Don’t ask me why I meditate because I have nothing to say that makes sense. It’s like asking me why I breathe. Because I do is all I can say.
Meditation is not doing something to get something because in meditation one ceases to make any effort to think. Of course, wayward thoughts do wander through the mind, but one pays them no attention. And feelings may come up from the basement to see what’s going on, but no one notices them so they just seem to dissolve.
So if thoughts and feelings are treated as non-events, what or who is left? If the thinker and his thoughts go, who is minding the store?
Meditation comes to us in many ways, and usually we don’t even recognize it. For instance, Sunday, some ladies came to pick my wife up for a play at Fort Lee, and the introductions suddenly became an Abbott Costello routine. One of the lady’s names was Willy, and I said Willy Nilly? And that set it off. The next thing you know we were going in insane circles.
Finally, after the nonsense died down, I turned to the lady who was seriously trying to explain to me who the others were and I asked directly into her eyes, “And who are you?”
Suddenly, there was this moment when the mind collapsed. It didn’t know whether I was kidding, having an early Alzheimer moment, or was mad. The hole in the mind was so large that you could have driven a truck through it. In that moment she didn’t know who she was nor did she know who I was. She didn’t know anything. The content of the mind had just dumped out.
Then she realized I was just kidding and the mind filled up with content again. The world returned and they left. But in that brief moment there was stillness, and in that stillness when the mind was frozen motionless something larger, something so vast that the mind cannot even comprehend it, emerged, as if we were suddenly transported to the edge of the grand canyon, felt its immense space, and brought back before we knew what happened.
Something grand, something wonderful, something frightening, something joyous lurks behind the curtain of thoughts that wraps around us in our minds. We sense there is something there—like a blind man might sense an elephant if he were standing next to it—but we can’t know what it is because we have to think about it. For us, what we can’t think about isn’t real.
Meditation is finding that hole in thought, going through it—and waiting.
Posted under General Observations
This post was written by ed on May 22, 2007
