Meditating and Knowing
Saturday January 2, 2010
Firstly, I should wish all visitors to thinkBuddha.org a happy New Year, if a little belatedly. Since I got back from retreat, I’ve had my head down working on the next philosophy book, and it has been good to have some time away from teaching, and a bit of the clarity that comes from meditation, to really get some thoughts on paper.
So for a few days, we were up before five in the morning and on our cushions for the first sit of the day. And when the sky started at last to lighten, the view from the window of the meditation room when I opened my eyes was – pleasingly – that of a bare branch against the sky, strikingly similar to the image at the head of this site. Anyway, the question that I was preoccupied with on this retreat was this: what kind of knowledge comes from meditation?
I should give some background to this question. I’ve been recently reading Paul Sheldon Davies’s book Subjects of the World: Darwin’s Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in nature
Now this is interesting in terms of meditation for sometimes it is suggested that in meditation one can experience the arising and the passing away of mental events directly, without any mediation, such that the mind becomes transparent to itself. And whilst something goes on in meditation – a settling down of the everyday noise, greater attunement to the various fizzes and pops and crackles of the mind going about its business – what interests me is the question of what degree of knowledge we can really hope for from meditation. What I want to know is this: how transparent? How inerrant is this knowledge that comes from meditation? Because I see no a priori reason to assume that this knowledge gained from meditation is any less subject to distortion, confabulation and “spin” than the daily, non-meditative chunterings of our mind. Or, to put it differently, if we can be wrong about things that seem convincing in daily life, can we also be wrong about things that seem convincing in meditation?
These questions might seem to be hard to answer; but at the same time, I think that it would be perfectly possible to design some cunning experiments to test whether the kind of first-person perspective that is claimed to arise from meditation is any more accurate than the first-person perspectives of our day-to-day lives. And even if we do not do the experiments in the meditation hall itself, it is said that there are those who are so well established in meditation that they can keep this kind of awareness up when they are not on the cushions, so we could test them in the lab whilst not engaged in meditation, and see if the have any less propensity to error. This might be a lot of fun. One could run the kinds of cunning experiments that researchers in psychology like to perform to see if there is a difference between what is actually going on, and first person accounts of what the subject thinks is going on (see Sue Blackmore’s website for some details on the experiments undertaken by Wegner, for example), but do these experiments on meditative virtuosos. And we might, of course, find that there is a difference in performance. But I suspect that we might find something else rather interesting: that these meditators were, like the rest of us, saddled with human minds that are largely opaque to themselves. If this was the case, then there would be interesting consequences, not least for how seriously we could take at least some of the claims made for meditation.
It may be, however, that there would be rather less than general enthusiasm at the idea of taking part in experiments such as this. A lot of the research into meditation tends to be into the benefits of meditation. Experiments aiming to explore the limits of meditation, rather than the spiffiness of meditation (although they might tell us some interesting things) might have a rather harder time attracting recruits.
Even if seasoned meditators, like the rest of us, have minds that are opaque to themselves, I do think that meditation as a method may still have some kind of important role in helping us to understand our minds, even if it is not a matter of bringing us direct knowledge of the mind’s inner workings. The role of meditation may be more negative than positive. For there are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of rhetoric when it comes to meditation in Buddhism. Very crudely put, on the one hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a path to inerrant, inner knowledge – meditation is a way of knowing our minds, of reaching certain knowledge, and on the other hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a means of overturning the things that we think we know, as a means of unknowing or not knowing. And I have a hunch – it is no more than that – that the second approach to meditation may have a really rather powerful role to play in the understanding of the mind. For many of our everyday concepts for dealing with the mind seem to me to be concepts that are rooted in complex metaphysical stories, stories that (as the Madhyamikas might like to say) tend to dissolve under analysis. Much of what I read on philosophical approaches to consciousness seems to be founded on a mass of false first-person “certainties”, certainties that some forms of meditation can call radically into question. Could it be that meditation could be a way of freeing us up from the myths that we spin about our minds (the myth of agency, the myth of some kind of inner, substantial self, and so on). I like to think of this not as a form of phenomenology (gaining data on what the mind is like) but as a form of unphenomenology (unpicking the assumptions that we have about what the mind is like, recognising that we don’t really know what we think we know). And perhaps in the space that is thereby created, we might be able to come to a quieter, more sober, more subtle and truer perspective on what it means to be a minded, embodied creature, here in the midst of the world.
