days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 33 - The Ins and Outs of Whirlpools
It has been rainy for a few days. Toward the end of this day, during a break in the weather, I biked four miles to spend some time on the bridge that spanned across the combined Middle and West Forks of the Gila River, where I could enjoy a pleasant view upstream. The first hints of sunset brushed the sky. Fifty or sixty vultures had arrived for their nightly roosting in several large cottonwood trees.
I did some push-ups on the bridge’s railing. Then I got to thinking about a swim I had taken at the swim hole on my neighbor’s river property three days ago in late afternoon. I had emerged cold. Standing on the rock that I use as the entry and exit platform, I went into a state that I’d known in the past but had been in only rarely this summer. In that special state, I am so thoroughly enjoying the physicality of the present moment that I experience thoughts from the inner voice as intrusions, as things almost painful, as happenings I want to fling off my back like flies or biting mosquitoes. I made sounds at the start of each meddlesome thought . . . Aghghghhh . . . get away . . . and it would go away. I shoved each thought away, viscerally, as if I had to use my muscles to accomplish the purge.
It was thus at the bridge today. With the vultures watching me, I started thinking about that state. How did I get into it? Why hadn’t I been in it more often? My thinking along these lines was what led me on this occasion to bring on the state again. As the state emerged, I paced around, back and forth, having walked just off the bridge but still on the road, with not a car in sight. I used my voice . . Aghghghhh . . . to drive away thoughts as they began to intrude. And I noticed the following:
As a burst of thought, often in a sequence, would begin, it would throw me into some scenario about my life, usually as combinations of words and imagery, the little narratives about past or future, such as a fantasy, a rehearsal, and more. With my alert, evaluating inner watchdog . . . Aghghghhh . . . I’d only be in the scenario for a second or two before I’d become conscious of its insidious pull on my attention. I did not abide in any scenario for even as much ten seconds. After the first second or two I was able to become conscious of each scenario starting to unfold.
And I would realize I had been trapped in the unfolding and the entrapment would usually increase so with each successive part of any given narrative. . . but then . . . Aghghghhh . . . I would growl, and use my muscles. My arms would tense up, also my legs, and I would cast my eyes up to a new place in the sky, give a final grunt and I’d be out. Then I had some seconds of silence. But it was amazing how quickly I would go in again, not to the that sequence but to some other.
At this point, after a number of entries and exists, I began to see more clearly the dynamics of the process. The way that attention gets pulled into various scenarios is somewhat like a landscape of hills-and-valleys, a metaphor often used in dynamic systems theory. Imagine a ball on top of a smooth, rounded hill with similarly smooth valleys as the depths between the hills all around. Around those valleys are more hills and around those hills are more valleys. It’s an undulating landscape of highs and lows. The ball atop any hill is inherently unstable. The slightest perturbation causes it to roll into a valley. In the mental analogy, being present on a hill of inner silence is unstable. Any slight shift causes the mind to roll down into a valley that contains a particular scenario of thought. The many possible scenarios of our mind create the landscape of valleys, and like a ball rolling into a valley any of these lower points can trap the mind in an automatic sequence of unbidden thoughts. It’s difficult to stay on a hill because the tendency is to roll down into the valleys.
In this simple, proposed analogy, the ball would never get out of the first valley it rolled down into. But we enter and leave many valleys in our stream of consciousness. In some cases, scenarios just end and we are transported quickly over a hill and into another valley. In other cases, say in meditation, we actively stop a scenario, and attempt to go back to and remain on a hill of inner silence. So our ball—whatever that is—has the ability to roll uphill out of a valley and back to a peak. These elaborations stretching the analogy, perhaps too much so. And there’s another problem. In the analogy, the valleys are passive. The ball rolls down because of gravity. But my inner scenarios felt (and feel) like active pulls on my attention. Our own inner dynamics have regions of thought that grab our attention, perhaps various specifics from them compete for success in grabbing our attention.
