Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 43

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

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 43 Seeking to Be a Better Seeker

As I walked the road, heading to the where the trail starts downstream along the Gila River and eventually arrives at the best swim hole, I thought of a conversation I might have in the future. In it, I’m telling a friend, “I’m seeking to be a better seeker.” What does that mean? What does that have to do with evolutionary biology or psychology? Might I be seeking a more developed consciousness to derive rewards that would make me more powerful in my various groups? Like a javelina learning a better grunt not for the sake of the grunt but to be more competitive in securing food? This abstract thing called seeking is a conceptual goal I’ve taken in as a meme from the culture, long ago from books like my early readings of Hesse’s Siddhartha and Magister Ludi and then hundreds of others, and later from training in science—let’s not forget that! Seeking is the intellectual, emotional, and even moral air I breathe. What does it mean, to seek to be a better seeker? For one, it means setting up a plan for the future. That’s exciting, but it’s also a kind of a fantasy that one must be careful of.

My drive for change in no small part has to do with renewing the self, perhaps even destroying the old self, letting it wither. But—Why? I like myself. I like my life. I also like the cliffs and clouds, but similar to them, my life and I have mostly formed without the higher levels of me having much to do with it. My life and I were set to a large extent from childhood, from teen years, and in my twenties and thirties. It’s shocking to think back on how one responds to situations and responds in certain habitual ways, how one puts forth endeavors in certain ways and then decides in certain ways, all based upon prior formed cognitive structures that go all the way back to infancy, even to one’s genes and their body-guiding interactions with one’s environment of family, society, country, and historical epoch. So part of my seeking is to see how much metamorphosis I can achieve. That requires using parts of the old self, like a caterpillar reorganizing into a butterfly, to turn into something new . . . uhuhahhhh. . . I don’t know . . .  for the hell of it! It sounds like fun. Tortuous pain, painful fun, frustrating fun, hard work fun. But perhaps there’s something extraordinary to be gained, which will take me to a place further removed from all the determining factors of physics, biology, and even my given culture.  

Because I’m always spontaneously thinking about things to do—projects, people to talk to—I might as well have some control over the thoughts. The master philosopher of myth and religion, Joseph Campbell, saw the issue. He advised, “Follow your bliss!” Perhaps the phrase is a bit simplistic, as any three-word life guidance would be, but somehow we must, from our storm of individuality, stand up and judge when the seeking is better and when it’s not, and, at the same, examine what we mean by “better.” We probably will need catch-word concepts like Campbell’s, such as putting value on creativity. Reaching within to check off whether the new seeking is individual, creative, attentive, less bound to mental whirlpools, or true to “your bliss” are ways to look at these large concerns. In the end, it’s important to explore what you want to explore. And not be bound to anybody else’s ideas any more. 

The higher and the more encompassing the level of thinking about the inner evaluator, then the closer that level is likely to be a thing born in your conscious present life, and not just a habit rolled onward from a past brainware program. Paying attention to ensure that one’s evaluator has been created as recently as possible is one way to escape feeling like a bio-robot, a cognitomaton. A higher level—to the extent it can be discerned—doesn’t guarantee a final solution, of course, because one could argue that any level will always be partially constructed from previous cognitive programs. But at least, at the very least, one can right now be conscious of seeking to build a new level, to really try and observe all that takes place and what is possible in this present moment. It’s the best we can do.

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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