Cowboys and Ignorance

I encounter many people who, once they hear that I am a meditation teacher, tell me that they can’t meditate because they think too much. Some of them are professors, scientists, and psychologists, who use their thinking in their work and have developed as human beings through using their minds. Because they have gotten a picture of meditation as requiring a quiet, thought-free mind, they feel they can’t do it. That is a real loss, a true shame. Jason Siff, Unlearning Meditation, p. x

All over the world, millions who meditate deploy a tactic that could have been lifted from a Hollywood Western. Whenever thoughts arise, meditators on metaphorical palominos head ‘em off at the pass. Like movie cowboys – or screenwriters – they use the tactic reflexively and too often. Still, cowboys have to do something about cattle rustlers and meditators have been persuaded that thinking has to be dealt with too. But what danger does thinking pose?

After they receive  instructions to follow, many who sit reasonably conclude that meditation has to be done correctly to get results. It’s a logical but not always helpful conclusion. With meditation widely believed to be a synonym for inner silence, the eruption of mental conversation might be taken as a hindrance to obtaining good outcomes. Others who want to become “good meditators” may rate progress based on how many quiet periods they go through. For them, persistent thinking not only disturbs the peace, it challenges identity.

Others don’t just seek peace, they seek the highest peace, the perfection of peace. This is nirvana conceived of as the ultimate achievement. The Buddha’s biography includes details about him developing the ability to enter into states of deep absence,  but he  distinguished those states from what he meant by liberation, directing followers away from the notion that nirvana and unbounded stillness are the same. Still, ideas of unbudging perfection show up in Buddhist schools and assume various names. Pure Mind, The Unconditioned, The Deathless, Emptiness, The Void, Original Mind, Absolute Truth, True Self, No Self. Sometimes when it’s talked about, no self amounts to no thinking. (No self, no nothing, might be another way of putting it.) For someone devoted to inhabiting starkly quiet mind states, the return of thinking must sometimes come robed in disappointment.

Still, it never occurs to some people to seek a void, let alone The Void.  Aware that Buddhist teachings describe effective ways of relating to life’s shocks, demands, stress and loss, people look to meditation for relief. With this in mind, techniques that might have been developed to generate quiet states in monasteries, now are often prescribed to alleviate various mental and somatic disturbances. In some contemporary models of Buddhism and psychotherapy, when thinking is allowed to bound off without heightened moment-to-moment scrutiny, the development of well-being is threatened. Unregulated thinking emerges as both a symptom and the root cause of maladies.

Basic teachings say that ignorance about what perpetuates suffering is the very condition that keeps suffering going. Instructions that imply freedom comes from controlling or ending thoughts mistake thinking for ignorance. They’re not the same. Wholesome development depends on understanding ignorance. This is the work of a lifetime. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to say that I’ve eluded the grip of my own ignorance, but even so, I know that I’ll never get anywhere by not thinking. Frankly, not thinking is what led me to some miserable places.

The Buddha presented a path of liberation from ignorance. This means that realms of experience conditioned by greed, hate and pervasive misunderstanding are also accessible to wisdom. How could our thoughts and the process of thinking itself be exempt? Why would we want them to be?

We think because we’re alive. What we experience in thinking has to do with the kinds of lives we’ve led and continue to lead.  It depends on what we do, what we say and who we encounter; what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste; what we believe about big things and little things too.

Thoughts threaten, cajole, clarify and confuse. They confine us and they free us. The variety and incongruity of the thoughts that each of us has known says how inadequate this one label “thinking” is for an immensity of experience. An often noisy chorus of thinkings carries us along throughout our lives. Over time meditation becomes about learning to pick out different voices in the multiplicity so we can finally hear what they have to say.

Maybe Thoughts Aren’t Like Clouds

This post picks up where the the last one left off.

In the land of meditation, thinking is not always regarded as similar to a pack of delinquent monkeys bent on torment and malfeasance. There’s also a popular metaphor that as far as I can tell comes from Zen that says the mind is like sky and thoughts are like clouds that trail off and disappear.

In Zen the image means that people are endowed with Buddha nature, empty, vast and sky-like, which is always present even when hidden by clouds. This disagrees or doesn’t disagree with early Buddhist teachings about impermanence, depending on who you ask. At the very least the premise behind the imagery illustrates that the metaphor was carefully chosen to impart this particular philosophical belief.

