I recently tore through Michael Pollan’s most recent book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence, and was blown away by how a science journalist/author (perhaps most known for his book exploring the food industry, Omnivore’s Dilemma) was able to so fluidly navigate between the worlds of objective researcher and reflective participant. He seemed to be balancing so many stories and narrative perspectives at once, yet was consistently able to find the space for his own guiding voice to shine through.

On one level, he tells a story spanning nearly 80 years of psychedelic research in America; From Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD in 1938 through its illegalization in the mid-60s and finally its scientific renaissance at the turn of the millennium. This story is told largely through multiple first-person accounts from those who were there with the Timothy Leary’s and the Aldous Huxley’s of the world, written in a way that emphasizes the visceral feelings of excitement and possibility that defined many of this generation’s greatest minds, scientist and hippie alike. Pollan talks to hundreds of individuals who have experiences with psychedelics or (in many cases and) are on the cutting edge of psychedelic research as he tries to find a space for psychedelics, spirituality, and what he terms “mystical experiences” in our modern scientific society.

An interesting additional layer that he weaves into his storytelling is the way that, as a total psychedelic novice, uncovering this research challenges his understanding of how his own mind interacts with the world. Self-described as a staunch materialist, Pollan becomes inspired to go on his first psychedelic journeys at the age of 60, bringing the reader along on an intensely personal and emotional journey of self-discovery as he tries to grasp first-hand what those he interviewed attempted to put into words. The way Pollan paints the portrait of psychedelics’ history in America through such a plethora of contrasting voices sometimes feels like a testament these journeys. His personal conclusions on the importance of recognizing one’s own subjectivity, the illusory nature of the mono-narrative that our ego whispers in our ear, and the ability to transcend seemingly paradoxical tensions through a type of understanding not based in logic are put on full-display as Pollan blurs the lines between researcher/participant, narrator/protagonist, historian/futurist. The traditional dualities of subject/object and contradictory truths seem to disappear in favor of the sentiment, an overwhelming sense of awe and optimism, which they evoke.

Pollan reaches for a variety of different lenses through which to articulate the impact of experiences he believes to be, in some ways, “beyond comprehension”: quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and theories of universal consciousness. But the lens I admired the most was when his exposition took on a more personal point of view:

“That was my psilocybin journey, as faithfully as I can recount it. As I read those words now, doubt returns in full force: ‘Fool, you were on drugs!’ And it’s true: you can put the experience in that handy box and throw it away never to dwell on it again…Yet though it’s true that a chemical launched me on this journey it is also true that everything I experienced I experienced: these are events that took place in my mind, psychological facts that were neither weightless nor evanescent. Unlike most dreams, the traces these experiences inscribed remain indelible and accessible.”

Pollan manages to retain a healthy bit of skepticism that leaves room for nuance and self-reflection in a field usually dominated by polarizing absolutisms. His tone therefore becomes inquiring as opposed to didactic, opening a window through which the reader can deeply engage with the personal questions that Pollan himself wrestles with. One of these questions, that I felt was particularly relevant to my own life, occurs as he is coming down from 5-MeO-DMT extracted from the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (yes, this is a real thing):

“Before I drew the smoke into my lungs, Rocío had asked me, as she asks everyone who meets the toad, to search the experience for a ‘peace offering’ — some idea or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, ‘doing’. I meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former.”

After recounting several instances throughout his life in which his action-oriented mindset had hurt himself and others around him, he comes to the conclusion:

“So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less. But as soon as I put it that way, I realized there was a problem — a big problem, in fact. For wasn’t the very act of resolving to favor being a form of doing? A betrayal of the whole idea? A true connoisseur of being would never dream of making resolutions! I had tied myself up in a philosophical knot, constructed a paradox or koan I was clearly not smart enough or sufficiently enlightened to untangle. And so what had begun as one of the most shattering experiences of my life ended half an hour later with a wan smile.”

This passage stood out to me as an incredible articulation of the kind of paradoxical wall that many of us who have journeyed into the philosophy of mindfulness and being have fruitlessly banged our heads up against. The importance of being present and the dangers of a goal-oriented mindset are dangerously close to becoming cliché at this point, but what does it mean that the way most of us respond to these ideas is through resolution and action? Is there any other way to respond? Without some sort of goal, can there be motivation for action beyond random chance?

