Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself
or get anywhere else,
but simply to realize where you already are.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you Go, There you are.
Making our experiences solid
More on naming our experiences, which we saw in the Sutta yesterday. It is good to pay attention to this spontaneous tendency, as it lies at the root of a lot of our everyday suffering:
When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it. Looking inward we freeze the flow of consciousness when we conceive of an “I” enthroned between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist. We take it for granted that we see things as they are and rarely question that opinion. We spontaneously assign intrinsic qualities to things and people “thinking this is beautiful, that is ugly” without realizing that our mind superimposes these attributes upon what we perceive. We divide the world between “desirable” and “undesirable” and see independent entities in what is actually a network of ceaselessly changing relations.
Matthieu Ricard, Happiness
Seeing today for the first time
Do not say, ‘It is morning,’
and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first time
as a newborn child that has no name.
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Everything comes to us that belongs to us
if we create the capacity to receive it.
Faith is the bird that feels the light
when the dawn is still dark.
From the solemn gloom of the temple
children run out to sit in the dust,
God watches them play and forgets the priest.
I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come
no matter how dark the present.
Rabindranath Tagore
How we name our experiences
A lot of our difficulties comes from the “name” we put on our experiences, how we label what is happening to us. This applies particularly to how we talk to ourselves in the moments that something is occurring, as this Sutta from the Buddhist tradition tells us:Name has weighed down everything
Nothing is more extensive than name.
Name is the one thing that has
All under its control
S. 1.61
Being where you are
When snow falls and slows down the traffic, we get plenty of opportunities to practice mindfulness, here explained in its simplest form. Often our way is blocked and we are forced to stay where we are for a long time. Being with our life “as it is” is the key to our practice, even when we don’t particularly want to be there:
You don’t need to try to get anywhere when you practice meditation. You only need to really be where you already are and realize it (make it real). In fact in this way of looking at things there is no place else to go, so efforts to get anywhere else are ill-conceived. They are bound to lead to frustration and failure. On the other hand, you cannot fail to be where you already are. So you cannot ‘fail’ in your meditation practice if you are willing to be with things as they are.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
Editing ourselves
One of the members of our group worked as an editor for a local magazine. She arrived often carrying bundles of page proofs from her still-unfinished work at the office. One wintry evening she was the first to speak: “It’s like we’re all trying to be editors over our emotions. We look ourselves over and decide what gets to stay and what has to go. We move from first drafts to smoothly polished paragraphs by crossing out certain grammatical mistakes and supplementing the weaker parts of the prose. When it comes to feelings and meditation, we’re all desperately trying to edit ourselves for improvement!“
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