Today the same imagery is offered as an instruction to those learning meditation. Watch your mind and let the clouds pass by. Frequently the emphasis is on the contrast between the unchanging clarity of a still mind and the  supposedly constantly changing nature of thoughts. (But for many people bothered by thoughts, the problem is they don’t seem to change at all.) Therapists will sometimes tell clients to see the clouds not as thoughts but as gauzy envelopes to put their thoughts into and let them be carried off into the beyond. Perhaps this allows clients to feel agency in what otherwise is presented as an entirely passive act of observing. But the idea is the same. Thoughts come and go. No need to hang onto any of them.

Clouds constantly disappearing in an empty sky. What about thoughts that don’t skitter away? Are they hopeless thoughts that won’t get with the program? Or perhaps they have the misfortune to have appeared in a defective sky, one that doesn’t conduce to rapid thought dissipation.

Instead, let’s imagine that thoughts are not like clouds. They may be as different from clouds as shooting stars are from Chicklets. I offer some new metaphors that allow for different possibilities.

• Thoughts are like a soaking drizzle.
• Thoughts are like someone climbing the slopes of Denali riding backwards on a caribou.
• Thoughts are like a spoonful of cottage cheese left over in a plastic tub.
• Thoughts are like a 600 year-old oak tree with expressive, twisted limbs, hemmed in by a suburban housing subdivision called Noble Oaks.
• Thoughts are like a pair of life-sized chess pieces, a devious black queen and a sly white queen, playing a game of chess with pawns, knights, bishops and rooks that walk off the chessboard to snatch morsels from a peanut bowl when no one is looking.
• Thoughts are like a friendly body builder who gives hugs that last a little too long and make recipients feel self-conscious.
• Thoughts are like an old dog that repeatedly nudges a napping owner with her nose.
• Thoughts are like a message written on a mirror in crayon that’s hard to erase.
• Thoughts are like a UPS guy stepping onto the field during the world pogo stick championship games intent on making a delivery to a bouncing contestant.
• Thoughts are like the voice of a narrator from a 1930s newsreel which leaves listeners wondering whether it was meant to be ironic or not.
• Thoughts are like clouds, ones drawn by Saul Steinberg, including a cloud that looks like bread dough floating in the sky, which supports a ladder featuring an ascending Abraham Lincoln and a pair of skyscrapers nestled above.
• Thoughts are like a chef picking the best green pepper from a pile.
• Thoughts are like a man who grew a beard for a prank, kept it for eighteen years and then shaved it off by whim, discovering the face he thought was underneath had disappeared.
• Thoughts are like ants striding up the arm of someone lying in the grass, down her collar, onto her shoulder and up her neck all the way to the cavity of her ear.

Metaphors for thinking, even venerable ones like those of monkey mind and floating clouds, should be taken lightly. Whenever the use of a metaphor too predictably corrals experience, it needs to be questioned, whatever it is. Otherwise you may end up on the back of a caribou surrounded by bouncing pogo sticks with nothing to eat but a green pepper.

Thoughts are like clouds drawn by Saul Steinberg.

Monkeys, Do Your Thing

In my practice I ordinarily sit with an attitude of interest towards thinking. Since the fantasy that my thinking will suddenly disappear doesn’t captivate me anymore,  I might as well let in my thoughts to find out what they have to say.

Less welcoming views of thinking tend to dominate the culture of meditation. A popular one compares thinking to rebellious monkeys cavorting in our brains or as one self-help teacher prefers “King Kong crashing through the jungle on amphetamines.” There’s a blogger who disturbingly casts most thinking as pathology, diagnosing monkey mind as “a debilitating disease.” A famous writer defines the condition as “thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.” They want us to know, it’s a jungle in there.

I get this. Noisy beasts have probably run freely in the minds of almost everyone who has meditated. It’s not just the dissonance. Thoughts come entwined with impatience, irritation, shame, regret, anger, bitterness, envy, grief, humiliation, boredom. Logically, if meditation is about inner peace, then strategies to cope with unsettled thinking need to be learned and applied. Or so the party line goes. I say we might begin by looking more closely at the language that’s used. Intolerance of thinking arises with the idea that mental activity is just “random shit that irritates me.”  That, after all, is the message the term “monkey mind” carries.

Still, many people want meditation to give them the ability to get their minds to obey. But the concurrent notion that an array of meditation techniques will lead to an abiding stillness needn’t be accepted as gospel. If someone has guilty memories about the care he was able to give his mother when she was dying, he can order his mind to hush for decades without finding out anything about why accusing thoughts keep returning. Eventually he might become skilled at keeping the troubling thoughts at bay, thereby depriving himself of the chance of feeling what needs to be felt and knowing what needs to be known.

