Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 29

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 29 - Awake in Night’s Thickness

At nightfall, the sky was so black and clear that the stars beamed forth as beacons, bright even in competition with the campfire. I recalled my childhood passion for the celestial constellations and a special library book. Its pages depicted a child who stood in wonder before a large portal—a half circle of night sky as it appeared at the four compass points around the seasons. As a child, I often toted the book outside, as a map, using a flashlight covered with red cellophane to preserve my night vision, and looked up to revelations: the North Star, Draco the dragon, seated queen Cassiopeia, and, in the cold, crystal skies of winter, blue-white brilliant Sirius and mighty hunter Orion.

What drew me to those nighttime patterns? What draws any child? Is it the discovery that a simple book can hold huge truths, via printed patterns that are congruent to those written in the heavens? Is the cosmos so constant that a book can maintain those truths, year after year? There’s also the sheer wonder of darkness pierced with glistening points, faraway but otherwise like our own sun.

Now my passion is to stand before the half circle of consciousness rife with its own kinds of fantastic forms. This inner sky, in a way not so different from the outer celestial turning, progresses through a series of changes as the unconscious below turns around and around and throws up the visible panorama of consciousness. But if the sky is consciousness, who is the boy who surveys it?

I awoke in the midriff of night. The river, only a stone’s toss from the tent and swollen from several days of afternoon rains, rushed in a steady roar. The river is part of my experience, I thought. And as I lay in the hollow darkness, alert and, as it turned out, unable to fall back asleep for a long while, I ceased any separation from the river. It more and more became one part of my total identity. After all, the river as I know it is my experience of it, in my brain.

Another stream of sounds played prominently in the visible sky of awareness. A few riffs from a Beethoven piano sonata ran up and down delicate lines of melody. They repeated over and over, their volumes waxing and waning to my inner ear, at times halting but not for long. The two auditory flows—river and inner piano—issued forth as distinct confluences then merged in the overall stream of consciousness. I could stop neither. And they were both equal parts of me as raw experience.

I have described, at this point, two flows, equal in power and running simultaneously in my mind: river and inner music. There streamed yet another. My tooth ached. It’s an area in a side of molars, where a dentist years ago had amputated a hopeless root. The gap left by the procedure healed but has never been completely pain free for more than a few weeks at a stretch. It’s often worse at night, and on this night, the pain was a river of ache, an unavoidable presence in the total panorama of awareness, adding a third branch to the other flows, all independent braids and all free-running. “I” could not stop or significantly alter any of them.

In this experience—eerie and difficult to explain—I had become the streams. And this “space” was entered, I later realized, because the evaluator was largely absent. Again, it’s hard to describe and I want to avoid gushy-mysticism about the experience, and it’s not as if I had no inner voice coursing along as well in the overall conscious flow. Indeed, there was an inner voice as a fourth stream. But key to the quality of this “space” was that I had ceased to identify primarily with either that inner voice or the commentator implied by it. Who is this commentator that makes the inner voice? In usual consciousness, it’s the “I” of the sentences of the inner voice. In this “space” I was no longer the “I” of the inner voice, even if “I” appeared as subject in the inner sentences. The I of the whole experienced moment—by identifying with all “now”—had blossomed to a form far beyond the “I” of inwardly voiced semantics.

Of all the streams, the inner voice was the most varied. Nature’s rushing river, Beethoven’s melody, and tooth pain were fairly constant and repetitive. By contrast, the inner voice was the very essence of psychological diversity. Even so, it had its own kind of constancy and repetition, which is why we can so easily call it a stream, with its babbling flow of comments and questions. Normally, the voice seems identical to “me” because it’s through the voice that I think I will my movements. But laying there tucked in a sleeping bag inside a tent within the vast darkness of the wilderness outside, I was not going anywhere. I had no need for the voice to verbally will anything. Yet it ran and ran, ran at my inner mouth. How could I then identify with it any more than the river? I didn’t. True, the voice contained “my” sentence structures (they weren’t in Japanese or Sanskrit) and occasional hints of autobiography. But the inner voice was largely outside any control. Though it spoke in English rather than white noise rhythmic gushing, in many ways it was no different from the river.