The scenarios are like areas of suction that pull our attention into them. They are like whirlpools. Imagine being in a row boat on a large body of water that has whirlpools all over its surface; small ones and large ones. There are spaces between the whirlpools. It’s possible to stay within the in-between spaces, but that is difficult because the whirlpools pull you in towards them. What makes this metaphor good is that the whirlpools are dynamic. When in one whirlpool, you start spinning around, which represents the ways that thoughts in sequences within scenarios start trapping the mind when it is pulled in. A metaphor that uses pits of quicksand, say, would not provide that dynamic quality to how mental time flows when in the traps themselves.
The whirlpool metaphor is also better than one in which the scenarios burst into existence, as geysers or pimples. Those visual concepts don’t contain the sense of being trapped. And the whirlpool concept contains another advantage. It offers a way to leave the whirlpools. In a real world fluid surface with whirlpools—say a turbulent stream—an object such as a leaf gets in a whirlpool temporarily. Then it’s thrown out into another, and then another. That feels a lot like mental reality. And, if one is in a boat, or living life as a water strider insect, there’s the chance of rowing or pushing out of each whirlpool by oneself, as well as a chance to use willpower to stay in the in-between whirlpool states.
The total situation might be imagined as mental possession of some sort of surface to the unconscious, with consciousness living as a ball or boat of attention on the surface, as it goes in and out of various surface whirlpools formed by the underlying swirling and mostly invisible, deep dynamics of the unconscious.
It’s so easy to get pulled into the whirlpools because there’s not much space between them—again, it might be like a rounded hill with almost no zone of stability, in which the slightest perturbation sets one a-sliding down into these whirlpools. Perhaps like the eddies in a river, the whirlpools wrap from one into the other. Thus there might be only small amounts of whirlpool-free space available to the seeker of quietude.
What are these whirlpools? They’re often relevant to the various problems that we have. It is difficult to imagine doing without them. They are our dealings with the world, dealings with other people, jobs or children, the uncertainties, the conflicts . . . yes, many degrees and kinds of inner conflicts. Things we need to attend to. Things typically don’t go right the first time or easily with the world. Whirlpools get formed. They contain joys and remembered pleasures, too, but most often problems. Problems need attention. A situation that requires immediate action seems to spawn the inner dynamics, again mostly in the unconscious, that gives rise every so often to a whirlpool as a cognitive dynamical system in consciousness, whose purpose as that system, so it seems, is help figure out a solution to the problem, a course correction, whatever. Once accomplished or put into a high-level to-do list in the mind, then that whirlpool can dissipate. At times we have major issues in our life that can occupy us, on and off, for days, weeks, months, years.
The analogy of this landscape of whirlpools might open up a new level of thinking about thinking. Or, so it seemed.
As I paced around in the growing sunset, on the bridge under the vultures, growling and groaning. . . Aghghghhh . . . I somewhat breathily described out loud the overall experience, outlined above, of the metaphor of whirlpools as I was going in and out of them. Because I was in my energized state of rejecting the whirlpools, I was able to extract myself from each of them, in turn, as I’ve said, after only a second or two. A whirlpool would pull me in, I’d yank or paddle myself out. I’d be out for a few seconds, and then another whirlpool would pull me in. This amount of time was much briefer than the usual length of time that whirlpools trap me during the normal course of the day when I’m not as conscious to the whole process. There was a cyclic process here: a slip in, a boom of recognition of the swirling, a pull out, then a slip in to another, and so on.
Now, when I say felt myself going in, what exactly is it that goes in? What is in a whirlpool? The I? Does it really seem as if I’m a little being in there, in a particular whirlpool? The previous summer, in Idaho, on the Upper Salmon River, I did get bodily trapped in a type of river eddy called a mix master. And it was difficult to get out. In fact, for a few seconds visions of my life at its end started flashing. Using all my muscles did not take me out. Finally the river itself popped me out. Sometimes even our best mental efforts cannot keep us from the traps of certain inner whirlpools.
