Signs of the Unseen

Before dawn, the sky was heavy with its own weight and low-hanging. It pressed down on the water of Chazy Lake, solid and slate-colored, disappearing in a sheet of fog the mountains that normally border the lake. It was as if those mountains had never been there, nor the houses dotting their hillsides, nor the people living their lives inside. As I sat at the table by the window looking out over the water, each of these was nothing more than an idea in my mind, less tangible than the warmth of the mug of tea seeping into my cupped palms. And still, together they reminded me of all that goes unacknowledged in our lives, is present but unseen. Or is seen but taken for granted.

On the bank a few feet from the house, an elm swayed in the wind, its roots, after years of erosion, half suspended in air. The tree is young, but already its days are numbered, and I wondered whether it knew this, whether it could feel death at its core, old xylem slowly compacting and hardening into heartwood.

A friend’s 8-year-old once said to her, “Mommy, don’t we start dying the moment we’re born?” Oh, I thought when she told me, hold on to that knowledge! Hold on to it, for you’re going to need it.

But despite these thoughts of death and the leaden sky and the fog, the morning wasn’t gloomy at all. Rather, it was very beautiful and very still, so I was happy to sit quietly and sip my tea and look at the silver water rippling. I was just beginning to wonder whether I should try to write some of this down when a light suddenly appeared across the lake. It was too bright to be a car, particularly at that distance, too big for a porch light, too concentrated for a floodlight, too still and too insistent for me to ignore. I suppose it could have belonged to a boat, but if it did, I never saw it. As I watched, the light split in two—one perfectly round orb on top of the other—and got longer and brighter, until I couldn’t look at it directly. I turned away for a fraction of a second only, and when I turned back, it was gone.

I don’t know what it was, but I know it was there and then it wasn’t, like a fleeting thought appearing at the very moment of waking, leaving behind only its afterimage—a faint trace of something I knew I shouldn’t dismiss, something indistinct but urgent.

We have to let go of the belief that what we can see and touch and name is more real and more relevant than what’s not visible.

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me, Walt Whitman says in “Song of Myself.” The line comes at the end of the poem, in the section preceding those other famous lines: Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes). These in turn follow his address to the “listener up there,” whom he asks—jokingly, it seems—if he has anything to confide to him, much like a parent might ask a 4-year-old caught with her hand in the cookie jar and chocolate all over her face, “Anything you want to tell me?”

I waited a while longer, watching the fog slowly lift over the lake. When the wind died down and the elm finally stood still, its thin branches looking like dark miniature thunderbolts against the open sky, I stood up and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Outside, the first calls of a robin were loud in the morning quiet.

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When I was 4 years old, my parents and I were invited to stay for a weekend at the house of a young couple they’d recently met. On Saturday morning I woke up early, grabbed the bag of crayons I carried with me everywhere, and made my way to the hallway, where I got down to work on a mural on the huge white wall under the stairs. Afterward, my poor parents had to spend several hours scrubbing my art off the wall. They were awfully embarrassed, but also secretly proud at my chutzpah, Mom said, even though I don’t remember seeing those friends again.

I’ve since wondered what drove that impulse. Kids draw, of course, but why? What’s that pressing need to make real, make observable and concrete what we see inside and outside us? What’s that hunger to capture our experience in words or pictures, in sound or movement—a hunger that is as fundamental as our drive for self-preservation? Perhaps we intuit early on that in expression lies understanding, or at least its beginnings. Perhaps we make art to better grasp our place in the world—and also to extend our own limits. Perhaps we create to see what we normally don’t see.

Ever since humans have had reason, both artists and mystics have been asking some variant of the following questions: What if what I see is not all there is? What if just beyond the limit of my senses there’s a whole other world, and what if that world has something important to teach us? In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called this something “the Reality of the Unseen.” The Greek philosopher Anaximander called it apeiron, “the indistinct,” and identified it as the unifying, generative principle of all that we experience. In Zen we’d call it mind. My first Zen teacher, borrowing from Teilhard de Chardin, called it the ground of being.

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me,” Whitman says, tiptoeing his way toward wisdom. And whatever it is, he adds, it’s untamed, untranslatable, without name—and then he names it: happiness. But this is no ordinary happiness. It’s not merely good fortune, nor is it subject to chance. It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. Taoism refers to it as the natural order of things, the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
(Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)

