FEST Writing Group

Dear FEST,  Below in bold you will see one sentence that links my Thoreau-vian adventure with DOS.  -Erik

RECALLING THE SELF

Erik Thompson

In many traditions, the path to peace is characterized as remembering, or recalling, the essence of who we are.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

-T.S. Eliot

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”

-Robert Frost

Recently I had a rather clear experience of an expanded sense of myself.

As I drove my daughter Grace and our friend Russell, aged 15, to our canoe embarkation point, we were all rather quiet. Grace was napping in the front seat. As we drove, I looked outside at the familiar Vermont landscape, and my experience of self quietly had my attention. I experienced a tangible stillness within- without effort or concentration of any kind. That stillness seemed enlivened in my awareness by the simple action of looking out at the passing scene. The relative quietness of the riders did not cause this experience. Nor was it caused by the beauty of the scene. It seemed caused by the pure mental quietude ripened by meditation practice. The wooden houses and green spring lawns, the flowering fruit trees and frisky goats, the little ponds and snow capped mountains of Vermont seemed more beautiful than before, glorified by the enriched presence of something very simple, an awakened sense of being. I have driven that road for 30 years. Today, the perceiver, the perceived, and the act of perceiving were glorified from within. The flowering beauty outside seemed rooted deep within me, an abstract inner silence, an impersonal condition of the perceiver that became a vibrating quality of the perceived.

Later, when we were boating on the still water, I was alone in my kayak with our small terrier Oscar. I experienced this inner silence even more tangibly. A tiny smile, far smaller than a half-smile, flickered over my face unbidden. Its external tininess contrasted with a sense of vastness within. I recalled the same tiny smile in a renaissance painting of Mother Mary that I saw last week. As with the man on the water, the human qualities of the woman in the painting were humble, but her inner qualities were radiant. Perhaps that is why people still look at this painting 400 years after it was created.

To the outer world, there was nothing different about the man in his kayak, paddling in the South Slang of the Little Otter Creek in Ferrisburgh, Vermont in the April flood.  But to the man himself, the muddy water had changed to wine. Its ripples were stirred by the hand of a vast silence within and around him. Its yellow-brown reeds quivered with being. The silence of nature has always called to those seeking peace. Yet how many paddlers have tried to flee yammering misery on the water in vain?

Certainly, I have. For the most part, when paddling, I have been rather happy, somewhat content, fairly appreciative. But today I was liberated. The rock my contentment rested upon seemed beyond nature, deeper than the lake bottom, wider than the vast grey sky that surrounded me.

What on earth does this mean?

The experience was “tangible” (from the Latin “tangere” meaning touch).  As tangible as a wooden paddle, yet so abstract. What I touched was as close to me as my very own self. What could ever be closer than that which perceives all that we experience?

This aspect of myself had the following qualities:

• It was silent, meaning It sat in stillness behind all the sounds I heard, an audibly inaudible background.

• It was still, meaning that amidst all my movements it was unmoving. As my eyes moved, it did not move.  As my limbs moved, it did not move.  My heart beat, but it did not beat.

• It was expansive. Just as one feels that the breeze, when it faintly stimulates the skin, comes from somewhere beyond the river, so I felt this tangible stillness to be from somewhere beyond all space and time.

(Was this transcendental thought put into my mind by poetry? Was it a precious fantasy? I don’t think so. Scripture becomes fascinating to the degree that it reminds us of something we have touched.)

• I have read the word “unbounded” over and again in ancient wisdom. What I am describing had this quality. Being beyond size, it seemed sizable. Being beyond space, it seemed spacious.  Being beyond boundaries, it silently whispered that I was boundless.

Here is a short list of the specific boundaries that were loosened during this experience:

• Pain- because it showed me that I am made of delight.

• Suffering- because it is a safe harbor that coexists with, yet transcends, all storms, emotional and circumstantial.

• Locality- because it brought a sense of non-locality to our lake. I knew this aspect of myself would be present anywhere. Wherever I will be, there I can find this. I could be at my daughter’s deathbed. It would be there.

• Conception- because this experience was pre-conceptual. Concepts describe it but are not It. (It is the same with all psychological concepts including Differentiation of Self.)

• Mortality- because it seemed immortal it communicated a sense of immortality to me.

• Psychological boundaries between me, my daughter Grace and Russell were refined. The teens desired to be out of sight and earshot. I celebrated their rising independence. It released rather than pained me. I was differentiated from them on a personal level, even as our separateness was dissolved on the impersonal level. 

Speaking of emotional suffering, it has been a goad driving me for as long as I can remember being Erik. For some reason I was born to suffer emotionally yet born to run toward freedom. At age six in Maryland, I wanted to race out ahead while hiking in Rock Creek Park with my parents. Later I sought out the thinner paths in the green mountains, and hitchhiked highway 80 to the Rockies, trying to free myself from a quiet tangible dread.

Though I wanted it all, I thirsted for emotional freedom more than money or status.  Standing on my father and grandfather’s sturdy shoulders, I was willing to sacrifice some of the financial stability they had. There have been many sweet tastes along the way. I finally found a stable marriage, after banging my fingers with the hammer of love.  “Going steady” was sweet and white, like a wedding cake. But there was blood in the batter- pain, rejection, loneliness and betrayal. I was both betrayer and betrayed, and both were shameful. No stability was found in the arms of early love.

In time, my true marriage was a safer harbor. But even that has its tides. And it is tinged with a concern. What if she dies before me? Will I be lonely?

Marriage without this may always be unstable.  Perhaps only the marriage of the self with the Self is truly stable. To know that Self is delight- when that is known, then all that comes has changed.  No matter what comes and goes, Self will always be waiting.

Meditation showed me a golden key to the door in the attic where stability was hidden, and that key is myself. That key can never tarnish, can be hidden but never lost. I know it may sound far-fetched, but not for me. That key is revealed when all the rushing and running, the searching and thinking, becomes still.

All the old sages say the same thing. Meditation has made their words spring to life.

When the mind lays down its head to rest, the key drops into the lock unbidden.  The path is the simplest one imaginable.  It is the pathless path of silence, of stilling the seeking mind, of returning to what we are.