more irony in meditation

I complained recently about my lack of motivation towards meditating. And my friend Joshua (Mudita Journal) has posted, recently, about "motivational interviewing" --- which I think is about being explicitly guided through one's priorities and the rationale for them, in order to reinforce the cognitive motivation for doing what one believes one should be doing. Or, those times when you ask a person to list all the benefits of a certain course of action, and all the costs and/or obstacles preventing them from doing it, so that they look at it and say, "geez, I should just do it." Albeit, as a therapeutic practice, it is naturally a much more delicate, sensitive process.

Eg, meditating.

I want to incorporate meditation into my regular life. Which means it needs to fit in with things like buying groceries, putting gas in the car, answering cell phone voicemail, doing the laundry, organizing clothes and dishes and fixing meals, and with my new life, taking care of a two-year-old. And the bigger 'meaningful' stuff like exercise and reading. (That's the Big Meaningful Stuff for me: running, swimming, reading, writing, my habits of dynamic stretching and dance, and relaxing and breathing well.)

This means, I don't want to think of meditation as something I can only do when I disrupt my routine life and "get away from it all."

Nonetheless, that's what I did. Friday night I went up to the San Gabriel mountains just north of Azusa.

Saturday morning I woke early, after very comfy sleep in my tent and sleeping bag, and hiked up a long, dry waterfall of round boulders to the top of the nearest hill, found a modest little spot on the ground with a view of a bush in front of me (turned my back on the grand, panoramic vistas behind me), sat down, set my timer for 40 minutes, and started breathing. Sitting up straight but comfortable, looking at the silly little sage bush in front of me.

Which is to say I started allocating all my attention, consciousness, focus, awareness, to nothing except my breathing and the simple physical sensations of my sitting (in this case, it included my cold butt).

You're not supposed to think when you meditate: that's the point --- to gain control of the impulsive spurts and leaps of cognition that characterizes our normal, waking consciousness.

Newbies like me, however, experience constant mis-firings. Focusing on the breath, but suddenly a thought appears. Like you're in a dark theatre, you begin to meditate, the curtains open... on nothing. And you feel the breath going in, the diaphragm pressing down, your belly fills, you feel yourself being part of the air entering your body, it warms up, and goes back out... and the stage of this theater should remain empty, dark.

But the stage for a novice doesn't remain dark: little monkeys with tambourines and drums and bright red-and-yellow hats come jumping out from the wings, chattering and clanging away. That's how I picture thoughts... the picture was suggested to me by, I think, a phrase in a book I read on meditation and buddhism -- referring to the unmeditative mind as "the monkey mind".

The goal is to push the tambourine monkey back off the stage, returning your attention to the silence and your breathing.

On Saturday morning I did so-so. The thoughts would come marching out on stage, clang-clang-clang, dancing and skipping and doing their damnedest to grab my attention. Pfft. I pushed them back off.

But every once in a while you find yourself mesmerized by the hypnotic belly dancing of a thought that just dropped onto stage from an unseen trapeze high above. Or one that rose silently from a trap door. And they're not wearing red-and-yellow hats and bouncing along rhythmically. They appear as the intoxicating eyes of a beautiful woman, looking straight into yours, promising you secrets, the gift of knowledge, the forbidden fruit.

Because that's what thinking does.

On this Saturday morning's first meditation, it occurred to me (all the paragraphs above were to excuse myself for telling you What I Thought while I was supposed to be Not Thinking)

...that buddhists, or meditation practicioners, must be infinitely more aware of just how real and tangible the phenomenon of consciousness is.

Which is funny, ironic. The goal is No Mind. Another related goal is to realize that You Are Not Your Mind --- to stop you from the cognitive mistake of equating your personal identity with your mind, your intellect.

I have long used the following metaphor for consciousness: a flashlight in a dark room. You point it around, and what you see is your experience. The rest of your universe remains in shade until you focus on it.

(And you only have one flashlight, and it can only illuminate so much at one time. Argh, the constraints.)

But in the process of meditating, you come to experience thinking as something much more discreet, malleable, tangible. I.e., in meditation, especially, the mind is given more reality than in our normal, passive, conscious life --- where the mind is unseen and unfelt because we are lost in its stage games at all times. Instead, in meditating you back off and realize you are in a dark theatre, and the mind is the stage. Monkeys come dancing onto it, and a spotlight appears. But you switch the spotlight off, and return to the volitionally-emptied stage.

I spent the rest of Saturday being distracted. I went for a short run, read Warrior Politics, hiked, swam briefly in Bear Creek.

If you know me, you know I normally eat pretty well and I'm always prepared with beef jerky, chocolate, protein or sports bars, cheeses, etc. So ironically, and due to logistical complications (helped out someone else, and was accomodating to the point that I didn't get my food from the grocery), I went camping for the weekend and took almost zero food and about 1/3 the amount of water I would normally drink. Hence the weekend was to be an experiment in fasting, as well. Which turned out to be very easy. (I guess my fasting included cheese, a quart of chocolate soy milk, Toblerone chocolate, Genisoy bar, about 15 ounces of spiced rum, and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.)

When I finished hiking around 4pm, I tried to meditate again, but kept falling asleep. And I wasted the rest of Saturday night looking at a campfire. The cabernet sauvignon was delicious, however, with chocolate, cheese, and some wickedly well-toasted marshmallows.

And on Sunday morning I opted to help some other hikers carry their kid out of the area (across the many creek crossings, which, sadly, pose difficulty for a populace that is more talented at sitting on its ass than performing on its feet), instead of taking an hour to meditate.

Oh, a tactical note: take care of your equipment, and it will take care of you. It's been a long time since I sat and took care of my equipment --- the very most important item of which is my boots. I always keep them waterproofed, usually with Snow Seal. This weekend, I observed people (who I would expect to know better) getting their feet wet and whining about it. My feet stayed dry the entire weekend. I'm guessing the difference is only that I keep my all-leather boots waterproofed.

This entry was supposed to be about what I experienced (and thought, tsk tsk) while meditating.

I was reminded that meditation is as easy as push-ups. When you just do it, you can drop and knock out 30 and repeat and repeat and repeat. But you don't jump up, after a set of push-ups, and look at your arms to see if you now have muscles.

Rather, meditation is slow, simple steps, and just like the push-ups, the great virtue is in doing them regularly, consistently. Over time, consciousness should be more like a technique one can articulate and operate with deliberation, art and grace; like dancing.

Thus speaks the sophomore.

Is this not a a case study of failure? I put myself out in the wilderness --- I can meditate, run, hike, swim, read, lay around, make a fire; and that's it. No computer. No job. No cell phone. No household. And I only meditated once. How am I to succeed at making this a daily ritual?