Becoming un-propelled

It is vitally important that we learn to create a kind of stillness in ourselves that allows us to see things as they are.

It is vitally important that we learn to create a kind of stillness in ourselves that allows us to see things as they are.

I mean, it is not vitally important if we decide we’d like to become enlightened beings. I mean it is vitally important if we want to address the wildfires and hurricanes that are ravaging the Earth increasingly. Or the partisanship that stands to divide the country in some final way. At this point in history, it is vital to any engagement at any scale, large or small.

The truth is, I can be steered by ideas without really knowing whether or not they are real. If I take a few minutes look at the contents of my mind, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s filled with objects made out of thought. Ideas about who I am, about how my day is going, about how my life can go. Ideas about other people, about what my community is, what my country is, etc. I would imagine it’s similar for you.

These objects are, for the most part, fabrications. If you’ve lived any amount of time on the Earth, I would think it’s clear by now that your ideas about how your life can go has had a limited connection to how your life actually goes. The reason for that should be obvious: your ideas about how your life can go are fabricated, and your actual life is more real.

Many of the ideas in our minds have this same quality. We in reality are not our ideas about ourselves, nor is anybody else in reality our ideas about them. Same thing for the other objects: the thoughts about career, family, general advice, etc. I see these objects in our heads as being like sculptures. They are representations of reality, but they are never reality itself, and often enough they are different from reality in significant ways.

The process of actually understanding reality — any part of reality — is a deeply receptive one. It requires a great deal of careful attention. I think it particularly requires attention because my sense is that for most people, the mind is a roil of these fabricated objects of thought. They form, change, merge dissolve. It’s a common experience; you can find mediation texts hundreds if not thousands of years old that talk about it. Humans have apparently been this way for a long time.

In daily life, we are bombarded by thought forms. Images of relationship, family, career; heroes, villains; wisdom, advice. It’s exceedingly easy for us to take these things in undigested, and to try to create with the undigested objects. But it’s worth noticing how impractical this is, too — when we are really entranced, how essentially violent, really, it is. You don’t fit a puzzle piece into the right place in a puzzle from having been told what its shape is. You fit the piece when you know what the shape of the piece is yourself, because you have studied it.

I see that if I want to really understand anything, I must really sit with it, really quietly. I need to get very receptive, drift past the traffic of fabricated objects, and really imbibe what a thing actually is, itself — whether it’s a situation, a part of myself, a part of another person or, usually, some interaction of these. I need to do this again and again, with phenomenon after phenomenon. I make time in my day to do exactly this —twenty minutes a day, at least, if I’m lucky. If I am particularly struggling with something. I try to set aside time particularly for that thing.

I’m not saying that I’m good at this, by the way. I’m just saying that I appreciate how necessary it is. It seems to me that, in anyone whose intelligence you admire, that intelligence is largely the result of having this receptive habit — either consciously or unconsciously. It seems clear to me that this faculty is generally available to people, too. But when available, it has to be cultivated.

In America today, I think it’s particularly interesting to look at the extent to which we are bombarded with pre-fabricated attitudes. Our media — especially social media — are saturated with them. And then many people reach for these attitudes when they try to solve problems. When I was teaching math in Northern Virginia, for instance, I was fascinated by the frequency with which young people first tried even to solve math problems with their personalities. And we certainly call on attitudes when we talk about sociopolitical issues.

Often these attitudes are ingested fabrications, rather than true, marinated habits of spirit. They, too, ought to be subjected to a more realistic process of scrutiny. This is true when we use attitudes alone to solve macro-level problems, and it’s also true when we use attitudes alone to solve group or personal problems.

It’s not to say that we can’t be guided by pre-made thought objects. Of course we can. Sometimes a well-designed thought object can help us get ahold of contours of reality that would have otherwise escaped us. And a rousing attitude can definitely be rousing.

It’s also not — just to say it — to argue that a true perception of the world is an atheistic one. Atheists would argue that theistic conceptions of reality are made of thought objects, but they often fail to realize that most atheistic conceptions of reality are, too. (Personally, I hold with A. W. Tozer, that there is no difference between the spiritual and the real. )

The point is to notice the extent to which we tend to be rather completely propelled by our reactions to these undigested objects. Walter Benjamin’s famous reaction to a Paul Klee painting comes to mind:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

We are the inheritors not only of a roil of events, but of a roil of thought. It has been fed to us from the beginning. We can continue to manufacture our reality from this churn, or we can begin to unwind it.

When we unwind it, we may feel that we are losing things. If done to sufficient degree it can feel even like you are losing your very identity, your trajectory, your whole life.

But think about that, too, unpropelled.

What are you losing, really?