It’s not monkey mind. It’s you telling you something urgent.

A meditator might object, “I’m perfectly willing to sit with grief, shame or anything significant when it comes up in sitting. What doesn’t seem useful at all is the chattering that goes on about nothing important.”

A period of thinking about deadlines, shopping lists and commuter schedules often seems like chatter because the rules say that those concerns don’t belong in meditation. It’s rules that make some thoughts or all thoughts unacceptable, not some higher truth that a few minutes of “celery, nuts, eggs, baking soda, and Bulgarian feta” marks a mind as inferior.  Even when thinking truly seems too trivial to put up with, the phenomenon itself may be a diversion that keeps a meditator away from more difficult thinking.  Someone spending most of a retreat listening to all the songs on the Thriller album playing in her mind may be pushed in this direction because she’s mad at her kids. The content of the self-singing may be trivial and undoubtedly hard to endure but what it’s about isn’t at all trivial.

Meditation students who faithfully follow instructions to get the mind quiet can also miss out on an interesting eventuality. Thinking usually changes on its own when not interfered with. Strategies to calm the mind aren’t even needed.

Gentle Transitions

We are not used to things changing by being gentle and kind, thinking that we must take decisive action or discipline ourselves with harsh methods. Jason Siff, Unlearning Meditation, p.11.

I think Recollective Awareness meditation is beautiful.

When meditators don’t have to begin sittings by doing something to manage the flow of thinking, a gentle transition into meditation can take place. Meditators can allow the conditions that are present determine the pace of moving from pre-meditation states of mind into more deeply meditative ones. As meditators offer less resistance to their thinking, they have less sense of being somebody who has to make something happen.

People understand the beauty in patience. A rush to get to “real meditation” can be driven by a view that meditation must stand apart from the rest of daily experience.  An intention to rapidly leave behind worldly cares makes a patient transition not only unlikely, but unwanted. It’s not difficult to see the irony of hurrying to reach a good state of mind.

Because gentleness is a quality that doesn’t need to have its way, during meditation disagreeable inner experiences can be allowed to go on; conflicts don’t have to be smoothed over or sidestepped. Someone who sits this way can be a little more gentle with experiences that don’t themselves exhibit that quality. This might mean just noticing how tightly a thought is held or what it actually feels like to defend a position. It’s not giving yourself a strong suggestion to let go, it’s learning to have sympathy for yourself as you go through unwanted experience. Gentleness comes along with listening to yourself without judgment or being kind when you hear the judging in your thinking.

When a sitting ends we move back into the sphere of ordinary concerns and responsibilities. A period of recollection after the sitting allows for a gentle transition in that direction. The sitting is over and our eyes are open; to suddenly get up might mean that ongoing processes that would benefit from attention instead get abandoned. Some meditations can leave us feeling exposed and unready to instantly resume life. Others are so interesting it feels natural to make notes to remember what happened. Others may have serious elements that deserve consideration before we move on. It can turn out we know very little of what we went through until we reflect on it.

When eventually I realized that my teacher was describing how meditation weaves itself through life’s fabric and that Recollective Awareness by design attunes itself to this process, I thought, “Of course. How could it be otherwise.” Still, I can’t name another approach to meditation that accounts for its dependently arisen nature. This understanding allows us to see sitting practice as coherently related to what we do off the cushion. It’s the consistent way that practice joins theory that I find beautiful.

The Job of Meditation

You don’t need to manage your mind when you sit.  You can give up control. Chances are, your consciousness hasn’t issued a call for you to step in. You’ll be fine. Your mind will be fine.  You can leave it alone for a while.

Perhaps this seems like “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, minus the sitar, but actually I’m proposing something  more easygoing than that. You don’t even have to turn off your mind. You don’t have to float. You don’t have to do anything to meditate other than sit still.

People tend to welcome this permission. It feels right because it addresses a particular aspect of suffering that almost everyone knows: There’s always something that has to be done. It’s not just having more to do than there’s time for;  it’s that we’re creatures that almost never stop doing something, regardless of whether there’s time or not. The information that sitting might be different comes as a big relief.