Have your say! [10]
The Storm Before the Calm
Wednesday December 23, 2009
Later today I’m off on the first retreat I’ve been on for some time, at Satipanya in Shropshire, and I’m looking forward to a few days of meditation and reflection. So yesterday I was putting things in order ready for the departure, and this included sorting out the kind of backup solution for my desktop computer that I should have got round to ages ago.
The trouble with moving large chunks of data around, however, is that things can go wrong, and when my aging desktop wheezed a little too despairingly and then decided to go into a sulk half way through the most ticklish part of the operation, with only one third of what I needed on my external hard drive, I knew that I was not going to have the quiet evening of reading for which I had hoped.
And as computer sulks go, it has to be said that it was a fairly determined one. Several hours fiddling around with the Linux command line to coax my machine back to life was not exactly how I wanted to be spending the evening before my retreat. But at the same time, the knowledge that I was going on retreat the day after certainly moderated my frustration. And this, I think, is interesting: why should I have naturally found myself moderating my response with more care than usual prior to a retreat? The answer, I think, is because experience shows that anger, frustration and impatience have a long half-life: they don’t disappear overnight, their effects continue to resonate, and that if you give in to them, and then the following day head off to the wilds of Shropshire, then they follow you – and that does not make for particularly enjoyable meditation. But I also wondered last night, as I set my online backup running (just to be doubly safe) and went to bed, whether I would have been quite so careful if I was not going on retreat the following day. When you are meditating a lot, you notice the effects of these things more; but that does not mean that the effects are greater. In the hurly-burly of daily life, sometimes it may be all to easy to fail to notice the longer resonances and after-effects of earlier states of minds.
Anyway, everything is now backed up, last night I slept well, my bags are packed and it’s a beautiful morning of sunshine and frost. I’m off. See you all in a few days!
Have your say! [3]
The Dramatic and the Bland
Thursday December 10, 2009
Once again, I have been finding myself thinking about drama, and about our obsession with drama. For it seems to me as if Western models of thought, of history, of ethics and even of ourselves are all, in one way or another, rooted in an essentially dramatic kind of thinking. Philosophy is the struggle of ideas; ethics is the drama of good’s triumph over evil; history is a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, either an upward march towards some ultimate goal, or an interminable decline into disarray; and we depict ourselves (perhaps) as protagonists in our own dramas (albeit dramas that will always be curiously incomplete, as we will have to flee the theatre the moment before the curtain falls on the final scene). When I watch my own thought processes unfolding, Ican see this tendency to give things dramatic form coming up again and again.
I have written before about my scepticism about this propensity for drama; but it was something I was reminded of again whilst reading François Jullien’s book, In Praise of Blandness
My own reading of this is that the notion of blandness might be a way of approaching things in which we sidestep our habitual attachment to drama. What happens to the taste of things when we refuse to see the world in terms of our habitual dramas? It is interesting, I think, to see meditation in the light of this notion of blandness. Often Westerners approaching meditation do so wanting big experiences, looking for some kind of story or plot or drama or revelation. But that was not what I found. Instead, I found something rather different. A stilling of stories and plots, and, yes, a kind of blandness. Along with this came something else, a kind of unease, the fear that, beneath the sound and the fury, beneath the clamour, beneath the stories that we weave, there might be nothing at all. “Does detachment really extinguish personality,” asks Jullien, “and does blandness render us numb?” This, after all, is old the criticism of certain approaches to Buddhist practice – they are anaesthetic in nature. In response to these questions, however, Jullien quotes the poet Su Dongpo, who records a dialogue with a Buddhist monk who wonders, after the subsiding of all dramas, what is left other than cold ashes. How can there be poetry, when the fires have gone out? The poet replies as follows:
If you want to perfect your poetic expression,
Do not reject encounters with calm and emptiness:
For calm brings the various movements to completion;
And emptiness embraces all possible worlds. (129)
The fear is that in the giving up of our habitual dramas, we are diminished. And in a sense, we are; but Su Dongpo suggests that we are also augmented. The world takes on a different aspect, and in losing our sense of our own dramas, other possible worlds begin to open up. There is poetry here, but it is not the poetry that we expect. It is not a poetry of high drama in which we play the heroic central role, but something quieter, something that is capable of bringing things to completion, or to a kind of fulness. As a meditator, it is good to remember this. Sometimes, when the dramas begin to subside, it can seem as if there is nothing there at all. It takes precisely this kind of attention to glimpse, there amid what seem to be cold ashes, a different kind of warmth, and a different kind of poetry. Jullien quotes the Tang dynasty poet, Sikong Tu.
