Chapter 1

ORIGINS

Before the Watcher Arrived

 I am sitting in my favorite chair, iPad in hand. Outside, a mockingbird is doing what mockingbirds do, stealing songs, making them its own, not seeming to know or care about the theft. I am not thinking about writing. I am just here, in the chair, in the morning, with the bird. There is light coming through the window. There is the warmth of the coffee. There is no sense of someone sitting here noticing all this. There is just the noticing. Later I will remember it and write about it. You are not reading about my experience of the moment. You are reading about my memory of the experience.

I am reminded of the satirical biography that opens with the line: “I was born at a very early age to parents who were much older than I.”  Clearly, some truths are more evident than others. I am 83 years old and intend to spare you the intervening details of my life but in some ways this book is about one of the less evident facets of my life. And yours. What I want to explore is something specific and, I think, more universal than the particulars of any single life. I want to examine certain mysteries that have followed me from the beginning, from before I had words for them, to this day.

My earliest memory, if it can be called a memory at all, is of a recurring dream I had every few months from my earliest years until early adulthood. Less a dream than a sensation that visited me in sleep. I would be floating in water, submerged but able to breathe. Then the sensation of being squeezed through a tight space slowly, the feeling would move from top to bottom. No image. Just the floating, pressure, the movement. And then I would wake up. I had no idea what it was. Years later it occurred to me that I might have been carrying a body memory of being born; floating in utero, then the long slow passage through the birth canal. After that realization, I no longer had that dream. What remained was only the memory of having had it.

That ending is worth pausing over. The reflective mind, when it finally names what the immersive body has been holding, often releases it. The naming is not the same as the experience. But the naming can complete something the experience left unfinished. Many people I saw as a psychotherapist have had exactly this experience of finally putting into words what they had been carrying wordlessly for years. The immersive experience becoming known through reflective thought.

My earliest visual memory is of a picture on a wall: a cottage at the edge of a meadow. The words Bless Our Home written beneath it, though I did not know they were words. I did not know I was in a crib. I did not know there was a world beyond the image. I did not know there was a thing called “I”. There was just the picture. There was just the seeing. Something was there, something was aware, but it had not yet learned to call itself anything.

When my mother passed away many decades later, I discovered she still had that picture hanging in her bedroom. I claimed it. It now hangs in my home, a quiet reminder of beginnings: home, family, my life. But here is what puzzles me about that memory: who was lying in the crib? There was seeing, but no one knew they were seeing. There was experience, but no “I” making the experience its own. How can there be memory without a someone there to remember? And yet there it is, the memory of the cottage, clear as anything. An image stored before there was even a concept of “I”, and years later, when that image was recalled, an “I” came into existence and the picture became “my” earliest memory. What changed?

Experience was occurring before there was a self to claim it. Awareness preceded self-awareness. Seeing happened before there was anyone who knew they were seeing. What the infant in the crib was inhabiting was pure immersive experience, consciousness without the layer that later learns to say, “I am the one having this experience.”  That this is possible, that experience can precede the self that claims it, is not a philosophical puzzle only. It is something each of us has lived through, though most of us can’t fully remember it.

Then there were words. They arrived slowly and with great confusion. The shapes called letters were supposed to make sounds, but I listened carefully and not one of them ever made a sound on their own. People made sounds at the shapes. Eventually I understood I was supposed to do the same. The sounds made words. The words pointed at things. But the pointing was invisible, no word ever actually pointed at anything. And the word was never the thing. When I said “water”, water sometimes came. But the word did not quench the thirst. The word stood for the water but was not the water. I noticed this early and found it very strange. I still do.

Once I had the word water, something changed about water itself. Before the word, I just drank when I was thirsty. After the word, I could think about water when it was not there. I could want water. I could remember water. The word gave me a strange new ability, to be separate from what I was thinking about. But this separation came with a cost I did not understand then. Sometimes I would be completely absorbed in something, playing, looking at clouds, listening to sounds, and there was just the playing, just the clouds, just the sounds. No separation. And then suddenly there would be words in my head about what I was doing, and the absorption would break. I would become someone watching myself play, someone thinking about the clouds, someone aware that I was listening. Language in this sense is both gift and displacement. It gives us the world in a new form. And it separates us, just slightly but permanently, from the world as it was before the word arrived to represent it.

Then there was a different water.

I am 7 years old on a sunny day at a Connecticut beach, learning to swim underwater, parents nearby under a beach umbrella. Suddenly:

wave. no ground. darkness. no air. tumbling. pulling. trying. fear.... air.

