Catching grace
From Monk Mode
Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
—Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
The grass knows how to grow, your heart knows how to beat, and the Sun and Moon know how to rise and set without your help. None of these things needs your active involvement, and indeed they’ll get on much better without it. Nothing bad will happen if you let go of the controls for a minute.
We talked a bit in Why you can’t meditate about how “meditation” is often hyped up as a quick and easy way to silence our head-noise and achieve instant enlightenment. Well, it really doesn’t work like that, as I’m sure you’ve found from experience.
So this is usually the first obstacle in the path of anyone who wants to sit quietly and just be with themselves for a while. We have unrealistic expectations that we’ll achieve immediate tranquillity, but instead we’re assailed with lots of uncontrollable, intrusive thoughts, and as a result we consider that the experiment has failed: we have failed. Likely, we won’t try again.
Learning how not to do things
It’s the same sort of problem that we often encounter when studying a craft, like writing, software engineering, or martial arts, isn’t it? We sabotage ourselves in advance by adopting an end-gaining mindset.
Indeed, this is probably completely unconscious, because it’s drilled into us almost from birth: you’re not here to enjoy yourself, you’re here to work hard and achieve things. Strive for goals!
We’re so used to seeing life through this lens that it’s actually quite difficult to set it aside, even for a few minutes. We carry around this presupposition all the time that we should be doing something, every moment from cradle to grave.
“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe.”
—Terry Pratchett, “A Hat Full of Sky”
In this context, meditation is unique. It’s the one thing you can’t do, because it’s precisely about not doing anything. That’s good news, because it means you can’t fail! All you have to do is sit there for a while. If you can do that, it doesn’t matter what else happens: you’ve succeeded.
In fact, most of us can’t do even that at first. The brain’s withdrawal agony at being deprived of its own fabrications is so intense, we probably can’t sit still for more than a couple of minutes at a time before leaping up like a startled pheasant.
It gets easier, though. Another paradox: not doing anything takes practice.
Let the mind rest when not needed
This is one reason I don’t think the word “meditation” is particularly helpful, because of course it implies that you’re doing some activity, which is the opposite of the truth. If instead I just said something like “not doing anything”, it wouldn’t sound nearly so impressive, but perhaps that’s a good thing.
We shouldn’t think about meditation as some rare and exotic activity, or something that’s reserved for special occasions. Instead, let’s think about it as simply letting our minds rest when not needed.
Opportunities for this arise all the time, once you know how to spot them: when you’re waiting for the traffic lights to change, while you’re waiting for the water to boil, when you’re listening to hold music and the repeating message that “your call is important and will be answered as soon as possible”.
In moments like these, don’t think to yourself “Now it’s time to meditate, I’m going to put my mind into a special state and become calm and tranquil”. Instead, just focus on being aware of what’s going on, inside and outside you. Thoughts and bodily sensations form, float by, and dissipate, like passing clouds. Rather than batting them away, or latching on to them and pursuing them, just let them go, and admire the view.
Freedom from thought does not mean no thoughts. It means that thoughts come and go freely.
Tranquillity does not mean that we start feeling lovely. It doesn’t mean that we start feeling blissful. It doesn’t mean our mind stops having thoughts. Tranquillity means that we begin to settle down in the presence of whatever is happening.
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
My book Monk Mode is an owner’s manual for the mind: how it works, how it doesn’t work, and how we can work with it to lead a relatively happy and fulfilling life. It starts with acceptance, which doesn’t mean being passive or apathetic. Quite the reverse: it’s an active process of realising and recognising what’s happening, instead of ignoring or trying to fight it.
No filter: experiencing the present
Just for a few moments, try to suspend the ingrained habit of judging and evaluating what’s around you (“This is bad / uncomfortable / too hot / too cold / too noisy”), and let everything be just as it is, good or bad.
Allow the photons to simply hit your retina, and the phonons to hit your ear, without trying to form them into pictures and then subjecting the pictures to intellectual analysis.
Let all that frantic brain machinery rest for a minute, and just sit and drink in things directly, as a flow of unmediated sense-impressions. Let yourself be a vessel that the world fills up.
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
—Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones”
The universe is not waiting for your instructions
Imagine that you’ve been carrying around a heavy weight all day, and for the first time you’ve been able to set it down and relax. How does that feel? Now take a breath, and savour it.
Feel the air rushing in through your nostrils, your diaphragm expanding, and your lungs inflating. Let the air go out again, without forcing.
See how the body knows how to breathe by itself, without you having to supervise the operation? Now let your mind do the same thing.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
—Matsuo Bashō, 1644—1694 CE
Don’t worry if this is a struggle at first: of course it is. Your mind doesn’t know how to stop struggling, because until now it never has. And the more you try to force yourself to stop forcing yourself, the harder it gets. It’s like trying to look at the back of your own head.
Relax. The universe is not waiting for your instructions.
—Bumper sticker
Catching a glimmer
After a while, if you’re sitting quietly in some pleasant place, you’ll probably get distracted or tired of the “meditation striving”, and something strange will happen. You’ll suddenly realise that for the last few moments you haven’t been thinking about anything.
That’s a weird sensation. Of course, you never experience it directly, only in retrospect. If you were aware at the time that you weren’t having any thoughts, then you’d be having a thought. Instead, it’s more like waking up and realising that you must have been asleep, because there’s a blank space in your memory just before right now.
At first it’s like catching a glimmer of some faint star, and you immediately start tilting your head this way and that, squinting in a vain effort to recapture what you thought you saw. Ignore this tendency and resist the temptation to switch back into the striving, end-gaining mode.
There is a Chinese story of one who came to a great sage, saying “I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” The sage answered, “Bring out your mind (your ‘I’) before me, and I will pacify it.” “These many years,” he replied, “I have sought my mind, but I cannot find it.” “There,” concluded the sage, “it is pacified!”
—Alan Watts, “The Wisdom of Insecurity”
Just keep sitting, maintaining a constant gentle awareness, and accepting whatever comes.
In particular, don’t try to push away thoughts that arise: just let them alone. Whether the thoughts are pleasant or unpleasant, if you don’t engage with them, they’ll simply pass over you and melt away.
Don’t get frustrated or mad at yourself for failing to suppress these thoughts, or for not being tranquil enough. Every time you catch yourself in the act of thinking (“I wonder what to have for dinner tonight? I should get something at the store”) just relax and let the thought go.
Instead of getting annoyed when thoughts arise, smile as though you’re greeting an old friend: “Thinking! Great to see you again. How’s it been? Okay, see you later!”
Why don’t you take a break now and give this a try? (Without, of course, trying to do anything, but instead just letting it happen, and getting out of its way.)
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to dispense with the idea of “meditation” as some special kind of activity (or inactivity), and make it instead just a normal and natural part of our way of living.
