It's day eight of an experiment. Or of an experience.
Day eight and I'm exhausted and today I am downhearted too. As if the universe is in league with my being, this first side of A4 paper has a browned edge. It's from an old pad I found in cupboard, perhaps a dozen sheets left, perhaps a few more. I probably wrote on all the others in writing groups I no longer attend, creating pieces I no longer have but may one day reclaim to see whether, with a clearer mind, there's anything work salvaging, editing, even performing or publishing in something more than a tiny blog post nobody reads.
I'm neither fatigued nor downhearted by the experiment but only by lack of sleep and an appointment today that went as far from ideally as possible because of rules and systems that make no sense. The lack of sleep is partly linked to the appointment and both relate to physical pain which is presently a constant, running on a scale from "mildly annoying" to "fuckfuckfuck make it stop!"
The experiment won't cure that though I've seen highly overblown and unrealistic claims made for similar experiments. Do this and your pain will stop. Do this and there will be no way your life won't be happy and infinitely better in every way. A book I've been sitting with, reading two or three pages a day says these sales techniques appeal to our materialism, our wanting to get things and that isn't far from what the experiment really is.
Eight days of meditation. Also eleven days of writing these pages, meandering non-fictions and fictions that perhaps have more meaning. Meditation, morning and evening, taking the time to sit and see what happens. And what happens in the fifteen minutes that I raised to twenty to see if it felt different - the ideal later would be thirty - is a cacophony of thoughts, voices, distractions, physical itches and annoyances. Generally everything that isn't what might be said when people often describe meditation.
It's so far from the form of internally saying the mantra, finding silence beneath it, and just being with what is that it makes me laugh. I'm almost tempted to set up a voice recorded and speak out every time something inside or outside distracts me from presence. But the speaking out and the recording would both inevitably alter the nature and scope of the distractions, in ways far more understandable than the way observation affects things like electrons or photons according to the quantum physics book I'm reading.
I don't understand that at all so am pleased when the author agrees that it's incomprehensible. I understand it so little that I don't even know whether calling photons and electrons "things" was wrong. The science seems to be true, as do the observations but nobody understands why or how it can be true. Perhaps that's like meditation though. The experience, at least when the inner storm can be walked through without getting so soaked, cannot be explained. There is only the experience and explanations don't explain. Then again quantum physics will almost certainly explain the inexplicable of photons and quanta in ways agreed upon by those with doctorates in the subject. However, at this point it's very easy to explain my meditation experiences.
It is meditation though. I don't doubt that. No matter how distracted or noisy or sometimes totally peculiar my thoughts and intrusive thoughts, how much I lose the mantra and how little I glimpse silence, a core, the ground of being. I don't see that at all and that's okay. It is still truly meditation.
Meditation does not imply perfection or silence or becoming found in the present moment or lost in whatever we might describe as divine. All of that may in time be approached. I hope it is and know that striving for it as the "goal" of my practice may only take away the opportunity for that first sight, that first revelation of a truth beyond ego, beyond the waves on the sea.
Meditation is a commitment. It's a discipline, an intent, a practice that may take different forms for different people. Every one of those twenty minutes was meditation. Perhaps even the evening I got up half way through to check that the radiator wasn't leaking because the sounds it made were worrying me.
There are people, many people who say that meditation is not for them because their minds are just too noisy. "I can't meditate. I'm too distracted." I've been told that a lot. I've found during previous times of trying a practice and giving up, sometimes with good reason and sometimes without, that if you mention it to people there's about a fifty percent chance that you'll get that response. "I have thoughts, deliberate and intrusive. It's too loud. Meditation is a big no and always will be because my brain just isn't made that way." I've heard other reasons though. "I can't meditate because I'm autistic." That excuse happens even though lots of autistic people meditate.
It's nonsense though, a complete misunderstanding of what meditation is. It's not anyone's fault for thinking that way. The practice and subject are sold as something they were never meant to be and with a legalistic "you must find the silence" that doesn't belong in the freedom of practice.
Heck, this morning my head threw at me images and action and lines from a television series I haven't seen in years, in the actor's voices. In all honesty I don't find the words and actions of Theodore Bagwell very calming, especially when he's carrying a shiv!
If those people were right then my lesson would be very clear. "Stop meditating. Stop trying. Your head is much too loud and sometimes it's plural too. Give up. Delete the timer from your phone. Give away all books you own. Instead read a book, watch YouTube videos, solve more puzzles and hope that one day you can go for long walks again instead of experiencing hell on short ones. Don't kid yourself that you'll ever be a meditator or able to do it properly and live in some enlightened state. That's for other people. Give up Clare. Don't be such an idiot or so arrogant to think it's for you."
They're wrong though. While the intensity and range of distractions has been humbling through the last week it's not the point. Meditation is intent and practice. It's one foot in front of the other, not an already sitting with a cake in the cafe on top of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). Meditation is acceptance. And that's enough for now. What happens happens. What I discover or experience will be what it will be. A deliberate phrase - the name of God revealed to Moses, just not in the present tense you would read it in most English Bibles.
The book says "God is the centre of the soul." I quote exactly. "Meditate consistently, in finding silence, in letting go of the world and ego you draw towards the infinitely close God and from there your relationship with ego and world are transformed." I paraphrase - perhaps incorrectly. Teachers call this mystery. I call it absolute mystery, invisible in the thunder of my head.
"God is the centre of the soul." What, Clare? Do you believe that? Yes. Yes, I do. I don't believe in a supernatural God and now find theism almost antithetical to human knowledge about the world and the universe. I don't believe in a soul that might continue after the physical body is gone. There I agree with most but not all cognitive neuroscientists. And even the word "centre" can't possibly be literal.
Yet I can still say I believe it. God is the centre of the soul. I may not interpret it how someone else does and may understand the words very differently to the author of the book but I do believe.
It takes faith though. If God is being, freedom or truth it takes faith. If God is the ground of being it takes faith. I believe but do not know how. Perhaps if God is simply nature like the metaphor in "Does God play dice?" then the centre of my soul is nature, a nature I don't fully embrace or live in fulness. Perhaps.
But if God is love? Love is the centre of my soul. That takes great faith indeed. I'd like it to be true of all of us but what is love anyway? Is it an objective reality or merely a construct we find helpful? I don't know. Then, when I look at myself can I believe love is central? I know my selfishness. I know how I've hurt people and sometimes said extremely horrible things. I've lost friends and sometimes they were right to walk away briskly. Some of my worst words were said when dissociating and not even knowing I ever dissociated. Some were not, they were entirely down to me and my responsibility. And some were the result of things I believed. Those words I regret fully while offering grace to myself for being under those harsh beliefs.
God is the centre of my soul.
I look at my brokenness, my limitations, my egocentric ways, my excuses, and so on. Still I say, "Yes. I do believe. God, whatever that is, is the centre of my soul, of everyone's soul."
No comments:
Post a Comment