Interference of the Mind

After a brief hiatus, I find myself back in the public sphere. Why am I back? I guess the more important question is Why was I gone? I hadn’t merely closed my blog or my social media, I had taken down everything… even my books. There is no single, wholly inclusive answer. Like most drastic decisions, it was a culmination of things, people, and events.

Earlier this week, I was folding the laundry while listening to a podcast called, On Being. The discussion was on “Becoming Wise” — snippets of illuminating conversations as requested by long-time listeners who preferred to digest their daily dose of philosophy in the time it took to drink a cup of tea.

The first speaker, author Eckhart Tolle, tells the story of a woman on a train whom he caught talking to herself. The tone of her voice was angry, filled with complaints and negativity, and he figured her crazy. While washing his hands in the bathroom, he thought, “My God. Her voice, she never stops talking.” At which point, he realized, that he did that too, except he didn’t do it aloud. He thought, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” And the person next to him looked up at him. He realized in shock, that he’d spoken aloud.

He goes on to say:

I was in the depths of depression, and I lived in anxiety about my life and my problems and my future. One night I woke up again feeling this sense of dread, and a phrase came into my head, which said, “I can’t live with myself any longer. I can’t live with myself any longer.”

Suddenly I was able to stand back and look at that phrase, and I thought, oh, that is strange. Who am I, and who is the self I cannot live with? Because there must be two of me here if that phrase is correct. There are two of me. The “I” was there, and the “me” that I couldn’t live with actually was the continuous mental noise, the stream of thinking that considered life and that considered myself as a problem…

What we are talking about here is a state of alert attention to what is, where compulsive thinking no longer operates. This means you rise above thinking to a large extent in your life, where you can face life without the interference of the mind — still being able to use the mind when it’s needed but not being used by it.

When I heard that last sentence, I paused, clothing in hand, and stared at the bespectacled eyes looking back at me in the mirror.

Eyes that for the last several months have gotten lost gazing at a galaxy of questions, spent countless sleepless nights searching for answers. Wondering if I’d ever get to understand–if I’d ever find peace from the constant stress that was wearing me sharp and thin. I was a blade ready to cut…until I’d begun to find some solace in the idea that if the multiverse did exist, perhaps there were versions of me fulfilling every forked path and every infinite possibility.

Shit. Here I’ve been struggling, thinking too goddamn much, trying, trying, trying to find answers, resolved to believe in a f*cking multiverse to find some sense of peace, and all I needed to hear was some old man say that the true problem was that I was thinking too much. That all I needed to learn was how to face life without the interference of the mind, and to stop being used by my own goddamn head.

It struck me because it had never been spoken to me in this way, and in that manner. Of course I’m aware that I think too much. Of course I know, because I’m introspective; I chatter non-stop in my head because that’s what I do–it’s who I am. It’s how I solve problems, think creatively, and communicate precisely. But what I hadn’t fully realized was how much of an enemy this other self had become. I’m older now, and just as I have evolved, so has the voice in my head. If I have learned the usefulness and value of manipulation, complex analysis, then so too, has the voice. I was being used, suffocating in a slow burial by my own shit-stirring mind.

I don’t think any of it is intentional. Not that that part of me was trying to self-sabotage, to hold me back because I felt undeserving–it’s operating on self-preservation. The voice adds a moment of hesitancy before any courage-required act. It’s preventing missteps and possible heartbreak. And the simplest answer when action is called for is to simply do nothing–for a long while at least. To circle and circle, so as not to stand still, and yet going no where at all.

So why did I try to shed my writing persona? Why did I cut ties with the nouns I had called myself for over a decade–author, writer, dreamer? Why did I suddenly feel like I didn’t deserve to be called a writer anymore?

I was no longer writing, therefore I am no longer a writer.

Logic, meet, Illogic.

Perhaps I sensed the nearness of some kind of madness.