More Notes on Anxiety

This dimension, and half-awake living along, produces anxiety in me directly in proportion to experiencing ordinary animal awareness. Strange. Poor animals. Too many impending events: a trip up north, a not-too-distance family parting, a septic-to-city sewer transition in the family, workmen doing plastering in this house, the demolition of our backyard, the building of a new garage… All this, vaguely felt, impending, produces the anxiety I feel. It is likely to diminish as I write this, as I take on a more adult stance. And that is little other than a state of concentration.

Concentration seems to open up channels to the influx of a higher energy. But is that really the case? Let me look. The first consequence of concentration is simply calm. Something neutralizes the stimuli that otherwise cause the anxiety. But what is anxiety? It seems to be caused by a barrage of reflexive inner “movements”; they are starts, beginnings of reactions; but they are immediately stopped again because no action can actually start: all of these stimuli come from the future. Still, the body echoes each impulse by producing chemicals—and just as rapidly terminates their production only to start again when the next thought triggers the same foolishly anticipatory and automatic reaction.

This process is interrupted when I focus my attention. What I here call a “higher energy” is simply the awakened presence of a faculty corresponding to what David Bohm called the unconditioned order, thus the order of “agency.” What really happens is that ordinary energy, wasted by mechanical reactions, is no longer wasted, becomes available, and a sensation of higher potency becomes perceptible.

(Here, parenthetically, I note that my use of the concept of energy—higher, lower—is usually sloppy. The higher does not belong to the material order where energy properly belongs.)

Over and over, time and time again, I’ve noticed that anxiety disappears as soon as I become conscious. Nothing changes. Impending events are still there but are no longer threatening. Not surprisingly, I’m never anxious about unpleasant medical procedures on the day when they occur, only in anticipation. States of anxiety, it seems to me, are states of inattention—and readily distinguishable from states of concentrated tension on the one hand and calm control on the other. Neither has that tendency of rattling us. Too bad it is so difficult always to be attentive; turbulent distraction certainly doesn't help me focus. There is a great temptation to float along pleasantly on the stream of time in childish bliss—but the stream sometimes becomes a little rough.