Things rich in colour run out, dry up,
While things that are bland grow gradually richer.
This thought may be counter-intuitive to those hooked on drama; but experience, at least, seems to bear it out.
Have your say! [5]
A Brief Note on Looking at Water
Sunday November 15, 2009
This morning, I realised that I had been sitting at my desk far too long, and – looking out of the window and seeing that it was one of those luminous late autumn days – I switched off the computer and we headed out for a walk by the river, which runs not far from where we live, in a pocket of wildness that cuts through the city. It was a truly glorious morning – a heron flapping away from the pond as we passed, horses ambling around the fields, and the river full and fast-flowing. As we stood by the river, I found myself recollecting a line that I stumbled upon in Sarah Allen’s wonderful book The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue
Back when I was in my teens, I nurtured dreams of becoming a painter, and I often used to go out with my paints and canvasses – either alone, or with friends – and sit by the river to try to paint what I saw. And although I produced one or two half-way decent paintings (which we then sold at the local market to tourists, in an early, but brief, flurry of entrepreneurial acumen) it always seemed to me that there was something essentially uncapturable about this flow. At one moment you could take in the shadows of the trees on the surface of the river, at another moment you could take in the depths beneath (and if you were particularly lucky, see a long pike lurking, half-camouflaged against the bottom of the river), at another moment you could take in the flicker of light on the surface of the river, and at another you could follow the movement of the small waves made by the wind; but you could never see the whole river. Sometimes I would try to find exactly the right way of looking, so that I could see the river as it was, but this effort was always in vain. Rivers are not, I suppose, the kinds of things that can be captured so easily as this. You can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus…), or even once (Cratylus…), or perhaps it is the case there is ultimately no river that we can grasp, and nobody who does the stepping (Nāgārjuna…)
These are the kinds of thoughts that begin to preoccupy you when you start looking at water with the kind of artfulness of which, I imagine, Mencius might have approved. Because this is not just about rivers, but it is also about perception: if there is an art to looking at water, and if there is no rule for art (as Kant insists – if I will be permitted the liberty of leaping so blithely from Mencius to Kant with hardly a murmur), then there is no correct way of looking at water. Indeed, singleness of view, I found out when I was trying to paint the river back in my teenage years, was the very thing that led to the loss of the river; and when this happened, the painting went dead. Then I’d realise that I had just captured the surface but not the depth, the depth but not the surface; or I had captured the movement of the wind but not the play of the light. Yet occasionally – very occasionally, because I was not nearly as skilled or as patient as I wished to be – I would make a few brushstrokes that would somehow bring to life not just one or other thing, but the surface and the depth, the light and the shadow, the pike beneath the water and the waves whipped up by the wind.
If all of this might be saying something about perception, then it may be saying something about the perception of things other than rivers: people, rocks, stones, washing machines, organisations, ideas… For perhaps there is an art to looking at these things, too (why, after all, should water be the only thing we can look at in this artful fashion?); and perhaps this art is precisely that of keeping a kind of fluidity to the way that we are seeing, so that we can take in now this, now that: the pike, the shimmer on the surface, the abandoned shopping trolley sinking in the mud, the shadows of the trees and those of the birds the pass momentarily overhead…
The lovely image that accompanies this post comes, as usual, from Wikimedia Commons, and is by the twelfth and thirteenth century painter Ma Yuan
Have your say! [3]
Questions we cannot go through
Tuesday October 6, 2009
I remember a friend once saying to me that he thought there were, roughly speaking, two kinds of philosophers in the world. The first kind, when presented with a problem, is the type of person who says, “Hmm… how can we solve this one?”; and the second kind, when presented with a problem, is the type of person who says, “Oh, look, a problem, let’s see how we can make it bigger.”
As with all such neat distinctions, whilst there is some truth in this, at the same time it is probably true that most of us, most of the time, do both of these things. There is a kind of satisfaction, or a kind of pleasure, in solving questions and laying them to rest. But there is also a kind of satisfaction, or a kind of pleasure, in following questions until they provoke further questions, and following these so that they, in turn, provoke still further questions, in a kind of infinite regress. And both of these kinds of approaches to questioning seem to me to have their place.
But of late, I have been thinking a bit about this second kind of questioning, about the kinds of questions that open up new questions that (to steal a nice line from G.K. Chesteron) “make settled things strange”. For it seems to me that one approach to thinking about what is going on in mediation is in terms of this kind of questioning that makes settled things strange. When I sit down on my cushions, paying attention to the on-going happening of things, often I ask myself questions such as these: “What is this thing that is sitting here?” Or, “Where do thoughts come from?” Or, perhaps, “I am hearing a bird outside the window. Where is the hearing taking place?” Or, “Who is doing the hearing?”
Questions such as these, if you keep asking them (and if you also remain attentive), have a curious effect. They are questions that probe away at the fine-grain of experience, and that do not lend themselves to clear an unambiguous answers. Of course, you can forumulate answers to these kinds of questions. Who is doing the hearing? Well, OK, it’s me, Will. I have a biography, a sense of myself, a life… But these answers give rise to fresh questions: “Are you the same as this biography? What is this sense of yourself? What is this life that you have? Who is it that is doing the having?” And if you do this for long enough, whilst keeping on paying attention, looking to experience itself for some kind of a respose to these questions, instead of looking to abstract formulations, something strange happens. The specific questions die away, but the almost bodily sense of questioning continues. And there you are, sitting on your meditation cushions, a big fat question mark plonked down somewhere in the midst of the world.
And it is at moments like these, that it is possible to touch a different sense of life. It is no doubt true that there are many problems to be solved over the course our lives. And so much of the time we are concerned with the kind of pragmatic questions that seek answers. But taken as a whole, life itself is more than a bunch of problems to be solved. It is not, that is to say, a crossword-puzzle that can reach some kind of final resolution. Thank goodness that this is so, because a crossword-puzzle loses all its appeal once it is solved. Instead, at times like these, it is possible to see life as a whole – to borrow the words of Heidegger – as a question that we can never go through, a question that instead, “requires that we settle down and live within it.” And it seems to me that this sense of life as a question that we cannot go through is one that opens up a sense of beauty and wonder when it comes to our existence and the existence of the world, an awareness of the inexhaustible preciousness of things, and of a richness that cannot be exhausted.
For those who are interested, the Heidegger passage in question (!) comes from What is Called Thinking Trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper Colophon (1968), p. 137
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Mind in the Balance?
Sunday September 13, 2009
Over a decade ago now, whilst living up in Newcastle, I responded to an invitation to go along to Northumbria University where some post-graduate students were doing some work on meditation. From what I can remember, I had sit down on some cushions that were set up in a portacabin, and have a few electrodes glued to my head. Then I had to meditate for a short period, after which I simply had to sit quietly, the electrodes still glued in place. The research project, I think, was something to do with exploring not just the changes in brain-state brought on by meditation – something for which there is ample evidence – but also the extent to which these changes continue post-meditation. And whilst I would like to report that, half way through the experiment, one of the researchers turned to the other and cried out, “Good god, Perkins, it’s extraordinary! He’s off the scale!”, the reality was much more mundane. They simply took their readings, unglued me, gave me a cup of tea, and off I went. I never even found out what the results were.
