ON JOURNALING AND STORYTELLING
Epigraph: Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (New York: HarperCollins, 1981), p.48.
| Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 73. |
APRIL 2001
Epigraph: Bob Marley, “Three Little Birds,” Exodus, produced by Bob Marley and the Wailers (PolyGram Records, 1977).
| Rumi, The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 109. |
METHOD, SOLITUDE, AND MEDITATION
Epigraphs: Albert Einstein, quoted in the New York Post, November 28, 1972, p. 12; Jean-Martin Charcot, quoted in Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 179.
| Coming from a natural science background, I knew little about qualitative social science approaches when I began to consider studying myself in solitude for my doctoral research. After changing my focus, I worked for two years at UBC in relative isolation before stumbling into an autoethnography workshop led by Carolyn Ellis. (The university community is so fractured that it’s very easy to not know about innovative research methods being developed in other disciplines.) |
While I was exposed to new ideas at the workshop, the experience was even more valuable because it clarified and validated the direction I’d been moving in on my own. My intuitive orientation to research and writing is very similar to the open-ended and informal approach of autoethnography: pay attention to what is happening and figure out what you need to do to explore and describe the situation.
Autoethnography follows naturally from the insight: “everything that is said is said by an observer” (Maturana 1978). In the domain of cognitive science, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) extend the work of Merleu Ponty and argue that it’s important to study cognition not only from the perspective of an external observer but also from the perspective of lived experience. There’s growing recognition in many fields that studying experience from a first-person perspective is a valid and important academic approach.
Autoethnography research is expressly presented as a personal narrative of the researcher. There is no covert assumption that the author speaks with the disembodied “voice of authority” (Ellis 2004; Ellis and Bochner 2000). It’s accepted that another observer wouldn’t necessarily experience and interpret events in the same way or even frame the same activities in the ongoing flow of life as important “events” to be interpreted. Emotional impact is welcomed and described as a vital aspect of any experience. In writing, the author speaks from his or her heart and mind directly to the heart and mind of the reader. The primary intention is to evoke resonance in the reader through first-person narrative rather than to provide objective description and analysis.
But my research isn’t precisely autoethnographic according to Ellis’s definition that “Autoethnography refers to writing about the personal and its relationship to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness” (Ellis 2004, p. 37). The primary focus of my research is myself in relationship with the nonhuman world rather than with culture. In some sense it’s impossible for a human to ever leave the cultural matrix, and seeking solitude is a cultural phenomenon, but my emphasis is on the auto- rather than the ethnographic.
During the year, I not only worked to remain mindful in the present moment, but I also struggled to make sense of my experience. My search for understanding often relied more on intuitive insight than on a logical progression of thought, but there were threads of insight that wound through the year — often disappearing for a while only to reemerge into consciousness — and seemed to deepen and clarify over time. Some of the threads remained tangled and frayed, and those, too, were an important part of the experience.
In her excellent essay “Writing: A Method of Inquiry,” Laura Richardson (2000) reflects on why so much academic writing is deadly dull. She argues that instead of attempting to evoke a living experience for the reader, academic writing usually tries to nail down some aspect of the world. Moreover, the process of exploration is divorced from the process of writing: first you do the research, and then you report the results. As an alternative, she encourages us to integrate the two aspects into a single dynamic process so that writing, itself, becomes an active part of the ongoing research. I’ve found this to be an exciting approach.
As my own research approach became more immediately self-reflexive, my area of interest broadened to embrace more than the fieldwork of living for a year in solitude. That phase remained the focus, but writing the dissertation was also an opportunity to develop mindful awareness; it became part of my exploration of education as spiritual practice (or spiritual practice in the context of education). My drift into circular self-reflexivity became clear to me while I was writing my doctoral qualifying exam essay. I began to use writing the essay as an example of what I was writing about. In doing so, I felt a surge of energy and excitement, and I thought, “Yes, this is it! This is what I’ve been looking for. This is the most direct way to bring my own life into the academic process.”
