I did not realize until I was well into my adulthood that I had always experienced a chronic anxiety that manifested in different ways depending on the setting.
In school, I felt like I had missed some instruction that everyone else knew. Like I was late to class. I could understand the concepts I was learning, but I did not understand why I was learning them. What I knew, but could not articulate, was that forced education was distracting me from something fundamental that was unresolved to me.
In relationships, I failed to understand the purpose. I enjoyed the moments of pleasure and companionship, but I could very clearly see the emotional pain around every bend. What I knew, but could not articulate, was that the closer I moved toward someone else, the further I moved away from something within myself that was urgent and unresolved.
Around people, I felt alone and isolated. I had a fairly active social life at times, but I always preferred privacy and solitude. I often thought that people knew something that I did not, and that is why they kept doing what they did. What I knew, but could not articulate, was that joining groups reoriented me away from something unresolved within me.
In conversations, I could see where the connection ended. I always wanted to keep talking, keep the conversation going. I got excited when a heavy conversation would build into something larger. A few of my best friends could carry on meaningful conversations for hours, and sustain ongoing narratives and discussions that stretched for years. What I knew, but could not articulate, was that I used those conversations to get closer to that unresolved question I had, and no one else seemed to have that objective.
Ushered through the various chutes and corridors of modern American life, I could not understand what I was supposed to do. The anxiety I felt was a tenuous and diminishing self-awareness that warned me that everything I was supposed to do and want were distracting me from the only thing that actually mattered.
Aside from the few best friends with who I could converse, other people seemed like automatons, oblivious to their circular paths of suffering. Though I could not concisely explain it, I believed I knew something that they did not, and I wanted so badly to tell them. There were people all around me, but no matter how loudly or earnestly I spoke, no one heard or understood me. So I talked more and louder. I persisted, and probably annoyed and enervated people.
When I was not talking, I was writing everything that came to mind in journals I hauled around everywhere. I wrote down anything and everything that came to mind: fantasies, ideas, dreams, philosophies, mundane daily reflections, lists, and creative stories that I would never finish. When I was 11 I saved up $80 from my paper-route and bought my first tape recorder so I could more efficiently capture my thoughts. I did not know what I was trying to say, only that I had to say it. To date I have thousands of handwritten pages, hundreds of thousands of digital pages, and countless hours of voice and video recordings. Every keyboard I have owned suffers the same familiar pattern of overuse.
My Search compelled me to protect and nurture the spaces and relationships where I could continue it — friends with whom I could converse at length, and my time alone spent writing. I rejected the spaces, relationships, and activities where I lost touch with my Search. I despised small talk about trivial matters, celebrities, and events.
Despite all my efforts, I would not understand what I was trying to say for many years. The feeling of something unresolved was deep below the surface of my daily existence, stifled by the demands of life. I needed the freedom to cultivate the presence of mind required to find the words buried deep within my awakening experience. But now I know that the underlying sentiment was authentic: We are not supposed to be here. I do not know exactly where I am going, but I know that I will find the way out. Follow me.
I wanted validation of what I was feeling, and despite endless conversation, debate, and discussion, I could not find it in conversations even with my closest friends. Without clarity, I was unable to communicate that message and no one followed me. Though I loved to laugh, I have heard myself described as “intense” many times. That intensity only grew — I intentionally manipulated every conversation toward heavy topics, alienating those around me who preferred the light-hearted person who could laugh and be carefree.
By 21 I finally gave up looking for someone to share it with and decided to search alone. I quit my job, dropped out of university, packed a camouflage backpack, and spent the next year wandering around the US and Mexico. It was a year of adventure, but ultimately ended in homelessness and poverty. I had moments of clarity, but the daily grind of life ate away at my ability to examine it, and I returned home disappointed and defeated.
Back in Portland at 23, I resigned myself to resuming my studies, but peppered my course roster with classes like Contemplative Studies to keep a toe in my Search. But as much as my parents hoped that I had “gotten it out of my system”, the impulse to Search did not go away. A short passage in a book I read deeply impacted me.
… In such places where animals are simply penned up, they are almost always more thoughtful than their cousins in the wild. This is because even the dimmest of them cannot help but sense that something is very wrong with this style of living. When I say that they are more thoughtful, I don’t mean to imply that they acquire powers of rationalization. But the tiger you see madly pacing its cage is nevertheless preoccupied with something that a human would certainly recognize as a thought. And this thought is a question: Why? “Why, why, why, why, why?” the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, “Why what?” it would be unable to answer you. Nevertheless this question burns like an unquenchable flame in its mind, inflicting a searing pain that does not diminish until the creature lapses into a final lethargy that zookeepers recognize as an irreversible rejection of life. And of course this questioning is something that no tiger does in its normal habitat…
“Ishmael”, by Daniel Quinn, 1992
While the book was intended as a commentary on the flaws of humankind and a plea for sustainability, it was only this brief passage on page 38 that resonated. It offered an analogy that worked: I was that tiger pacing around the cage of life I woke up into every day. My obsessive writing and documentation, conversational intensity, frustration, and existential restlessness was me asking “why?”. But where others resigned to their cage full of distractions, I demanded an answer and I believed that I could find it.
That realization was my invitation to the next level of self-awareness. A short time later I was preparing rice and tea in my downtown Portland studio when I felt an urge to say “thank you”. The instant I expressed gratitude, a surge of energy emanated outward from a familiar but repressed core deep within me and enveloped me in electric bliss and omniscience. I knew the truth in that moment; I saw the unresolved thing I had always been searching for.
Afterward, I decided that I had encountered “God”. I had been an avowed agnostic since I discovered the word a decade earlier in high-school, but this was the most real experience I had and I once again dropped everything, bought a one-way ticket across the world to a country I had never visited, and left everything and everyone behind. I decided I would devote my life to God and live in a hermitage as a monk.
And I did partly escape. I was outside the cultural cocoon of America, and funds that would only last a day at home could stretch for weeks. But most importantly, I was utterly isolated from people and I could live without any but the most basic social expectations. This freed up tremendous energy to reforge my relationship to people in general, and focus on my Search.
The excitement of my epiphany slowly gave way to the routines of life again. I decided that my electrifying experience of bliss would not be a permanent state; but instead was a revelation to awaken me out of the rut I had fallen into. I declared that it was a theory of everything that I was searching for.
I could not focus on just one half of my experience: a true theory of everything must explain everything. The mundane and ultramundane, physical and the spiritual. I spent the next four years in the Himalayas in search of a theory of everything that brought the full range of my experience into a single framework.
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