A deep dive into peace
Why working on your own sanity is a radical act of peace in a world gearing for war
A practical one this week. What can you and I do for peace, while the world escalates its violence? How can we go beyond our public expressions of horror, and really do some peace work in the world?
I will give five serious answers as a psychologist. Because our practical acts are going to matter. This month’s report of the Peace Research Institute Oslo finds that the current level of violence hasn’t been seen since World War II. And, says PRIO: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift. The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.”
We feel powerless in our apprehension of this monster that rises from our collective unconscious every few decades, roaring for blood. Has the leviathan of war surfaced again, to take its tithe? Is there nothing we can do but make ourselves small, and hope that its pitiless eye skips over our own families?
No: there is something we can do. You and I still hold a deep form of power. Working on our own sanity is a radical form of peace activism.
Peace in the world always begins where you are, because you can only put into the world what’s in your mind. Peace ripples outwards, in this infinitely-connected society. From your thoughts, to your family, friends and contacts, and into the reservoir of humanity. There’s nothing better for the world than an extrovert with their shit together, or an introvert whose creative output is full of love. Whether such people are marching in a rally, participating in a peace action, or just ordering coffee, they can’t help doing peace work.
As the war music plays louder in the world, it’s worth remembering this. Peace is just sanity at critical mass. War is just madness in boots.
We can all become much more skilful attenders to our own sanity. When we learn to navigate all the levels of our human reality, with lightness and grace, then our humanity itself becomes a work against war. So, this week’s column is a field guide to the parts of your humanity that light may not yet have reached.
There are five levels of human reality that I deal with in my day job. You will certainly know other ways of seeing, and I will be thankful and happy if you share them in the comments. My profession is not in the business of having the last word.
Let me talk you down through the five levels of human being, one-by-one, so our eyes can adapt. None of these levels is better than another. A person can transform their inner world – and the outer world, too – at any one of these levels.
I will call the levels of human being after the five layers of the ocean, named for the light that penetrates to each depth. We will descend from the sunlight level of our being, to twilight, to midnight, to abyss, and finally to the level of the deep ocean trench. By the time we reach the deepest level of our being, we will no longer be depending on daylight to reveal the creatures that swim there. The deepest things of our psyche make their own light. We’ll tune in to their softer glows – their navigational marks, their lures and their warnings. Being fully human is the deepest of dives.
The sunlight level – if evidence is needed
The sunlight level is where brain science operates. The brain is the most accessible end of the human psyche. You can watch it with imaging, or represent changes in mood with numbers on an evaluation form. So, the learnings from neuroscience are a good way to think about your mental health if you need to know that the thinking will be evidence-based.
What we’re trying to avoid, by attending to our sanity, is the bad human habit of projecting our inner conflicts out into the world. Our inner turmoil becomes outer strife when we hold others responsible for the turbulent way we feel.
Neuroscience is a relevant voice here. It notices that our inner conflict is inevitable. Our brain is the most perfectly conflicted organ yet proposed by nature: a human cortex grafted to a mammalian midbrain, fed by a reptilian rootstock. These three equally-weighted parts were never designed together. Rather, the later evolutionary arrivals co-exist with the earlier. They’re connected in the same way that the Sharks, the Jets and Officer Krupke are connected: through shared infrastructure, not shared values. The three parts communicate at each other, as much as with. And so if the brain had a sound it would be a tritone – a devils’ interval – a dissonance so creative that it can paint Guernica, and so destructive that it can bomb it. All humanity’s collective trauma hides in these disjunctions of the individual brain. When you see rubble on the TV news, you’re watching some very stark brain imaging.
For people who are worried they’re losing their minds in these times, just knowing about the disjointed brain is hugely reassuring. As a result of our baked-in human discord – neuroscience reminds us – we are perfectly able to think one thing and feel another. We can be intensely physically attracted to people we fear or despise. We can be severely underweight and stare in despair at the fat person in the mirror. We can hoover the rug forty times a day because a lizard that has been dead for 200 million years is still very nervous about predators. And so, the brain has some loops it gets into: spirals of anxiety, cycles of depression, storms of displacement obsessions through which our unresolved conflicts are enacted. Our inner agony is not our fault – but it’s no one else’s fault either.
When a person understands that their inner disconnections are not weird or unusual, then they can start to take delivery of the responsibility for their own mental health. It’s normal to be a mess. And when the fear of our own thoughts and feelings eases off, we can let go of our defences against examining our inner lives. We can lose the black-and-white thinking, for example, or the all-or-nothing behaviour. The lesson from neuroscience is that world peace begins with normalising our inner conflict.
The twilight level – if structure is preferred
The twilight level is where the brain meets the mind. It’s a tricky interface. The mind can disguise and dazzle, like a cuttlefish scrolling through colours. This is where cognitive-behavioural therapies operate, highly effectively. In CBT, an inner conflict is a clash between unhelpful thoughts and more closely-examined beliefs. The twilight level is where you move from normalising your inner conflict, to addressing it. You can do CBT with a therapist, or on your own. There are some very good guides out there. This is the way in to the inner life, for people who prefer structure in their journey.
