I had almost given up on my friend Nick's blog, even threatening to take it off of my sidebar if he didn't post something new soon, when I see that he's put up a very interesting post about anxiety, the animal kingdom and the human mind. I also see that the post went up way back last January 29, which either means I hadn't visited for a while, or he's taken advantage of the miracle of post-dating (as I'm doing here).

But anyway, one of his points is that the human mind, with its ability not only to think, but to think about thinking, creates neuroses and anxieties unknown in the animal kingdom. "When a zebra is being chased by a lion," he notes, "its body shuts down all non-essential systems and puts all the energy into getting away. When the chase is over, things go back to normal. Because zebras don't sit around all day worrying about the next lion attack, their bodies don't stay in flight mode. Hence, no zebra ulcers."

Obviously, we humans spend a lot of time worrying about lion attacks or the equivalent thereof, which is the source of much of our suffering. The Buddha saw this, pointing out that we create most of our own suffering. Yes, we will get old and die, but right now, this very instant, you're mostly likely not dying (if you are, in fact, dying as you read this, I won't mind at all if you skip the rest of this post for now and tend to your demise).

Zebras may get eaten by lions from time to time, but in the meanwhile, they don't torture themselves getting all neurotic about the next attack.

When I travel, I often worry about my house getting broken into and burgled, although there's not a thing I can do about it from my Holiday Inn or whatever. I sometimes get upset about an argument that I might theoretically have at work next week, even though it's the weekend, my opponent is nowhere around, and there's no rational reason to really believe that the argument will ever likely occur. The Buddha once said that if someone tells a lie about you and you get upset about it, it's as if they threw a spear at you and missed, but you pick up the spear and start stabbing yourself with it.

The mind doesn't make the body sick, because mind and body are one. When something's wrong with your stomach, it may produce acids and other secretions that are intolerable to other parts of the body and make you sick. When something's wrong with your mind, it may produce thoughts and ideas that similarly make you sick. And when something's wrong with your body, it could make something go wrong with your stomach or your mind, which further affects your body and so on in a downward spiral.

Mind and body are not two things - they are one. It often doesn't feel that way, it often feels that our mind merely resides in our body, but the brain is just another organ, and just as the spleen squirts out digestive juices or whatever it is that a spleen does, the body squirts out thoughts, and we are not our thoughts any more or less than we are our bile fluids.

Zebras know this. Baboons show some evidence that they're starting to forget this important truth. Nick points out that researcher Robert Sapolsky uses a blow dart to anesthetize baboons he has been observing and draw vials of blood. He analyzes the blood to track the levels of various stress hormones. Armed with his lab data and field observations about their social behavior, Dr. Sapolsky has mapped out the linkages between social situations, stress, low-level bodily processes, and the resulting impacts on overall health.

Of course, I wonder how much he takes into account the stress caused to baboons by a scientist armed with blow darts who anesthetizes one of the tribe each day. "I hope I'm not next. Where is he now, anyway? Wait, what was that sound? Was that him? Shit, I don't want to be caught next. . . ."

Poor baboons.

Anyway, Nick's point is that we choose how we react to our surroundings, and those choices make all the difference between a healthy, fitful life and a life of anxiety, stress and its consequent effects on our health.

A point I totally agree with. For me, zazen is a technique for directly realizing how most of my perceived world, with its supposed threats and dangers, imagined insults and attacks on my pride and ego and so on, is all just a product of my mind. If we create our own worlds, why do we create one so hostile to ourselves?

(Let your mind relax for a few minutes. Be aware of what is actually happening in this very moment, not what your baboon mind imagines might could happen. Drop your anxieties and fears and prejudices and hostilities and see what your real nature is like underneath all of that. Interesting, no?)