50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 25 - Help!
This morning I walked outside and spontaneously lifted my arms to the sky. I cried forth, with urgency, “Help me.” Then I implored the sky and all the world, “Give me a vision.”
Maybe I’m carrying forth with all this introspection as a lark, because I have no intention or fortitude of greatly shifting the structure of my self. This period in seclusion might be a convenient and even conventional excuse to escape from the world and its problems, even from friends who entrain me (with no harm intended) into certain ways of being. The simple bottom line might be that I like being alone, to hike in the wilderness, to contemplate nature. The larger project to record the process of introspection is, or so it feels so today, a pretext. It justifies this way of using time—“See, I’m being productive.”
Many Native American cultures had a means to answer desperation: The vision quest. The seeker went alone to an isolated place in nature. A flat rock outcrop high up on the side of a mountain might offer a suitable site for the ritual, which typically lasted several days. Without food, and, incredibly, usually without water, the quester stayed there until a vision came. In some cultures a buffalo or bear hide, used as a wrap, was the only clothing, and it also served as bedding.
Most of the day during a traditional vision quest was spent naked. In some traditions, the seeker scraped out a quadrant of lines upon the ground along north-south and also east-west, and then paced and danced back and forth along them, in a sequence, repeated over and over and over, chanting and imploring the great spirit for a vision.
The vision quest as a block of time for seclusion took place, typically, when some crucial stress level had been reached, either from a personal crisis or from a problem facing the whole tribe. The actual vision at some point during that block was expected to provide an answer, perhaps in the form of a conversation with an animal spirit. The point was to go beyond the rational mind.
To me, armed with the understanding of neuroscience, it’s clear that when the vision came for those seekers their brains had been pushed into visual and auditory hallucinations. Sure, getting a message in such a state is possible; it’s a message generated by the unconscious. For example, I don’t think “my” three trees, the Weird Sisters, actually give me messages when I visit them, though I often gain new ideas. In the indigenous vision quest, a brain pattern is triggered and blossoms forth. The vision quest consciously creates the setting that leads to a profound, perhaps even psychedelic-like experience, like dreaming in broad daylight.
Saint Augustine had moments in which he, too, gave up on rationality. I read about these moments and sense a degree of their likeness to aspects of the Native American vision quests, again, in personal understanding. After detailed introspective probing—much of which sounds almost modern to me, for example on the workings of memory—Augustine often and suddenly breaks into exuberant praises of God, and celebrates his utter dependence on God for answers to his questions. It’s odd—it’s like two different people writing. Perhaps during the introspections he reaches limits in his ability to progress with logic. He gets stuck in the entanglements of thought, in the pine needles, in the seeming impossibility for thought to understand thought, in the futility of self-attempting-to-know-self, in the quicksand of the I seeking to comprehend the I, in the paradox of the parcel of the stream knowing the stream. In those states, questions proliferate like a chain reaction. Then Augustine switches over into his devotional praises of God and entreaties. Oh Lord, show me, show me the way. It’s not that he’s simply afraid of dying and wants to know the way to feel all right. One thing I admire is that he’s asking God to help him figure out how memory works.
And so this morning I feel something of an urge for either a vision quest or a turn to a larger consciousness than my own. I can’t . . . I’m stuck . . . I can’t . . . I can’t seem to . . . I’ve recognized the importance of imaging and many types of thought, and the need to think about thinking, to nurture awareness of awareness. And yet I feel . . . can I . . . can I put all the ideas together in a package? Is that the goal? I’m stuck. Help!
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
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