Meditation
Friday September 23, 2005
I am awake this morning before dawn. The sky is streaked with a trace of pink. I shuffle from my bed down the corridor to my cushions, flick the switch on the heater (it is late September, and already cold), light the candles and fold my legs under me. I arrange my blankets, wrapping one around my waist and one around my shoulders. Then I close my eyes.
Nothing much happens. The breath comes and goes. Thoughts come and go. My attention wavers: sometimes it is sharp and clear, at other times I am lost in soupy dreams. In a moment of distraction, I open my eyes and look out of the window. The sky is becoming smeared with bright crimson. I marvel at the beauty of the sunrise for a moment, and then return to my meditation. Later, when I bring the meditation to a close, the sun is visible through the branches of the poplar tree.
Once I meditated because I was excited by the idea of the East, I wanted to taste something of another world. Then, after becoming a Buddhist, and already seeing this other world slipping beyond my grasp, I meditated because I knew I should meditate, as a good Buddhist must. Later, when I renounced all hope of being a good Buddhist, when I gave up all expectation of any attainments, when the dream of Enlightenment burst like a bubble in a stream, I meditated in disillusionment for several months or years. But when there is nothing left other than disillusionment, why continue meditating? So before long I ceased meditation altogether for a year or so.
But then… but then one morning I got up and found myself making my way back to my cushions, which I had never quite brought myself to pack away in the cupboard. I sat down before dawn, and closed my eyes. It was January, and cold.
So this is how I now meditate. With no idea of Enlightenment in my mind. With scant hope of gaining much thereby in wisdom and compassion. With awareness of how irrevocably I am saddled with my human passions, bound to them forever. My hopes and dreams of awakening belong to the past. And now I meditate for this reason alone: because it is beautiful to awake before dawn, to wrap yourself in blankets, and to sit quietly, the breath coming and going, as the sun, unseen, makes its way up into the sky through the branches of the poplar tree.
