Shallow and deep revisited

 

An emotion or a feeling can be so powerful, so recondite, so cosmic, so fed by one’s entire life with its countless nuances and meanings, our body so transported by it that it must be consid­ered “deep.” Then there is all the complex thinking we do in psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, music, linguistics, history and the rest that delivers only ideas – stuff that sits on the very top of our heads and is replaced by the next thought. This is shallow.

A feeling is deep because it is the exact, ultimate truth of the moment and simultaneously a messenger of our entire history. And because feeling is meaning: There is no other meaning in our lives but what we feel, though we love to think there is. It is our Aristotelian A is A. Thought is shallow because it guesses, rationalizes and hides the truth. “My parents were abusive to me for years. But I believe in piety, grace and forgiveness.”

It may seem to feel powerful to think on non-objective subjects, essentially everything but science. I think about the psyche much of the time, but at the end of the day my questions and under­standings impress me one whit, no more. They don’t move me. What is moving, sometimes life-changing? Sitting with my wife, chancing upon my first butterfly in over five decades, looking deep into my dog’s eyes – two souls communing. Even that Windjammer Barefoot Cruise thirty-five years ago: Lying on the wood deck at midnight, nestled in the ocean, white sails waiting, watching the stars. Children are so much deeper than adults until life pushes and pulls them onto its tracks.

After all this work with clients is over, I hope to become deep again. News of the day has made that more possible: It is so revolting, with power-hungry sociopaths marching over decent people and decent ideas, that I’ve largely dismissed it: Shallow Headline World recedes. It will be time to shut my mind down as a creator, at most a receiver, and to go back to the world. Just feel­ing that comes in through open eyes: wind, water, color, sunrises, peli­cans, storms, the absurd closed door of the infinite uni­verse. I hope to fight the urge, which will come, to be a doing person. This is the plight of adults: to need to be busy, productive. It’s often an ego need: to feel we’re accomplishing something good. But even goals that are driven by curi­osity or passion, isn’t it ridiculous to be fated to move, find, dig, dis­cover, create, build for an entire life?

Monks meditate for years. But they’re engaged in no-mind or thinking mind: shallow. Joseph Campbell, the mythology expert, read nine hours a day for five years straight. How could he stand to learn other people’s brains for years? As void as can be. People become dedicated to a community: searchlights dancing at each other. Is there another meaning that human beings are made for?