Dear Living Dark readers,
This morning I read an online article that was presented in that familiar format where only the first few paragraphs were initially visible, accompanied by a “Read More” button at bottom that I could click to see the rest. I clicked it and finished the article. Then I scrolled back to the top, and as I did so, I came across a section heading that I hadn’t noticed during my first reading. It said “Read Less.” I thought, “Oh, I missed that part!” and paused to read it. Then I realized the heading was actually the “Read More” button now transformed into its opposite, enabling me to hide the “more” text if I wanted.
I laughed at my little mistake. But then I paused and noticed something important: The article was on a spiritual topic, and when I came across what I thought was a missed section about reading less, a little spark of pleasure ignited within me. I instantly, tacitly assumed I was going to read some advice about cutting back on the number of things I read and/or the time I devote to reading, advice about reducing reading to a more focused activity and a less profligate, distracting, and dissipating one. I assumed I was going to imbibe some wisdom about letting go of the FOMO associated with seeing an endless stream of apparently cogent and worthwhile books, articles, essays, and blog posts flooding my field of attention and leading me to employ Pocket, or Instapaper, or the Substack app, or browser tabs, or PDF printouts, or email folders, or some other tool or tech to save all these things for later, resulting in an infinite backlog of unread material piling up not just digitally but psychologically, like an expanding gallery of accusing stares lodged in the back of my mind. This morning, as I stumbled across what I briefly mistook for a subsection titled “Read Less” in a spiritual article about the wisdom of letting negative emotional and cognitive responses to life’s contingencies serve as valuable opportunities for spontaneous healing and change, I felt a little surge of hope at the thought that what I was about to read would speak some healing peace and spaciousness to me.
When I laughed, it was not only because I recognized my little mistake, but because I realized I didn’t need any such section of any such article to give me permission. I’m already able to let go of any felt pressure to keep up with the endless tide of books and other teeming texts that wash up on the shore of my world. I already know all about this. And I hope you do, too.
I know that my self isn’t in those books and essays. For much of my life, I read books and other things in a frankly desperate, craving way, hoping to find The Answer to the problem that was given to me when I was born. It took several decades and college degrees, and the cultivation of a hyper-developed intellect stocked with more texts than the Library of Congress and the Library of Alexandria combined, for me to arrive, not through reading but through realization, at the recognition that the answer isn’t in a book at all but in the one who reads books in search of the answer. The same principle also applies, of course, to all of the other objective/external things—jobs, personal relationships, possessions, places, reputation, and more—that we use to deceive ourselves by projecting onto them and into them the sense of a primal goal to be achieved or an answer to be found. I myself have placed stock in each of those things at various times. But books have always been my preferred repository.
For much of my life, I read books and other things in a frankly desperate and craving way, hoping to find The Answer to the problem that was given to me when I was born.
So today’s accidental/imagined admonition to “Read Less” wasn’t strictly necessary. But apparently I needed to be reminded of it, enough so that I inadvertently manufactured an occasion for it to happen.
At the risk of invoking irony, let me relate all this to a book. After all, books, like everything else, can serve as valuable pointers to truth even though they can never be or embody the truth themselves. They only represent a siren song if we let ourselves take them that way.
Around thirty years ago, fresh out of college, I was captivated by the book Journey of Awakening by Ram Dass, which I found in a bookstore in Springfield, Missouri—probably Waldenbooks in the Battlefield Mall, where I spent so much of my life that I may as well have installed a cot. Though it’s hard to single out a portion of this lovely little tome that moved me more than any other (since the whole thing moved me), the author’s words about making your life lighter by simplifying it, along with the personal illustration that he used to drive the point home, may have been the most memorable.
Ram Dass said:
As you enter quieter spaces [through meditating] you will see how clinging to desires has made your life complicated. Your clinging drags you from desire to desire, whim to whim, creating more and more complex entanglements. . . .
If . . . you run around filling your mind with this and that, you will discover that your entire meditation is spent in letting go of the stuff you just finished collecting in the past few hours . . . This encourages you to simplify your life.
He recommended that we keep track of the specific kinds of mental distractions that keep coming up when we observe our minds, since these will be different for each person. He also described the benefits of doing this:
You will easily see what you must clean out of your closet in order to proceed more smoothly. . . .
