The Pathless Path

Searching for a Self

Photo: © David Whyte

Looking into the self is often like looking into a void, especially if we come to our search through trauma and loss. There may be a tidal gate inside us to open, but it has often been described, especially in the East, as a gateless gate, or like an adventure I once experienced in the Himalayas, a pathless path. In other words, to begin with, we cannot even see it is there, and we do not recognize it. Something has been lost on the surface, and we cannot as yet see anything that could replace it. If this lack of orientation continues without any outside help, we start to lose faith that there is anything other than our overwhelming experience of being lost. What we then feel is often described as depression.

Part of the burden of depression can be the constant sense of not knowing. It can be a release then, to think, that when we first come across the idea of a pathless path, by definition, we are not meant to understand what it means. We are meant to pay a different kind of attention—the kind of attention we might pay if we thought our life was at stake at high altitude—one that starts to change us from the inside out.

We could see depression as a complete loss of attention to anything outside our own sense of disorientation. To be depressed is to feel a vague but constant sense of imprisonment. One of the other diagnostic features of depression is a loss of articulation. Suffering in silence, we often find we cannot even properly tell ourselves how we feel. To do that we have to find a bigger language for ourselves, for which as yet we have no confidence and no energy.

Anyone who has suffered real loss, the loss of a child a, a marriage, a well-loved home, has always had difficulty conveying the absolute sense of devastation to those who are at present more fortunate. As if standing on fishes, Rilke described it, as if the ground had a life of its own and were swimming away underneath him. Many of us who take the solidity of the world for granted have had glimpses of what it would be like to have that ground taken away. It is hard to convey that sheer sense of faraway physical isolation, surrounded by swirling snow, and separated from the friends who give your journey context and sanity. It’s hard to convey the sense of emotional isolation, being left behind by someone you thought love you and would continue to love you to the end.

It is hard, also, to underestimate the way human beings need a sense of foundation in their lives; good foundations can be consciously felt or taken for granted. I remember being caught in a powerful earthquake in Peru, which for days after, created a literal stomach-churning anxiety in me about the supposedly solid earth on which I stood. It felt very strange to look at the ground as being an untrustworthy entity. I also remember being attacked in the days after that tremor, by a band of locals drunk on corn beer. Though I escaped unhurt, I had a pain in my stomach for two days from the first, direct revelation that my fellow human beings could try to kill me for no good reason. This was not the ground upon which I thought my relationship with other men stood. I was not only shocked, I felt bereft. All I could do at the time was take to my bed for forty-eight hours; pull the blankets over my head, and in that claustrophobic darkness, come to very reluctant terms with it.

Sometimes we walk around with the blankets invisibly over our head, talking, conversing, sometimes even laughing, but looking all the time, as if through a glass, darkly. we are traveling, but we are anxious travelers, wondering whether the direction we are following in our darkness will actually lead us off a cliff edge . . .

-excerpt from the chapter, ‘Searching for a Self: The Pursuit That Is Not a Pursuit’ from The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

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