I don’t think we can simply say it’s always good to be whirlpool-free. That would be too one-sided. The would ignore the reality that mental whirlpools are parts of our lives and certainly help us get things done. But it does seem of value to be able to choose to be in the swirls of whirlpools or not. In other words, the inner evaluator, which I have discussed, as part of its own structure, can be shaped by valuing the ability to be able to sometimes not only be whirlpool-free but also to have the power to choose when to enjoy and learn from that freedom.
It seems reasonable to conclude, for now, that the way to strengthen the ability to be in the mental calm between whirlpools is to put value on the state of being whirlpool-free. If one values this state, then one might learn better what it takes to be in the state. So the first step is to value being outside of the whirlpools. Perhaps the state of being whirlpool-free is a state of mental rest.
But, still, what’s the I in all this? Awareness? Well, yes. Consciousness? Maybe. We need to think about these words. They cannot just be flung around, because they overlap with each other. But it does seem that we can say that attention is what goes into the whirlpool. When attention goes into a whirlpool, the whirlpool becomes the context, in other words, the scenario is then experienced for that duration of time by the visions that occupy attention. Attention, though conscious, is swirled around and given certain contents by the dynamics of the whirlpool.
For example, that day on the bridge I noticed that one to two seconds in a whirlpool gives time enough for several images and sentences to play out. I am sucked into a whirlpool and suddenly inner language begins. I talk to myself; dialogues jabber away. I am figuring something out, speaking to somebody in imagination, replaying a memory. The “I” in those sentences feels as if I were actually the one talking, meaning my whole I—attention is in that whirlpool and the “I” is a player in the whirlpool’s action. Usually images accompany the sentences, making little fantasy worlds, with “I” as a very abstracted body within those worlds.
Now, to complicate matters, there’s the fact of another I, in what is my metacognitive larger state, who is and was aware enough of the dynamics to be able to report them to myself inwardly as well as report them here in these words (I used a tape recorder during this experience). So a larger kind of attention is “above” the whirlpools, as we are the stream that knows the stream, perhaps the case is the whirlpool that knows the whirlpool. The I in the whirlpools is therefore a kind of subset of this larger attention. But a lot of time, being human, we live immersed within that smaller attentional subset of occupying whirlpools. When I am in those imagined scenarios of language and images inside a whirlpool, what cognitive part is engrossed? Is it my mind as an agent, an actor? Why does being engrossed in scenarios so often feels like being a passive recipient of the surrounding dynamics?
Furthermore, why take on this inner exploration at all? As I stood in the sunset with my body pulsing up and down, scrunching toward the ground then lifting back to the sky, an answer went through my head, pertaining to the goal of thinking about thinking. “To deepen this particular experience is the goal.” To deepen means to make life more profound, more conscious. And that could require spending more time outside the usual sets of whirlpools. There is a saying in Zen about polishing the mirror so it becomes speckless.
But, then, reminding myself again, if we didn’t have these whirlpools, well, we’d in a sense be like all the other non-human animals. Is that so terrible? Let’s leave aside for now any judgments on that matter. The fact that the non-human animal mind is a mirror that is relatively immaculate (we don’t know this, it’s only what I was thinking then) might be one reason we love the animals. When we watch the animals we often inwardly feel that they are more in the present, more whirlpool free.
Of course, as said, I’m hypothesizing about the contents of the animal mind. But consider: As I watched the nearby vultures in the tree, they entered and resolved conflicts with each other. They jockeyed for roost spots in the cottonwood branches. One vulture gets too close, the other squawks. Someone establishes dominance, one launches off for a thirty second flight to return and then land in another branch. They do get into whirlpools. But those disperse quickly. The vultures take care of their whirlpools right then and there. The vultures do not seem to mull things over for days or years.
We love the animals because they seem to be relatively whirlpool-free. They set an example for us. Yet if we were as whirlpool-free we’d also have their limitations. Humans are more complex. The human world creates situations that require attention to live, which we do within enormous kinds of mental whirlpools in our dynamical cognitive systems that are geared to figure things out. This is why we all have so many whirlpools. Eckhart Tolle, the renowned philosopher of the “now,” has suggested that the heaven that Jesus talked about was the state of consciousness of being in the present moment, therefore, in my language here, of being relatively whirlpool-free. So why aren’t we all in that state of heaven? Jesus apparently pointed it out two thousand years ago, and one can make a case that Buddha pointed it out even before Jesus. But I also think that the complexity of civilization requires people who a lot of the time (how much is optimum?) have their minds these swirling whirlpools.