Still, it was nice to have a small part to play in the growing field of research in the place where brain science meets Buddhist practices of meditation. I was reminded of my brief experience of life as a laboratory subject whilst reading B. Alan Wallace’s latest book, Mind in the Balance
Wallace’s book is divided into two parts. The first – Meditation: Where it Started and How it Got Here – gives a decidedly selective view of the history of contemplative traditions, moving from ancient Greece to the desert fathers of Christianity to the India of the Buddha’s day, whilst at the same time launching an assault on what Wallace takes to be the harms of scientific materialism. The second part of the book – Meditation in Theory and Practice – then alternates between chapters on “practice” where Wallace sketches out a particular form of meditation, and “theory”, in which he reflects upon this practice.
It rapidly becomes clear that there is a vigorous dualism at work in Wallace’s work. On the one hand, there is the world of contemplation, of ethics, of spiritual truths, of meaning; and on the other hand there is the deterministic material world of genetics, instinct and emotion. And, the argument goes, whilst the sciences are very good at understanding the latter world, they are not at all advanced when it comes to the understanding of the former world. It is here that Wallace sees the need for light from contemplative traditions (in particular the contemplative tradition with which he is most familiar, that of Tibetan Buddhism) to balance out the picture. We need, in other words, a kind of “inner science” to balance the outer science with which we are familiar. Without such an inner science, our understanding not only of ourselves, but also of the universe as a whole, will be stunted; and, not only this, we risk closing ourselves off to the very spiritual realities that we are so much in need of. The stakes, it seems, could not be higher. At the very end of the book, Wallace writes that “We are now poised for the greatest renaissance the world has seen, for the first time integrating the ancient and modern insights of the East and West. The time is ripe for humanity to take the next step in our spiritual evolution so that we can successfully rise to the challenges of today’s world and flourish in the world to come” (199).
There are innumerable problems with all of this. The first problem is that of the very partial approach that Wallace has taken to contemplative traditions. He weaves together strands of ancient Pythagoreanism, Tibetan Buddhism, selected Christian writers, and certain aspects of Hinduism, to construct a a set of “truths” revealed by the “great wisdom traditions of human civilization, including religion, philosophy, and science.” In the story that Wallace is telling, as far as I can discern it, the following things are true: that all the great contemplatives, more or less, experience the same kind of thing; that consciousness is a “deep space” in need of exploration; that consciousness is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe – if anything, more fundamental than the “mere” material world; that consciousness is essentially unbounded by birth and death, and therefore there is such a thing as rebirth; and that our collective human welfare and happiness are dependent upon these realisations. However, this account does not pay any attention to differing accounts of contemplation and of experience that undermine the story that Wallace is telling. I am not sure, for example, that the idea of contemplation as a form of exploration of some inner “deep space” is one that makes a great deal of sense when seen in the light of the Chan and Zen traditions. This is a serious problem, because if the argument rests, as it seems to, on the commonality of the findings of contemplative practitioners, then this commonality needs to be well established for Wallace’s argument to be taken seriously. Not only this, but also whilst there may be an awful lot of interest to be said about the place where science, philosophy and practices of contemplation meet, the characterisation of science, philosophy and religion as convergent wisdom traditions seems to be one that at the outset seriously skews inquiry we are engaged in. As the argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this is a view that requires not only a partial view of history and a restrictive perspective upon the traditions in question, but also a sprinkling of magic courtesy of quantum physics, if it is to work at all.
The claims that Wallace makes about the efficacy of meditation in terms of brain plasticity, mental well-being and so forth, are today relatively well-attested – although, somewhat parenthetically, it may be that there is insufficient research into the potential harms of meditation. Nevertheless, whilst it is one thing to say that meditators are in general calmer, that their frontal cortices are more frisky, that they have less violent startle-reflexes, or that they are kinder to animals and small children, it is another thing entirely to say that the accounts they give about the ultimate nature of the universe – filtered through a long and complex religious tradition – should be taken at face value – even if we found that those accounts converged substantially, which I’m not at all sure that they do. And the metaphysical views of which Wallace is trying to persuade us are so extravagant that I cannot help feeling that he needs to work rather harder.