That was the moment in its entirety, as the immersive holds it. When I reported it to my parents, they were relieved I was safe. They could not grasp the seriousness of that moment in my life, not because they didn't care, but because the moment had already passed by the time I reached them, and what I brought them was not the experience but my attempt to describe it. Reflectively. What they could not see, and what no account could fully carry, was the thing itself: the darkness, the pulling, the fear, and then the single word that was not yet formed as word at all.

Air

The description was not the same thing. It never is. That gap between what the immersive holds and what the reflective can carry to another person, is what this book is about.

I have a memory of lying in grass, looking up at clouds. Completely lost in the looking. No one looking, just the clouds and the looking and no distance between them. And then a voice in my head: I am looking at clouds. And in that instant, everything changed. There was now someone looking at clouds. An “I” had appeared, and with it, a space between the looker and the looked-at that had not been there a moment before. I tried for years to catch the voice before it spoke. I never could. The moment I tried, the voice said: “I am trying not to think”. And I was caught again, watching myself trying to stop watching. The watcher was watching the watcher. And that made no sense at all.

I wondered, even as a child, whether time was something real or something we made up. Adults were always talking about time, “hurry up”, “not now, later”, “you will understand when you are older.” But when I was completely absorbed in play, was there time? Or did time only appear when I stopped playing and thought about how long I had been playing? If nothing moves, is there time? If no one is counting, measuring, comparing, is there time? Or is time something that appears only when we step back from experience and think about it?

There is a difference between being “in the moment” and having the moment. When I was lost in the clouds or under that wave, there was no one there to have anything. The moment simply was, and “I“ dissolved into the experience. The instant the voice arrived, something changed, not the clouds, not the wave but my relationship with them. There was now a “me” that was having an experience, which meant there was a gap between the “me” and the experience that had not existed a moment before. That gap is small. It is also everything. It is where the self lives, not before the voice, but in the space the voice creates by arriving.

Years ago, my friend Bob and I were talking about a mutual friend who had died at ninety-one after years of dementia. I said, I don't think I want to live much past eighty-five. Bob smiled and replied, “I’ll ask you again when you're eighty-four.” Bob was not a philosopher. He was a clothing salesman. But something in me recognized the truth before my mind had finished processing the words. I laughed first. Then I understood. The recognition came faster than the thought.

Genuine laughter works that way. It is a collision between the two modes that the immersive registers first. A joke establishes an expectation, a logical sequence, a predictable pattern, and then violates it in a way that is surprising. The body gets it before the analytical mind can explain it. That is why real laughter cannot be willed. It can only be received. What Bob understood, what the clothing salesman knew that a philosopher might have labored to explain, is that our relationship to mortality cannot be fully accessed through reflection alone. We can think about death, plan for it, accept it intellectually. But knowing it in the way that reorganizes how a person lives requires a different kind of contact. The joke was the delivery system. The laughter was the recognition that the meaning had arrived.

There was a time when, even after I had a few rudimentary words, I did not experience a “me” to which things happened. I might have walked naked into a room at age two without self-consciousness. There was no embarrassment.  The adults might laugh at the innocence of childhood, but I had no idea there was a “me” that was the object of their attention. I did not yet have the capacity to know there was something others could see, something they sometimes referred to as “you”, that I was not yet watching. I was not aware of being watched.

But gradually that changed. I began to sense that the object others were seeing was “me”.  They were looking at “me”. When they said “you” it was ME!  Imagine the confusion as a child is making that connection. Try to remember that there was once a time when something you now experience as being there all the time was not there.

As I look back, I can see that two things were happening at once. I began to realize that I was an object of the attention of others. And simultaneously I was beginning to be an object of my own attention. What did they see?  What was their reaction to what they saw?  What had I done that may have resulted in their reaction?   I had become an object to myself. But who was the subject observing this object? Who was the “I” that was watching “me”?

There was something that could be seen, my body, my behavior, what others could observe. That seemed to be me. But there was also something doing the observing, something that felt like the center of experience, something that could not be seen. That seemed to be “I”. But what is “I”? Not the definition. Not the concept. The experience itself. Right now, as you read this, there is a sense of being someone reading. That sense, what is it? Where is it? What is it made of? I have asked myself this question ten thousand times. I sometimes feel the answer, but I still do not have an explanation.

And stranger still: sometimes the “I” disappears. When I was completely absorbed in playing as a child, there was no “I” playing. There was just playing. When I was lost in a book, there was no “I” reading. There was just reading. When I am struggling to find words as I write this book, there is just writing. The “I” only appeared when the absorption broke, when the voice in my head started commenting. So, is the “I” real? Or is it something that appears only sometimes, under certain conditions? And if it is not always there, what is there when it is gone?