Mystics have always known naming is what gives birth to particular things; it’s what makes them distinct and multiple. The cup of tea I had held in my hand was distinctly not my hand, nor the rippling water, nor the swaying elm. The mountains are not myself, and are therefore distant, other, and subject to my whims and desires. I can climb the mountain for my own pleasure, or I can blast and mine it for my own greed. Distance allows categorization, which easily leads to polarization. But take the mountain and unname it, and suddenly it’s singular, universal, and eternally real. Suddenly that mountain is me, is my own body and mind, and what I do to it I do to myself. This is why, amid so much that needs our attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, some of us stop and not do for a while. This is why we sit hour after hour focusing our attention on just one thing—the breath, a question, an image, a sound—diligently unnaming all the multiple things. So we can love them. So we can protect them the way we protect ourselves. We fiercely guard stillness and silence so we can guard that which in our to-doing gets lost or overlooked. We let go of thoughts so we can remember what we so easily forget. Yet paradoxically, it’s through forgetting that we remind ourselves of the unseen. It’s through the conscious, deliberate forgetting of names and forms and opinions and preferences that we recall what’s always been there, hidden just below the surface of our busy, clattering minds. (The Pali word sati, mindfulness, means to recall or bring to mind.) We could call this type of practice remembrance by forgetting or, in the language of the Tao Te Ching, attaining through nondoing. Its prerequisite: a cordoning off of our attention, a cloistering of our senses.

At the beginning of every retreat at the Zen monastery where I trained, one of the monitors would always say, “Please turn off your cell phones so you can really enter the cloister of the monastery.” They could also have said, “so you can enter the cloister in your mind.” The Latin claustrum means “enclosure,” a space that’s sealed off from others, shut in. In a convent or monastery, it refers to a covered walkway that separates the monks and nuns from laypeople and the workers who tend to the needs of the community. But there’s also a small area in the brain called the claustrum, and one of its functions, neuroscientists speculate, is to integrate the information the brain receives from the senses in the form of motor, visual, and auditory cues and put it together to form a full picture, somewhat like the conductor of an orchestra interprets a score, fine-tuning each instrument’s tempo, volume, or articulation to deliver a coherent musical piece to an audience. Part of this work requires that we narrow our attention by sealing off from our awareness anything extraneous to the experience, and this is also the job of the claustrum. As you read this article, there might be in your peripheral vision rain spattering a window, or a shadow slowly lengthening across a wall, or the green of sloping hills, or people sitting close together on a train. You might be hearing the whirring of a fan, or the screeching tires of a subway car, or your coworkers’ conversation. But by choosing to focus on just one of the many inputs that are bombarding your senses—these words on this page—the claustrum is working to shut out of your mind everything else. In this way, you can see more clearly, more completely, what’s right in front of you. And if you choose to go further, what’s underneath—the signs of the unseen.

Isn’t this wonderful? We’re all walking around with our own private cloister.

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The last morning at the lake I woke up to a clear dawn. The sky, still dark, was tinged with orange in the east and the faintest of pink lines, also reflected on the water. A thin band of fog played over the lake and the mountains stood silent behind it, rising green and noble. A pair of loons broke the surface of the water and swam close together, stopping to bat their wings now and then, looking like they were clapping to a tune only they could hear. After their brief synchronized dance, they’d settle back on the surface and swim some more, one of them periodically dipping its head to look for fish, coming back up, and turning to the other as if checking whether it was the best moment to dive. They must have agreed eventually because the two dove in unison and disappeared.

Looking at the quiet lake, and at the elm on the bank, and at the dock rising from the water as if birthed from it, I thought, If every moment you could really see things as they are, every moment you’d be weeping. If I could see more and more clearly, I’d be crying out of sheer joy and wonder, but also out of grief for all I’ve missed and continue to miss. I’d be on my knees, soul brimming with gratitude and reverence and awe for the astounding, beautiful, terrible reality of it all—for everything I’m blessed enough to see, and for all that’s unseen. In an essay, Whitman called it the “soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things.” I think of it as the pattern woven through the fabric of the universe. All of us have the sense—though only some of us trust it and even fewer follow it—that in all the chaos, the general unsettledness of the world, there is a clear image, an orderly pattern that emerges slowly when we grow wholly quiet and wholly still, when we don’t rush to fill it in ourselves with our naming. Because this is what’s required to see the unseen: that we be more innocent of certainty and knowledge. We must be willing to not be so sure about who we are, what we’re here to do, and why. And we have to let go of the belief that what we can see and touch and name is more real and more relevant than what’s not visible.

Still, in the days that followed I looked again for the light—I couldn’t help it. I wanted to have some sense of what it was. Despite everything, a part of me wanted to name it. Fortunately, I didn’t see it again, but my longing got me thinking that maybe we use our knowledge and certainty as buffers. Maybe they’re our protection against taking in too much reality too quickly. So maybe it’s good that practice takes so long, that we generally see so piecemeal. We’re certain until we’re not, and then we go looking for a bit of ground to stand on. Slowly, tentatively, we take a step and then another, and we see a little more of what we couldn’t see before. Then we get cocky and become certain again—until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.