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        "Not this, not this." Neti, neti. Nothing as no-thing. The Divine as no-thing. The ultimate ground of "reality" as nothing, as no-thing. This, in a nutshell, is the meaning and method of the via negativa, the negative (or negating) path in meditation, contemplation, and worship followed by such diverse travelers as Meister Eckhart and the Brahminical sages of the Upanishads. Wallace Steven's "The Snow Man" is a kind of quiet meditation that walks along this negative path, beginning as it does with One and Mind and ending with Nothing and Is (being). The trip down Steven's negative path is one of quieting, of reduction of motion, perception, and consciousness to a still, quiet point at which what "is" may be beheld.
         What is "a mind of winter"? What does this "mind of winter" enable? What kind of perception, what kind of insight, what kind of enlightenment does this mind make possible? A "mind of winter" is a mind stilled into repose; there is no action in Steven's lines beyond "regard[ing]," "behold[ing]," "think[ing]," "listen[ing]," and "behold[ing]." Of these five activities, thinking is the most dynamic, the most bound up with will and individual agency, and it is the "mind of winter" which enables a transcendence of thought into the realms of listening, regarding, and beholding. "One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / . . . . and not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind" (1,2,7,8). This is a kind of descent, though not in the sense of a precipitous tumble down the slippery slope from humane rationality to a kind of beastly, grunting, droolingly anti-intellectual state of sub-aesthetic arrest; rather, it is more akin to the kind of quiet descent—or withdrawal—from the workaday realm of "intellectual" noise into a more silent and contemplative space from which "One" may "listen," "regard," and "behold."
         With this stilled mind, "One" beholds a wintry landscape: frost and snow-crusted boughs of pine trees, "junipers shagged with ice," and "One" hears the "sound of the wind," and the "sound of a few leaves." Coldness and sound work in interesting ways here. The wintry landscape shows few signs of life, of activity; life—and motion—seemed stilled almost to the point of having stopped entirely. Atomic motion theory gives us a model in which heat energy and motion are related: the colder the body, the slower the motion of atomic and sub-atomic particles within that body. Winter stills. Winter quiets. Winter also kills. Death is perhaps the most common symbolic baggage that winter carries; however, the presence of the evergreen pine and juniper trees suggests another reading—dormancy and stillness, inactivity and repose. Winter, snow, ice, and cold function here not as symbols of death but as symbols of quietude, of a state of repose, reflection, and an at least temporarily lessened gap between knower and known, observer and observed. It is precisely the "mind of winter," the mind of snow, ice, and cold that allows "One" to hear the "sound of the wind" without thinking, without separating from the field of perception.
         The "sound of the wind" that is also "the sound of the land" serves as the ultimate grounding of the poem's landscape, of the poem's cosmos. It is that sound to which "the listener . . . listens," and it is that listening—as listening, a concentration beyond thought, a concentration transcending the ordinary mental noise which flashes through our heads each second—that leads to the epiphany of the poem's final line: the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." This is a state of mind which various systems of Yoga refer to as samadhi. Samadhi can be variously translated as deep equanimity of mind, meditation in which the mind is quieted to the point of stillness and "one-pointedness," and apotheosis or union with divinity (sam—together with + adhi—Lord or divinity).¹ It is also explained as a synthesis, a putting of the mind, or intellect, together in a unified meditative state through a contemplation of the divine (sam—together + a + dhi—mind or intellect). This state of mind, this samadhi, can be arrived at through sound; specifically, this means through the use of external sound to still the internal sounds of the mind, to still the steady stream of conscious thought (the thought that would lead to thinking of "misery in the sound of the wind"), until finally a state of quiet repose, contemplation, and sharply reduced or even eliminated sense of separation and duality is reached. This is the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "Nothing that is not there," realize, in other words, the illusory nature of such separations as I and Thou, I and It, I and not-I. This is also the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "nothing that is," the no-thing of the via negativa, the nirguna brahman (brahman—god, or divinity, or ground of "reality," nir—without, guna—attributes), the "not-god, not-ghost, apersonal, formless" No-thing of Meister Eckhart (248).
         The use of sound, the "wind" in the "sound of a few leaves," and the "sound of the land," functions as both the demonstration and facilitator of the "mind of winter," the samadhi of the "One," of the "listener." The often-referred to, but less-often understood mantra OM (AUM) illustrates the use of sound to reach the state-beyond-thought in which "One" would not think of "misery":

AUM stands for the supreme reality. It is a symbol for what was, what is, and what shall be. AUM represents also what lies beyond past, present, and future. Brahman is all, and the Self is Brahman. This Self has four states of consciousness. The first is called Vaishvanara, in which One lives with all the senses turned outward, aware only of the external world. Taijisa is the name of the second, the dreaming state in which, with the senses turned inward, one enacts the impressions of past deeds and present desires. The third state is called Prajna, of deep sleep, in which one neither dreams nor desires. There is no mind in Prajna, there is no separateness . . . . The fourth is the superconscious state called Turiya, neither inward nor outward, beyond the senses and the intellect, in which there is none other than the Lord [nirguna brahman] . . . . Those who know this, by stilling the mind, find their true stature . . .(Mandukya Upanishad 1-5, 7, 9, 11)

