“My awakening to this truth came like a bolt of lightning on a gray winter’s day in Southern California. It was January 9, 1996, and I was pacing the floor of my tiny apartment, adjacent to the University of California, Santa Barbara. I had been working on the same research problem for months, trying to understand the complex group of phenomena we call ‘depression’ within the existing framework of evolutionary psychology. This school of thought held that the mind is a collection of separate problem-solving instincts, each one arising from a separate brain circuit that had solved a specific survival or reproductive problem for our ancestors. I had spent years of graduate and postdoctoral study doing research guided by this model, but I now felt deeply troubled by it. I just couldn’t fathom how a bunch of separate instinctual circuits could possibly produce the seemingly orchestrated series of physical, psychological, and behavioral changes that make up a clinical depression.”

“Depression was a problem I knew something about. As a graduate student in neuroscience, I had spent years studying the characteristics of the dopamine system, one of the major neurotransmitter systems implicated in this condition. And long before that, I had a deluxe crash course — a severe episode of depression that had, over a frighteningly short period of time, systematically siphoned off my will to live.”

“At first I simply felt odd — a little sad and unable to think clearly, with a diminished sense of self. But then everything spiraled downward. I was constantly tired but couldn’t sleep. I tried to eat, but my favorite foods tasted like cardboard. Nothing felt pleasurable and, perhaps more disturbing, nothing felt painful. It was like being slowly embalmed. The sensory world faded, and nothing interested me. I stopped socializing and eventually lost the motivation to get out of bed. Finally, my periods stopped, and I was in a kind of holding pattern — not quite dead but not really alive. It was a profound experience — nothing like a set of instincts gone awry. It was more like a single plug had been pulled, and the vital force within me was draining out.”

“As I stared out the window, trying to find the right words and feeling the downward pull of my heart, my mind flickered back to my research problem about depression. Suddenly, something snapped into place. The depression I was beginning to experience wasn’t the result of ancient problem-solving instincts gone awry, as the evolutionary psychologists had claimed. Nor was it an illness or a chemical imbalance, as the psychiatric community claimed. What was becoming clear in that moment was that depression is a potentially lifesaving adaptive response — a kind of dormancy. Suddenly I understood that there is an energetic calculus in our brains and minds that effects this downward shift: When our intelligence system perceives that there is not much to gain by carrying on with the tasks of life — when we are overcome by too much loss or are facing a period of too little gain — we get ‘depressed.’ By the same token, the seasonal shutdown psychiatrists call seasonal affective ‘disorder’ is actually a normal, if uncomfortable, recalibration for the energetically barren winter months that our species confronted during our ancestral past. This kind of motivational downshifting forces us to radically reconfigure our lives and our selves in an effort to keep us energetically solvent. My brain was shutting down my motivational system to keep me from wasting any more behavioral energy on a dead-end path.”

“Like a person starving in the desert who rejoices when he comes across a succulent tuber poking out of the ground, I went from sliding into a depression to being launched into a state of elation. I had 20 years of accumulated experimental knowledge about the mind and brain and almost 40 years of life experience to be resolved through the lens of this energetic model, and with this huge energetic boost, my own mind wasted no time. For the next weeks and months, I hardly slept as I was bombarded with hundreds of insights into how our intelligence system is designed to solve our behavioral challenges. A new paradigm of the human mind began to emerge — one that explained its functional design in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy.”

“Somewhere in the midst of this ‘enlightenment period,’ I realized one simple truth: all life intelligence systems evolved in a world where the number one threat was — and is — entropy: the tendency toward randomness in a system. It takes a lot of energy to counter entropy and significantly more to form the basic jobs of life, so all forms of life have intelligence systems that have been honed by evolution to acquire, manage, and direct energetic resources. Everything else is secondary to meeting this energetic bottom line.”

“Behavior itself is energetically expensive — we must use energy in order to even attempt to get more. If our behavior doesn’t get us “the goods,” we run out of energy and die. Nature’s solution to this economic conundrum is a behavioral intelligence system that acts as an energetic cost–benefit analysis and prediction system. It creates a neural record of our experiences, a “representation” with all the details of each relevant moment, especially the attendant energetic costs and benefits. When we find ourselves in a situation similar to one we’ve encountered before, the system uses this stored information to “model” various behavioral options, estimate their likely costs and benefits, modify the one that most closely approximates our current circumstances, and chart an energetically sound behavioral course into the future.”

“My awareness of the exquisite integrity of the energetic universe. In this amazing period of discovery, it became crystal clear to me that the same laws that continually effect the changes in the seasons and that shape and reshape the contours of the land and the seas are continually shaping and reshaping our thoughts and behaviors and are creating our reality and our sense of self. I knew that I was experiencing the Tao — the energetic flow of the universe. One night, while I was standing under the stars on a grassy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, ‘I’ simply disappeared into it — anatta, ‘no self.’"

“Energetic interactions. The love we feel when our child smiles at us, and the pride we feel when we’re praised for a job well done are the emotional correlates of an actual or a predicted gain in energy; likewise, the anger we feel when we’ve been mistreated, and the jealousy we feel when someone flirts with our mate are the emotional readouts of an energetic loss.”

“Divine or not, there is what might be called a plan—a body of interrelated laws, discovered through the great communal detective story of science, that govern all forms of matter and energy in our universe and lead inexorably to the design of your mind.”

“When we look at the human experience through the clear lens of universal law, the distinctions between the physical and metaphysical, disappear. Through this lens, we are energetic life forms, at once absolutely exquisitely unique, and yet universal – sharing with all members of our species all aspects of the human experience, the full range of human emotions and a creative capacity that is unparalleled in the kingdom of life on earth; sharing with all life forms the essential characteristics of all life; and sharing with all things animate and inanimate the ubiquitous fingerprints of these universal laws. Through this lens, we can see clearly that energy is constantly in flow, and the energy that we are is constantly changing, with every experience, in a great universal unfolding. Through this lens, we can see that there is a constant two-way energetic exchange between us and everything in our physical and social environment. Whatever we release into the social and physical world, positive or negative, constructive or destructive, enters into the environment — the environment in which we humans are our selves being created. In this view, it is clearly in our enlightened self interest to release into the world only that which is healthy and uplifting.”