Today's blog title is credited to T.S. Eliot, who happens to be a favorite poet of Shinzen Young, author of The Science of Enlightenment. Shinzen is also one of my favorite meditation teachers as of late. I find him to be extremely clear and gentle on the trials and tribulations of deep meditation practice, as well as appreciate his pragmatic and scientific approach with minimal Buddhist jargon. I still have an immense appreciation for Siddhartha Gautama's refined formulation of the original dharma (which Shinzen often pulls from), and continue to see these methods as part of my practice within the cosmology of a Catholic theocentric worldview. I look at Buddhist practice as bottom-up; and Christianity as top-down-all-around. It works for me.
Meditation is not always easy, and yet the only bad meditation is often the one we don't do. Even if the experience is challenging, there may be something good happening that we aren't aware of. Perhaps our soul is getting ready for what our mind isn't seeing yet. Meditation is even better if we don't resist the what and persist with the why. Meister Eckart says, “You should not attach such importance to what you feel; rather, consider important what you love and what you intend.”
In essence, we meditate to liberate ourselves to be present to Reality, to what is, to God. But even Shinzen acknowledges we can not directly experience God: “you only experience the afterglow of God.” God is too Real for our finite nervous systems to inhabit.
But we must (as Thomas Merton once said about improving prayer life) take the time. We must take the time for practice for the sake of the practice itself. What comes of it will come in the right time, and yet there is always a vector to all of this. As Shinzen points out, we are made for practice as even our busy, aging minds point us toward the Real.
“The ordinary mind is constantly scattered in many directions and cannot hold a center. We think this monkey-mind experience is awful. People feel tormented by this ceaseless turning of the mind. But when you look beneath surface appearances, the scattering can be interpreted as space effortlessly spreading, and the inability to hold a center could be looked upon as contraction gobbling up the solid ground beneath you.”
The solidity we hold on to is never relaxing. Even in our happiest conditioned moments (e.g. being in love, enjoying a favorite piece of music), there is still an underlying sense of more—or even that this experience will not satisfy due to it being unenduring. We approach an wide open canyon right at the point of a cliff that holds us back from leaping; or giving up our control or safety.
“When things solidify, when there’s pressure in body, mind, sight, or sound, people have a tendency to blame themselves: “I’m resisting.” “I can’t let go.” Expansion and contraction give us a different way to think about pressure and solidity. It doesn’t have to be about you at all; it’s about two impersonal forces eventually learning how to mutually interpenetrate without mutually interfering. Relating to unrelaxable solidity in this way can help you to develop equanimity.”
We first must recognize equanimously this subtle discomfort as a complete experience—for that is what is solidifying and standing in the way of our relationship to the Real. In practice, we go over and over this as we slowly and effectively uncover the True face that God wants to see. He doesn't want us to be safe and defensive; He wants us as we are fully alive!
Shinzen is quite a fan of The Cloud of Unknowing also. The author there says, “It is not who you are or what you've been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.”
Our anonymous friend adds,
“Even meditating on God’s love must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. Show your determination next. Let that joyful stirring of love make you resolute, and in its enthusiasm bravely step over meditation and reach up to penetrate the darkness above you. Then beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving, no matter what comes your way.”
This strong determination is an approach Shinzen acknowledges can get us all the way. The techniques suffice, but our intent is necessary.
Between Melting and Freezing / The Soul’s Sap Quivers / Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer? — T.S. Eliot