But then the gentle suggestion to relinquish control meets the more authoritative, mainstream view that meditation means training the mind to behave. Someone who welcomes the invitation to sit without a to-do list can still find it hard to recognize that his ordinary meditative practices keep managing going.  When you notice you’re thinking about an ex-spouse and you follow an instruction to bring your thoughts back to your breath,  you’re managing your experience. When you start with your attention at the top of your head and you methodically spiral it down through your body, you’re managing. When you label thoughts, feelings and sensations: managing. Follow a guided meditation: managing by delegating the chore to a professional. Repeating metta slogans is a form of managing, too. Lovely, but managing.

Surely I can’t mean that all someone has to do to meditate is sit still. But I do mean that. Calm states and other mental processes different from ordinary thinking may develop in a sit, but you don’t have to do anything special to bring them on.  Beginners tend to accept this statement because it sounds inviting and they don’t have a history of practice to uphold.  Periods of investigation into memories or aspects of dharma teaching can come up, without them feeling like obligatory tasks. Meditation isn’t a second job.

Before I learned Recollective Awareness I did a practice that relied on a lot of technique. including procedures to apply when facing different eventualities. It felt secure to have a roadmap for each sit and to some extent, for my practice itself.  I could look forward to getting good at the techniques and someday gaining mastery over my mind.

When I discovered Recollective Awareness, much of what I heard was so different that I couldn’t even take it in. What I did take in left me feeling conflicted. Then my future teacher told me that conflict wasn’t forbidden. That got my attention, mostly because it sounded so strange. It dawned on me that until then when internal conflict came up I had one overwhelming response: I want this to go away now. The notion that I could follow the Buddhist path and still have real emotions helped me understand the path depended on my being honest with myself. A practice that relied on transforming emotions rather than seeing into them became less interesting.

Transforming emotions means making an effort to change experience into something “better.” It’s controlling. But this post isn’t presenting  a new meditation instruction, one that says don’t control. If anything I’d like to subvert obedience to instructions. And to pose the question, Did you come to meditation because you needed more tasks to do?

                                                                             

Comden and Green on Intentionality in Buddhism

“Long Before I Knew You” is a romantic song from the musical, The Bells are Ringing, which originally ran on Broadway in 1956 and became a movie in 1960.

Long Before I Knew You

Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adoph Green

Dearest, dearest, one thing I know, everything I feel for you, started many ages ago.

Long before I knew you,
Long before I met you.
I was sure I’d find you someday somehow.
I pictured someone who’d walk and talk
And smile as you do,
And make me feel as you do right now.
All that was long before I held you,
Long before I kissed you,
Long before I touched you and felt this glow.
But now you really are here and now at last I know
That long before I knew you I loved you so.

Here’s Barbara Cook singing it on YouTube.

What seems like a pretty song with a sentimental lyric upon examination turns out to be a pretty song that raises philosophical issues having to do with what we know and how we know it. How do we know our experience? What gives it its flavor, its solidity? Why does experience feel as if it’s happening to me?

The singer tells us she “pictured someone who’d walk and talk and smile” just the way the one she’s in love with walks, talks and smiles. She sings about a wish fulfilled. The feeling that when something new happens that there’s an aspect of familiarity about it, that it’s not really new, because it was experienced in such full detail in the imagination. It might feel uncanny. Destiny has made it all happen. Or perhaps the singer made it happen by the power of her dreaming.

“Everything I feel for you I felt ages ago,” the first line in the song, could also be the title of a dharma talk on how intention is seen in early Buddhism.

In Buddhist philosophy intention includes the same process that we conventionally regard as intention: thinking about performing an act before doing it. Juries debate premeditation in deciding whether a defendant should serve time or not..

But the early Buddhists saw intention as including a broader range of actions and mental behaviors. They  also regarded the daydreaming typified in the song as intention. When the sweetheart in the song appeared, the stage had already been set. Their relationship didn’t begin with their first meeting, its history includes the protagonist preparing for it in her imagination. Fantasy is intention. But that wasn’t the beginning either. The conditions that led her to conjure up those traits in him go back even earlier. Did she identify with a couple in love that she saw on a movie screen when she was younger? Did she think, I want to be in love just like them?

When you admire a character in a novel, imagine a career, leaf through a catalog of bathroom fixtures, consult with an investment strategist about retirement, do an online search for baby names even while thinking I’ll never have children, then you’re adding some intentional energy to processes already in motion. The song catches the idea that there can be a long gap between these intentions and some kind of fruition. You find yourself living in Alaska, making eye contact with a caribou  one day and wonder how you got there, forgetting that as a small child your happiest moments included bright mornings in winter building snow forts with your friends.

