Just One Way of Looking

Anyone who keeps a journal, as I do, or has written a memoir, is familiar with writing from the “first person singular” point of view (POV). Whether describing inner feelings (“I feel sad”) or commenting on someone else’s behavior, (“I can’t stand it when you chew with your mouth open.”), engaging our lives from that personal perspective, we are bound to take everything personally.

Some writers chose that first person POV for their novels. But I’ve chosen the more diverse way of knowing provided by a “third person point of view”, for all three of my novels. Providing characters with their own perspective, allows them to question each other’s individually limited ways of viewing the world. It’s a way to explore a wider perspective that, in lived life, would require having genuine feelings of compassion for other human beings.

My first two novels (“Asleep at the Wheel of Time” and “Falling on the Bright Side”), both have two main characters, whose interactions and collaborations provide the heart of those stories. But in my third novel, “Gaia Awakens”, which I published this month, I have a dozen main characters. I didn’t begin with those characters in mind. The starting block from which I picked up a pen and headed down the track, was my personal feeling of helplessness in the world in which I am now living. But working on the world creation that novels requite, those characters showed up, one after another, on its shores.

My hope was that, within the fictional world that I was creating for these characters to live in, a transformation could occur—a more hopeful one than I see happening in the world in which I live. But I didn’t know how to make that happen. It was just a hope that–in the simpler landscape of Gaia Awakens–I could influence what happens; since I can’t seem to influence that is happening in this one–where broken human beings exert their will, undeterred by compassion for the damage they wreak in people’s lives.

To my surprise, something did start happening in the fictional world of Gaia Awakens. Those dozen characters started becoming open in their own lives and concerned for one another. As the book’s title suggests, a path of healing came into focus for more and more human beings, as Mother Earth herself began to influence what was happening.

Can that have any ramifications for this world, which is still in such visible distress?

In our own lived lives, most of us are stuck in a first-person point of view; we are single selves who have not only been conditioned to see things in a certain way but, regardless of the particulars of our individual conditioning, we view our world like bystanders at an accident; viewing everything that happens from the perspective of an outsider standing at a distance and making judgements.

I’m taking a class based on the book “Gesture of Great Love” by Tarthang Tulku. In a chapter, “Mind Magic”, I was surprised to be asked to be aware of the moment when “I” comes to be. I’ve grown accustomed to viewing my “self” as part of the furniture, not as a point-of-view that arises magically–like Nessie arising from the misty surface of Loch Ness. The idea that this “self, and its way of viewing experience, arises into a field of awareness in which it was not present before, is just not my way of viewing life.

If I was able to be aware without needing a self that is being aware, then perhaps I could notice the moment when this self-perspective arises and produces a world in which “I” am an outsider, separate from all “I” behold. This might then open another way to experience, in which I am inside what is happening, not outside peering in.

Perhaps then I wouldn’t have to rely on my usual distanced sympathy for the difficulties others are going through, but would feel their pain directly inside my own being, as if I was a tree standing in the wind and sun, drinking yesterday’s rain from the depths of the Earth– no more able to turn away than a tree can uproot itself and separate itself from the underground network of mycorrhizal fungi through which it communicates with its vast world.

I know I should be careful what I ask for. I have a friend who feels the impact that heartless decisions are having on people who are unable to avoid their consequences. I don’t know that I have the strength to live with such acute sensitivity to the needless pain being inflicted in a world that is far from being a fictional one for so many.