My life unfolded with a growing fascination with these mysteries. I have never been good with numbers, but words enchanted me. By age seven or eight I was walking alone to the library, seven blocks away. First the librarian, Ms. Driscoll, allowed me two books. Eventually she let me carry home as many as I could manage. I devoured The Black Stallion, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig. From the alphabet to Dick and Jane to diagramming sentences to graduate school in psychology, words became more than letters. They were containers of meaning, and of mystery. But the mysteries only deepened. In graduate school I learned terms for things I had wondered about as a child. Consciousness. Self-awareness. Metacognition. The terms were useful for discussing these experiences, but they did not explain them. They just gave the mysteries more precise names. And I could never be sure that my colleagues and I were discussing the same experiences when we bandied these terms about.

When my son was nearly three, he told me he had an imaginary friend. I asked what his friend said to him. He thought for a moment and said, “He tells me to try new things. He helps me figure things out.” I asked what his friend's name was. “Xerox”, he said. My son had no experience with copying machines. I have no idea where that name came from. But I have a theory, one that has made sense to me ever since. I believe my son was encountering himself. Not the self he knew directly, but something else, a voice, a presence, something that could comment on what he was doing, something that could help him think about things. Was this my son’s “I” emerging? Was he making the transition from the immersive state into which he was born to the reflective state in which he would eventually spend the rest of his life?  Was this the voice in the head emerging enough to seem like someone else because he had not yet identified it as his own? A duplicate self, a Xerox, that could observe and comment on the original? If so, what does that mean? Are they the same or different?  Is one more “real” than the other?

As a new therapist, I learned never to assume I understood the meaning of a word simply because I knew its definition. One of my first clients taught me this lesson. She told me she was struggling with her “lover”. I assumed things I should not have assumed. A man, I thought. Then a woman. Finally, she said: “My lover is my dachshund.” I felt the floor shift. Not because the answer was strange but because I realized I had been so certain I knew what her words pointed to. The word “lover” had taken me somewhere she had never intended. I had been in a conversation with my own assumptions rather than with her. Since then, I have tried never to assume I know where a word was pointing until the person who used it showed me. I learned to listen for private meanings.

This is the clinical face of the philosophical problem. Words carry private meanings, not just definitions but histories, textures, emotional freight, whole networks of associations that differ from person to person and are rarely visible on the surface. The therapist who assumes he knows what a word means has retreated from the immersive mode, the receptive, attending, genuinely curious mode, into the reflective mode's catalog of prior knowledge. He is no longer present with this person. He is present with a category.

The corrective is not to abandon the reflective capacity but to hold it more lightly, to keep it in service of presence rather than in place of it. The skilled clinician, like the skilled reader, the skilled friend, the skilled parent, moves between the modes: absorbing what is being communicated without immediately categorizing it, then stepping back briefly to consider what it might mean, then returning to contact. The reflective mode names and organizes. The immersive mode receives and stays open. Neither alone is adequate. That client taught that lesson more effectively than any textbook.

Twenty-three years ago, I had a heart attack. A serious one. As I lay in the hospital, my cardiologist came to see me before I was discharged. I had been lying there for days with the kind of thoughts that come when the body has just reminded you of its limits, going over what had happened, calculating odds, trying to get ahead of whatever came next. When he walked in, I asked him: “Given the condition of my heart, how am I likely to die?”

He looked at me for a moment. I could tell he had heard the question before. But I could also tell he knew I had never asked it before, not really, not with the weight it carried that day. His answer surprised me. He said: “You shouldn't be asking me how you're going to die. You should be thinking about how you're going to live.”

That was twenty-three years ago. I am still thinking about it.

What he gave me was not information. It was not reassurance. It was reorientation from the question the reflective mind reaches for when it is frightened, the one that tries to manage the unknown by turning it into a prediction, to the question that can only be lived rather than answered. Not how will this end, but how are you going to be inside it, now, today, in the time that is available.

The crib. The grass. The watcher catching itself. Xerox. The dachshund. The cardiologist's question. The mysteries I have been carrying since before I had words for them are still here, as vivid at eighty-three as they were when I had no name for what I was experiencing. I have not solved them. I am not sure they can be solved. But I have learned something about living inside them, about when to step back and think and when to stop thinking and simply be. About what stepping back makes possible, and what it costs. About the voice that comments and the silence that exists before and after it.