Annoyed the Hell Into Me

The Search for a Better Way to Be Human

When I was going through my divorce, I hurt from the inside out.

I was not simply losing a marriage. I was losing the organizing idea around which I had built my life. I had been living from a concept of we—two people sharing a home, a history, and, I believed, a future. I wanted to spend my life with this person. Then, suddenly, the we was gone, and I was returned to me.

That me felt terribly alone.

The old expression about being alone in a crowd finally made sense. I could be surrounded by people and still feel separated from life. Everyone else appeared to be moving forward while something inside me remained stranded. The marriage had ended in the outside world, but it continued inside my mind. Memories, questions, imagined conversations, regret, anger, and hope kept replaying without being invited.

The continual inward suffering annoyed the hell out of me—or perhaps I should say it annoyed the hell into me.

I wanted answers. I wanted relief. I wanted whatever was happening inside me to stop. Unfortunately, Alka-Seltzer was not helping.

At some point, I became curious about the machinery producing all this pain. If my thoughts were arising within me, and those thoughts were shaping the experience I was having, what was making those thoughts tick? Why could an event that had already happened continue hurting me today? What part of the pain came from the divorce, and what part came from the story my mind kept telling about the divorce? Could I change the story without lying to myself about what had happened?

Most importantly, was there a better way to experience being alive?

Those questions began as an attempt to escape pain. Hours of thought turned into days. Days turned into weeks, years, and eventually decades. The search continues today, although its purpose has changed. I am no longer trying only to eliminate an unwanted feeling. I am trying to understand what it means to be human: how the mind creates experience, how the ego protects and imprisons us, whether a deeper awareness exists beneath our thoughts, and whether we can learn to participate more intelligently in the life happening through us.

When Survival Gives Way to Inquiry

Abraham Maslow proposed that human motivation develops through layers of need. Food, shelter, and physical survival demand attention first. Safety follows, along with belonging, love, esteem, and the desire to develop our potential. Later in his work, Maslow went beyond self-actualization and wrote about self-transcendence: moving beyond preoccupation with the individual self toward service, unity, meaning, or something larger.

The familiar pyramid commonly used to depict his theory makes development look much tidier than life actually is. Research does not support a rigid staircase in which one level must be completed before the next begins. People living through poverty, grief, or danger can experience compassion, creativity, and spiritual depth. People with wealth and security can remain consumed by status, fear, and resentment. Human needs overlap; they disappear, return, and compete with one another. Culture also affects which needs people emphasize.

Still, Maslow identified something important. When survival and instability dominate our attention, there is usually less room for contemplation. When life becomes sufficiently secure—or when suffering becomes so intense that our usual answers collapse—we may begin asking different questions.

I did not begin questioning myself because I had climbed calmly to the top of a pyramid. I began because the structure I had depended upon fell apart. My pain created the opening.

Perhaps people begin the deeper search from opposite directions. Some reach enough safety and success to ask, Is this all there is? Others are forced by loss to ask, How do I live now that what I depended upon is gone? Comfort may create room for inquiry. Suffering may make inquiry unavoidable.

Reflection or Rumination?

Looking inward is not automatically enlightening. I learned that I could spend hours examining my pain without actually understanding it.

Psychology distinguishes productive self-reflection from rumination. Reflection is curious. It asks what happened, what I felt, what assumptions I made, what I can learn, and how I want to respond. Rumination is repetitive and prosecutorial. It circles the same injury, searches for someone to blame, and tries to solve the past by replaying it.

Both can feel like serious thinking. Only one tends to produce insight.

Research has found that insight is associated with greater well-being, while rumination is generally associated with poorer well-being. Self-reflective writing has also been shown in controlled research to increase perceived resilience compared with merely describing events. This does not mean that every hour spent thinking about ourselves makes us wiser. It means that the quality and direction of attention matter.

The useful question is not simply, Am I looking inward? It is, What is this inward attention producing?

If it repeatedly strengthens anger, helplessness, superiority, or victimhood, it may be the ego building a more sophisticated prison. If it increases honesty, perspective, compassion, responsibility, and freedom of response, it is probably becoming insight.

My divorce initially produced plenty of rumination. I wanted to understand, but I also wanted to retry the case inside my head until reality delivered a different verdict. Gradually, I began recognizing that pain and suffering were not identical. Pain belonged to the loss. Much of the continuing suffering came from resistance, interpretation, and the demand that the past should have unfolded differently.

That realization did not erase the loss. It changed my relationship to it.

Can We Practice Our Way Toward Wisdom?