As your run-of-the-mill Harvard overachiever, I have similarly recognized my own preference for action, and the control I assume will come with it. In response to the overwhelming feelings of insecurity that come with the recognition of my own lack of anything approaching true agency, I gravitate towards the immediate comfort of grasping at the straws of control at the expense of finding power in trust. And it’s all too easy to find examples of how incredibly damaging this lack of trust can be. I don’t trust others enough to delegate. I don’t trust that situations will work themselves out. Even in times when personal involvement will certainly make a problem worse, I will oftentimes prioritize the sense of security that comes with the illusion of control over the actual outcome or opportunity cost of expending my energy on other things. And this necessity for control does require incredible amounts of energy. The constant scanning through hundreds of past experiences, imagining of alternative outcomes, and paralysis that comes with the most trivial of decisions is exhausting.

In How to Change Your Mind, British neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris’ outlines a grand unified theory of mental illness in which depression, addiction, anxiety, and obsession are not categorically different diseases, as outlined in the DSM, but instead involve “uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination that gradually shade out reality and fray our connections to other people and the natural world”. He points to the ego as the source of these habits, comparing it to an orchestra conductor that has become tyrannical in its attempts to maintain order. Think Terrence Fletcher from Whiplash.

During my time off from school, I experienced this need to do, to distract through habit, to keep moving forward as an attempt to maintain order against the dangerous wanderings of my mind. Dangerous wanderings that were screaming at me that none of my successes were bringing me contentment. Dangerous wanderings that were telling me I was worthless and fake and unhappy. I came to see that this type of strategy as a treadmill. With each new achievement came disappointment and a subsequent need for more achievement, more distraction, and more doing.

So, like any action-oriented achiever who reads an article about mindfulness on Facebook, I turned to doing: journaling, meditation, and reflection. All so I could rid myself of this pesky mindset I saw as obstructive towards my real goals. And for a while, it helped. There was that beautiful honeymoon period when I felt like my energy was finally being well-directed. But soon enough, I hit the wall of Pollan’s Paradox, and I too was left with a wanton smile.

Wasn’t I just replacing one treadmill with another? Remodeling the office into a yoga studio without addressing the crumbling foundation of a goal-oriented drive? Sure, I was no longer placing as much self-worth in the idea of being successful in an academic or professional sense, but I was placing a lot of self-worth in the idea of being spiritually successful. I tempered the illusions that working hard enough and long enough would ever earn me a job title that would be the source of my fulfillment, but I did still seem to think that if I could just meditate for long enough or read enough philosophy about the ego and self that I would have a hallelujah moment and find myself enlightened. So my excitement was visceral when Michael Pollan so perfectly put into words this previously unarticulated paradox of being and doing, as was my disappointment when he too was stumped.

And yet, it was not two pages later, with this disappointment still fresh on my mind, that another one of Michael Pollan’s trip reflections stood out to me as potentially insightful to the problem at hand. Interpreting the line in Walt Whitman’s famous book, Nature, in a new light, “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all”, Pollan meditates on the fundamental importance of being able to hold onto “two warring ideas in the same brain”, overcoming the paradoxical through the “transcendence of the categories we rely on to organize the world”. So what happens when we apply this possibility for transcendence to the very being vs. doing paradox itself? Can we, through questioning the paradox’s assumptions, demonstrate the falsity of this dichotomy?

The first assumption to question is whether being and doing are indeed mutually exclusive. In other words, must every action necessarily be categorized as either a form of being or a form of doing? And must it only be a form of either being or doing?

Well, let’s take the example that I used earlier of using meditation to be more present. On one hand, the intention of the meditation is to be present, and oftentimes there are moments in which it feels as though the tyrannical orchestra conductor is quieted. In this sense, being takes the form of a recognition or appreciation for the present moment. But even in the depths of my rumination about the future or recollection of the past, my experience is still that of thinking within the context of the present moment, and I, on some level, am only able to imagine these other circumstances through the medium of my present self. Therefore, by the very nature of continuing to exist within the concept of time, I must be “being” in some sense .

