OF COURSE ANNE AND I HAVE dabbled in meditation. Who hasn’t? We’re certainly old enough, curious enough, and occasionally daft enough to have done enough dabbling for half a dozen lifetimes. And meditation certainly takes a lot less effort than seeking out golden toads in the Costa Rican cloud forests, or hunting for unique species of plants atop the soaring Tepui Plateaus in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, or any of a couple of dozen other zany “pursuits of the almost impossible” we seem to have undertaken in our endless and erratic quests for “secret places” and “lost worlds” described in my previous books.
But unlike those other ventures, in the case of Buddhist-inspired meditation, we never seem to reach any specific destination. Assuming, of course, that there is any destination to be reached. Prior guides we’ve experienced along the mystical breathe-in-breathe-out route have emphasized that wonderful old saying: “There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path,” and freely admit that there are many times when they feel the constant dichotomy between ceaseless mind yammer and silent meditative now-ness is one that is ever challenging. “It’s a simple art, surrounded by complexities,” a colleague once told me after “an amazingly long” weekend meditation course. “I mean, you’d think your mind would actually enjoy switching itself off for a rest. Unfortunately, mine apparently doesn’t…”
Our guide for the Tuesday morning “meditation for beginners” session at the Dzogchen Center was a blond-haired woman with a captivating smile and eyes that bored into you and never seemed to blink. She definitely looked like a meditation-maven. But she was also disarmingly honest at the outset by admitting, that despite her years of practice, she still had days when she felt herself to be at a novice stage, grappling with a mind so teeming with thoughts and emotions and imagined crises and gotta-do lists that she wondered why she’d ever considered meditation as a practice. “You never get ‘there,’” she said with a broad smile. “But sometimes you just know you’ve moved sideways into a different and far more peaceful space—and that suffices and encourages you to carry on.”
Even Sogyal Rinpoche writes in his Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:
“There are so many ways to present meditation, and I must have taught it a thousand times, but each time it is different, and each time it is direct and fresh.” He goes on to suggest in colorful, honest language that “generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity…in intense and anxious struggles, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities. We are fragmented…We don’t know who we really are…So many contradictory voices, dictates and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere leaving nobody at home.” How many times have I thought that! Then I resolve to resolve the “waste” but invariably continue—after a guilt-laden period of nonreform—to continue just as before.
“Meditation,” Sogyal suggests “is the exact opposite. It is a state in which we slowly begin to release all those emotions and concepts that have imprisoned us into the space of natural simplicity…We return to that deep inner nature that we have so long ago lost sight of. Meditation is bringing the mind back home, releasing and relaxing…and ultimately embodying a state of gentle transcendence which is why we are all here.”
The luminosity of the shrine room here seems to engender transcendence. Sometimes silvery sheens of mist or glowering banks of dark cloud can create an otherworldly mystical sense of floating with only occasional glimpses of open ocean or ragged precipices tumbling down to churning surf-spumes. On other occasions the sun can be so dazzling on the sea and the myriad greens of the land that your eyes water with the intensity of it all. You’re not exactly crying, although on many occasions, you could indeed be tempted to weep at the overwhelming beauty of it all. On other occasions you might vanish into a dreamtime miasma of your own imaginings, living inside your own silences.
On this particular day Anne and I are sitting on small cushions facing the ocean vistas (actually Anne is sitting on a chair because she thinks she’ll get cramps!). And it is the light that is the main feature of the room today. The light in the air and on the sea and the distant Skellig islands—that incredible pure molten platinum light that combines the intensity of silver with the sheen of gold but is more powerful than either in terms of its calming quality.
The session begins gently with our guide reminding the dozen or so early morning participants to “follow the breath,” the slow, regular, in-out rhythms of breathing that can allow us to circumvent the constant clamoring yammer of the mind and reach a quiet state of timeless now-ness. We’ve both tried this before, so her instructions are familiar.
“We’ll begin now,” she says and gently taps the brass bowl with a small leather-wrapped stick. The sound echoes and re-echoes around the sun-bathed space and seems to go on for minutes until finally fading away into a delicious silence. And then of course begins the battle. A battle you’re trying to pretend is not a battle at all and doesn’t really exist except that pretending something doesn’t exist is, of course, already an admission that it does. The mind doesn’t like to be sidetracked. The mind is used to being the boss—center of all focus and attention. The mind demands to be heard even when it’s offering nothing but jumbled gobbledegook.
“Concentrate on your breathing—the slow in and the slow out—forget everything else,” our guide says. So we do, and for a while it seems that the pathetic prattle of consciousness—that messy porridge of lists and forgotten must-dos and should-haves and could-haves and guilts and fears of futures that may never come and fears of repercussions of past action, or fears, as FDR suggested, just of fear itself—the whole ridiculous frantic flurry and scurry—it seems that it might actually be quieting down for once.
For a while at least.
But inevitably I do catch a sneak thought or two creeping in, even as I am studiously not thinking about thinking. I tell myself firmly that I shouldn’t think about the thought but instead try to think about nothing until the thought slinks away, unexamined, and leaves me nothing else to think about except wondering when the next sneak attack of thinking thoughts might be on its way. It’s that whole elephant-in-the-kitchen thing. Trying not to think about something everyone is thinking about but that you’ve all agreed not to think about because thinking about it would be a mutual recognition of the elephant’s existence, which of course you’re all trying to ignore.
I think possibly, maybe, there were a couple of interludes in my half hour of meditation on my little cushion that you might say were blessed by pure unthinking silence. Moments of modest illumination expanding in a place where loose, dangling threads of thought and experience can coalesce into more enduring tied knots of perception and insight. But most of the remainder was occupied by a mental jousting match in which those errant (and ridiculously random and meaningless) thoughts would be challenged by the “wannabe a better me” advance guard of mind-protectors, valiantly warding off invaders but trying not to think about it too much!
Finally—our guide tapped her brass bowl with the small stick, slowly lifted her head, and allowed herself a modest, rather shy smile, and it was all over. Anne thought the experience was great and was eager to return. I thought, maybe—next week, or—whenever…but first I need to have a serious chat with this lump of gray stuff that contains my rambunctious, restless mind. Whatever a “mind” actually is…