When people hear that the Buddha defined karma as intention they may think if they can’t find premeditation before an action they took then they’re off the hook, like a defendant hearing a not-guilty verdict. But then they hear that the Buddha defined intention so broadly that having a fantasy is karma. Back on the hook. But karma isn’t about punishment for doing bad deeds. Teachings about intention allow us to learn more about how our thoughts resemble acts that we take rather than insignificant airy nothings.

The protagonist in the song didn’t  make her lover appear by imagining him. But when someone shows up who reminds her of her daydreams, she’s hooked. Her prior fantasizing created an ideal object of love; she’s already in love with that. When she sings that she knew him before she met him she signals that she’s fallen in love with an idea of a person, more than the person in front of her.

Why Do You Meditate?

If someone asks me about the purpose of meditation, I usually toss the question back. I’ll ask, Why do you meditate? Or, Why do you want to start?

I’m not being cagey. It’s almost a certainty that the questioner already has ideas about what meditation can do for her; I’m interested in hearing what they are. Still, not unreasonably she’d like me to say something. Isn’t a meditation teacher supposed to extol the promises of practice? She wants support for her goals or she may want me to suggest a couple. Or maybe she’s simply curious.

Since I think it’s important for meditation students to hear themselves say what they believe meditation is about, I listen. This gets at something crucial to the Recollective Awareness approach:

The experience that people  have of meditation can’t be isolated from what they’ve picked up about meditation. That doesn’t mean that there’s a pure state of influence-free meditation that we’re supposed to reach. It’s like marriage, which can’t be isolated from a lifetime of hearing about marriage. The notion that says meditation depends on clearing the mind can be as consequential for meditators as the pronouncement “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health” usually is for husbands and wives.

If someone takes up the idea that meditation will lead to a feeling of oneness, then deliberately or not, he will be doing a “oneness practice.” The influence his belief exerts can be hard to pin down. He might not realize what’s been going on until he looks into a persistent feeling of disappointment he has when he sits.

People receive so many messages about meditation’s benefits that the process of Unlearning Meditation that Jason Siff describes can profitably be entered into even by people with little or no history of meditating.  Which should go in your “strange but true” folder.

When I see every day that my mindfulness newsfeed has many new stories added, and that those stories trigger proliferating tweets, retweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, TV news stories and radio segments, then the reticence of a Recollective Awareness teacher to contribute more fodder to a meditation student’s imagination probably doesn’t make much difference. The strength of the ongoing mindfulness wave in psychology and medicine means the dominant message about meditation today has to do with its health benefits. The results of a PubMed search impress the reader not just because of the outcomes they categorize – PubMed  can seem like contemporary Abhidhamma-  but because the amount of studies is numberless. Almost.

Can meditation help insomnia? There’s research. Low back pain? Yes, in a small group of elderly subjects. Depression? What kind you got? Worry? It works. Anxiety? It helps. Fibromyalgia? Maybe a little. General well-being? Certainly. Prison recidivism? There’s evidence. Mood in a cohort of post-surgical cancer patients? Yes. Classroom attention? Yes. Motivation? Yes. Social anxiety? Yes.

Without talking right now about the often unchallenged status of peer review studies in our culture, I’d  like to call attention to another way of looking at meditation that gets overwhelmed sometimes by data, tables and charts. It’s an orientation towards looking at what meditators experience in meditation, a phenomenological approach, rather than a prescriptive one. If meditation is mostly seen from the perspective of what it’s supposed to do, an understanding of what it actually is doing in the lives of individual people will be hard to find. There are consequences to the dissemination of thousands of articles each year about how good meditation is for you, and that should also be part of the discussion.

It turns out I am going to give an answer to the meditation student’s question at the beginning of this post about the purpose of meditation. We can stop the war against ourselves. Buddhist practice can show us how that happens. As genuinely wonderful as it is for people to get relief from depression, if meditation becomes regarded as merely Welbutrin without side-effects, then the possibility of a radical reordering of the way we know experience can be lost.

Over the Edge with Kisa Gotami – Part 2

Kisa Gotami wandered for days, clutching the noisome corpse, knocking on doors, searching for a mustard seed from a house where no one had ever died. Eventually an old couple brought her into their hut where they took turns asking questions.

Why do you think that your dead child will be restored to life when no other woman’s dead child ever has been? Don’t you smell the stench? Won’t your husband’s parents turn on you now that there’s no longer a son to inherit their wealth? Are you afraid of this?  Has it occurred to you that what you’re doing is exhibitionistic?  Have you put your child down once since you found him dead? Do you know how many days it’s been? Do your arms hurt? Have you bathed?

