An approach (Tom Torr’s books):

“What I am now” is inscribed in the neurons and chemistry of the brain, and the state and function of the organs and their behavior. Engaging with this means facing the reality of the body; cognition and the “Self” are considered parts of this body. Cognition cannot drive evolution into conflict and still maintain the equilibrium of “what I am now”; for equilibrium, it is necessary that the movements of cognition be compatible with the findings that the body’s possibilities and limitations determine for it. Otherwise, that incompatibility will spread to awareness, approach, perception, the “Self,” and consequently, to “what I am now.”

Cognition cannot be independent of the body, and for equilibrium, it is forced to submit to its frameworks. If it does not submit, it cannot make the brain’s cognitive system accompany it in a way that vitalizes its movement, and the world of cognition, in turn, becomes dual. Only observation, experience, and trial and error—that is, rationality—can guide this duality toward integration.

Perhaps if we consider rationality to be the deference of the “Self” to its own totality and moving in harmony with this totality, then the lack of rationality could be seen as a misuse of the notion of free will, an overstepping of the “Self,” and its domination over its own totality; as if instead of the voice of the “Self” being a representative of my totality, it becomes a sound detached from the totality, produced almost solely in the mouth.

In this interpretation, it is not unknown why and how belief plays a cancerous role in creating a gap between “self” and the totality and is castrating. Around this cancerous tissue, which, compared to the functional biases of cerebral cognition, is the equivalent of putting itself to sleep or into hypothermia, the path of observation, experience, and trial and error becomes narrow and rugged. Cognition, and subsequently awareness, evolutionary intelligence, and approach, lose their fluidity, rationality dims, and the brain’s perceptual efficiency declines. Of course, the degree of this rationality and its absence is itself part of “what I am now.”