On Altering Your Gaze
"What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
I was out for a walk when a neighbor walking in the opposite direction greeted me with good morning. I was startled. With my head slumped, lost in thought, I hadn’t seen her approaching. Walking head down, oblivious to my surroundings, can be dangerous on a winding country road where cars occasionally come by faster than they should.
That morning, I was flailing in what the late psychiatrist Thomas Hora called the Sea of Mental Garbage: “It is the repository of all harmful and destructive ideas which manifest as our pain and suffering, difficulties and sorrows; it is every lie about who and what we are and what our purpose is; in other words, its content is the darkness of ignorant ideas.”
Hora draws attention to our fragmented thinking and ongoing narrative about other people and circumstances, which we’d be embarrassed to share with others.
We don't need to share our garbage thoughts with others, but we do need to recognize when they occupy our mind. My head was slumped that morning because I was detached from Reality; detachment from my surroundings was the natural consequence.
Laura Kennedy recently shared advice at the heart of our work at Mindset Shifts U.
A good guide to the Self-Help genre is as follows: if it’s promising change without honest self-interrogation and a good deal of volitional discomfort, it probably won’t really help. If it makes you feel better without giving you some work to do, foster skepticism. Before we can change, we have to see ourselves as we actually are and consciously break ingrained habits of thought and behaviour. There is nothing comfortable about that – it pitches us out of the familiar and robs us of our ability to respond intuitively to people and situations.
Our minds are unruly and need training, which we must do for ourselves. The discomfort we experience is grist for learning. To soothe our discomfort, our ego’s cheap trick is to shift responsibility for what we feel onto others. Our practice is to become aware of these dysfunctional, ingrained patterns.
As I was drowning in the Sea of Mental Garbage that morning, there was a simple restorative. I picked my head up and reconnected with the woodland surroundings. You can try this restorative practice at home. The next time you find yourself lost in thought, just raise your head and shift your gaze; do nothing but observe your surroundings.
In his essay “Walking” Henry David Thoreau observed how easily he got lost in his thoughts:
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.
Thoreau asked, “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
We might ask, What business have I talking with my partner while I thinking of something else? What business have I playing with my child while I am thinking of watching football? What business have I stopping by my colleague's desk while thinking of a grievance I hold about them?
This past week has been peak blueberries on our bushes. If I pick with thoughts that this is keeping me from more important things, picking is tedious. I settle into a rhythm if I pick with presence, appreciating what I’m doing and the bush. I hear the birds, and like a kid, I don’t want to stop picking. As a bonus, picking with presence increases my energy for the rest of the day’s work.
Thoreau wasn’t seeking perfection, and we shouldn’t either. Whether we publicly share our foibles is our choice, but awareness of what our mind is up to is necessary.
We’ve completed our work with Bonds That Make Us Free, but Terry Warner shares an instructive story in chapter 10, “The Truth Dispels the Lie.” It didn’t make the earlier session overview, but it is helpful to share it now.
In Warner's story, Paul is out with his friends and feels pressured by them to use drugs. Warner writes, “How Paul behaved in relation to those boys—or in other words, his insecure, approval-seeking way of being—disposed him to accept the drugs he was offered.”
Warner provides the way out: “But this was not the only relationship in [Paul’s] life. He had ties to others—his family members—in relation to whom he wasn’t so self-absorbed.”
That morning, I stopped being self-absorbed when I picked my head, looked at the forest around me, and returned a greeting to my neighbor. Similarly, when we fully engage with our colleague, partner, or child, we stop being self-absorbed.
Warner writes, as Paul disconnected from the pressure from his friends “he could awaken himself to and reconnect considerately with them by turning away, in his imagination, from the immediate situation.”
Out of that choice, Warner explains, comes the transformation:
That mental act drew him back into a more assured, less anxious way of being. That is what enabled him, with a suddenness that otherwise would be incomprehensible, to reverse his response to his peers—almost as if, in that decisive moment, he had been transformed into a different sort of person.
Paul was bonded to something larger than a group of boys doing drugs. “He responded to those boys not as one bonded primarily to them, but as one bonded primarily to his family.”
When Paul was about to go down the wrong path, he relived past rejection experiences and thoughts about fitting in. He feared what the future might bring. He was not present.
In “Walking,” Thoreau wrote, “Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.”
When Paul came to his senses, he was in the present, and his bonds transformed him.
Recently, Max Borders delivered wise advice in a single evocative sentence: “I’m not wild about crying my teardrop into the ocean and expecting the tide to turn.”
Max wasn’t writing about personal development, but his advice applies here too. Turning the tide in our personal lives does not come from our mental churning.
Turning our personal tide is impossible until we are first willing to be transformed by the bonds that reflect our highest values and most profound connections. Experiencing those bonds in the present moment, we can sail beyond the Sea of Mental Garbage into what Dr. Hora called the Ocean of Love-Intelligence: “The infinite, divine Source out of which flow all intelligent, useful, loving, inspired creative ideas.”
We can stop crying our teardrops in our ego’s sea of garbage and align ourselves with the mighty Ocean that we didn’t make but always welcomes us. Truth—Love-Intelligence—dispels our fantastical lies.
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Beginning in September, at Mindset Shifts U, we begin our study of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. With Kamala Harris threatening to manage grocery prices and dramatically increase the government's role, Hayek’s warnings have never been more critical. After studying Hayek, you can explain to others why the price system works better than a bureaucrat in Washington. When politicians tell you they act in the public interest or the common good, you will understand why the terms lie.
In December, with anger almost certainly boiling over after the election, we will consider the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s healing essay “On Anger.” On Friday, one excellent recommended translation of “On Anger” was temporarily on Kindle sale for $2.99.
I will share our fall schedule at Mindset Shifts U in the next day or two.
Thank you for this. I know that this can only be self-serving, but this essay resonates deeply with something I wrote yesterday about managing bipolar II disorder: https://open.substack.com/pub/sacredtension/p/bipolar-monasticism?r=8vyw0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Primarily, that it is the most simple, basic stuff that is the most medicinal: clear awareness, being outside, loving others, being present. We resist such solutions because they seem too simple for such overwhelming problems.