The tendency to demand ever more signs to replace symbols..makes our lives more and more factual, intellectually strenuous, wedded to the march of mundane causes, and beset by disconcerting surprises…A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage. It is prosaic to the point of total indifference, purely casual, devoid of that structure of intellect and feeling which we call “personality”
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
We have what we seek, it is there all the time,
and if we give it time,
it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton
For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day-to-day. I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing — to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.
You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!
Pema Chodron.
What I encourage is a moving towards simplicity, rather than complexity. We’re already complicated personalities. Our cultural and social conditioning is usually very complicated. We’re educated and literate, which means that we know a lot and have much experience. This means that we are no longer simple. We’ve lost the simplicity we had as children and have become rather complicated characters. What is most simple is to wake up…it’s as simple as that. The most profound teaching is the phrase “wake up”. Hearing this, one then asks, “What am I supposed to do next?” We complicate it again because we’re not used to being really awake and fully present. We’re used to thinking about things and analyzing, trying to get something or get rid of something; achieving and attaining. In awakened awareness there is no grasping. It’s a simple, immanent act of being here, being patient. It takes trust, especially trust in yourself.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence
Our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice—the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck — is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.
Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.
Pema Chodron, Waking up to your World
This quote, from a essay by Anne Dilliard, is as good a description of the simple – but difficult – act of paying attention, that moment before we add words to what we are experiencing. It is something which we keep working at, slowing down the continual commentary which accompanies everything in our mind, working on our capacity to just let thing be:
This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip’s stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat. I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator – our very self-consciousness – is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.
Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