         Just as AUM takes the listener down a path of stilling the mind to a realization of a unitive state "beyond the senses and the intellect," the sound of the wind in Steven's lines takes the "One" with the "mind of winter," and the "listener" beyond the very senses and intellect through which they behold "Nothing that is not there" (the ever-present sense of separateness and duality) to that point from which they may behold "the nothing that is."
        The "nothing that is," refers back to "there," implying that nothing is an entity, a formless form if you will, that somehow fills the contemplated landscape. Taken in this sense, the poem's last phrase can refer to the stillness of the cold winter landscape, lacking its usual motion, life, and activity. The "nothing that is," can also be taken as the no-thing that is. This nothing takes no form; it fills no space; it simply is. This is the formless, characterless ground of all being, all is-ness; this is precisely the is that the via negativa attempts to point toward with its formulaic is-nots: the neti, neti of the Upanishads, the nescio, nescio of St. Bernard. The "mind of winter" is that state of samadhi or turiya in which distinctions fall away. The two senses mentioned above can work together in an interesting way: just as a dormant winter landscape will once again give way to the active landscape of spring, so does the unitary consciousness of the "mind of winter," of samadhi or turiya once again give way to everyday waking consciousness; distinctions return, and the "nothing that is" once again appears as the somethings that are. Stevens gives us, in "The Snow Man," a brief glimpse of the unitary state, in which even the distinction between the "One" of the poem's first line, and the "listener" of the poem's thirteenth line is dissolved. Are they two? Are they separate? Yes. Are they one? Are they united? Yes. That is the "mind of winter." Ultimately, Steven's poem suggests that through the contemplation of "nothing," through the stilling of thought, we may realize that "One . . . . is."

Notes

1) This last translation of samadhi as "together with divinity," is disputed. Huston Smith, Professor of Comparative Religion at Syracuse University, explains it this way:

Etymologically sam parallels the Greek prefix syn, as in synthesis, synopsis, and syndrome. It means "together with." Adhi in Sanskrit is usually translated Lord, paralleling the Hebrew word for Lord in the Old Testament, Adon or Adonai. Samadhi, then, names the state in which the human mind is completely absorbed in God. (The World's Religions, 49)

        Those who object to this etymology suggest something like the following: sam-a-dhi, in which sam translates as "together," while dhi translates as "thought (especially religious thought)," "mind" or "intellect." Samadhi, like the Greek syn-thesis, is a putting the mind together, an achieving of coherent awareness (although the similarity between thesis—from the IE dhe—and theos/thesos—from the IE dhes—leads me to suspect that the concept of synthesis implies, at least vestigially, a re-union with the divine). This "putting the mind together," this samadhi, which Mircea Eliade describes as an "enstatic experience"—literally an experience of standing within—is "the state of contemplation in which thought grasps the form of the object directly . . . the state in which the object is revealed 'in itself'." In this state "it is said that the yogin has ceased to employ 'imagination,' [and] no longer regards the act and the object of meditation as distinct from each other" (Yoga 77).
        It is also possible to look at sam-a-dhi in this way: the Sanskrit a, like the Greek a, the Latin in-, and the Germanic un-, is often an expression of negation (this has come down to us in such English words as "atypical," "asymptomatic," etc.). Taking sam roughly as "together with," and dhi as "thought/intellect," sam-a-dhi could be translated as "together with non-thought," or "together with that which is beyond thought." This would fit nicely with the Brahminical "description" of Brahman as neti, neti (not this, not this). In this case the pursuit of samadhi would be the search for that which is beyond fragmentation, beyond images, beyond the categories of human thought. Heinrich Zimmer, in his Philosophies of India, discusses two sides of samadhi: 1) savikalpa, samprajnata—"absorption with a full consciousness of the duality of the perceiver and thing perceived, the subject and object, the beholding inner sense and the beheld Self"; and 2) nirvikalpa, asamprajnata—"nondual absorption, absolutely devoid of any consciousness of a distinction between the perceiver and the thing perceived" (435, 436). There is, in this latter state, no longer any meaningful separation of knower and known.
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Works Cited

• Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckart: A Modern Translation. Trans. Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper and Row, 1941.
  
• Eliade, Mircea . Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1969.
  
• Smith, Huston. The World's Religions. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.
  
• Stevens, Wallace. "The Snow Man." The Palm at the End of the Mind. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
  
• Upanishads. Trans. Eknath Easwaran. Petaluma, California: Nilrigi Press, 1987.
  
• Zimmer, Heinrich. Philosophies of India. Ed. Joseph Campbell. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1989.