In 1983, twenty years before my awakening, I had a mental breakdown, rendering me unable to work, even to leave my home. I was working for the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, desperate to do whatever I could to prevent nuclear war. More than once the staff saw the sun rise, and I speak literally here: we’d been up all night. We were devoted.
The pressure of the job simply crushed me, and I had to go on leave for a time, attending therapy three times a week. My therapist suggested I read something about the natural world, an alternative to the one my job immersed me in.
In a way, the whole thing prepared the ground for my ultimate awakening.
I got myself a copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. What a gift the book was. It was comforting to be gently “relocated” from my inner torment to the loveliness of the natural world, a place I’d felt at home all my life. I would take the small book out with me into the woods behind my house, sit and read for a stretch of time. Over the years, I’ve gotten rid of almost all of my books, but not that one. I recently picked it up again. The older I get, the more profound its meaning. It appears to be a celebration of the natural world. But there is so much more to it.
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This time I’m noticing, in a way I didn’t all those years ago, Dillard’s observations about consciousness — a not-surprising shift of focus, in light of the awakening that occurred in the interim, twenty years ago. Most readers of the book would describe it as being primarily about the vastness and beauty of nature, how it overwhelms our puny human selves. The wild begs for us to give it all our attention, to allow it to work its mystery on our human selves.
The blessing of my breakdown, all those years ago, was not that it made nuclear war any less likely. What it did was enable me to understand that it wasn’t the threat of global annihilation that was causing me to fall apart. It was my inability to look in the face the limit of my control. I kept thinking that if I worked hard enough, my colleagues and I could prevent nuclear war. I didn’t want to look at the truth that there were limits to what any of us could do.
I couldn’t bear to know what the real cause of my agony was. It was me.
* * *
I will never forget something the therapist said the first time we met. “Why are you so hard on yourself?” It would be months before I’d understand what she was saying. I was doing this to myself. It wasn’t so much the stress of the job. Her guidance helped me to recognize the limitation of my control to fix the world, or even myself. To realize that I was causing my own keen pain by falsely imagining I could change much about the world . . . or my dear self.
All these years later when I picked up Dillard’s book again, it carried a whole new meaning. Listen to what Dillard says: “Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. Self-consciousness, however, does. ” The book’s reach extends well beyond trees and sky, plants and creatures.
It’s got to do with being alive, and feeling you’re alive, in the moment. About letting be whatever you observe, whether on the interior or out there. Not trying to change whatever you observe going on inside yourself: but noticing it. Oh yes, seeing that it is there. So if, for instance, I notice myself perseverating over my “imperfection,” asking how I might improve, I might also notice how uncomfortable that whole thing makes me.
I am, in short, causing my own suffering.
* * *
If I notice how my mind enters into the picture of my suffering — that I am repeatedly turning my eyes on myself instead of out there on the world as it is (whether gorgeous or full of war, hatred, dissolution), if I can see what my self-consciousness does to keep me in turmoil — then I can begin to learn. To go easy on myself. It becomes possible to redirect my eyes “out there,” to have compassion for others, revel in the natural world.
Daffodils, for instance.
Over the years I was to learn an enormous amount about the destructive power of the mind. Seeing how I believed the ideas that I myself had generated. Understanding that far from being “objective” truth, my mind’s productions were a function of its mischief-making self. Awakening amounted to a radical relief from mind-inflicted suffering. Bit by bit I came to see that the mind (when not misused, misapplied) can actually be a blessing. And to learn the difference between thinking-about and attention. (Dillard’s word for attention is consciousness.)
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A thousand times a day (or whenever it comes to you to do so) let yourself remember that there’s a difference between thinking-about and being-with. Being-with does not cause pain. (This drives the mind crazy.) Yes, it hurts to allow yourself to sink into the agony of a loved one in great physical pain. But the allowing itself is radical surrender, which feels good. Allowing what-is is actually a relief. Eckhart Tolle writes of this, the weird kinship of surrender and something verging on ecstasy.
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The bottom line (always) is radical allowing. And love.
I am deeply grateful to those of you who are able to make donations, no matter the size. My love for you is the same, whether or not you’re able to give.
Oh, and give some thought to picking up Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. May it be the eye-opener to you that it’s long been to me.