When we first begin a meditation practice we may be motivated by a desire to bring peace to our restless minds. We may even have a desire for something called “liberation” or “enlightenment.” And we may naturally judge the “success” of our meditation by our ability to “focus” or to still the mind. Our experience and judgment of “success” or “failure” in our meditation may become one more go-round of the restless mind; and our desire for enlightenment—even our desire to “meditate correctly”—may become one more picture or expectation or anxiety for the mind to fixate on.
Over years of practice the mind indeed becomes more stable and the ability to concentrate or to enter into stillness becomes natural. Nevertheless the mind is still capable of being quite active, and just as happy to seek all kinds of distractions. One morning I may sit down to profound stillness; another morning I may be no more than an unpaid babysitter for the antics of my mind in the playpen of the meditation cushion. The curious thing is that over the years it makes less difference. We discover that the growth in our meditation practice is characterized not always, or necessarily, by the absence of mental activity, but by its insubstantiality. That while the shadow-dance of the mind continues, there is another light of presence, another light of being, that continues to shine through and is never really diminished, even by distraction. And that thinking and not thinking are both creatures of that same light. The distinction of thinking or not thinking, or good or bad meditations, even of meditation or not meditation, melts away.
By that same token, moods and emotional states are experienced as ripples in the dance of one same energy; or as various bouquets arising from one same wine. And we become better able to simply taste the wine and disregard the various labels that come printed on the bottles. The idea that one state or another takes us closer to, or farther away from, some imagined goal, or constitutes a falling away from some ideal state that thus needs to be restored or repaired, also becomes increasingly obsolete. We more easily perceive and abide in the ocean of being itself, and are less troubled that any form of turbulence could truly disturb the nature of the ocean.
Before we begin to practice, we naturally give reality and authority to our thoughts, as if they were independent and commanding entities that could define our reality for us. But as we simply allow the light of our empty awareness, or awakeness, to shine, thoughts lose all shape and substance, or any defining authority over our awareness. If you shine a light on a shadow to see it more clearly, there’s no shadow at all.
We may begin to perceive, in fact, that thoughts are simply a play of the emptiness itself—just another radiant arising of the original light of our awareness, like a rainbow produced by the refraction of light, playful and ungraspable. There is no separation and no quarrel between the absolute source and its relative manifestation. As the quarrel dies out even the notion of a distinction between source and manifestation vanishes. Path, separation, union, dharma die away from our conceptual schemas. We are the one complete wordless reality. “Marvelous, marvelous,” it laughs at itself through the eyes of zen sages.
Who is there either to be lost in form or to be caught in a one-sided image of absolute or transcendent emptiness? That so-called emptiness is none other than the actual relative world of our every moment experience; the familiar world of opposites, of hot and cold playing on our skin. This cloudy night sky is shot through with the laughter of moonlight.