As I lay on my back, tactile feelings also ran within my body, almost as an undercurrent to the four other streams. The tooth pain was so intense, I treated it like a stream of its own, and felt all other body sensations as an additional stream. Right arm was crossed over my chest and right hand controlled the tape recorder, which I had grabbed from beside the sleeping bag when the singular rareness of the moment had first become obvious. Left arm rested alongside my torso on the air mattress. Heels of feet were lightly touching the floor of the tent. Buttocks and thighs were supported against the air mattress. There was a pain in my right big toe, new to me; perhaps its nail had dug into flesh during the previous day’s long hike.

I yawned. And I breathed. Which of these sensations am I? Neuroscience has revealed that many of the inner body sensations, including pain, shunt up into the brain through particular types of neurons in the spinal column called C-fibers. Under the skull the signals from the so-called interoceptive system pass through several transfer stations of brain knots, into a sub-surface part of the brain, specifically the right insula, which some neuroscientists even suggest is the seat of the body-self, a proto-self that could perhaps be cognitively duplicated as a higher-level abstraction elsewhere in the brain during conscious thinking, forming the complex psychological self we normally think of as “me,” in the thought process.

It’s usually easy to experience the psychological self as not identical to the nonverbal streams of inner music, outer world sounds, and body sensations (including pain), and think of these streams not as the self but experienced by the self, because they seem to run on their own and cannot be willed away or changed in any substantial way. But there was a self beyond even the inner voice, which is usually more identified with the self. For example, I noticed that I could change my breathing, not stop it altogether, but at one point had an experience of . . . “There—I held my breath,” and I wasn’t telling myself in the inner voice to hold the breath. Something else—some self that is not within the inner voice—did that.

The inner voice itself does not directly discover the tooth pain. The inner voice can comment on it (and does, “Damn, again!”). But the voice is not feeling the pain. What’s feeling the pain? I’m feeling the pain. What is that I? Whatever it is, it can then transfer knowledge of the pain to the unconscious cognitive system that creates the inner voice.

And so I stayed awhile in this expanded presence, somehow able to witness the subsidiary tributaries merging into the overall totality of consciousness. I was simply everything in experience. The mystical practice called the via negativa typically denies the tributaries, step by step, one by one. Indeed, the experiencer cannot be any of them. This via negative is a useful practice. Another standard technique of meditation is to put attention on the breath: one, two, three . . . which helps to shunt identity away from the inner voice and to a rhythmic part of the interoceptive tributary of experience. This night I entered a different practice, what might tentatively be called a via inclusiva, a bonding to all the flowing braided tributaries of experience, a summation of them all.

In the morning, having slept later than usual, I arose, shaking off the fuzz of an end-of-sleep dream wherein I had been banging my fist on a table; others were watching me with some surprise and I sang an old song from the 60s rock group, The Kinks: “Girl/I want/to be with you/all of the time/all day/and all of the night.” Ah, good to be alive, here in the morning. Doing what I want to do. A little achy, a little sore, a little guilty. But . . . alive . . . in the wilderness. All of me, the feelings, the body, my voice, all of me.

Reference

Craig,A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 655-666.
Abstract: “As humans, we perceive feelings from our bodies that relate our state of well-being, our energy and stress levels, our mood and disposition. How do we have these feelings? What neural processes do they represent? Recent functional anatomical work has detailed an afferent neural system in primates and in humans that represents all aspects of the physiological condition of the physical body. This system constitutes a representation of 'the material me', and might provide a foundation for subjective feelings, emotion and self-awareness.” As of January 2025, the paper has been cited (Google Scholar) more than 7000 times.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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