninety percent of the thinking of supposedly intelligent people is not helpful and may be intensely harmful, depending upon the nature of the thoughts. It makes sense. Every brilliant person I have ever met has achieved only a fraction of his or her potential, and ninety percent of them fight actively every day against the misery of their minds. We fool ourselves with the idea that more and better kinds of thinking will lead to happiness, when the solution is to interrupt our ceaseless monologue, to pull back from it, to be quietly amused at the antics of a tool that has run amok, like Apprentice Mickey’s brooms in Fantasia, as we commune with the calmness behind the thinking.

So I have learned that I am not my own worst enemy after all. It’s my mind that’s the culprit. Now I just have to see if my new health insurance covers lobotomies, and I’ll be set for life. Stay tuned.