Sensations Thoughts and Emotions by Lincoln Stoller
First a mountaineer, then a physicist, now a counselor: body, intellect, emotions. I am a generalist and I used to think of myself as an amateur, but I have since driven out the experts.
I’ve been around long enough to see my climbing partners dead, my physics colleagues wrong, and standard therapy useless. Insight only comes from integrating your senses and generalizing. Until then, you’re a pile of compost waiting for something to sprout.
I wrote these essays while still integrating myself. I had passed death, academia, and psychedelics, moved into hypnotherapy and neurology, and was approaching the quacking of psychology. I offer these essays as a shaky ladder out of the well of narrow thinking.
This is an attack on the intransigence of the Western mind. I am the Indians riding around the circled wagons, shooting arrows at the institutional, colonialist thinking now lodged in the epigenetics of the First World.
We lost the first battle because the West made the Faustian bargain and sold its soul for the wealth of exploitation, but the war is not over. Your need for mental health will turn the tide.
Our culture’s lust for consumption is reaching its limits. The wave will crest on politics and the environment, but it will break in our minds. We will be cast onto the shores of confusion, where we will be lost until we recombine our minds, bodies, and feelings.
This book helps you see, think, and feel back together those parts of yourself the Western mind reduced to rubble. If you feel integration to be unnatural, that’s your problem at a glance. I apologize that the day is dawning and there’s work we need to do, but hello. It’s time to wake up.