Perhaps the whirlpools are essential to hold civilization together. The whirlpools create the mental structures that determine how we interact with the world. On their plus side, the whirlpools give us new ideas, poetry, inventions. And we have to consider what it means to will one’s attention into a process of creative swirls of thinking, into poetry, invention, into solutions we need of any sort. But even without such willing, the thought scenarios roll on, and that is a fundamental fact of the structure of William James’ fundamental fact of the stream of consciousness.
So it’s not so simple just to say, dichotomizing: “Have the whirlpools” or “Don’t have the whirlpools.” They are a fact. On one hand, the whirlpools can become cognitive traps. The mirror is not as clean as it might be. On the other hand, the whirlpools exhibit the premier human capability of running inner scenarios of thought. So which hand to choose? This issue has come up before for me—it will be a matter of evaluating the kinds of whirlpools. The fact of whirlpools should be critiqued. Which are parasitic? Which are creative?
Biking on the way home from the bridge and vultures, I continued to be able to stop some whirlpools almost in their tracks. I noticed how crucial the moments of just crossing over the lips or edges of whirlpools can be. During the time of the first word or two of inner speech within a new scenario that begins, or the first imagined scene at the start of imagery, when at the beginning of a slide into a whirlpool you can still get out fairly easily. Once you’re into a full sentence and quickly ensuing dialogue, with associated streams of imagery, then you’re caught. At the moment of slipping over the lip—at just that moment—with my newly found strength, I could quickly say, “I don’t need to be thinking about that now. I don’t need to be thinking about that now.” That strength to feel the lip and react helped keep me out of the whirlpools.
Do we sometimes go into the whirlpools because of boredom? If so, then that presents a very tricky situation, because that means we value the ease of drifting in and out of the whirlpools. To actively reject this easy, default situation, we have to gain something from the whirlpool-free state. We might free ourselves from anxiety—because the whirlpools often contain that, too. We free ourselves from being swirled around and basically determined by our unconscious responses. We know the kind of trouble that gets us into. It gets us into war for one thing. It gets us into difficult relationships full of negative emotions. It gets us, as the psychologist Keith Stanovich would say, into serving our genes rather than our conscious self. It might also get us into what is many times right for us, given that the possibility of having whirlpools must be an inherent capability of our human brains human. Of course, it is difficult to define what is the self that we want to serve and who is I that sets up the self that we want. That gets all circular and paradoxical. But that doesn’t mean it’s not all worth trying to figure out, because who we are ultimately may be largely circular, and thus exploring circularity is a pattern on the way to new knowledge. We deepen the experience of existence when we develop mental contents able to look at mental contents, when we think about thinking, when we are aware of awareness.
After returning home (it was by then quite dark), I grabbed my camera and walked back outside to attempt, unsuccessfully, to take a photo of the night sky. I had a couple whirlpools. There I was, mentally telling a colleague in the upcoming autumn at the university that I had some ideas to share from the summer . . . and before hardly time at all passed, I was pulled into a rehearsed scenario with him, with . . . some pride . . stop . . . but also excitement and gladness . . . a mixed bag of mental contents. Anyway, I didn’t need to be thinking about that now, I told myself. Then I thought how I should copy the evening’s tape for a sister and let her analyze the ideas . . . stop . . . I didn’t need to be thinking about that now. There is so much that I don’t need to be thinking about.
The metaphor of the system of whirlpools, by itself, is not going to be enough. I can already feel myself being sucked into whirlpools as the normal state, including the state of obsessing about whirlpools. The mental whirlpool-creating structure that is grooved within me is too deep to change immediately. It’s a product from an entire life, and, as I’ve said, seemingly necessary for humans. This is going to be hard work.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
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