JUNE 2001
Epigraph: S. N. Goenka, video recording of oral teaching at the December 1998 Vipassana meditation retreat, North Fork, California. Also see the Vipassana
Meditation website, www.dhamma.org (accessed May 2, 2008).
A GLANCE AT OTHER SOLITARIES
Epigraph: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1854; reprint, 1971), p. 37.
| Ibid., p. 308. | |
| Richard Byrd, Alone (New York: Putnam, 1938), p. 120. |
JULY 2001
Epigraph: Catholic Diocese of Machakos’s website, www.machakosdiocese.org
/uwo/uwo_28.htm (accessed May 2, 2008).
DANCING IN THE HALLOWED HALLS
Epigraphs: Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Witter Bynner (London: Lyrebird, 1972), ch. 1; xx, Henry Miller, quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations, ed. John Cook (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 46.
| Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Natural Unfolding (Santa Cruz, CA: Unity Press, 1976), p. 40. | |
| Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 197. | |
| Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 89. | |
| Francisco Varela, in The View from Within: First-person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness, ed. Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear (Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1999), p. 1. | |
| Although I still sometimes get caught in dualistic thinking about realism and subjectivism, I’m slowly relinquishing the dream of an objective “God’s-Eye View” of the world; I’m rediscovering my physically and culturally embodied existence. I live in an actual world; my own direct experience is neither abstract nor imaginary. It’s true for me in this place at this moment, but it’s not universally true. |
As a concrete example, imagine how a simple object like a table might look to a spider or an infant. It seems evident that they would perceive it quite differently from how we (adult humans) do. We might say, “Yes, but we see it as it ‘really’ is.” Now imagine seeing the table as a physicist might claim it “really” is: electrons whirling through (or electron clouds in) largely empty space around jiggling clusters of protons and neutrons. She might insist that her version is the correct one. We could also imagine the table as we would see it if we were the carpenter who had built it: the surface he had shaped and sanded, the legs he had turned on a lathe, the pieces he had assembled and varnished. We would notice every variation in grain, each small flaw in workmanship, and the nearly invisible bloodstain from a sliced finger. Which is the most accurate representation of how the world “really” is? Or are they all equally valid from distinct points of view? Perhaps the world is not any one way.
As a social example, imagine two people reading this book: one is intrigued by and identifies with the inner explorations portrayed; the other finds them self-indulgent, tedious, and irrelevant to his or her life. Each — via the journal — perceives the author in a certain way. I compare their experiences of who I am to who I experience myself to be. Which of the three views is objectively correct? Who, actually, am I? Is there an ideal, unbiased, correct answer? If so, who could know with any certainty that he or she has that complete and unbiased answer? Or is the person in the journal actually someone different for each of us? Now consider the metaphor of drawing conceptual outlines on a sheet of acetate. Our notion of who we and others are often tends to obscure the constantly changing Suchness of our being.
This is the position I find myself in. I cannot coherently claim to experience the world as it “really” is. First, my perceptions are constrained by my physical structure. My perceptual gear is sensitive to only a narrow band of all that im pinges on it, and then my mind constructs an experience based on the neural response that is triggered by the appropriate stimuli. Cultural training strongly affects what I perceive and how I interpret it. Finally, as Freud and Jung showed, my personal history can affect me so strongly that I project preconceived attri butes onto the world and then believe I see what exists “out there.”
Although this line of reasoning seems logically clear to me, the idea that I’m cut off from the unknowable “real” world and isolated in my own mind is disturbing; it seems solipsistic and lifeless. In my heart I know that I’m part of something larger and that I didn’t create myself. I exist not in a vacuum but in an environmental matrix with which I’m physically, biologically, socially, and culturally coupled. When I visualize the processes of evolution working through enormous stretches of time (or the formless presence of God dancing creation into existence), I realize I come from and belong to that something larger. I am That. But is this felt knowledge any more certain than the positivist’s dream of objectivity? Here, the wheels begin to spin, and I lose traction.