Each time you lighten your life, you are less at the whim of thought forms, both your own and others’. It’s as if you have built a world based on the thoughts of who you seem to be. . . . Each time you give up an attachment to a thought form, your world becomes that much lighter and clearer
To illustrate, he described his former relationship with music and the way it had changed as he introduced meditative space into his life. His words are piercingly resonant with my own experience, both of music and of books:
I recall that as a Harvard professor I had FM in my car and stereo in my office and home; I was constantly surrounded by music—even with a speaker in my bathroom. In addition there were paintings on all the walls and decorations of my car.
Slowly, as meditation changed my perception of the universe, I started to crave simplicity. I placed objects on the walls that reminded me of higher possibilities: pictures of beings who were in higher consciousness, symbols of this consciousness, and art that represented it. I found that I was beginning to appreciate the silence and was content to enjoy a few pieces of music or art thoroughly rather than fill every space with sound and with imagery.
At times, I even felt the total contentment that comes from sitting in silence in a purely white room. (Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s Guidebook [New York: Bantam Books, 1990], 109, 110–111, 111)
As I said, this has always stuck with me. I think of it fairly frequently. This is because, in addition to the interesting fact that the passage’s final line stands as perhaps the perfect response to Pascal’s famous observation that “all of humanity's problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” I personally know whereof Ram Dass was speaking. Three decades ago, in my early twenties, I could sense its wisdom, but apparently there was still a karmic load of obsessiveness over books and reading that had to be played out in this life. I intensely felt that I grokked and agreed with his point, but my addiction to reading simply wouldn’t let up. If you ever run into any of my old friends and coworkers from Glen Campbell’s former music theater in Branson, Missouri, in the mid-1990s, ask them about my practice, which I later found was kind of legendary at the theater, of reading books while directing the video portions of Glen’s live shows. I mean I did both at the same time. As I called the shots, communicated with my camera crew through the headsets, ran the video switcher, and called up and ran prerecorded video segments on the IMAG screens at the requisite points in the show, I was also reading books by Huston Smith, Alan Watts, Allan Bloom, Theodore Roszak, and more, holding them open with my left hand right there on the video switcher console. (“I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas,” Carl Jung said in his autobiography. “There was a daimon in me, and in the end, its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon.”)
At my next job, at Missouri State University, I essentially wall-papered my office with printed out quotations from various world mystical spiritual texts and traditions and my favorite poets, such as Walt Whitman. I mean scores of them. Maybe hundreds. I liked to read these quotes while taking breaks from my media production work. I also burned with yearning for the spiritual freedom and insight they expressed, but that I was unable to feel for myself. Thinking back on it now, I see how much those literal walls of words became not so much windows on spirit as a prison for—or rather, a prison of—my mind.
But over time, mercifully, this all changed. My relationship to reading and other clinging obsessions lightened up as clarity arose over the emptiness of the self that was obsessed. As with Ram Dass’s relationship to music, this transformation has also changed the nature of what I’m drawn to read, and the nature of how I relate to it and what I derive from it. Sometimes, as with today’s “Read Less” experience, I’m brought to reflect on these things by passing circumstances.
The answer isn’t in a book but in the one who reads books in search of the answer.
And what about you? Do you feel the pressure of a mounting backlog of unread books and things that you think you want to read and/or ought to read? Are your bookshelves (and your inbox, web browser, and reading apps) piled high with accusing stacks? If so, are you really obligated to take on that pressure? In order to be complete and fulfilled, to be who you already are, the truth behind your persona, do you need to read a book? Do you even need to finish reading this very post, or subscribe to this or any other blog? Can anything I write here help to set you free? Or do I only, in a sense, erect more bars for this prison with every word I type?
Remember in Network when Howard Beale yelled at his prime time network television audience to wake up from the collective trance of TV and turn off their sets? “This is mass madness, you maniacs!” he shouted. “In God's name, you people are the real thing! We [on television] are the illusion! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now. Turn them off!”
I feel like doing that here. Stop reading these words. Turn off the screen, back away, and step out of the cage of your verbal mind, the narrow-necked Zen bottle with the full-grown goose inside. Notice the wider reality of what is beyond the trance of these words, including your real self as the ground of it. Stop reading these words right now. Stop this very second. Stop right in the middle of the sentence I’m
"We are the illusion". True dat, Mr. Beale.
For online writing, when I find things I want to read, I either read them right that second or I schedule time to read them on my calendar. If they aren’t worth a calendar appointment then I don’t read them. If I skip or move the calendar appointment more than once, then I delete the unread reading.
Books, I just read whatever and whenever I feel like it.
I would also like a Read Less button, but to just summarize or bullet point online writing. I mean ChatGPT does it, but it would be nice to have that button right on the page as some things I def would prefer to be shorter.