On the other hand, this sense of being present is also being mediated through the acts of concentrating, breathing deeply, and maintaining a certain posture. Preventing my body from crumpling under the weight of gravity or resisting the urge to swat a fly are still active responses to the influence of my surrounding. Even the choice to do nothing is still a choice to do. Not to mention that at any given moment there are actually a million little things my body is subconsciously doing just to keep me alive. Regardless of my attention to conscious actions or inactions, as my existence always occurs within a physical form that is interacting with an external environment, I also must be “doing”.

So, then perhaps there is no such thing as an action or non-action motivated entirely by either being or doing, nor is it ever possible in any moment to “be” without “doing” or to “do” without “being”. There is no point at which we are able to interact with our environment without existing, just as there is no point at which we are able to exist without interacting with our environment.

But does the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive mean that the dichotomy is necessarily false? There are still times in which I certainly feel like I am doing more than being. If I didn’t, I would have no need for the resolution to begin meditating in the first place. An apt metaphor could be the dichotomy of black and white. Even though there is no such thing as true black, as we would not be able to see something that absorbs the entire visible spectrum of light, there are still certainly dark paints and light paints, and the more dark paint that I put into a mixture, the darker the overall mixture becomes.

But are we so sure that the relationship between doing and being is as zero-sum as black and white? That with each 1% increase in focus on being, we decrease our doing by that same 1%?

Have you ever been so absorbed in an action that you have completely lost yourself to it? Have you ever been so focused on the movement of running, or dancing, or writing, or reading, or drawing, or driving that the buzzing inner-monologue that keeps you aware of your position in space and time disappears completely? How you are suddenly no longer thinking about how much longer you have to run, or what groceries you still need to pick up, or that embarrassing moment when you thought a cute girl was waving to you when really she was waving to the much more handsome man behind you.

In that moment of absolute focus and presence are you “doing” or “being”? While we have already established that by the very nature of existing and interacting with the world, it is impossible to exist in one state completely without the other, could it also be possible that these two states are not actually on opposite ends of a linear spectrum, but somehow connected? Or at the very least, that their relationship is not strictly zero-sum?

But how is it that two seemingly oppositional states of being can occur at once? And which one is “true”? An interesting parallel to this type of duality exists at the quantum level, where light can be expressed as either a wave or a particle. In reference to this wave-particle duality, Albert Einstein wrote “it seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.” If neither the picture of reality that views an action as motivated entirely by being nor the one that views an action as motivated by doing can fully explain the phenomenon of existing within a physical environment, then perhaps we must sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. But how do we decide which interpretation we should choose?

The great physicist Frank Wilczek, who won the Nobel prize for his work with subatomic particles, viewed quantum theory as a lens through which to understand larger life principles. While the traditional laws of physics apply at most levels of analysis, once you dig deep enough, you need entirely new frameworks for understanding. When examining the most basic building blocks of our material world, we must be able to process something like light in two contradictory ways. The same can be said for the deepest levels of truth:

“Ordinary propositions are exhausted by their literal meaning, and ordinarily the opposite of a truth is a falsehood. Deep propositions, however, have meaning that goes beneath their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth”.

This idea struck me as devilishly profound. And while scientific in nature, it seems directly in line with Michael Pollan’s psychedelic realization of the ability to transcend categories through embracing a kind of understanding not based in zero-sum logic. In the face of multiple conflicting truths, it is our observation and interpretation alone that has the power to make either of these truths real, but more importantly, able to convey information.

“To address different questions, we must process information in different ways. In important examples, those methods of processing prove to be mutually incompatible. Thus no one approach, however clever, can provide answers to all possible questions. To do full justice to reality, we must engage it from different perspectives. That is the philosophical principle of complementarity. It is a lesson in humility that quantum theory forces to our attention… Complementarity is both a feature of physical reality and a lesson in wisdom.”

When we treat light as a wave, we are able to learn certain things about its properties that do not manifest when we treat light as a particle, and vice versa. Similarly, when I view myself as an inconsequential speck on a pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, I am able to gain perspective about my worries, my suffering, and the futility of my search for significance with respect to the rest of the universe. But when I view myself as the subjective center of my universe, I see my own importance, the infinite significance of the immediate world around me, and the power of my own interpretations to manifest reality.

