Writing As Daily Meditation

The Six Paramitas: Concentration, Wisdom and the Fourth Reminder, Part 6

Back at Penn State I had a writing teacher who said sharing our writing is like taking our clothes off in front of each other. It occurs to me as I work through this experiment that this is a very public private journal. That I’m in way too deep to turn back now unsettles me. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it means I’m required to choose my words with more care. Sitting on my meditation cushion, considering this part of my practice, not writing anything down, thoughts freely drift away, leaving only faint imprints. Writing—then posting—nails them down for later revision, so this written record can be revisited and revised to help me better understand my sitting meditation over time.

Concentration

This is the one I love the most. Unsurprisingly, this most “spiritual” part is the one I’m least able to articulate. Beware the New Age clichés! Let’s see if I can avoid them.

To begin, I have to mention that I’ve neglected to say that this meditation on the Four Reminders and the Six Paramitas comes near the end of my morning exercise program. I do pushups and squats, planks and clam shells, stretches and free weights. It’s not heavy duty by any means, but certainly enough to get the blood moving in an old guy with a bad heart. Physical exercise begins to arouse what President John Quincy Adams, who started each day with a swim in the Potomac, called “the animal spirits.”

He wanted that feeling of plunging into the water, then of climbing back into the fresh air dripping wet. I imagine him shaking himself like a dog just back to dry land, exploding silver shards of light. Think of how you feel after a workout or a walk in the woods on a fall day. You generally feel “more like yourself.” You are more in touch with your environment. Your mind is clear. These are the moments when you find yourself feeling Whitmanesque—“I am large…I contain multitudes”—joyful, confident. Ready to persevere, to face up, to risk generosity, and patiently accept your vulnerability.

My exercises do wake up my spirit. If I’ve reached this point of my meditation lost in my head, overly thinky, then taking inventory of how my body feels brings me back again, an important feature because my mind is sometimes like a dog I used to own when I lived out in the woods. Barney. He was a Blue Tick/Irish Setter mix. Long-legged, deep-chested, with a hound’s gift for scent. He ran deer. I wouldn’t see him for days. Lord knows where he got to, but he’d come home ready for a long nap by the wood stove. That boy done been on a bender.

My mind can be like that, so I have to call it back to simply watch my breathing, and just try to be present in the classic sitting meditation.

It’s the easiest thing in the world that I often find impossible to do. My mind latches onto an idea or a memory and that idea or memory latches onto another and then another until I can’t remember what the original thought was or how I arrived at where it’s taken me.

So I start over, maybe counting breaths:

One. That’s good. Two. Holding steady. Three… Twenty-seven. Wait! How’d I get there?

I’m almost exaggerating. I bring my mind back to the present moment repeatedly.

The practice is an effort to tune into the energy of the now—the sunlight filling the bay window of our bedroom, cars swishing by on the avenue down the block, the feel of my meditation cushion under my butt, the ache in my right leg bent into the easy Burmese meditation posture. Awareness without articulation.  

One way to look at this is to think of an inner well of silence, something Hermann Hesse called an inner “stillness and a sanctuary” where we can go to be truly ourselves. Another way to look at it is the theory that our minds do not create consciousness, but are instead like radio transmitters. Emptying our minds is a turning of the dial to remove the static, turning the dial to better hear the music of the now.

As I make this effort, I hope to feel all that I’ve thought about leading up to this practice. That is, I hope that I have integrated my contemplation, no longer needing to think the words anymore. Awareness without articulation. This is the spirit of my meditation I want to take away.

Meditation, after all, is a practice to be taken off the cushion and out into the world. Take a deep breath and be generous. Take a chance on being vulnerable. Be patient. Remember that we all suffer. Stand up and be true to yourself. Try to achieve some level of mental stability, some level of mindful equanimity. 

These steps—gratitude, morality, patience, the rest—these are reminders. That’s all. And so, as I reach this point in my routine, I remind myself of spirit.

We cultivate opening ourselves by practicing emptying our minds.

Wisdom

After ten or fifteen minutes, I’m ready to go on to this final paramita.

I make no pretensions to wisdom. But my job is not to tell you what is wisdom. It’s to articulate what I am thinking about wisdom and to learn something by doing so. Maybe you’ll look at what I write and say, “No, that’s foolish. I have a better idea.” Or you’ll say, “What utter gibberish!” and then outline your own view. Good. That’s what you should do.

My understanding of wisdom in Buddhist thinking is that it refers to a deep understanding of the true nature of phenomena. That is, all phenomena are empty of a permanent nature. The closest I can get to this concept is the Law of Interdependent Co-Arising. “All beings are my mother,” is the simple explanation I’ve heard over and over again from my Tibetan friends. I am constantly created and recreated through my interactions as a part of this vast fabric of being. I find meaning in the instant I interact with you and the other beings I encounter, and my essence changes so radically with each encounter that I am actually empty of any permanent essence. To the extent that I exist at all, it is always in relation and is always changing. We are, therefore, all One.

That’s pretty heady stuff, and I’m not sure how deeply I’ve felt it. A little, for sure, but more like skipping stones than diving deep. In fact, I’m not sure I entirely buy it. Sure, we are created and we evolve through relationship with the sentient beings in our lives as well as with the physical and cultural environment. Embracing that is a giant step toward more fully realizing our humanity. But accepting radical emptiness is another matter. Doing so requires the dissolution of ego and the abandonment of the idea of soul, which presupposes a permanent essence. That’s a steep climb for a farm boy raised as a Christian. It calls for a future discussion of my spiritual experiences to sort out why I call myself a Buddhist in the first place. That will have to wait for another day, if ever it arrives at all.

For now, though, I believe the better part of wisdom is to keep learning by practicing my meditation.

And now for the Fourth Reminder.

The Fourth Reminder: Beware the Flaws of Samsara

Samsara refers to this cyclical world of suffering through birth and old age and sickness and death, grasping after delusions of permanence along the way. It is, in other words, this human condition. Its flaws are (1) the delusion that we can achieve permanence (though we try to do so by acquiring material things and achieving perceived importance) and (2) the dread of our annihilation.

Trungpa Rinpoche, who has never been one of my teachers, said that Samsara is “Our lack of recognizing that we have had a precious birth, our denial of our own death, the karma of taking a human body…” The antidote for the flaws of Samsara, therefore, is gratitude, acceptance of death, and recognition of cause and effect. 

To take the discussion further into my eclectic, Buddhism Light approach, I’ll remember what my old friend Nick Cafarelli, a devout Catholic, used to quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

So, whatever religious or mystical drama has awakened our awareness of the ineffable, we do well to acknowledge and cultivate that experience. We do an injustice to ourselves by ignoring it.

My meditation practice and my love for quiet walks in the woods is my way of cultivating my spirit.