Covid Meditation--Episode Three: A Way Out

Once a Canadian girl of Scottish origin told me a story that had bitten her and the telling bit me. She said that in the age of growing up when she felt that all eyes were on her and not favorably, so that she went from blushes to tears and back again, her Highland grandfather, observing her pain, said sharply, “Ye wouldna be sae werrit wi’ what folk think of ye if ye kenned how seldom they do.”

This is a quote from John Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent.

The quote bit me as well. I tried to recall that quote verbatim after I finished the novel, but couldn’t remember the exact words. I thumbed through the text, then thumbed through it again, but still couldn’t find it. (This happens to me often. I read and come across something I want to remember; if I don’t write it down, and I usually don’t, I am unable to find it, no matter how hard I look. I remember that the line in question was, say, in the middle of a left-sided page in the middle of a book. So I search the text accordingly; no luck. I call such lines minnows. I remember lines of them darting away from the boy I once was as sunlight flashed from them, as I waded towards them in a bay. Those little lines never return, at least while one wades through their habitat; the quote-minnows, however, with perseverance, almost always do).

While I still couldn’t find the Steinbeck quote, I searched the internet. I found it attributed to the author David Foster Wallace in the following translation: “ You wouldn’t be so worried about what people think of you if you realized how little they do”. The internet overwhelmingly is of the opinion, however, that the quote comes from Eleanor Roosevelt.

Did Steinbeck translate Roosevelt’s quote into Scottish as a little joke, the discovery of which lay waiting to be uncovered in an obscure article years hence? I don’t know.

I do imagine Foster Wallace coming across the quote and writing it down. He suffered from severe depression, ending his life at 46 by hanging himself. I imagine that the quote was especially poignant to him at times when he wanted to allay bitter self-doubts and feelings of failure by obtaining the approval of others. Whatever praise he did find in life--and it was considerable, since his talent was prodigious—it was probably never enough.

Why? Not because he didn’t receive enough attention from the outside world, but quite possibly because he received too much attention from his inner world. If he was like many successful depressives, he had impossibly high standards, which doomed him to the noose of failure despite what others would imagine to be a string of successes.  A sufficiently severe inner critic is able to grind even a Shakespeare down to an inarticulate glob of raw meat.

We symbolized this inner critic in the last blog of the Covid Meditation series (Episode Two) as a psychological manifestation of the Wizard of Oz. The angry Oz who appeared on the screen (of consciousness) proved to be an illusion, created by a man manipulating machinery. The hard work of meditation eventually causes one to realize that the severe inner critic is maintained by the bells and whistles of ignorance. This is a significant step on the path to enlightenment. The fifth step of the eightfold path is Right Effort. The first fetter to be overcome by Right Effort is “belief in the existence of a permanent self or soul.” (Science is in accord with the illusory nature of the ego, the specifics of which will be discussed in a later essay).

If one is especially beset by greed, hate, and delusion in its various forms, one can expect progress though hard work, but one should not expect an instant cure through meditation! It is like playing the piano. Most anyone can learn to play music in a way that delights the ear of the listener, but it takes commitment.

A severe inner critic is, I think, almost always present in depression. It is good to know that there is a way out, even though the light at the end of the tunnel is very far away. The great poet Hopkins was at times stricken by a severe depression which, while it lasted, destroyed the one potential “anodyne to suffering,” hope. In a so-called terrible sonnet, he wrote,

O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheep

May who ne’er hung there…

When one is in despair, it’s like hanging from a cliff without the possibility of getting help. Yet those cliffs are illusions, the heights of which are conjured up by chemicals, having no objective reality. Can meditation and mindfulness make “the rough places plain?” Without a doubt.

What about those who are, in general, content? Buddha said somewhere that those who are dissatisfied have an advantage, since they realize that there is a problem to be solved. It is doubtful that the culture we live in, infected by the diseases of greed, hate, and delusion, has left anybody unscathed. A person who is reasonably content will likely continue on a common path of reasonable ignorance to the very end.

There is a variation of despair in which the inner critic lavishes praise on the “individual” as if he were a god. The resultant neediness, that is, seeking, even demanding, praise from everyone, arises from a core of imagined inferiority.

We can adapt Steinbeck’s/Roosevelt’s dictum into the following: You wouldn’t worry so much about what you’re saying to yourself, once you realize what your real self says about you—namely, nothing.

Reaching that state of nothing is well, everything. We might not be able to get there, but we can sure come closer to where nothing troubles one again. As we approach that goal, we become more happy, more peaceful, and more content.