In ‘Why do we meditate (part 1)?’ I described that the first and maybe most fundamental reason is ‘to make sense of all that is happening in our mind.’ In this post I wish to take that one step further and look into why knowing what is going on in the mind is so important. Hopefully I can show that this awareness elicits two developments: firstly, we learn to see we have agency here – life is not happening without us – and secondly we can make friends with the mind, with this capacity to be aware and all the other mental factors that come with it. We can work with what is arising in each moment.
“As I grew more intimate with the waves of experience running through me, the running commentary in my mind released its grip and the tension in my body begins to dissolve.” Tara Brach from Radical Acceptance Chapter 2
To see that “running commentary“ for the first time is the strangest thing. It has the potential to free you utterly and simultaneously this new view can depress and demotivate entirely. I have to admit to experiencing the latter way more frequently than the former: I sit on the cushion, I invite my attention to the breath and boom! there goes my mind driving off to wherever the hell it wants to go. Some days it makes me question just what it is I have been doing with my time all these years. I mean what is the point? Doubt and more doubt slides off deep soup spoons into my mind. But actually that is the point; every time you sit you gain a more intimate knowledge of the territory of your mind. This allows you to see how you are constructing your world. Every meditation, no matter how supposedly ‘poor’ is a good meditation. Every meditation broadens your ability to see how you are meeting the world and the motivations and intentions behind your words and actions.
And now things get more interesting. Once you start to become comfortable with what is there and begin to ‘make sense of all this’ then it is only a tiny step to realising you have some agency here. A thought or storyline arises – maybe it’s new to you, maybe it’s a familiar pattern of thinking – and you notice it. Now it is no longer in the shadows. You know it is there, you can see it, maybe even feel it. There in front of you in plain sight are the movements and shuffles of the mind which oversee and control how you meet the world, how you colour and feel about your day and how you are creating your future life. How you are constructing and meeting your world is laid bare in front of you.
Imagine if you were to step back from that thought. Neither denying or indulging it, just pausing it for a moment. If you are meditating you could gently and kindly return to the breath. If you are elsewhere, then maybe you could notice the sound of the birds or the traffic. What happens then to the storyline? Try doing this a few times with what maybe the same storyline or different ones. In one form or another the feeling, the dominance of those thoughts and the awareness of them will change.
Here is the second reason to meditate. You learn that you have agency to respond in a different way to your outer and inner worlds. Things are not fixed. You can take a different path, turn left or right. Tara Brach calls this the sacred pause. Everything beautiful and loving can bloom from here. As you pause, you touch in to what is present and then you can see as Charlotte Joko Beck says “The frantic desire to get somewhere to be better is illusion itself and itself the cause of suffering.” The pause offers the space to move from blindly reacting to a more wisdom – tinged responding to your life. When such awareness is within easier reach not only is there more agency but we can start to see the motivation behind our actions. We pause, watch the thoughts arise and with no extra effort become less controlled by them. Additionally, we can start to test out which thoughts and mind states might serve us best (and with some of these we will know that already, without having to experiment) and which might being us and others more happiness.
There is the third reason to meditate We can see the motivations behind our actions and way of living. “Everything rests on the precipice of motivation.” says His Holiness the Dalai Lama. If the motivation is love and generosity then good things result. If the motivation is greed, aversion, hatred or jealousy then the outcomes will be negative and create suffering for both you and others.
We study the mind so that what leaves our hands, our mouths and our hearts does not carry the same pain we inherited.” Devin Berry talk on Dharmaseed
So meditation opens up a world which we can meet and inhabit with more thoughtfulness and consideration for our own happiness and for that of other beings. All this grows out of noticing what is here in this moment. This understanding expands broadly and deeply merely from being with what is here. You don’t need to go looking for anything outside you. This is radical – as radical as you can get it in 21st century western culture. There is no requirement to pay for anything, go anywhere or rely on anyone else. There are no smart targets, no goals met or not met.
“This is not an improvement plan; it is not a situation in which you try to be better than you are now…. The idea isn’t to try to get rid of your anger [or any other facet of yourself] but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty and also to see it with gentleness.” Pema Chödrön chapter 4 of ‘The Wisdom of no escape’ which I wrote about here
Joseph Goldstein uses a phrase “don’t waste your suffering” And I think what he means is that no one makes us react to a particular scenario in a certain manner. We do that. One event elicits different responses from different people. Look at a football match when a goal is scored. One side of the stadium erupts in noise and jubilation and flag waving, the other end goes quiet, despondent, slouched and maybe angry.
There is a story about Ryōkan, a 17th/ 18th century Japanese Zen wandering monk and ascetic. He was living in a mountain hut. He had very few posessions at all. One day he come back and found he had been burgled. All his vital tools and food were gone. In some versions of the tale he caught the thief in the act and offered him his clothes. Ryōkan wrote a Haiku that evening.
“The moon in the window,
The thief
left it behind”
Man, what a way to live and respond! Now I am not saying you or I can live with Ryokan’s attitude and awareness right now, but this story points to how compassion can bloom from awareness and infuse our lives. What I hope to do later, as I promised at the end of part 1, is to get to how love is central and key to meditation. how maybe it is already present in this present moment. But that is for next time. For now, hopefully we can see how meditation may bring a better understanding of what is going on and consequently how that can lead to seeing that we have agency in our lives and that we can start to use that agency wisely and choose better ways of meeting the world.
trustingmind 
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