Don’t you smell the awful stench? Have you considered that your precious boy won’t ever be restored to life? Have you considered how grotesque this is? Do you know much you frighten other mothers’ children? Aren’t you getting weary of this business? Do you blame yourself? What kind of scenes play out in your mind? Do you hear his voice? Is he angry with you? Can you tell us what you feel in your heart and stop repeating your fantasy of how things should be?

Will you let the women of the town comfort you? May we comfort you? When have you thought about your husband’s anguish? How many days have you been knocking on doors with that corpse clutched to your chest? How many times have you heard sorry, there have been many deaths in this house? Can you see that you’ll never find the mustard seed?  Did you really believe that if you found the right mustard seed that your suffering would end?

Over the Edge with Kisa Gotami – Part 1

Let’s start with an image from an early Buddhist story. A thin young woman holds the corpse of her child. No one can make her let go of her dead boy. She begs each person she encounters to give her some potion to bring him back to life. I imagine her lifting up the lifeless body up for all to see, its head drooping to one side.  The people she meets recoil. She’s mad.

This image comes from the story of Kisa Gotami who later on will be told by the Buddha that he can give her help if she brings him a mustard seed from a house that has never known death. Kisa Gotami finds out that death has visited every house. An understanding of impermanence brings her back to her senses. At last she’s able to put down the body and bury her child.

An anthology could be made of the many versions of this story that can be found online. I appreciate the way that writers have made it personal,  imagining details that aren’t in the canonical version, changing others. We hear the child is an infant and a year-and-a-half and old enough to run around by himself; that she carries the body as she goes door-or-door and that Buddha has her leave the corpse with him before she goes on her quest; that people in the town scorned her and that they offered her kindness.  If you’re interested in how texts change, a search online offers up a lot to savor.

Most interpretations of this tale say that Gotami comes to know the pervasiveness of suffering, that everything born must die.  And certainly her story is about coming to terms with grief. But that phrase  - coming to terms with grief – sounds flat, which goes along with my feeling that most readings could go deeper.

One writer sees it this way:

The story of the Mustard Seed is well known in all Buddhist Sects. It is a monument to the idea of practice in the face of loss and suffering. The Four Noble Truths have as their base the idea that change is constant, and that we will always lose everything we are attached to. The Mustard Seed story illustrates this well. Through the suffering of Kisa Gotami we are reminded of our own, and how we are all connected in that suffering. All who live suffer.

I did come across one breath-grabbing exception to the conventional: http://tinyurl.com/a9hzecb. In an essay about her anguish after giving birth to a stillborn baby, the writer Angie Yingst plunges so far into the Kisa Gotami story that we see her differently as she comes out the other side. It’s writing that shows us how immersed reading changed her at the same time it’s writing that offers us the chance to change by reading it.

Mothers do go mad with grief. Annie Yingst tells us she went to the brink. The image of Kisa Gotami shows someone over the edge. Yet what’s usually presented as Gotami’s insight doesn’t come up to the intensity of her struggle to reach it. Everyone dies? Is that it? Did we really need a Buddha who only comes along once in an aeon to tell us that? 

In a later post I will suggest another reading of the story which stays with the desperation of Kisa Gotami clutching the corpse of her child.

Give Conflict a Chance

Here’s a statement that gets a lot of agreement: You don’t have to fight yourself in meditation. Simple enough to go on a bumpersticker, it’s a principle of Recollective Awareness, the approach to meditation I teach. And it comes as a relief when it sinks in. The mind as it is in meditation doesn’t have to be fixed, managed or upgraded before it can be met. Each time you start a period of meditation you get an invitation that reads, “Come as you are.”

It wouldn’t be much of  a statement, though, without a corollary: The struggle in the mind between what we experience and what we want to experience doesn’t just go away because we declare a truce. That’s a little long for a bumpersticker. We’re still going to have thoughts that bother us – unpleasant feelings, memories, anticipations, or irritated reactions to pains or noises. Experienced meditators find themselves in unwanted mind states and have the urge to do something to get to something “better.” The fight we carry on with ourselves may be loud and lengthy or subtle and brief but on some level a conflict occurs between what’s going on and what we want to go on.

Teachers of accepted meditation practices collude with our desire to quickly get to what we want at the beginning of a sitting by telling us to move attention away from thinking. They say don’t bother to be interested in the fundamentally interesting discord that persists. I think they don’t know what we’re missing.