Let us take the example of the “Rainbow Body”, discussed towards the end of the book. This is said to be the culmination of the Tibetan Dzogchen practice, in which one’s body “allegedly dissolves into shimmering, multicoloured light at death.” This is an impressive party-trick if you can pull it off, but even more impressively, it can be done without dying at all, in which case, “All the atoms of the body vanish into the absolute space of phenomena, but one still retains the appearance of a physical body, which can be seen and touched by others.” Pretty neat, but the obvious response is this: show us the evidence. When it comes to the latter version – in which I am still alive – then this seems incapable of being tested. If I told you that all the atoms of my body had indeed vanished into the absolute space of phenomena (whatever that is), whilst to all appearances looking just like me – a bloke sitting somewhere in the East Midlands of England, typing whilst the cat snoozes on a beanbag – then I cannot see any way that this could be tested. For all I know, that cat could have pulled off the same trick. And if I can still be seen and touched, in what sense can it be said that my atoms have vanished. What is the light bouncing off? What are you touching? As all of this is, as far as I can see, incapable of being tested, we can leave it to one side. The other claim – that the body, at death, could actually dissolve into a rainbow, is something for which we could find some degree of concrete evidence, but unfortunately Wallace does not provide anything like this. He tells us that there are lots of cases of eyewitness reports, but there are eyewitness reports of everything from Elvis living down the road, to alien abductions, to milk-drinking statues of Ganesh, to angels in the shopping mall. It is simply not good enough to say that the reason that we do not accept such stories is “the ideological hegemony of materialism.” We don’t accept them, generally speaking, because they are implausible, and because insufficient evidence has been advanced. As a Buddhist friend was fond of muttering, when she heard people telling stories about auspicious events such as this, “Auspicious? Suspicious, more like!”
I may, of course, be wrong. But I can’t help thinking that, when it comes to exploring the possibilities for rich dialogue between contemplative traditions and the sciences, Wallace is barking up the wrong tree. For me, I suspect that the really productive dialogue will not come from some kind of a revolution in the sciences, an overthrowing of materialism, and a discovery that the Tibetan stories were right all along, but instead it will come about from a revolution in the way that we see ourselves in the light of the sciences. For it seems to me that, when we come to exploring the knotty questions of consciousness, we are hamstrung already by a kind of mysticism: the mysticism of our idea of an enduring self, the mysticism of our belief in free will, and the curious philosophical mysticism that posits ineffable qualia. And if we are going to proceed at all in these discussions, I suspect that we will do so not by adding mysticism to mysticism, and by the spinning of new fictions, fantasies and dreams about a separate and self-subsistent spiritual realm, but rather by the realisation that those things that we take to be realities are themselves fictions, fantasies and dreams.
Have your say! [7]
Wouldn't it be a lovely headline?
Saturday August 15, 2009
Yesterday I bought myself a second-hand bicycle. It is not, it has to be said, a thing of beauty. The bicycle’s purple hue is not the colour that I would have chosen, and the seat is decidedly uncomfortable. But despite all of this, it was wonderful to be back on two wheels after a few years. I pedalled away from the cycle shop and headed along the Great Central Way, following the path to the end as the dragonflies wove to and fro across the path. At the end of the Great Central Way, I met an old man and his dog picking apples. Or, to be more precise, the old man was picking apples, and the dog was just sniffing around in the undergrowth. So I joined in (the apple-picking, not the undergrowth-sniffing), and with a good few apples in my bag – cookers, not eaters – I wished him farewell and headed back home. And even though, as I cycled back home, it was hard to ignore the fact that the seat really was uncomfortable, this brief interlude in what has been a week of editing and proof-reading and so on, was a thing of absolute delight.