Many religious traditions claim that human beings can cultivate a less reactive and more awakened way of living. Modern psychology cannot confirm enlightenment as a metaphysical achievement, but it can measure some of the qualities traditionally associated with it.

Mindfulness can strengthen the ability to notice thoughts and emotions without immediately acting upon them. Compassion practices can increase kindness toward ourselves and others. Self-reflection can reveal the assumptions hidden beneath our reactions. Therapy can expose recurring patterns. Service can loosen the ego’s preoccupation with itself. Honest relationships can show us parts of ourselves we cannot see alone.

The scientific results are encouraging but less dramatic than spiritual advertising sometimes suggests. A major review of meditation programs found small-to-moderate reductions in anxiety, depression, and pain, while evidence for broader improvements in positive well-being was less conclusive. A meta-analysis of compassion-based interventions found improvements in compassion, self-compassion, mindfulness, distress, anxiety, depression, and well-being, although many of the underlying studies were small. Research on loving-kindness meditation has produced promising but inconsistent findings; when comparisons are limited to stronger randomized studies, gains in life satisfaction become much smaller.

In other words, contemplation is neither magic nor nonsense. It is training.

One particularly interesting finding is that growth in self-compassion may predict emotional well-being more consistently than mindfulness by itself. Simply observing my mind does not guarantee that I will treat what I find wisely. I can become highly aware of my shortcomings and use that awareness as a weapon against myself. Observation becomes healing when it is joined by honesty, patience, and compassion.

This fits my experience. The deeper work is not merely noticing the ego. It is learning not to hate the ego for being there.

As I explain more fully in Ego & Soul: What I Mean by Them, the ego is the part of me trying to navigate the human experience. It plans, protects, compares, remembers, anticipates, and builds an identity. It is not an enemy to be destroyed. During my divorce, it was desperately attempting to reconstruct order after its world had been disrupted. The problem was not that it tried to protect me. The problem came when I mistook every fearful thought it produced for the whole truth.

Does Awakening Develop—or Arrive?

Accounts of awakening often describe a sudden event: the boundary between self and world dissolves, time disappears, an unexpected unity becomes obvious, or reality seems to be understood directly rather than intellectually. Researchers have documented experiences of this kind under names such as mystical experiences, oneness experiences, self-transcendent experiences, and spontaneous spiritual awakenings.

Some arise after years of meditation or religious practice. Others appear without warning during grief, illness, psychological crisis, childbirth, encounters with nature, or brushes with death. The experience may seem to happen to a person rather than being deliberately created.

This suggests that awakening may be both cultivated and received.

The story of the Buddha reflects that paradox. His awakening is portrayed as a breakthrough, but it followed years of searching, discipline, contemplation, and failed approaches. The final insight may have arrived suddenly, yet the mind receiving it had been preparing for a long time.

A gardener cannot order a flower to bloom at noon on Tuesday. The gardener can prepare the soil, provide water and light, remove what is choking the plant, and create favorable conditions. Practice may work in much the same way. It cannot guarantee a dramatic awakening, but it may make insight more likely and make us better able to integrate whatever insight occurs.

Science can study the reports, brain activity, psychological effects, and behavioral changes associated with these experiences. It cannot establish whether a person contacted a universal consciousness, entered an unusual but entirely brain-generated state, or experienced both descriptions of the same reality.

Nor can the intensity of an experience prove its truth. Mania, psychosis, drugs, trauma, and neurological disturbances can also produce certainty, unity, revelation, and a feeling of special significance. The most useful test comes afterward: Does the person become more grounded, compassionate, functional, humble, and open to correction? Or more grandiose, impulsive, certain, and detached from shared reality?

A powerful experience may open the door. The way a person lives afterward tells us more about what came through it.

Is the Soul Growing—or Being Revealed?

This returns me to the distinction I make between ego and soul.

One explanation is entirely psychological. The ego is the brain’s working model of me—my history, identity, desires, defenses, and plans. What I call soul is a deeper mode of the same mind: the capacity to observe itself, question its impulses, hold competing perspectives, experience connection, and choose something wiser than immediate self-protection. As the brain develops and experience accumulates, this reflective capacity can become stronger.

From this perspective, I am not uncovering a separate spiritual entity. I am developing a more mature form of consciousness within the brain.

But another possibility remains. Perhaps consciousness is more fundamental than the individual brain. Perhaps the brain does not create awareness from nothing but focuses it into one particular human perspective. In that case, maturity may not manufacture the soul. It may make the person more capable of recognizing or expressing an awareness that was present all along.

The raindrop gradually becomes capable of comprehending the ocean—but the ocean existed before the raindrop understood it.

Science has not resolved this question. Changes or injuries to the brain can alter personality, judgment, awareness, and the sense of self. That demonstrates how deeply our human experience depends upon the brain. It does not conclusively prove whether the brain produces consciousness or transmits and localizes something more fundamental. I explore the practical value of holding such possibilities without confusing them with proof in Does It Have to Be Real?.

I do not need to pretend certainty where none exists. Both possibilities lead toward similar practical work.

If the soul is a capacity created by the developing brain, I can cultivate it through reflection, compassion, courage, and deliberate choice. If the soul is a deeper consciousness that has always been present, those same practices may clear away enough noise for me to recognize it. Either way, the path asks me to become less trapped by automatic thought and more awake to what I am doing with this life.

The Search Changes

When I began, I wanted to get rid of an unbearable feeling. I treated suffering as a malfunction and introspection as the repair manual. I wanted to find the correct idea that would make pain stop.

I no longer think that is the whole purpose.

The deeper search is not a method for arranging life so that nothing hurts. Divorce, grief, aging, uncertainty, disappointment, and death remain part of the agreement, whether or not I remember agreeing to it. Wisdom does not exempt me from the human experience. It may allow me to experience it without turning every wound into an identity and every fearful thought into a command.

I also see the danger in trying to achieve enlightenment. The ego can turn spiritual growth into another competition: a more impressive identity, a higher level, a claim to possess truths other people cannot see. The search for freedom can become one more form of captivity. It is another version of the question I ask in What Does the Soul Call Success?: whose scoreboard am I using, and what am I trying to prove?

Perhaps enlightenment is not a permanent trophy. Perhaps it appears in moments when I see clearly enough to stop defending the little story of me and respond from something wider. Then I forget. Then I remember again.

That may sound less spectacular than awakening beneath a sacred tree, but it gives me something real to practice today.

I can notice when fear is thinking for me. I can examine the story between an event and my reaction. I can distinguish reflection from rumination. I can question the beliefs I inherited. I can listen before defending, remain curious when certainty feels irresistible, and choose compassion without abandoning judgment. I can recognize that the ego is trying to help while refusing to let it run the entire operation.

My divorce did not give me enlightenment. It gave me a question I could not put down.

The question led me inward, but not merely deeper into myself. It gradually led me toward other people, psychology, philosophy, consciousness, responsibility, and the possibility that the individual life may belong to something larger. What began as an effort to escape suffering became a search for meaning, purpose, and a better way to participate in whatever is going on here.

Perhaps I have been building a wiser brain. Perhaps I have been learning to hear a soul that was present all along. Perhaps those are two descriptions of the same unfolding.

I still do not know whether the raindrop creates the idea of the ocean or finally recognizes where it came from. In Friendship: Raindrop Reflections, the same metaphor becomes a way of exploring what we reveal and awaken in one another.

But I know the search has changed the way the raindrop falls.

Research Notes and Sources

• Maslow’s hierarchy is influential but is not supported as a rigid, universal sequence. Modern researchers have proposed revised models, and critics have questioned its linearity and cross-cultural applicability: Kenrick and colleagues, Perspectives on Psychological Science and Yang, Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

• Research distinguishes constructive self-reflection and insight from repetitive rumination; insight is more consistently associated with subjective well-being: Harrington and Loffredo, Journal of Psychology.

• A randomized controlled study found self-reflective writing improved perceived resilience more than descriptive writing: Bucknell and colleagues.

• A systematic review of meditation programs found small-to-moderate reductions in anxiety, depression, and pain, while evidence for positive mental health outcomes was less conclusive: Goyal and colleagues, JAMA Internal Medicine.

• A meta-analysis of 21 randomized trials reported improvements across several compassion-related and mental-health measures, while noting that much of the evidence came from small studies: Kirby, Tellegen, and Steindl.

• A meta-analysis of loving-kindness and compassion meditation found a small pre-to-post improvement in life satisfaction that was no longer statistically significant when restricted to randomized controlled trials: Gu and colleagues.

• In stressed adolescents attending meditation retreats, increases in self-compassion predicted improved emotional well-being more consistently than increases in mindfulness: Galla, Journal of Adolescence.

• Researchers have documented subjective reports of spontaneous spiritual awakenings involving unity, nondual awareness, and lasting changes, while these reports cannot establish a metaphysical explanation: Corneille and Luke, Frontiers in Psychology.