In addition to resorting to Dr. Seuss as my dissertation/life coach lately, I have been looking into the enlightenment writings of Eckhart Tolle — a popular author, increasingly popularized by Oprah’s book club and workshop series looking at his A New Earth (which, for the record, I did not participate in but casually admired). In his earlier book The Power of Now (1999) he describes in accessible terms, what many others have in less accessible terms, the basic tension between the true self and the mind-identified self. That is, for most of us, the mind has exceeded its essential use as a tool for thinking and taken over in disease fashion, causing us to feel addicted to thinking, unable to truly turn “off” our thoughts and reside in a state of true stillness and peace.
I like to think that post-modern enlightenment philosophers have inherited the sentiments of Romantic poets invested in the “transcendent” experience. For instance, Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” or Cowper’s “Winter Evening” resemble a kind of quiet armchair moment of internal peace and separation from the mind as addictive thought machine that Tolle suggests in “freeing yourself from your mind.”
Further, it strikes me as a little disturbing that a career in academia, weighted with cultural capital, and highly esteemed as the “life of the mind” seems essentially at odds with the experience and state of enlightenment. Add to this the unique stage of graduate study within the academic career and we have, what I see in the words of Tolle, a rather egoic friction point. Tolle notes that the ego (the mind/addictive thoughts) is hardly concerned with the present moment and is only, dysfunctionally concerned with the past and the future.
The ego says: “‘One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.’ Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future.”
Sound familiar? ‘When I finally get this Ph.D. done, everything will . . .’ In the meantime, our children are growing and changing (as are we) and how often are we only partially aware of the present moment because we are thinking about finishing the next chapter — thinking (foolishly), ‘then I can relax, then I can focus on the moment’?
There are plenty of precedents for investigating this tension, not least of which include the ancient texts of Plato, so I am merely scratching the surface here (the unique privilege of a blog afterall). In fact, if I want to seriously add the medium of the blog to this discussion, it would seem that the blog is a sort of mediation (many academics have them) between the lofty work of “the life of the mind” and the desire to consciously ‘take off the thinking cap’ and achieve a higher state of awareness, i.e. enlightenment. Can a blog occupy the middle-ground? How strange that these two ideals, intellectual and spiritual, though they both represent a highly evolved stage of development, seem to be at odds with each other. This is both obvious and confusing to me.
My next question (which I’m sure Tolle gets into as I would see upon further reading): how could we integrate these two highly evolved stages of development: the intellectual of the academic lifestyle and the mind-free self? While academia seems to encourage layers of discourse and the ability to observe materials from varying perspectives (in perhaps the same manner that Tolle suggests the true self can “watch the thinker,” the actions of your own mind) it is rather insular, dare I say ‘Ivory Tower-ish’ in its resistance to non-academic frameworks and forms of truth.
I see more installments on this topic in the future. –Jen
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