I return to my own immediate experience of physical embodiment in this time and place. This awareness not only resists the assumption of pure objectivity, but also protects against flights of pure disconnected subjectivity. My experience of the world is real, but it’s neither universal nor permanent. I feel my body-mind relax into this middle way — until the next time my mind begins to grasp for certainty and clutch at thoughts in the wind.
| Ken Wilber’s work is very valuable and worth reading, although some of his more recent “pop” books seem less useful than his earlier ones. For an exploration of the personal development of consciousness (and for a useful bibliography), No Boundary (1979) is excellent. Wilber’s major work is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995), in which he develops in detail his four-quadrant developmental model. The Eye of Spirit is a useful alternative (or introduction) to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. All these books discuss the development and validity of various modalities of exploring the world. Up from Eden (1981) focuses on cultural evolution and the relationship between evolving consciousness and manifestations of culture. |
One could argue that in purporting to present an objective developmental model, Wilber smuggles in his own personal and cultural values. Whenever relative value is assigned to different cultural and personal attitudes and behaviors, the assessment must be based on some hierarchical system. It cannot be otherwise. This creates a problem: What value system do we use? What grounds do we have to assume that the particular system we (or our culture) happen to prefer is universally superior? If we don’t overtly acknowledge that the system we ’re using is our own preference, then we must covertly assume that those values are implicitly better.
Wilber points out the internal contradiction of radical relativism when it claims that all cultural mores and values are equally valid; in doing so it implicitly assumes that its own standard (equality and inclusion) is superior to the alternate standard of judging some cultural mores and values to be better than others. But Wilber himself assumes that spiritual development and a deeper and wider embrace of the world is a pre-given “universal good” rather than simply his own (and his culture ’s) preference.
The only way out of this bind that I can see is to assume neither that all cultural and personal attitudes and behaviors are equally good nor that one ’s own judgment is universally valid. Each of us needs to take personal responsibility for our values, live by and argue for them, and trust the flow of the universe to sort things out. There’s a challenge here. What if someone else’s values include killing anyone who holds values different from his; then what do I do?
| In his excellent and readable book Radical Nature, Christian de Quincey describes four philosophical schools of thought that attempt to create internally consistent worldviews that include the relationship between consciousness and matter: materialism, idealism, dualism, and panpsychism. Materialism and idealism begin by giving either matter or consciousness precedence as the primary “stuff ” of the universe and then attempt to show how the other — which is fundamentally different in kind — can arise spontaneously. Such spontaneous arising miraculously creates something from nothing. This is, according to de Quincey, philosophically forbidden. Dualism gives both matter and consciousness equal but separate status and then attempts to demonstrate how they relate to each other. Such a relationship is also philosophically impossible. |
De Quincey, himself, argues for panpsychism, which claims that consciousness and matter are not separate at any level of organization. Consciousness, in one form or another, is inherent to matter all the way down from humans to subatomic particles. This does not imply that rocks can think, but only that they, along with all else, have subjectivity: they are not merely objective things. I find it difficult to imagine that a rock has subjectivity, but I can easily imagine that all organic forms do. More important to me is my experience that the whole flowing universe, when not conceptually divided into separate things — organic and nonorganic — is fully alive. And when my mind is still and clear, I perceive consciousness to inhere in the whole world, not just in humans and a few other so-called higher animals. Consciousness may be called Spirit, Life, God, or any of many other names; it manifests to me experientially as the Presence of something.
As far as I can tell, there are internal inconsistencies in all conceptual systems, and I imagine that thoughtful materialists, idealists, or dualists who experience the world through one of those lenses can also point out internal inconsistencies in arguments for panpsychism. This doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is that panpsychism has a long history and a respectable philosophical reputation. It’s not that I believe panpsychism is necessarily the correct philosophical position to hold; rather it is one well-crafted story I can relate to that other people have long used to make sense of their lived experience. I am not alone.
