Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude-Day 10

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 10 -- Desire for an Alternative Moment

Days in the wild often just seem to disappear. Yet they are also as full as can be. Late this day, with the main meal in my belly, I hiked an upland ridge into the vastness. . . but did not make it to a spot I knew, the three ancient juniper tree skeletons, which I call the weird sisters.

During the relentless uphill climb, I noticed myself tingling with a mild anxiety. I had started too late, or so I kept saying to myself. I wanted the sun even warmer, and also higher in the sky, so I would have more open ended time until darkness hit. This dissatisfaction had begun even at dinner. Anxious to get going, I had too quickly chewed the corn, too hastily gulped down the rice. Now on the way, if I walk faster, I thought, I could go farther but then after turning would have to hurry an even greater distance back home with the light fading.

Bottom line: I was desirous for conditions to be different from what they were.

Desires, which I will use synonymously with the concept of wants, are worth examining. Think about a hungry, crying infant. Hunger is a want. So is my want for more daylight on the hike. Hunger and a want for more daylight differ in many ways. But both are states of dissatisfaction with things as they are.

Many traditions that deal with human potential (such as so-called spiritual traditions) advise us against being dissatisfied with what is. Simply put, dissatisfaction is frustrating, and therefore it creates inner pain. The state occurs when there is a difference, a separation, between what is present in the actual moment and what is desired. Obviously, this is an utterly typical state that humans enter. It is so typical that many wise folks have formulated teachings about how we can diminish this type of pain. Buddha, for example, was explicit about it in the first two of his Noble Truths. His first truth was: There is suffering. His second truth: Suffering is caused by desire. In his additional truths he went on to offer a way out, using a system of mental practices.

Buddha referred to psychological desires and their consequent sufferings, not the suffering caused by a physiological want such as hunger. Let us likewise ignore, for a moment, such physiological wants, though there is a possible connection between the two types. The psychological ability to want, say, to go see a painting by Van Gogh, could have been piggy-backed in adulthood, developmentally speaking, on a primal ability to physiologically want. But this is an issue for cognitive scientists to figure out. To get straight to the key question: How do our psychological wants work?

In addition to the generalized feeling of longing, imagery is often important. In my desire for more time during the late afternoon, I imagined the sun higher. I saw it in my mind’s eye. That helped solidify the fuel, in a sense helped fuel it. Also in mind’s eye, I saw myself arriving at a more distant point along the ridge than I knew I would actually be able to accomplish. Retrospectively, while hiking, I imagined myself eating dinner a half hour earlier (which would have given me half an hour more). I played and replayed an alternative situation by imagining new features in the future and in the past.

So it is possible that a want is a combination of visceral reactions that are directly related to the feeling of longing along with cognitive patterns that usually employ imagery as well as more obvious, inner, silent verbalizations, such as those whisper beneath the breath—“Damn, I should have made dinner earlier.” On top of all these feeder streams into the grand stream of consciousness, there is also, during reflection on the dynamics of want, the silent admonition that I probably should not think about things being different from what they are, which is another point that typically arises in the mind when one notices the anxiety (Buddha’s point about suffering). In short, I want to get out of wanting.

This last point entails that I am aware that I am wanting things to be different from what they are. This is a form of metacognition. I often notice, during realizations of this kind, in such moments of self-awareness, that the realization first occurs nonverbally. Something deep wakes up, if just a little. That is then followed by the verbal (I refer here to the silent, inner voice). How does the first step happen—that I nonverbally realize that I’m in a state of wanting things to be different?

Try it yourself: Have the realization that you are wanting things to be different from what they are, but do it without hearing an inner voice speaking to yourself. For me, the start of this realization comes with an inner, almost muscular tension associated with the juxtaposition of some aspect of the outer world with a fleeting, dreamlike inner image of the desired state.

For example, one image during my hike was the real sun. The other image was the sun as I wanted it to be, higher in the sky. The inner tension came from “weighing” them, in a feeling akin to comparing two things on a set of scales. There was a sense of wanting to tip one and transform it to be like the other, perhaps to replace the outer world with my inner, desired image, or to morph the outer world to conform to my image. This occurred in a sensation that was visual and quite visceral. For me, there was a sequence in these cognitive events as the comparison unfolded. Attention to the sun’s position in the outer world arrived slightly ahead of the inner world image of how I wanted things to be. That makes sense. The outer world is sensed as it is before it is subsequently sensed as undesirable in comparison to an inner image of how the outer world would be in the more desired state.

Who it is that has the want? Who this “I” that is wanting the difference? Exploring this could lead again to my wondering if I’m a neuro-robot. In the case of these suns, outer and inner, on this particular hike, I did not decide to have the want, I just started wanting. That in itself, I can only conclude, was very automatic.

Returning to the topic of physiological wants, they are very much who we are and also very necessary. If the newborn doesn’t desire the breast, then it is in trouble, it could die. Like how individual raindrops clinging to cedar needles share the spherical shape, humans in the human condition share wants. We all have hunger. If it is true, as I suggested above, that physiological wants form the foundation for more abstract wants, as we mature in a universal developmental process, then we probably all share a general ability to contrast an inner picture of a desired world with the actual world.

We certainly are creatures full of complicated desires. In most animals, I surmise, wants are small in number and relatively primal. But for humans—well, even the contents of my tiny mountain trailer proves that I have a huge number and variety of wants. Each manufactured item was, at some point, desired by me. That is why I bought it. I have had an incalculable number of desires. My days are full of desires. Many of these material desires if reasonable in cost I am able to fulfill. I want a CD, I buy it. And so on, almost ad nauseam. Of course you could say there is the general desire for things, then many specific desires for each thing. Consider the way that a bird in a state of hunger has the general desire for food, and then in foraging satisfy that hunger, enters into specific desires when it spots a caterpillar on a tree limb or see me a toss piece of bread to it in my yard. But what does that mean—for me to posit a most general, upper-level desire for “things” (and not just those material)?

The other day I said that a hike should be like life, you want it to go on forever. You know it won’t but you can want it to. On today’s hike, I noticed that I was not in the state of wanting it to go on forever. I was always five steps ahead, thinking that the future might change the sun’s angle and push back time to an earlier point in the day. Futile ruminations! I suggest that the same dynamics happen for all the weightier and more consequential wants in life. This state of anxiety feels akin to what a complexity theorist might call an attractor state because one can swirl into it so easily and unconsciously.

Thus the state of wanting, consisting of a basic, binary comparison of real reality with the desired reality, seems to be an attractor state not just on rare occasions but as an integral part of the flow of consciousness on most days. Once in that state it can be difficult to exit . . . even if one is aware of it.

Of course, awareness has to be the first step. We cannot make changes unless there is an initial awareness, in this case the “what is” of the structure of want. This is along lines of cultivating thinking about thinking, or awareness of awareness. But it’s so easy to get sucked into a little trance of unawareness. So easy.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk