The weirdest thing happened to me at lunch last week. I was just sitting there, having a conversation about something I can’t even remember at this point, when all of a sudden it popped into my head that part of the psychological baggage I have been carrying around with me includes the belief that whatever I think or feel must be tweaked or altered before it can be shared. There was a sense of rejection as something somehow inherent within my self, an inborn sense of incompatibility between the world and my desires. Which I guess might makes another in the series of similar realizations that started before I left on that meditation retreat a few weeks back.
This time I realized that I was carrying around, at a really low level, a profound distrust of the world and my place in it. It all ties in, I think, to some early formative stuff from when I was a kid, but that’s really all I feel needs to be said on that aspect of the experience. Although I’m trying to be as open as possible about these experiences, I think those kinds of details might be the airing of too much dirty laundry in public. I’m interested in exploring and documenting the subjective feelings and experiences as they arise during these “ahah!” experiences, in the interest of shedding some light on whatever it is that these experiences are (and what it is that they’re trying to point me towards, in an attempt at a sort of spiritual triangulation), but I don’t think that such details from my personal history are necessarily relevant. Unless you had the exact same childhood I did, I don’t think those kinds of details would be as helpful as a close examination of the dynamics of the situation (a study of changes).
Anyway, once I became aware of it, I realized that this distrust of the world was a foolish thing for me to be carrying around, because distrust is by definition a conditioned thing (that is, there has to be some thing in the real world which is distrusted), and therefore the distrust itself cannot be permanent. It is something that is dictated by circumstances, and although distrust always could be a warranted response, it was not something that I had to continually keep in place. To have choosen continual defense over paying attention and defending when appropriate was just plain lazy…
That is to say, the realization was that such defensiveness comes third. First is the presentness of my being aware. Second is the reality to which I turn that awareness. And only third does that awareness respond to that reality. There is no response that must always be in place, prior to awareness of reality.
Of course, all three are constantly going on all the time; there’s no “reset” button that allows us to start the game over again. But it is a question of where you rest, where your awareness and identity begin. If your identity rests in the world, well, that’s always changing, how can there be anything permanent to identify with? And if your identity is in a certain learned reaction to the world, well, you’re trying to make a permanent house on sand that’s always shifting. The question is, what is it that knows the sand is shifting? What is it that reality is always shifting around and through? Find that and you have found a place a rest, the refreshing fountain that bubbles up inside every one of us.
Upon having that realization, I felt a twinge from my lower right ribs, an area that has been causing me some pain recently, followed by a sense of opening up and release. (I have gone to see my doctor about the pain, but he’s not sure what it could be. He put me on daily Alleve for muscle inflammation…) There was a feeling of being more present, of having let go of something physically, of a chronic tension having left the body. I’m a big fan of the ideas behind Willhelm Reich’s work and always believed that mind and body are two expressions of one underlying whole, but this was an instance where I felt a particularly strong awareness of the connection between the two, when a shift in one happened almost immediately following a shift in the other. It felt like a call-and-response or an echo…
That’s the end of the story, but I still have to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why all of a sudden like that? The quick and easy answer is “the grace of god”, or as the abbot at my zen temple put it last week, “the spring doesn’t happen and the sun doesn’t shine because we think about them.”
However, while I don’t disagree with those answers, I think it’s also more than just a one way street. That is, I think we are sometimes (and not as often as we would like) lucky enough to be able to put ourselves into places, situations, and states of mind where we are more likely to receive that grace. For me, I think the meditation practice has had something to do with it. There are times that nothing much happens during meditation itself, but then insights / changes of view / moments of bliss, will pop-up throughout the day. Does this happen to anyone else? Most of what I’ve read seems to take for granted that such experiences usually happen during the meditation itself. For me though, they sometimes seem to catch up afterwords, away from the cushion.
Who knows? Maybe it’s a reminder that nothing needs to be done, that simply being in and of that awareness is enough, and that the spring will come on it’s own, in it’s own time…
