The first thing I learned in Peru—and here I mean direct learning, not stacking more facts on the woodpile of knowledge—is that healing is outside the thinking mind’s wheelhouse. For one thing, the mind by its nature is a house divided: our personalities contradict themselves constantly. In my case, part of me always held out hope, even if a theoretical kind, that I might someday, somehow, have an “enlightenment” moment, the big-ticket aha, while another part was stowed away, stoking cynicism and pessimism. Spirit, by contrast, is one with itself. Our minds, our learned knowledge, can store
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