This week I was thinking a lot about how my life was going exactly a year ago. Last October, I was still reeling from the loss of my job and healthcare and dealing with the lingering pain of a particularly hurtful breakup. My identity had been so wrapped up in being an academic that when I was faced with the prospect of what I then perceived to be end of my academic career, I became completely unmoored. I was suffering from nearly constant intrusive and catastrophizing thoughts, daily anxiety attacks, and a general sense of failure. I have struggled with self-esteem issues since I was in middle school, but this was perhaps the most acute period of battling with insecurity that I had yet faced. With the help of my friends and mentors—and let’s be honest, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program—I was able to survive this rough patch, but it was some time before I really began to heal.
The first thing that began to bring me peace—aside from the love and support of my partner at the time—was diving into Eckhart Tolle’s work. My friends Natalia (the very same Natalia who introduced me to the Feelings Collector) and Steve had suggested him to me even a year prior, but I suppose I wasn’t ready for his teachings then. But, drowning in suffering, I was open to anything that might help. Steve suggested I listen to the audiobook of A New Earth while doing a repetitive manual task, so one afternoon I sat down with several years’ worth of loose change to sort and roll up into bank sleeves. It, more than anything else, changed my life and my perspective. From then on, I listened to Tolle’s audiobooks for hours each day, on my morning walks, at lunchtime, on my evening walks, and then when I exhausted those, I began to listen to recordings of his seminars and retreats.
One particularly compelling passage for me is the opening anecdote to Chapter 7, “Finding who you truly are,” which concerns the famous inscription above the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself. The temple was the seat of the Oracle, to which people came to find out about their fate or for guidance about a course of action. Tolle argues that most visitors to the Oracle likely missed the point of “know thyself,” if they thought about it at all, for no matter how accurate the Oracle’s proclamation, knowledge of the future cannot save us from unhappiness and self-created suffering. According to Tolle, the true meaning of the inscription is as follows (emphases added):
Before you ask any other question, first ask the most fundamental question of your life: who am I? Not what you identify yourself with, the content of your mind. Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideals/beliefs. Knowing yourself has nothing to do with whatever ideas/concepts are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in being, instead of lost in your mind. Who you think you are, your sense of self, your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your needs and what matters to you in life. And whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a criterion to find out how deeply you know yourself. What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you. So, you may want to ask yourself the question: what are the things that upset and disturb me? If small things have the power to disturb you then who you think you are is exactly that: small. That will be your unconscious belief. What are the small things?
Or, in other words, to borrow a turn of phrase from David Epstein: learning stuff is way less important than learning about oneself. So, what were all the negative intrusive thoughts telling me? Many things, of course, but primary among them was the feeling that I had failed. That I wasn’t good enough. That I had made a huge mistake with my dissertation, and as a result, my career as an academic was coming to a premature end.
Now, I want to return to that sense of a premature end in a second, but first we need to take a slight detour to get there. In graduate school, I often consulted self-help books related to productivity, professionalization, and other things I felt I needed to improve upon. Some of these books were helpful (for example, Getting Things Done, which is an all-time classic), others of which were just anxiety inducing (The Professor is In, don’t even get me started), and others of which were a mix of both. One that I’ve written about before is Cal Newport’s “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.” I’m not fully on board with all of Newport’s ideas, but one that I agree with him on and believe deeply is that people can only manifest greatness insofar as they bring their power to bear on a point they’ve chosen to show their full measure on.
A year ago, I felt like my chance to do something great—work that I could really be proud of, work that would “make my name,” that would give me the opportunity to make a real contribution to human knowledge and have important things to say about significant topics—was slipping away. More painfully, I felt like I had squandered an otherwise excellent opportunity with the generous fellowship that I had by choosing the wrong point on which to “show my full measure.” In truth, I had long since lost interest in my primary research subject, the topic of my dissertation—but had chosen to stick with it and make my pivot to a new area of scholarship after my PhD was complete. And then I found myself in a situation where I was no longer employed as a scholar, stuck with trying to sell a project that I didn’t want to continue on the job market, and what I perceived to be no possibility of starting anew. I was bitter, rankled by unrequited ambition, and wracked with regret over my choices.
And, as you can imagine, that state of mind was not particularly propitious for actually doing anything helpful to remediate the situation. It made getting into a flow state of any kind extraordinarily difficult for an extended period. Or rather, I was often in a state of flow, but a negative or shadow flow. In other words, the rock tumbler was working just fine, but because everything that I was putting into it was emotionally upsetting, everything that was coming out was painful and these thoughts crowded literally everything else out of my consciousness unless I expended a great deal of directed attention to escape the loop.
I learned a great deal from these experiences, however, and thanks to friends, family, a very capable therapist, and a new job, I am much better at staving off these patterns of thought.
But, that doesn’t change the fact that I am still troubled by the process of choosing on what to show my full measure. For better or for worse, I have ambition. I feel like I have something I want to contribute to the world intellectually, and I have been frustrated by my perceived inability to do that many times in the past. I have often felt like I chose poorly when I developed my research specialization, because my topic is obscure, and my training interdisciplinary and unorthodox, which has meant that I don’t have as good a command over certain literatures that are prized by critical scholars and political thinkers in a range of social science and humanities disciplines.
But what I know now is that it actually doesn’t matter what you do so much as how you do it. Or perhaps, it doesn’t matter so much what you know, but how you use it. Tolle would agree (emphasis added):
“If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. "How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it. As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love, even the most simple action.”
What I take from this is that we don’t actually have as much control over our circumstances as we would like to think. But one thing we can control is how we handle where we are now. To circle back to Cal Newport, what this means for me is that the important part of the manifestation of greatness is not the chosen point aspect, but the bringing your full power to bear component. And this is only possible, of course, if you are in a state of mind where the Rock Tumbler can work effectively. Those states of mind tend overwhelmingly to be flow states, whether the stillness of meditation or the activity of sport.
For better or for worse, the mind can only focus on one thing at a time, so the question is, what’s it going to be: ruminating about perceived “missed chances” and fearing the uncertain future, or accessing the Present Moment? Fretting about things over which we have no control, or accessing the wellspring of creativity?
I have learned a great deal in the past year about what things most upset and disturb me and what these things indicate are important to me. Do I still have days where I feel like a failure or that I’ve made irreversible and fatal mistakes that have tanked my career? Do I still have days where I question the wisdom of my choice of specialization? Sure, who doesn’t? What is different now is that I am less bothered by these thoughts and recognize them for what they are more readily. Just thoughts. There are more important things to focus on.
To end by returning more or less to where I began, I’d like to relate another lengthy Tolle quote that helped me greatly in my darkest times, and which still resonates (emphasis added).
So place your attention on feeling the emotion, and check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern such as blame, self-pity, or resentment that is feeding the emotion. If that is the case, it means that you haven't forgiven. Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.
The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind. Non-forgiveness is the very nature of the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive. Only you can. You become present, you enter your body, you feel the vibrant peace and stillness that emanate from Being. That is why Jesus said: "Before you enter the temple, forgive."
Next week, I’m going to do what I can to wrap up my notes on the relationship between the creative process and healing and get onto what I’ve been calling the “Big Connections Between the Teachers” in my annotations—hopefully I can come up with a better title than that to describe what’s coming in the near future.