This morning, catching up with various bits and pieces, I came across a comment piece on the Guardian website which made me reflect a little more on this sense of delight. In the piece, Naseem Khan responds to a piece that Zen teacher Norman Fischer wrote in the New York Times. Fisher’s essay, For the Time Being, was about a retreat that he led on Puget Sound. Here is a brief passage from Fischer’s article:
I am a Zen Buddhist priest, so a meditation retreat isn’t exotic to me: it’s what I do. But this one was particularly delightful. Sixty-five of us in silence together for a week, as great blue herons winged slowly overhead, swallows darted low to the ground before us as we walked quietly on the open grassy space between the meditation hall and the dining room. Rabbits nibbled on tall grasses in the thicket by the lake. The sky that far north is glorious this time of year, full of big bright clouds that can be spectacular at sunset – which doesn’t happen until around 10 p.m., the sky ablaze over the tops of the many islands thereabouts.
This is, I think, a lovely passage. Of all the words that fill the New York Times, not many are, I suspect, as filled with such straightforward wonder and delight as these. ‘Wouldn’t it be a lovely headline,’ sings Rufus Wainwright, ‘“Life is Beautiful”, in the New York Times?’ Khan, however, does not entirely agree, and her piece calls into question the value of this kind of retreat. ‘If William Blake could find heaven in a grain of sand,’ she asks, ‘shouldn’t we look for it in a thrown-away tube ticket and a MacDonalds hamburger. is it really necessary to retreat to settings of unimaginable tranquility in order to attain tranquility?’ In asking this question, Khan is not, it should be said, entirely unaware of the way that retreats work. As Fischer points out in his piece, and as she also notes, if retreats seems like ‘getting away from it all’, the thing that one does not get away from is one’s own mind. That, for better or worse, comes along for the ride. And so if, on day one, you are thinking ‘Oh, look, there’s a beautiful heron!’ it is very likely that by day five you might find yourself thinking, ‘If that damn heron croaks loudly in my meditation again, I will personally wring it’s long and beautifully slender neck.’
However, providing that you manage to deal with your irrational heron-hatred, the real problems, Khan suggests, begin when you get home. It is then that you realise that the cat has been sick on the carpet, your great aunt is up to her old tricks, your house has been vandalised whilst you’ve been away, and your email inbox is groaning, and you suddenly seem to lose every last shred of the apparent wisdom and compassion, every last twinkle of the gratifyingly spiritual glow, that you seemed to possess whilst on retreat.
As a corrective to this, Khan talks of other models of practice – for example, Bernie Glassman’s street retreats – which may act as a “counter to blue herons and fine sunsets.” Yet, for me, whatever the value of these other forms of practice, I am not at all sure that blue herons and sunsets need to be countered. To be sure, if one is fortunate to find oneself on such a retreat, it is always worth being aware that these are very particular conditions, that they will come to an end, that when you get back home you will almost certainly have to deal once again with your vomiting cat, with your backlog of emails, and with your troublesome great aunt, as you did beforehand. But at the same time, there are definite benefits to such experiences of delight. It is good to be reminded of the beauty of things, it is good to cultivate wonder and awe at the extraordinary fact of our being here, thinking and feeling beings, in a world filled with sunsets and croaking herons and mad great aunts and vomiting cats and so forth. In itself, there is nothing self-indulgent in delight. It is attachment to the things that delight us that is self-indulgent. And to have periods in our lives in which we can open ourselves more than usual to this kind of delight can be profoundly useful. Of course there are things to be getting on with. There are ethical demands and responsibilities upon us. But without delight, I suspect that our ability to respond to these demands and responsibilities is limited. And this is why, I think, it is important to be able to open up spaces of delight within our lives – those impromptu cycle rides, those retreats, the time spent with friends.
The world contains both the possibility of delight and the possibility of suffering. If we are interested in cultivating the art of seeing things clearly, then we need to be open to both. If it were possible to allow the awareness of suffering to enter into our experience of delight, without this awareness thereby diminishing the delight that we experienced, and if it were possible to allow the awareness of the possibility of delight to enter into our experience of suffering, without this awareness obscuring the urgency of the suffering with which we are confronted – then, I think, we’d really be getting somewhere.
Have your say! [6]
