Meditation
Above and beyond the pell-mell, the commute, the asap, the efficiency, the compulsion, the overtime, the time-is-money, the hurry up, the out-source, the invisible hand of the market, the bottom line, the standardized test, the drive-by, the fast food, the insufferable events, someone was sitting still and seemingly doing nothing. The locale could have been Japan or what was called Siam. The locale could have been India or what was called Tibet. No news was made because there was no news from that place of still grace. The act occurred in silence and though people sat down and got up, there was no beginning or end to the endeavor—a spiritual respiration cycle.
As a boy, more than one teacher told me about Christopher Columbus. He was touted as a hero, confused perhaps but courageous, or, as it came to seem to me, headstrong and obsessed. Over time, I realized the history of heedlessness could fill many dense volumes. I am tempted to write endless volumes, the history of human short-sightedness forming a long, winding caravan through the wastelands of suffering. Yet people were cheering all along, lining the parade routes, saluting the tyrants and generals, embracing what was likely to destroy them. I see Columbus stepping ashore in that reproduction of a painting that hung in my fifth grade classroom. Though I was not of that persuasion, I heard the exhortation: “Onward, Christian soldiers.”
I did not care about “onward.” Like the snow globes I saw around Christmas, time, I felt, should go nowhere. Perennial, eternal, sempiternal: the words danced (as I grew older) around my head, a comfort and remonstrance. How could we move onward forever? That seemed a contradiction, as if a limited amount of space could keep expanding to meet human imperatives. And the notion of discovery seemed bizarre to me. It did not take much of my fifth-grade imagination to see people peeping out at the wooden boats from the trees on the shore. Those people were already there. They were in no need of being discovered. When I said something about these thoughts, the teacher, a kindly, white-haired woman fond of winter mints and cardigans looked at me with something like horror. “What are you thinking?” she asked me as a glint of perturbation troubled her placid blue eyes. Already, I was in metaphysical trouble.
To use a modern analogy, I might have said, “Imagine a car with no brakes.” Even at a young age, I was handy with an analogy, though words were little help in a world where, as my dad liked to tell me, with an air of resigned satisfaction, “You can’t stop progress.” I thought of progress as some motorized pachyderm nonchalantly treading on everything in its path. Progress had a life of its own. People contributed to it but they were its vassals more than its lord. Progress was both brilliant and indifferent. Progress was a myth, I could see that, but its inventor heroes were not the stuff of Odysseus. I liked reading about scientists like Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver because they did not seem in any big hurry. They looked and thought. What they noticed had to do with the way things were, the vast tune of being.
Stillness makes for a strange siren call. People, after all, thrive on active purpose. The gods, as they loll in eternity, may look down at us with pity, but purpose, however unproductive if not downright destructive, is what we have to go on. Though people may manufacture one, as in “I’m going to become wiser or calmer or happier,” the stillness that meditation calls on has no clear purpose. It is like entering a domain that has no boundaries but is snug as skin. It practices much more than it preaches. It has nothing to do with betterment in the sense of more of anything. It is more like paring away the detritus of living, all that clings to us and willy-nilly becomes who we seem to be.
As the industrial West migrated to the East, the spiritual East migrated to the West. The industrial aspect had a much higher profile than the spiritual one, which barely may have seemed to exist amid world wars, jet travel, and the coming of computers. When I first learned about people like Allen Watts and Gary Snyder, about Americans who had encountered Buddhism and meditation, I thought of explorers in some largely impenetrable jungle, Zen Balboas. How wrong I was in my ignorance yet how understandable a reaction that seems. I had a degree of intuition for what they were doing but no map. I knew only the achievements of the West, the progress that could not be stopped.
Wisdom, a term relegated to oblivion in modern times, is all on the side of meditation. Though the first inclination is to believe that invention will save us from invention, as if addiction will save us from further addiction, there is everything to be said for easing off the throttle and spending more time quietly being here. It takes some courage to say that because the thrust of modern times has been that invention is more important than being. That thrust seems, when one steps back from the heat of the touted moment, unequivocally wrong. One of the questions that modern times asks is whether people will hold on at any cost to the myth of invention-as-salvation. Behind that question lurks another: will people be willing to still their grasping, individual demands—got to, have to, need to, want to—and enter the deeper domain of the very un-abstract being that starts with one’s breath. Nothing could be more tangible than that taken-for-granted breath.
As modern times went by, more people sought out stillness. It was not hard to see why. The prospect of personal peace answered the era’s plentiful and compelling urgencies, both physical and mental. Within modern times resided Futurism, Blitzkrieg, Five-Year Plans, Great Leaps, Red Brigades, Get-Big-Or-Get-Out, Hostile Takeover, and many other frightening, capitalized imperatives, all eschewing peaceful being in favor of concerted doing. Since any such imperative is literally headstrong and, accordingly, out of touch with mere-being-on-the-earth, action for the sake of action was bound to have a high cost. Meditation was one genuine brake that humankind had, a referencing of the vast, inner Something Else.
Yes, I have been meditating for decades.
Hi Baron, as a failed meditator, I much enjoyed this essay. I can’t sit still and let my mind be at peace. And yet, in the biblical story of Mary and Martha I’m much more like Mary who chose to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn from him than her sister Martha who was busy with many things. I’m very concerned about the direction of our country and feel I should DO something. The elites in congress seem bent on holding on to their money so want to withhold needed funds from the IRS for fear they’d have to pay their rightful taxes. I fear for democracy losing ground around the world. Erdogan, a dictator, was just re-elected in Turkey. Things do not look good. So I do pray, but I also want to DO something- at least write an Opinion Piece for the local paper.
"Progress had a life of its own. People contributed to it, but they they were its vassals more than its lord." "Though the first inclination is to believe that invention will save us from invention, as if addiction will save us from further addiction..." Wow. These words are prophetic. The time of Homo sapiens is fast waning, by our own hand. Perhaps we are engaged in species apoptosis--programmed death for the good the universe.