Read an Excerpt
The Inward Voyage
How lovely!
Through the torn paper screen,
the Milky Way.
Issa
When we were children our days were full of wonderthe world unfolded itselfand ourselves at the same time. In such an eternal afternoon the grass hums,the ball flies into the blue, and the girl sings the skipping-rope song:
Cindereller dressed in yeller
went upstairs to kiss a feller;
made a mistake and kissed a snake.
How many doctors did it take?
imagining the time when she will be bitten by a life that is still beingdreamed and has not yet arrivedthough it is clear to her father, watching,that life is here for her now, utterly complete.
Beneath or inside the life we lead every day is another life. This unseenlife runs like a river beneath the city, beneath work, family, ambition,beneath our pleasures and griefs. "There is another world," saysPaul Eluard, "and it is inside this one."
In the helter-skelter, in the rush to get an education, to make a career,to make a family, to find material success, to hurry, to do, to survive,this interior life is often subjugated or paved over. The life that in thechild is something vivid and whole goes further inward in the adult, whereit usually slumbers until it is called forth. But this life beneath or withinour ordinary life is irrepressible, unstoppable: it comes up in lovelinesslike jonquils out of fallen snow, it rises in supplication like hands outof gratings in a pavement in India, and it bursts upward through our chestsas the fountain of shock that is our reaction to evil news. It appears indreams, revery, memories of childhood, in what we find beautiful, and inwhat we find ugly as agargoyle, and appears too when we fall in love, whenwe fall ill, when we are lost on dark paths. It touches our pleasures withmelancholy and intermittently pierces our desperation with joy.
I have always loved to think of the old navigatorsthe small bands movingto a new continent over land bridges made by the ice age; the Polynesiancanoe masters, sailing into the vastness with a coconut shell half filledwith water, observation holes drilled into it near the rim; James Cook,who rose through the ranks to command the ship Endeavour, carrying JosephBanks to botanize through these same Pacific islands; and my own ancestors,transported in chains to the desolation of Botany Bay.
Whether or not our travels may eventually extend to the stars and thosebrave, hard-pressed voyages be repeated in some new form, our frontier nowis the inner life. In this book, two great lineages of inward explorationare brought together. The first is the Asian tradition with its long devotionto the arts of attention
and to a spiritual understanding based on inquiry and experience ratherthan dogma. The second is the Western method of work with the soul, withexploring the life of feeling, thought, and the stories and legends thatthe soul likes to tell, stories in which we trace our destiny through painand joy, to find out what happens next.
The inward voyage and the outer both have an heroic aspect. Outer voyagesmake new connections by which human beings achieve many endsadventure,trade, conquest, and love. The inner voyage also makes new connections:it plunges us into an initiatory space, the way young boys were once thrustinto the forecastle of a sailing ship; then, as the world we have knowndisappears, we are rocked and whirled around until the ship anchors oncemore in a harbor. We step ashore in a land that is not externally new butthat our eyes, being changed, see in its primeval freshness. The interiorvoyage overcomes loneliness by offering us a place in the universe, wherewe can know ourselves in the midst of all changes.
If we respect the inner life, we find that it is also possible to reversethe whole relationship between inner and outer, beneath
and above, and make the inner life come first, as a garden that is tendedfor the tending's own sake. To cultivate, to know, to love this vast inscapeis the only way to be free in any circumstances, the only way to mend thepoverty of wasted years. We explore the interior realm because it is whatwe humans are forconsciousness, the marvelous voyage.
Much of the journey is about the ways we work with our attention, becauseattention gives us more life. It expands the register, bringing us to noticemore of the vividness and consolation of our dark lives, so that we canexist in our true range, and not go around missing things, as if we knewcountries only from their airports and hotels. Attention is the most basicform of love: through it we bless and are blessed. When we attend to theinterior life, we also connect with what surrounds usthe espresso machinehissing, the skipping rope with its two red handles in line and the ropecurling lazily out and back, the green points on the snowdrops nodding overthe cold ground. What was matter and merely inanimate becomes family, andwe, the children walking, walking, walking home. All wantingfor love,to be seen for who we are, for a new red caris wanting to find and betaken into this mysterious depth in things. And it is this inner connectionthat resolves the problem of who we are and makes us at home in the world.For the interior life sweetens the humblest thing. It opens for us the magicin ordinary life.