The Stillness Already There
La quietud que ya está ahí
A student reflects on the value of guided reminders during meditation, and the teacher explores how glimpses of stillness gradually shift where we look for peace.
The Stillness Already There
A student reflects on the value of guided reminders during meditation, and the teacher explores how glimpses of stillness gradually shift where we look for peace.
Having you speak a little more and provide guidance throughout the session worked a lot better for me. Just hearing you speak about that pulling, the trying to control, the pushing against the waves. That constant reminder of how we're fighting against our thoughts instead of letting them roll and pass through.
The impulse to control
It's very natural to think or believe that the calm we are longing for comes through controlling life, controlling what's moving, controlling mostly our thoughts and emotions. In a way, it's turning that upside down and noticing that we are looking for something that is, in a sense, already at rest. There are no words for it. It's been described as awareness, or peace; today I was describing it as stillness. But the direction is the opposite of trying to control and fight with our thoughts and emotions. It's noticing that we already inhabit something that is at rest.
It's very subtle, though. It's one thing to understand this, and another to see it at play.
How glimpses accumulate
Maybe in this meditation you had three glimpses, each a fraction of a second. It might have been more than that, but even that much starts to accumulate a kind of gravity, a weight, where it begins to change where you look for value. Over time, the more you taste that (as you said, it's not intellectual but experiential), you notice that movement and inner tugging. Then you might have a glimpse of something that resonates with something being still, even if you don't feel you've really tasted it. It might be just a micron of a second. Those little interruptions, those little singularities, start to change where you look for what you're looking for.
Instead of this relentless search through changing and controlling experience, it starts to turn around. You can begin bringing attention to that which is already still. Life then, in a sense, is freed to be more itself, rather than you trying to control it.
A different direction
But it's a very different approach, a very different way of being. It's very counterintuitive at first. Our whole society is built around that other direction, and it's been doing that from the beginning of time, with very few exceptions.
And it's something you don't need anything in order to keep discovering in yourself, more and more. There's no skill, no practice, nothing you need to develop. It's just a turning of attention, a shifting of what we value. Then it can look like a practice, because now you are attending to something different on a regular basis. But it's more like going for walks every morning. To somebody for whom a walk is a senseless thing, they might look at someone walking every morning as doing some really hard practice, as though committed to a discipline. But if you're simply discovering these moments and glimpses of stillness, you're doing it out of your true desire, out of genuinely valuing it.
Ninety-nine percent thinking, one percent presence
It's striking to think that ninety-nine percent of the time I spend meditating, I'm actually intellectualizing it, and maybe one percent is where I actually experience something that's in the moment.
That's how it goes. It's a very by-the-book process. You sit to meditate and it will reveal the mind-boggling, constant activity of your mind. And that's great.
It's a split microsecond where I experience something that's not in my mind. It's sad, but also hopeful.
It's full of opportunity. I would see it more as a doorway to opportunity. But I wouldn't expect anything in the future. That's where hope can get tricky, because it's hope for something changing in the future, and that's more mind. The future exists only in your imagination. Show me the future without using your imagination. It's an impossible problem.
The battle that is itself the obstacle
It's like a battle with my own mind, but then the battle itself is what's preventing so much. If I could just quiet the mind. And then even wanting to quiet the mind is another thing. It's this infinite, perpetual trying to solve something.
You're having quite a few realizations right now, and I would recommend that you celebrate that. What you're saying sounds like a drama, a movie where things are going wrong. I don't mean you're dramatizing. I mean it feels like things are going badly. But actually, I would say celebrate, because you are seeing your experience far more clearly than ever before.
What you're describing is a very big shift. That's a realization. I know it doesn't seem like it or feel like it. It's not an "aha, angels singing" moment. But this is how it goes.
Thought mistaken for reality
Most of humanity never gets here. The fact that you can say, "These are actually my thoughts and not reality," is huge. It opens the door to seeing more and more. And the more you see, things start to change.
For more than ninety-nine percent of people, the reflected reality in the mind becomes reality. There can be a period where things get a little bumpy. It could be a long period; a couple of decades, in my case. But that confused state, where thought is taken for the whole of reality, is how you get all of these political problems, social problems. Most of it is fueled by the conviction that imagined reality is the true reality. It's the only way to see somebody as an enemy. Otherwise, it's just another human being.