AUGUST 2001
Epigraph: Simone Weil, Waiting on God: Letters and Essays (London: Fount,
1977), p. 55.
SEPTEMBER 2001
Epigraph: Antonio Machado, “Cantares,” 1929. The original Spanish version is
available at the Los Poetas website, www.los-poetas.com/a/mach.htm (ac-
cessed May 2, 2008); this English translation is mine.
THE URGE TO BE ALONE
Epigraphs: Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, ed. W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger (New York: Viking, 1962; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993), p. 134; John Donne, Meditation V. in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin, (New York: Modern Library, 1952), pp. 420–421; Paul Tillich, The Eternal
Now (New York: Scribner, 1963), p. 11.
| Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Ballantine, 1988), p. 35. | |
| Ibid., p. 85. | |
| Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1974), p. 18. | |
| Charles Alexander Eastman, quoted in Philip Koch, Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1994), p. 284. | |
| Koch, Solitude,p. 27. | |
| David Hume, quoted in Koch, Solitude, p. 211. | |
| Storr, Solitude, p. xiv. | |
| Henri Nouwen, quoted in Koch, Solitude, p. 244. | |
| Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (New York: HarperCollins, 1981), p. 34. | |
| Koch, Solitude, p. 230. | |
| Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove, 1961), p. 195. | |
| Marcel Proust, quoted in Koch, Solitude, p. 160. | |
| Koch, Solitude, pp. 190, 199. | |
| Petrarch, quoted in Koch, Solitude, p. 209. | |
| Thomas Merton, quoted in Koch, Solitude, p. 113. | |
| Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, p. 27. | |
| Koch, Solitude, p. 216. | |
| The data are taken from Robert Greenway, “The Wilderness Effect and Ecopsychology,” in Allen Kanner, Theodore Roszak, and Mary Gomes (eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), p. 128. | |
| Greenway, “On Crossing and Not Crossing the Wilderness Boundary,” unpublished manuscript from a talk given at the 5th World Wilderness Conference, Tromso, Norway, 1993, p. 207. |
OCTOBER 2001
Epigraph: Zen proverb quoted in Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977), p. 300.
TECHNOLOGY AND DESIRE
Epigraphs: Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: V. Gollancz, 1982) — this aphorism is often referred to as Clarke ’s Third Law; David Brower, quoted in Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), p. 43; Thoreau, Walden, p. 37.
NOVEMBER 2001
Epigraph: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), p. 1.
DECEMBER 2001
Epigraph: Zen saying, attributed to Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, Workman’s Zen Calendar, entry for June 14, 2005, (New York: Workman, 2005).
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
Epigraph: The Buddha, Diamond Sutra, in The Buddha Speaks, ed. Anne Bancroft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), p. 83.
| Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), pp. 347, 530n2. |
SMALL MIND/BIG MIND
Epigraphs: Albert Einstein, quoted in the New York Post, November 28, 1972; Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism (Boston: Shambhala, 1973), p. 8.
| Mel Weitsman, from Dogen’s Shobogenzo. Talk given at Chapel Hill Zen Center, Chapel Hill, NC, November 8, 1997, available at www.intrex.net/chzg /mel10.htm (accessed May 2, 2008). | |
| These three quotes are from Jack Kornfield, A Path with a Heart (New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 147, 254, 269. |
FEBRUARY 2002
Epigraph: J. Krishnamurti, “Truth Is a Pathless Land,” talk delivered August 2, 1929, Ommen, Netherlands, http://www.kfa.org/history-of-krishnamurti.php (accessed May 2, 2008).
REENTRY
Epigraph: D. T. Suzuki, The Awakening of Zen (Boston: Shambhala, 1980), p. 111.
EPILOGUE
Epigraphs: Zen saying, Workman’s Zen Calendar, entry for March 1, 2005 (New York: Workman, 2005); H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebook, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 241.