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The world is too much with us, Wordsworth once complained – but it is not always so. Sometimes the world draws us out of ourselves, and we are enlarged. A starry night will do that, or entering the vastness of a cathedral. The clamor of the world gives way to a prayerful hush. For once we are able to hear ourselves think. And yet I usually find that when the world falls silent, so do I. Tramping through woods on a snowy evening, I am aware of the sound of my own breathing and of the snow crunching underfoot. Thoughts disappear into an abyss. One’s self gives way at such times and with it the wider frame of the world.
“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves,” exhorted the poet Robinson Jeffers. “We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from.” Jeffers is sometimes taken for a pantheist, but like many nature mystics he was probably more of a panentheist – the difference being that for him the wider frame was God, not a world in which God was contained.
Jeffers’ use of the word “uncenter” is telling, since it would appear to be the opposite of what most meditation techniques would have you do with your mind. W.T. Stave makes a distinction between what he calls introverted mysticism, which involves a withdrawal of the senses from the world, and extroverted mystics who find an underlying unity in external objects and events perceived through the senses. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that many of the most striking examples of mystical experience occur in nature. The wilderness experiences of such biblical figures as Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist and Jesus come to mind. Further examples can be found in the writings of mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Thomas Traherne, poets such as Wordsworth and Byron, naturalist John Muir and the adventurer T.E. Lawrence.
In his poem “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens uses the metaphor of a winter landscape to convey a sense of unadorned awareness. In notable contrast to the lush and often exotic imagery in many of his other poems, the images here are uniformly stark, cold and clear. To apprehend naked reality, he says, one must have a “mind of winter” that is empty of all content apart from what it beholds:
…not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
A mind that is capable of fully apprehending reality is a mind that has fallen into silence and, in effect, has ceased to have any awareness of itself apart from awareness itself. Consciousness and the objects of consciousness are revealed to be one and the same.
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Robinson Jeffers, “Carmel Point”
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