Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Blog #6 Meditation: Simple but Not Easy

While visiting MNDFL in New York City, I heard Lodro Rinzler describe meditation as “…simple but not easy.” It couldn’t be said better. It’s true: the instructions are simple and clear; but what meditation unearths tends to throw a wrench or two into the works.

In a talk I gave last night, I suggested one way we could work with this challenge is to consider some pre-meditation practice. Here are my remarks:

Let’s start off by simply paying attention – not to just one thing but to everything that is going on for us right now, at this very moment. But please, don’t meditate; don’t close your eyes; don’t follow your breath.

If you are paying attention, you can’t help but notice what’s coming through your sense perceptions, because our sense perceptions are ON, effortlessly. Our eyes let us know that we are playing in a field of visual perception; our ears let us know that we are playing in the field of audio perception; our nose and our tongue lie low but alert us to every change. Our skin and the nerve system throughout our body continually remind us that we play in a field of temperature, texture, pain and pleasure. When we pay attention we can’t help but notice these things. The sense gates remind us that we are alive. Awake. Woke.

Besides these miraculous characteristics related to body, we have miraculous characteristics related to speech. If we pay attention, we can’t help but notice that running along with our sense perceptions is constant communication through thought. We have words, sentences and paragraphs that are continually reminding us of what we are engaging with, moment by moment. If we are really paying attention we can’t help but notice the endless commentary that we produce – talking to ourselves about ourselves; talking to ourselves about others.

There is also a third category – paying attention to all the nuances and power of our attitudes and emotions.

All these elements are going on and are available to us if we are awake and paying attention. They might show up in feelings about the present, as in, “Man, am I hot.” (If you are younger, that could mean two different things; but if you are older it usually refers to something far less exciting.) Or, you might have attitudes and emotions with regard to the future, as in, “Oooo…look at that new iPhone 6! S! Plus! Me likey! Me want Apple Pay. Me want AirDrop and FaceTime!” There might even be emotions about past, present and future, all wrapped up in one: “I love her soooo much…..But I can’t believe what a jealous %#* she was last night…..That’s it! I’m through…..Arghhh! She’s driving me crazy. I need to STOP thinking about her. Stop. STOP. But, but I love her so much! I HATE this!”
  the endless wheel of passion, aggression, and ignorance.

If we pay attention we can’t help but notice all these things streaming through our consciousness. If we pay attention we can’t miss them.

Although my first instruction was to pay attention and not do formal meditation, the difference between them seems to be rather small. What is the difference? Meditation requires some attitude adjustment – like paying attention without bias. But if we’re truly being attentive, there’s lots of bias. A meditator is also supposed to notice thoughts and emotions without judgment or self-loathing. But if we’re paying close attention, we see lots of judgment and lots of self-loathing.

What’s Inevitable

I don’t mean to short-circuit everyone’s discovery, but there are two likely conclusions you will arrive at if you pay close attention to the mind. These are 1.) “I am good” and 2.) “I am bad.” If you meditate, if you are practicing being Awake, there’s a good chance that you will experience endless variations on the themes, “I am good” and “I am bad.”

Negative and worrisome thoughts are part of our genetic endowment – after all, our cave-dwelling ancestors' survival was probably not predicated on their happiness index; they survived due to fear of being a saber-toothed tiger’s dinner. Be that as it may, we are naturally (and nearly effortlessly) high-functioning beings. We can think things out and can have incredibly deep insights. We feel. We naturally connect with the world. It is basic to all of us. It is inherent. It is good. We call this Basic Goodness. In momentary gaps of consciousness, we notice that we are naturally plugged in. The world flows into us. We don’t have to search for this connection; nor do we need to improve ourselves in order to find it. We have basic workability; we are basically good. Nevertheless, this is all rather confusing for a practice that is purported to bring your mind peace. Yes, you will notice this basic, elemental goodness…but you are also going to notice your “terrible badness.” A contradiction?

Well, as I said, meditation is simple, but it’s not easy.

Confusion and Openness

Buddhist teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche once said:

You are good; fundamentally, you are healthy. Moreover, that particular health is capable of accommodating your badness as well as your goodness. When you're good, you're not particularly bashful about your goodness, and when you're bad, you're not particularly shocked by that either. These are simply your attributes. When you begin to accept both aspects of your being as energy, as part of the perspective of your view of yourself, then you are connecting with the fundamental goodness, which can accommodate all of these energies as part of one basic being. This is very solid and earthy. It is invincible in fact. (Work, Sex, Money p.35.)
His son and heir, Sakyong Mipham adds that we are bound to notice that meditation will reveal our self-loathing and struggle. We may be fundamentally good, but we feel bad. So there is an important question to ask ourselves – are we going to try to shut that awareness down, or are we going to nurture it? If we choose the former, our meditation practice will blind us, stupefy us, and slow us down as we wait for it to help us become something new or someone else. We think that meditation is going to help us get better, but we don’t realize we need to start with the stepping stone of knowing who-we-are.

We Are Innately Good, But…Let’s Get Some Feedback

We don’t have innate terrible badness; we have temporary terrible badness. And all of it is built on habit. The deep insight that is born of intensive meditation comes from noticing habit. We all have very well-established habitual patterns. How can we cultivate seeing those habits? Doing meditation? Sure, but I think we need more than that. I think we need feedback from others. And why not? Don’t they have the same measure of basic goodness and searing insight as you do? We might know someone who can be honest with us if we demonstrate that we are willing to own all that we are. There might be someone in our life that is willing to articulate truths about ourselves – truths that WE don’t wish to articulate to ourselves. If we hope to develop our attention and mindfulness, why not engage with others? Why not engage with a meditation instructor, a therapist – maybe your husband, wife, lover or friend? (Although, in such cases, I adhere to Brené Brown’s suggestion that you share your deeply personal conversations with someone who has earned your trust.)

There might be an argument against this, based on the ancient Buddhist slogan that says, “Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one.” What this means, basically, is that nobody knows you better than you. You know what’s going on with you. I think that’s true. But let’s consider something that Sakyong Mipham said, “…the tradition of meditation came from a culture that believed in the inherent health of mind; but when a culture does not believe that, it makes the situation tense.” Certainly, in our culture, there is much tension around accepting both positive and negative attributes. We are far too invested in our image which is often frail and prone to self-recrimination at best and self-hatred at worst. Sakyong Mipham has been telling us that our spiritual journey requires us to find a way to be who we are and relate with who we are. That means accepting ourselves in light of every mixed message that arises.

Conclusion

Trungpa Rinpoche, who seems to have endless resources of psychological jujitsu, says “…we accept at the same time the destructive qualities in our basic mechanism as well as the positive qualities in our mechanism, so we have no ground to have a battle at all.” (Glimpses of Shunyata, p. 14)

What does that mean?

If there is no ground for battle, that means there is no target. There is no fight between the so-called “good me” and the “bad me.” Instead, we learn to sit like a mountain. Regardless of storms and lighting that pass over it, we remain. If we are paying attention, we can’t help but notice all of this can go on without having to freak out. The difference between meditation and our experiment with attention is that we possess a few special ingredients that we can generously apply to our attention; and with these, we are able to hold all the positive and negative truths at once. What is foremost is kindness to our self; and what is deepest is sense of humor about how easily we can go astray. Along with humor and acceptance, honesty and fearlessness are our pre-meditation essentials. With these, we convert our meditation practice from a feel-good technique into a tsunami of appreciation for ourselves and our world.

© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson

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