We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
Sogyal Rinpoche
A similar quote on meditation to yesterday morning’s one, noticing the tendency of the mind to use different strategies for avoiding simple, direct contact with life as it actually is. We prefer exaggerating our stories about life, often, to how things actually are. The mind likes to produce simulations of future or current events in our life, often making the anticipated difficulty seem bigger than it actually is:
Meditation practice provides provides the perfect context for observing our beliefs and recognizing the tug-of-war we have with our experience. Just sit quietly for five minutes and watch what happens. Unless we have some accomplishment in meditation, we won’t know what to do with all the activity. We become overwhelmed by the energetic play of the mind, pummeled by our own thoughts and emotions, bewildered by our inability to sit in peace. We will want to do something. And we really only have two means of escape from all this mayhem: we can either spin out into thought, which is an exaggeration of reality, or we can suppress or deny it.
Exaggeration and denial describe the dilemma we have with mind, and not just in meditation. Exaggeration and denial operate in conjunction with all our fantasies, hopes, and fears. When we exaggerate experience, we see what isn’t there. And when we deny it, we don’t see what is. Both exaggeration and denial are extraneous to the true nature of things, the nature we experience when we can just stay present.
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question
Things that are real pose no danger to the mind. The real dangers in the mind are our delusions, the things we make up, the things we use to cover up reality, the stories, the preconceived notions we impose on things. When we’re trying to live in those stories and notions, reality is threatening. It’s always exposing the cracks in our ideas, the cracks in our ignorance, the cracks in our desires. As long as we identify with those make-believe desires, we find that threatening. But if we learn to become real people ourselves, then reality poses no dangers.
This is what the meditation is for, teaching yourself how to be real, to get in touch with what’s really going on, to look at your sense of who you are and take it apart in terms of what it really is, to look at the things that you find threatening in your life and see what they really are. When you really look, you see the truth. If you’re true in your looking, the truth appears.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually,without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think.
Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
A. A. Milne, The House on Pooh Corner
Often we can get caught up in our fixed idea for the day and get anxious or upset when things go differently or “wrong”. This can extend to our whole life, too. We have a picture as to how our future will be and spend a lot of our time day dreaming about how things will be better when it comes to pass. It is not easy just to rest in the present, wisely planning for the day or the future but allowing it unfold in ways that we do not always anticipate. Sometimes we miss the opportunities that are presented by focusing on one that we think should come.
While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, ‘You know … my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.‘
Henri Nouwen, Reaching out: the Three movements of the Spiritual Life
