More on clarity of mind
Just as you move into the body with awareness to free yourself from it – to no longer identify so completely with the physical body that your Self is veiled – just so with awareness you can lean into your thoughts, become intimate with the ways in which your mind works. Seeing your thoughts arise and pass away, you recognize how nebulous they are, how much a product of your own ego and your desires, and with a little practice you free yourself from them as well. The object of your attention becomes not the resolution of some perceived problem, nor planning some future which may not occur – you don’t give your attention to the results of some thought process – but watch the process of thinking itself.
By cultivating awareness, one is able to distinguish oneself from the thoughts, and no longer be bound to view each idea as Truth, or as Self, but instead merely as a passing fancy, one which may or may not have any merit whatsoever. If we train ourselves not to grip each passing thought so tightly, if we are able to watch thoughts like objects, rising and falling on the waves, like a mental respiration, we may free ourselves from the dogma of our own being: all those things we have decided are inviolable, the Gospel According to Me, are open to inquiry, to question, and to a new and more solid basis for acceptance, or bais for their discard.
If you feel there is any tinge of mystery surrounding these words, it is only because they are new to you. In the practice of meditation there is no mystery: simply be still, and observe. Suddenly there is a storm of voices – all yours – clambering for attention. Greet each one, and then dismiss it. Nothing is happening: you are sitting in a chair, you are sitting on the floor, there is no tremor of the earth, no explosion wracking the walls; nothing at all is happening, except a chorus of yapping mental street dogs. They are not even happy to have an audience, they could care less if you are listening or not, they just yap for the joy of yapping.
Inevitably – if you don’t run madly from your little circle of stillness – inevitably the clouds of these apparently seamless and incessant thoughts begin to part. The dogs disburse, the noise diminishes, and Nothing comes to take its place. What remains when clouds move off? Clear, open sky: clarity.
I have said there is no mystery, no mysticism in meditation practice, and there is none, there should be none. Any ornament you hang on the altar of yourself is one more voice, one more cloud. I say “there is no mystery” because we come to the practice of meditation with such loaded minds, with a briefcase full of stories of hippies and drugs and levitations, a Pandora’s Briefcase which, when opened, challenges any thinking person with a whirlwind of demons and nonsense. And little fairy-winged Hope, of course, what drew one to the idea of insight meditation in the first place. So I say, to beginners: there is no mystery. Just come and have a seat with us, in our quiet circle, and enjoy the peace we have collected together. If you go home quieter at heart, what a gift you have given yourself!
But while there is no mystery in the practice, the real Mystery, the beautiful mystery of being alive, the amazing nuances and colors of how we think and feel and touch, these all rush into your awareness in an effortless bit of magic. It takes hardly any time at all before more living that you thought possible becomes part of each day. And like any true inquiry into the nature of being – like the masters of high energy physics who looked into an atom and found fuzz; like Hubble’s astronomers seeking out the far end of the Universe with the largest eyes they can construct; like the cellular wizards who unravel the keystones of life on earth – like any true inquiry, a simple practice leads you into what can only be, forever be, the company of mystics, be they scientific or intuitive.
In our daily, unpracticed lives, we hold our thoughts like knives, cutting and shaping the world according to our fears and our desires. We create structures of thought that we live within, and which completely dictate our actions. Our US leaders’ actions in recent global events are clear example of how the box we create around our minds limits creative responses to complexity, allowing only black and white descriptions for what is, in fact, a rainbow. As we practice watching our thoughts and our responses, we begin to loosen the tight weave of that fabric, we begin to see its weaknesses, see where it is poorly constructed. And when the veil is finally freed enough, a beautiful (frightening!) emptiness is created.
You have seen this space once in a while, after you have gone to bed, and just before sleep. Perhaps you had been preoccupied with a problem, with some knot in your life, and for days had been looking for a way out. What to do? Try this, it is bad. Try that, it is worse. The mind turns the stone over and over, and still it is a stone. But then one evening – you have given up on this dilemma, you have shrugged your emotional shoulders, had a drink with friends, watched a funny movie, just let it go – one evening you wash yourself and ready yourself for bed, you tuck yourself in and give a long and gentle sigh… the body settles into the mattress… it is silent in the house, silent outside… you take another long, slow breath and the body relaxes… as the body relaxes, the mind relaxes… you are going to sleep, and the thoughts are not racing around, those street dogs are not yapping… stillness, just before you fall into subconscient sleep…
And then your eyes fly open: of course! “Oh, that’s exactly it, what an elegant solution… why didn’t I think of it before?”
The space of stillness between waking and sleep is the magic of meditation, it is that emptiness which we practice creating, and which, when created, is like two open hands waiting for gifts to fall from heaven. Without meditation your hands are closed, always closed, and the real creativity – the one which you do not and cannot direct, like the gestation and birth of a child – the real creativity is this openness to the mystery that is all around. It’s the rainbow in what otherwise seems shades of gray.
What more could one ask for? A practice as simple as sitting down, which offers the riches of the greatest adventurers of all time…
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