In this way, the truth of categorizing any action as either being or doing is less dependent on where exactly I think the motivation falls on some false, zero-sum spectrum, and more dependent on what it is that processing the world through either categorization can teach me. To do full justice to reality, I must engage with both categorizations and the lessons that they provide.

Allow me to explain with one more paradoxical example.

The Japanese monk, Shinran, born in 1173 C.E.

The Japanese monk, Shinran, claimed that existence is like being caught in quicksand. We are given the mental faculties to imagine a world full of objectivity and absolutes, and yet are brought into a world without them. We are born into quicksand, forever in danger of sinking into despair. The path towards enlightenment (or realization/self-actualization/the discovery of meaning etc.) begins the moment one realizes that everything around them is not actually solid ground. The cruelty of this realization, however, is that we have the ability to imagine a world made of solids, and so we struggle to try to reach it. But the more one struggles to escape the quicksand and free oneself from the constant fear of drowning, the deeper they sink. It is only after the trapped person becomes exhausted by this effort and surrenders themselves to the fate of drowning that the quicksand settles and they realize that they are able to float.

This paradox of human existence and the search for enlightenment seems to perfectly mirror my own fears. I could imagine a world in which, through hard work and discipline, I would be free from the constant fear that my world does not have meaning. I could have my hallelujah moment, “achieve enlightenment”, “understand my purpose”, and be free from purposeless suffering for the rest of my days. But the very teachings which I turn to in the name of this goal all claim that the only way to achieve such a state of enlightenment is to give up the search. And herein is the paradox.

In the same way that I cannot truly “be” through a resolution “to be”, I can no longer give up if I believe that giving up will lead to escape. But I think the key lesson of the story is not that there is no escaping the quicksand, or that humans can actually float in quicksand if they just stay still, but that we alone hold the power to determine what escape means.

The initial struggle of the person trapped in quicksand is motivated by the possibility of achieving the instinctual definition of escape, of liberating oneself through sheer force of will from the unrelenting downward pull of the quicksand, of reaching solid ground. Enlightenment, in this sense, is a state of existence dichotomous to that of the suffering world, rising somehow above or outside of it. And with that in mind, surrender will always just be a means to the hopeful end of achieving that goal.

But if you look closely, this is not the kind of enlightenment that the story promises. It says nothing of solid ground. The only escape that it promises is from the immediate sensation of drowning. Rising to the top, not escaping the quicksand itself.

Under this interpretation, the physical manifestation of suffering and the spiritual possibility of enlightenment form the same kind of false dichotomy as being and doing. The two are not mutually exclusive, for the embrace of one does not come at the expense of the other. It is only through giving up the hope of ever finding something solid, and allowing oneself to instead surrender to the inevitability of suffering, that one can realize that floating is not so bad.

If we limit our interpretation of escape to that of reaching solid ground, then every action is motivated by doing. Surrender is an action oriented towards a goal, and the respite will always be temporary. Allowing the quicksand to settle may bring you floating to the top, but the moment you reach for the shoreline, the sediment loosens, and you begin sinking again. But, if we interpret escape to be from the immediate sensation of drowning, then action can be motivated by being. Surrender is a recognition, and perhaps even an appreciation, of the the quicksand instead of trying to exist apart from it.

If this is the case, then the paradox I find myself in is a one of my own definitional creation. Limiting my interpretation of enlightenment to a moment of achieving some sort of absolute understanding or purpose will only yield futility in the face of an impossible goal. True enlightenment, then, is the continual recognition that even when we are completely surrounded by sand with nothing concrete in sight, and we are sure that we are sinking, and that this time the sand is rising higher than it ever has before, we can still float.

Meditation or journaling or resolutions to be more present can therefore be a means to an end at the same time as they are reminders of our present state. It is through the actions of swimming, and struggling, and surrendering that we can be made more aware of, and present to, the quicksand around us. It is through the truth that we are doing and the truth that we are being that we can begin to understand more about the spectrum of our own experience.

So, is Michael Pollan’s resolution to be more present a form of doing? That depends…what is he trying to learn?