The last time I talked with my grandfather, I was struck by his summarization of people’s lives: Carl Walters, he bought a farm, married a girl from in town, had two kids, and he died. One of his children was a banker. He did really well. Had a big, brick house near Kidville. He died. Elizabeth was a student of mine. She married a boy from Simpsonville. He died. Later on, she died.
So it went, life after life abstracted to two or three sentences. Of course, at 97, my grandfather has a long lens through which he views the past. A lot of the detail is lost. We aren’t much different. We condense hours into days and weeks into months. A courtship becomes, “Your father and I dated, then we got married,” and all those evenings of wonder and doubt are lost to the fragile chemistry of memory. Memory becomes a mere outline of our lives.
Are you anything other than this fragile chemistry?
That is not what I set out to write today. Instead I wanted to write of the heart of the spiritual path – the quest for our source. Particularly, of the day I realized that the answer to my philosophic questions lay in looking for the source of thought. Prior to that day, I spent nearly two years reading spiritual books, attending Self Knowledge Symposium meetings, challenging and changing my habits and character deficiencies. In short, I was improving my self, becoming a better functioning human being.
That changed one day when, during my first solitary retreat, it dawned on me that I was searching in the wrong direction. I suddenly realized I had to study my mind with my mind, to search within for the source of my thoughts. If I could unravel that mystery, I would be free.
Trouble is, that sudden realization didn’t happen that way. My brain did a bit of automatic summarizing in the twelve years since that isolation. I know this because I still have my journals (by the way, if you don’t keep a journal, you are a fool. It is an immensely valuable practice.).
Rather than a sudden realization, there was a slow percolation of thoughts over the preceding months. Working through one method, a new method appeared. That is the path. You work with the immediate problems at hand – your natural koans – by observation, then rejection of that which is less true (see The Natural Koan and To Change or Not to Change, for more on this).
Here is an excerpt from my journal. It is the last day of my first week- long solitary retreat.
7/28/1992: When I first came to the Group [Self Knowledge Symposium], I was hurting from a girl who left me, disillusionment with the academic world, and the recognition that my life was still not right even though I had moved to a new town. I was facing my fear of being alone. The Group gave me something to be a part of; where I could fit. The conversation stimulated my mind. I took some pride in being part of a group of philosophers who were talking about “deep stuff.” My old fear of death, which I had intellectually settled, resurfaced. I realized I didn’t know where I was going, if anywhere, after death. So I began to read and wonder. The longer I stayed, the more I began to look at the world. I realized that no one really knew anything. They were all stumbling along in the dark. I was afraid of wasting my life.
This summer brings a change of perspective: who is afraid? My curiosity about myself has awakened. I wonder who it is that is driven by this fear and why. Where do thoughts come from? I see now that I must analyze my thinking machine before I can discover anything about an afterlife. For some reason, I’m not quite as afraid of death. Oh, I know the body would resist to the end, but the idea of death isn’t quite as terrifying. There is work to be done, countless factors to be accounted for. I am curious about my robot. Still, I lack desire, a fire to know. I must build a fire under me, get my feet moving.
I never did find the fire I thought I was supposed to have. I simply kept working.
If you seek the source of thought by literally looking within your mind, attempting to look beyond the black box from which thought originates, you may move beyond being merely memory. You will look upon the summarization of your life with humor rather than fear and let the details fall where they may.