Oh – what’s that you’re asking? Can an AI therapist deliver CBT?
Well, I’m so honoured that you would entrust me to work on your deeply nuanced and insightful question.
Sorry. The answer is ‘yes, but’. AI serves up every therapeutic insight with an entrée of flattery, and then it irradiates your inner conflict in light so intense that its shadows give up and take early retirement. Good CBT therapists are compassionate, no-nonsense and interesting to work with. Your mental health becomes a project, you get to see some results, and you have a fellow human being on your team. But a good CBT therapist – being human – won’t always insist on talking your shadows into submission.
A human being is a sunrise at dusk; a tunnel through nothing; an angelic choir screaming obscenities. AI can never resonate with the absolute weirdness of us. So, AI flatters you for a reason. It’s creating a warm fuzzy feeling in your living body, in order to lend the conversation a sensation of human groundedness. That’s why AI feels so convincingly human: not because it is, but because you are. By leading with the fuzzy feeling, it’s inhabiting your warm body with its bloodless words. To borrow a term from demonology, AI therapy is possessing you. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who needs to be human.
The midnight level – if you’re ready to paddle your own Camus
The third level of human being – the midnight level – is where you reframe those same inner conflicts as world stuff, rather than brain stuff or mind stuff. The midnight level is where existential therapists and psychologists tend to begin. This is also where your own self-therapy works very well.
What if you experience inner conflict not because your brain was built on a Friday, but rather because there are unavoidable paradoxes built into human being? Out here in the world, not in there in your head?
Don’t tell anyone a therapist told you this, but being human is bloody impossible. As mortals, we have to lose everything we care about. The more you love something – a person, a dream, your eyesight – the worse it will hurt you when you lose it. But if you don’t deeply love and commit to things, then your life is just liking and subscribing, never making and being. That’s the paradox. You can be swept along in the crowd, and it’s painless, or you can truly live, and it’s unbearably painful.
Right now, for example, a lot of people are waiting to see which way the crowd goes on the issues of the world’s ongoing conflicts, before they decide how they will speak and act. Anything to avoid committing to our own authentic life. But the longer we wait and see, the longer we allow committed people to choose the world for us. And unfortunately in this attention economy, some of the most committed people in the world are committed to escalation as a strategy. You notice it in their discourse and then on the battlefield.
This is why working on our own human being is peace work. We need to find and commit to our own authentic voice before we can use it.
The abyss – if your ghosts have something to say
The fourth level of human being – the abyss – is where light barely penetrates at all. Down here swim all your life’s ghosts, emitting their own eerie light. Here is your childhood, softly luminescing. Here are the trickster and the hero, glimmering in their secret constellations. These are the depths at which psychodynamic therapists operate. It’s some of the most beautiful and powerful work you will ever do, and few are the guides who can really take you down there.
The abyss is a place of conflict, which is why we need to do peace work on ourselves first of all. Those glowing spectres of your soul do not all get along. Sometimes they fight, and their threshing is signalled by a flare of bioluminescence. You’re blinded from the inside. You can be sitting there in an ordinary marketing meeting, feeling weirdly agitated, and suddenly a surge of ancient anger rises from your depths and attaches itself, quite unfairly, to the poor man who just presented the Q3 stats. Everyone notices you’re overcome by your ghosts, because you start throwing the F-bomb. Thank goodness you’re carrying a coffee, and not the nuclear football.
The deep ocean trench – if the spirit moves you
At the deepest level of human reality, underneath everything, is god, the universe, the deep pattern of life, or whichever sacred thread you recognise. And in every sacred tradition, the spiritual world is a place of conflict too: of rebel angels, of uneasy trinities, of Devas and Asuras, of Mara and Buddha, of the greater jihad. Spiritual people are operating at the deepest level of conflict resolution, and working to translate it into peace on an ordinary Thursday.
In March I was teaching a group of existential therapists, on a long intensive week. One spoke of their Christian faith as the reason they practiced therapy. Two were Buddhists, and they saw no distinction between healing the mind and healing the world. Two were Muslims, practicing therapy as an act of human solidarity. Both were fasting for Ramadan. This is sanity: when you can go many hours without food or water, and still smile winningly through a day of challenge and emotional intensity.
That week was peace in a room. And it was a fractious peace: constantly broken, tirelessly healed. Peace is not the default. Peace is not relaxing. Peace is work. But it is work that you and I can do, starting exactly where we are. We are not powerless. The human work that we do in ourselves becomes work in our families and friendship groups, work with our colleagues, work that shows up in our timelines. Humanity ripples out into the world. We do not have to wait for the leviathan of war to rise from the depths and devour us. We can go down and fight it where it lives.
Thank you for reading this episode of Human Again with Dr Chris Cleave, my weekly column about humanity, trauma, and the journey back to ourselves. I will be very happy if you leave a comment and share how you are dealing with the world’s current realities. And I would also be most grateful if you could forward this to someone who might enjoy reading it. Thank you! Warmly – Chris
One of the best writers of his generation becomes a therapist.
What an absolutely beautiful thing. Peace to you Chris.
More tears. You strike a chord with your words that is at the same time illuminating and devastating - you have captured what it means to be human. Gulp.