Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Blog #7 Don't "Meditate"

Meditation. The word can be defined many ways. Inside the four walls of a Tibetan meditation center, it might mean one thing. If you are Christian, it means something else—the words “meditation” and “contemplation” are the reverse of the Buddhist definitions.

Or if you are a mindfulness teacher, you might say that mindfulness is the same as meditation, provided you take out the messy Buddhist parts.

Or if you call yourself a meditator and you have a mate--and if your mate thinks that as a meditator you are behaving badly--they might say “Why don’t you go and meditate on THAT!”

There’s no reason to argue about who is right or wrong, the important thing is to understand what you are doing, because, as Sakyong Mipham put it, If you don’t understand what you are doing with meditation, you will not do it for very long.

In the Tibetan tradition, the word meditation is shorthand for three interrelated disciplines: Hearing, Contemplating, and Meditating. I like the way Acharya Richard John describes it:

“’Hearing’ refers to taking in information in an accurate way. This was the method used at the time of the historical Buddha, when disciples would listen to teachings, remember them and pass along what they heard. When repeating the teaching, they would often preface it with, "Thus have I heard…”

Of course, things are somewhat different now; with current technology, it is possible to take in information from multiple sources: we can read books, attend talks, listen to CDs, watch DVDs, or go online. All of it falls under the category of ‘Hearing.’

“’Contemplating’ means taking what we have learned and making it personal, by chewing on it, questioning it, unpacking it, and restating it.”

Contemplation is perhaps the most creative of the three because it involves figuring out how we can make the teaching personal and pragmatic. It could be as simple as reading a paragraph before going to bed and then dropping the book to your chest in order to think about what you just read; or it could refer to a flash of insight or amazement that came from something you just heard on a recording – something that caused you to pause an audio file to jot down a few notes that resonated with you deeply…or painfully…or both.

You might even decide to re-read a quote 3 times so that you are confident that you got the subtleties of the message.  You might even read an interesting passage in a book and reach for your yellow highlighter so that you can easily re-visit that paragraph tomorrow. All of this is contemplation, which can be creative or formal­­ – as long as it is personal…that’s what matters most.

Meditating” refers to the practical discipline, in which one takes an upright posture and works with the breath, a mantra or another object of focus. It is the heart of the tradition; the actual training. On a deeper level, meditation means having a direct and personal experience of what has been learned and contemplated.

So, meditation can be thought of as the sum of these three, combined.

But let’s pretend we know nothing of these concepts. What if they never existed? What if there was no historical Buddha and we had to figure out by ourselves what it means to be more awake and present in our lives? What would motivate us to do so?

Well, we might note that our minds get continually hijacked. We might want to understand why that happens. I heard this description from an excellent teacher, Acharya Dan Hessey in New York City two weeks ago. He described the essence of human beings as “travelers – traveling all the time, always on our way to somewhere. There’s this constant quality of, someplace to go; something to do; what is the next thing?”

He added, “We don’t experience where we are coming from, because of the going to.”

So is that the essence of our difficulty…our constant involvement with the next thing coming our way? Is that the tendency we must counter with meditation--that we are always traveling; always moving to the next best thing? Does that strike a familiar note? Because if we are going to use this identical approach with our meditation, it’s going to blow up in our face. It is going to fail, and meditation will be just another way to make us feel more neurotic and inadequate. If we keep trying to spiritually maneuver ourselves to become something else, or improve this goofy mess called “me”…well, it’s going to be like trying to pull a rabbit out of our hat

Meditation is not going to magically transform us into a new, improved me. We cannot adopt the approach: “out with the old and in with the new.”

So…I suggest we don’t meditate…with quotation marks around it; with air quotes.

How do we do that?

Instead of “meditating”, we work with our attitude. We try to relax this “traveling.” Instead of trying to get to somewhere else, we "Stay" – as Pema Chodron says. It’s like saying, “There’s a lot happening today…deliveries coming, guests arriving, etc. so I’m just going to stick around and be there for whatever arrives. I'm going to just let it all just come in. The whole parade.

The idea with “Don’t Meditate” is that we’re going to feel everything that comes up. Like Trungpa Rinpoche says, we are going to try to avoid sweeping anything under the rug, because when we deflect, that is the enemy of meditation practice.

We could simply be there for the breath, and then when our mind shifts over to the itch on our back, or the siren we hear outside, we can be there for that. And if the next thing we notice is a thought, we can be there for that shift over to thought. And if we notice that we lost track of our breath, we can feel ourselves shifting back, and feeling the breath. And then….though this may be a little difficult to believe…when our mind plunges into deep and painful emotions, we can be there for that, too. Yes...that too.

All of these elements are part of our communication with our world; our sights, our sounds, our tastes, smells and touch. Even our thoughts and our emotions. All this makes up our beautiful and amazing contact with the world around us. Granted, we are not going to dispense with the tool of meditation, the object of our meditation—the breath—because the breath is a very powerful tool for communicating with nowness. But if we hope that meditation is going to help us avoid paying attention to things as they are; but instead, fixate on our hopes for a imaginary, perfected, new and improved ‘ME’...then we will have lost communication. We have lost our signal for Being. Here. Now.

Real meditation (without the air quotes) means being fully connected to the present, whether via body, mind, emotions, interactions, or even society. Society is sacred, our social interactions are sacred—no less sacred than our Buddha Mind or Buddha heart. 

So when you meditate, don’t “meditate”. Imbue your meditation with the attitudes that make it work: curiosity; a sense of humor when you find yourself being habitually critical and doubtful of your ability; openness to whatever presents itself. All while you sit on your throne.

To put it another way, we can sit with our thoughts and emotions, with this kind of attitude:

“Good day, co-worker I am irritated with. I see you’ve come around again.”

“Hello boss that I despise. Funny seeing you here again. Welcome to my meditation 
session”

“Hello argument I am having with my spouse. Wow, we are quite busy today, aren’t we?

“Good morning self who pisses me off and can’t sit still…self that I sometimes loathe. Let me give you a hug.”

To meditate properly, we take the attitude that whatever arises in our mind is sacred. There is nothing we need to sweep away. Instead, we choose to feel it all--sense perceptions, ayatanas…we feel them. Our thoughts, our emotions--we can feel them. All of these experiences keep us right here, on the dot. Whether we are relating with our sacred wakeful self…or our nasty neurotic self...we feel, we communicate—there’s nothing more holy or more spiritual to search for.

© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson