Operating Manual for Enlightenment: Recreating Your Mind by Lincoln Stoller

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This Operating Manual is not offering enlightenment, it’s describing it. The enlightened mind unites intellect and emotion despite their separation being built into the structure of our brains. This split appears in the mythic division between our lower and higher natures, and the separation of mind and body.

Intellect and emotion function in concert. As color and shape are to vision, one complements the other. When fully integrated, they cannot be taken apart.

The topics in the book’s first half lean toward the intellectual. The second half looks at the division from the emotional side. What we are separating with one hand, we are putting together with the other.

Struggle

We naturally consider our problems as different from ourselves. We see them in our environment, and rely on our skills and insights to resolve them.

Our intellectual solutions address one aspect of these problems, while our emotions address another. Are these problems to be solved, or processes to be understood? What should we do if our problems are inside us?

Mind

Your state determines your readiness, arousal, and self-reflection. Your state of mind orients your thinking, how you can feel about yourself, and who you’re able to be. Equally important are thoughts you’re not likely to have, or cannot have at all.

This book is about the states of mind that support focus, awareness, thoughts, and feelings. It’s is not a guide to solving problems, it’s an explanation of how you see.

State

With our state of mind, we gather our thoughts and focus our attention. Focus without a state is like a telescope with no one to look through it. In order to focus, first take full responsibility for all you think and feel.

The properties of your state determine what you’re capable of. One state of mind is not enough because you cannot understand the world from one point of view. Your future is determined by your range of states of mind.

Wisdom

Alternate states of mind support understandings we don’t have. They may be logical, emotional, spiritual, or evanescent. They could involve knowledge spread across generations so that no one generation has the complete picture. We might call them prophetic, inspired, psychedelic, or delusional.

Larger states of mind develop with experience, but they’re not defined by the facts they hold. One needs a state of mind that can accommodate contradictions without generating conflict.

Instantaneous Enlightenment

Change does not happen instantly, but epiphanies feel instantaneous. The reason is simple: a new state is a whole rearrangement of one’s previous conception. There are no halfway states to total rearrangement. Many pieces need to fall into place before we can make ourselves into something new.

We are at a watershed moment in our understanding of the mind, after which psychology will change. Instead of focusing on thoughts and behavior, we are coming to understand that what’s important is what you can think and how you can behave. The Operating Manual is an intellectual, emotional, and neurological road map to the integration you don’t yet have.

About the author

Lincoln Stoller grew up around and was mentored by artists, engineers, scientists, athletes, and educators recognized as some of the greatest of the 20th century. He has published in the academic and the popular press as an astronomer, physicist, software architect, neurologist, anthropologist, psychotherapist, and explorer.

As a teenager, he fell 1,000 feet off the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, swam to rescue on an island in the arctic sea, crashed his airplane, collapsed his horse, stepped in quicksand, survived frostbite, starved, poisoned himself, survived a major earthquake, was buried in an avalanche, and became a cultural ambassador to families in Central America, Mongolia, and the Caribbean.