MEDITATION

Meditation provides us with the strength to discover our basic goodness, relate with our fear and develop loving kindness. Meditation is not necessarily a religious or spiritual activity. Like basic goodness, it is an innate and completely natural part of ourselves, but one we have lost touch with. Gary Snyder has written that meditation is “as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves or soaring in circles is to hawks and eagles.” He calls meditation “attention to consciousness itself.”

Buddhist traditions describe two aspects of meditation. The first is mindfulness, the process of settling and resting the mind. Mindfulness means being present rather than distracted by thoughts. Developing mindfulness leads to the second aspect, insight. With insight, also called awareness, we gradually come to recognize of our Buddha nature or basic goodness. Mindfulness, literally resting the mind, is so fundamental to beginning to see what our nature is, that all spiritual disciplines - from the Lakota vision quest to the solitude of the 4th Century Carmelite desert fathers - have probably contained methods that foster it. In the fundamental practice of being silent and still, it makes little difference whether we speak of the discoveries that occur as being mind, Buddha nature, God, spirit or consciousness.

Normally our mind is busy with thoughts and we are busy thinking about them, holding onto them, generating more of them. In this state we are distracted from life and distracted from ourselves. Mindfulness means calm abiding. Calm abiding is a way of letting thoughts subside. It is not an attempt to stop thought, just relax our involvement in the constant stream of thinking most of us do. The most common practice of mindfulness or calm abiding is sitting meditation. One sits in a comfortable position and begins by paying attention to the breath.

Mindfulness might seem very basic, even remedial. But once we begin, we find it to be challenging, exhilarating and humbling. In meditation, we begin to really notice how many thoughts we have. This initial experience is described as sitting behind a waterfall! At times, the roar of discursive thoughts seems deafening. And the degree to which we are normally not mindful in daily life becomes more apparent to us. These experiences challenge us to to call on the courage to persevere.

It is relatively easy to be mindful making love or hang gliding, but these activities occur between hours and hours of the mundane. Who really pays attention walking to the mail box or putting pots away? Yet our sense of wonder and loving kindness is often born from the mundane. Who has not, at one time, watched dust particles float and dance in afternoon sunlight and felt the vastness of the universe? Seemingly we function so well, buying all the items on our shopping list and then placing them on the proper shelves of the refrigerator. But we are really only sleepwalking. We don't feel the sensuous cold of the perspiring milk carton, do not notice the lush ochre of stone ground mustard. If we do not notice the things around us (much less other people) we cannot love them.

If we are fortunate enough to spend time with a master of meditation, we begin to see the penetrating and profound beauty of ordinary actions. And we see our own lack of mindfulness by contrast. For example, after almost twenty-five years of serious meditation, Sharon Salzberg began to study with Burmese Theravadan teacher U Pandita. As if she were a rank beginner, Pandita instructed Salzberg to takes notes describing the things she noticed after meditation. Salzberg's pride was soon undercut: “I'd go in there (for an interview) and before I could read my notes he'd say, 'What did you experience when you washed your face?' which was nothing, because I hadn't paid the least bit of attention to that.”

from Loving-kindness Meditation, Chapter Two, by Bill Scheffel