Yesterday was the 800th consecutive day on the cushion. I started meditating ten years ago but didn’t begin keeping a log of my daily practice until 2014. I’ve only missed two days in those four years. In all my reading about meditation there is general agreement it should be a daily practice. I sit for 30-45 minutes.
“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”
— Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)
Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”
This post by David Cain was clearly written for me personally. Note the reference to “his local high street” in the third paragraph. Unclear about his reference but I spend my mornings at a coffee shop on High Street in Jefferson City. Coincidence? Perhaps.
A man with a boring job is on his way to work when his attention is caught by some unexpected detail in his otherwise familiar routine—a peculiar insect, a pattern in the concrete, a cryptic slogan on a t-shirt.
This detail seems extremely significant to him, but he doesn’t know why.
The strange sight wakes him up from the autopilot-mode by which he has been living his life. He is suddenly aware, for the first time, how complex and interesting his local high street is, and he stops to take it in.
Around him pass hundreds of distinctly different people, each a unique individual, driven by some unseen personal motivation. Shops are filled with thousands of trinkets, tools, snacks, and books. Delivery trucks roll past, music plays from somewhere, buildings rise above him. The scene is miraculous to him.
As he surveys the street, he witnesses something surreal: another version of himself is walking away from him, towards his usual bus stop, evidently not having had this same moment of self-awareness. For reasons he is never told, at that moment his life had apparently split in two.
However, his double does not make it onto the bus: as he waits, an air conditioning unit falls from a window above, killing him instantly. In a very unexpected and unstorylike way, his life ends.
The man has no idea what has happened, and never receives an explanation. The authorities never identify the person beneath the air conditioner, and the man never tells anyone what he witnessed because nobody would ever believe it.
There is nothing to do but carry on with his life. But he is a changed man.
Every morning he is amazed to find another whole day awaiting him. Every meal, every phone call, every greeting from his doorman feels like an undeserved gift, as though he’d mistakenly been given the honeymoon suite at a hotel. He feels grateful even for his problems.
None of the details of his life have changed, except one thing. He now lives with an awareness that he was never truly entitled to be alive; he just happened to be, and still is.
His ability to breathe, see, feel, and make choices now seems to him like an unearned, arbitrary status—one that he may freely enjoy, but which can be revoked at any time without explanation.
He hopes he never loses this sense that his life is essentially a bonus round, consisting entirely of borrowed time, not just from the day of his strange experience, but from the beginning.
There’s more to Mr. Cains post and it’s worth a read.
I started meditating in 2008 but didn’t make it a regular (daily) part of my life until November 30, 2014. At least that is the date I started keeping track. Since then — as noted here previously — I have missed just two days, for a total of 1,343 days on the cushion. Today’s practice was 700 days without missing.
I sit for either 30 minutes or 45 minutes depending on what’s going on. I am a firm believer in making meditation a daily part of one’s life, if only 10 minutes.
I hope to share “1,000 Days” with you next year.
Most of us has had the experience of committing something to memory. The multiplication tables; important dates in American history, etc. But how does one go about intentionally forgetting something? The following is from a novel (crime fiction) by Lawrence Block, one of my favorite authors. The protagonist is a contract killer and the excerpt describes how he avoids thinking about the people he kills.
“Years ago he’d learned how to clear his mind after a job. Very deliberately he let himself picture the master bedroom on Caruth Boulevard as he had last seen it. Portia Walmsley lay on her back, stabbed through the heart. Beside her was her unnamed lover, comatose with drink, his fingers clenched around the hilt of the murder weapon. It was the sort of image you’d want to blink away, especially if you’d had something to do with it, but Keller fixed it in his mind and brought it into focus, saw it in full color and sharp relief.”
“And then, as he’d learned to do, he willed the image to grow smaller and less distinct. He shrank it, as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope, and he washed out the bright colors, dimming the image to black and white, then fading it to gray. The details blurred, the faces became unrecognizable, and as the image disappeared, the incident itself its emotional charge. It had happened, there was no getting around it, but it was as if it had happened years and years ago, and to somebody else.”
I don’t know if this works. Like everyone, I’ve had moments in my life I’d rather not recall but I’ve never made this kind of conscious effort to forget.
I’m imagining a technology that doesn’t exist. Yet. A lightweight set of electrodes that monitors my brainwaves and transcribes (transmitted via Bluetooth to my mobile device, let’s say) my thoughts. An advanced version of today’s voice-to-text apps. We get to read that “stream of consciousness” at long last.
I imagine printing out a hour’s worth of this mind noise and using a red pencil to circle anything interesting or profound. Alas, there is almost nothing worth noting. Hour after hour after hour. I’ll program an intelligent algorithm to scan a week’s worth of my thoughts. What the hell, let’s to a month! Scanning for something worth saving. Not much, it seems. All that miraculous brain power wasted on “monkey chatter.”
Since I’m imagining yet-to-be-invented tech, how about a drug (or an implant, perhaps?) that will quiet that mind noise, leaving only the input from my senses. (I’m thinking we’ll need a timer switch to re-engage the thought process.)
Click.
I feel the morning sun coming through the hundred foot oak trees that shade my deck. I hear birds — near and far — singing to whomever birds sing to. There’s the sound of the water feature gurgling in the middle of the flower bed. A cool breeze gets a sigh from the Golden Retriever at my feet (say ‘hello’ Hattie). I take a sip of coffee and experience the slightly bitter taste on my tongue. Somehow I know this is a good thing without an accompanying thought. I still have 10 minutes before the noise returns.
“The noticing of a passing thought and the explosion of an ancient star are not unrelated phenomenon: both the product of a self-creating, self-destroying ubiquitous capability.”
— Living Nonduality
“Wanting to overcome the mess and not have it anymore is precisely the mess. […] There is nothing anyone can do to be anyone else than who they are, or to feel any other way than the way they feel at this moment. […] There is no way of transforming yourself. The “you” that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.”
Still the Mind (Alan Watts) (PDF of excerpts)
“Meditation is not about doing anything. It is simply paying attention.”
Not counting basic hygiene (brushing my teeth, etc), the only thing I do every day is meditate. I sit for 30 minutes, sometimes longer. Every day for the last 500 days. I keep track but I’m not sure that’s good idea. Too easy to get fixated on the streak, keeping the string going.
I’ve missed twice in the last 1,000+ days. Once when I was sick and again when out of town attending a high school reunion (#50). I’m not sure why I keep track of my practice. Maybe it’s for the same reason prisoners make marks on their cell walls (do they still do that?). They’re afraid they’ll forget how long the’ve been in prison? I’d rather think I keep track because it gives me a little added encouragement to sit, although I really don’t think I need that anymore. My daily meditation is the best half hour of my day. But why?
Steve Hagen says meditation is useless. The only reason to meditate is to mediate. Which sounds like something only those who meditate would say or understand. I’m sure when I started (10 years ago?) it was for stress management or relaxation or something but somewhere along the way it became an end in itself.
I find it simultaneously the simplest thing in the world and the most difficult. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, focused on my breath. What could be easier? And within seconds my mind has jumped to some random thought… I gently bring my awareness back to my breathing… and the cycle repeats, endlessly. Why would anyone invest half an hour every day doing this? Again, Steve Hagen: “At the heart of meditation is the intention to be awake.”
Meditation Now or Never (PDF of favorite excerpts)