50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 41 The Unobtainable
Today I planned to explore a new route. If I hiked way up past the Three Weird Sisters, I thought, and up into the tangles of Brushy Mountain, I should be able to locate a trail that reputedly took a steep descent into the valley of the Gila River on its northwest side and well downstream of the old Alum Camp. From there I could walk back the known river trail upstream to home.
It didn’t work out.
After nearly two hours along the ridge and up into Brushy, I thought I had found the new trail down, but soon this guess petered out on frighteningly loose eroded rock. I doubled back and walked a new ridge further east, and several times explored trails that seemed to descend securely, but in each case they too just disappeared, probably animal paths, possibly trail remnants. I stood and stared at the red jagged cliff outcrops far below, trying to see a way to bushwhack down to that shimmering river of safety glimpsed at the distant bottom.
Certainly there was a way, somewhere, and it was likely I could just start a no-return trip down and improvise my route along the way, choosing local courses of least resistance. But sometimes in this rugged, uncertain country such a strategy takes you to dead ends above impassable cliffs. And I was alone. Not good to take chances. I did take a deep breath and decided to turn around.
During the hike back home, I practiced saying “no” to things that came into my mind. Suddenly I was seeing the world around more vividly. Earlier, when I was letting my mind ramble, I was seeing but just enough to get by, to follow the trail, to keep on track. So if I shut down the inner dialogue with a series “no’s,” then what in the vision increases? Can vision become rich enough that it fills the space usually occupied by the inner chatter? This hearkens back to the ways to experience a tree. One can either start thinking in inner words and images about the things one is seeing, or be immersed in their visual aspects and thus fully in that stream of special sensory thinking. But our natural degree of attention to the visual world was constructed by evolution to accomplish things, and not just to create visual engagement with textures, contrasts, and colors. So for how long can the visual world hold us enthralled?
Further exploration of these issues is difficult, because it tends to lead one, inevitably, into questions about how to spend mental time and thus about the deep structures of self and its goals. If I have an idea, say, to write such and such article, I can do it. I can change words on the computer and do it. But if I say, explore deep states, or meditate upon changing the structure of the internal evaluator, it’s so difficult, because I am already programmed a lot by my past habits, which for the most part work, even though at times it feels like being set in concrete. To really explore these matters is like entering into the practice of shamanism. It’s like changing the cliffs, altering the flow of the river, jumping out of the channel.
Began laughing . . . we don’t know where we are going, so we might as well laugh about it. Away whirlpools, away, away, so I can play. Maybe I can play in the world more, more than I do.
Walking back, I began a habit of exhaling with a breathy, audible “hmmm.” Along with this gentle, rhythmic “music,” I attended to the crunch of my boots on the gravely brown path, sacralizing the time with crunch the whole way. The inner music had mostly stopped. The mental whirlpools were only few and spread out with large amounts of space between. This allowed me to see them for what they were in each case, much more consciously. Each became visible: a little bit of future here, there’s the university, do I go into town once more, what do I expect to gain from silencing myself. One whirlpool came and went so fast, that though I sensed it as “useful” (like the questioning about the function of silence), I couldn’t retrieve it. Some whirlpools I approved, though I didn’t dwell in them. To others I said, nah, you’re not needed. It wasn’t a violent No! I merely climbed out from them after half a second, a second at most. No thought patterns ensnared me for very long. Fantastic! And I was not forcing an answer to the question of what role this silence will ultimately have. Perhaps the function is simply to see the contents of thoughts better. You cannot think about thinking unless you first know what you are thinking about. I sat at the top of a ridge, a half mile from where the trail begins a steeper descent into the inhabited portion of the valley, near home. I could see ahead and still some distance below the orange cliffs near the East Fork, and, also, about twenty miles to the east the blue-gray Black Range. It was late afternoon.
As shadows deepen,
Rocks remain on fire.
Touch them. They won’t bite.
© 2025 by Tyler Volk
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Ed -- yeah, I'd vastly prefer not paying close attention to politics. I've always liked to keep up just enough…