Settling
Monday August 3, 2009
It seems to have taken a long time, but I’ve now settled into the new house down in Leicester. The books are more or less in order (we resisted implementing Dewey classification, although it was tempting as we tried to impose some semblance of order on things), the cat has taken to his new life down here and seems to be spending most of his time lounging on a beanbag in semi-bliss or pottering around the neighbours’ gardens, and most of the boxes are now unpacked. So this morning, after a break of a couple of weeks, I was back to my meditation cushions. And it was a pleasure to be settling back into meditation after spending ages shifting boxes, and dealing with the intricacies of negotiating with electricity and telephone companies.
As I was sitting this morning, it struck me that meditation is about as far from being an abstract pursuit as is possible. There is a popular idea of meditators as having their head in their clouds, and of meditation as an unworldly pursuit. But it seems to me that there is nothing more worldly than meditation. Not only this, but it also seems to me that a lot of what is sometimes called (although I dislike the term) “worldly” activity is, on the contrary, somewhat abstract and unworldly.
What do I mean by this? What I mean, I think, is this: that much of the time in our everyday lives, we are preoccupied with abstractions and with “what ifs?”. We perpetually run simulations of the world through our minds, testing out possible futures and reminagining the past. We weave endless stories, and then tangle ourselves up in the stories that we weave. Of course, this kind of abstraction is a part of the stuff of being human. Our capacity for this kind of abstraction is one of the things that helps us find our way around the world. But at the same time, there is more to life than this web of abstraction. And one thing that meditation can do is it can allow the senses to reattune themselves to the world, and it can allow us to settle back into the living, breathing, and absolutely concrete physicality of our being.
Sitting in meditation this morning, it was as if the clamorous and agitated flocks of birds that are my restless thoughts eventually grew tired of fluttering around, and they at last home to roost and settle. And it was as if, in turn, my body slowly settled back into the world, putting down roots as I sat there on the floor, so that I was no longer a thing set apart from the world, but once again was immersed in things. And as this happened, I felt a richer sense of life – one that has been somewhat in abeyance for the last couple of weeks – beginning to return.
It’s good to be back.
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Kluginess
Wednesday June 3, 2009
Professional philosophers are people who make a living from thinking about stuff, and given that they make their living from the activity of the mind, it is not surprising that many of them can tend to have a rather starry-eyed view of the virtues of what Woody Allen once called his “second most favourite organ”. Often, however, when I listen to philosophers talking about the mind, I find myself wondering precisely whose mind they are talking about. Certainly, I fear, not mine. For when philosophers talk about the mind, they often claim that the mind is a pretty spiffy thing. Indeed, the overwhelming impression that they frequently give is that the mind is about the spiffiest thing that there is. No doubt this is a gratifying belief, given that the same philosophers often go on to imply that their own minds are, as minds go, to be counted amongst the very spiffiest examples of this already spiffy organ.
But speaking personally at least, I’m pretty much convinced that my own mind is really not that spiffy at all. OK, so it can perform a trick or two when it needs to. It’s not without its uses. So far it has managed to get me by. But at the same time, when I take a cool and dispassionate look at it, it seems a fairly shoddy affair. Any mind that does not accurately file important information about where I last left my glasses, or that seems to so stubbornly resist the tidy logic of the word-order of German sentences, is clearly not as spiffy as all that.
So it is nice to know that it is not just me. Gary Marcus’s Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
In his book, Marcus draws on a large body of research in psychology to explore the various kluges that lie behind those everyday things that minds do – remembering, believing, choosing, generating language, experiencing pleasure, and (alas!) malfunctioning – and by the end of the book he has built up a picture of the actual workings of the mind that would be a useful corrective to any idealist philosopher. Or, for that matter, any idealist Buddhist.
My own interest in the kluginess of the mind is closely related to my Buddhish tendencies. When I started out meditating some fifteen or so years ago, I did so out of the vain (in both senses) hope that I might thereby manage to upgrade my mind to something a bit spiffier. I’d read all kinds of books about Buddhist sages who had minds perfected by the long practice of meditation, and I gave myself fifteen or so years to do the same. But from the very start, things didn’t seem to turn out quite as I had hoped. When I sat down on the cushions and directed my mind to simply following the coming and going of the breath, I found that I was even more feeble at performing this kind of simple task than I might have feared. My mind wandered off before I had even counted ten, or five or even two breaths. This was dispiriting stuff for a beginner, but I persevered out of the hope that one day I would triumph.
As the years went by, however, I began to realise that it doesn’t really work like this. Sometimes I managed to rein in my mind’s tendencies to wander a little, and sometimes I didn’t. But the more I got to know my own mind, the more I had a sense that it was both tricksy and fundamentally recalcitrant. And although certain approaches to Buddhism present the kluginess of the mind as a problem to be surmounted, I became increasingly sceptical of the possibility of the mind overcoming its own haphazard nature, and increasingly convinced that the mind – or my mind at least – was klugey through and through. Not only this, but the more I looked at what people in general were like, the more I came to the conclusion that it was not just me, but everybody was saddled – for better or worse – with a mind irredeemably afflicted by kluginess. Even the most accomplished Zen master may sometimes forget where they have left their glasses. A decade of meditating in a solitary cave in the Himalayas is no guarantee against fallacious beliefs.
Alongside this growing awareness of the fact that we are all irredeemably klugey has come a different attitude to meditation. These days, I no longer think of meditation as a kind of upgrade, replacing my gimcrack, shoddy, not-quite-fit-for-purpose mind with one that is sleek, shiny and new, one that functions with a cool, unruffled grace. Instead, it seems to me that the reason meditation is both useful and fascinating is that it is a way of exploring directly this kluginess of the mind, of recognising the slips and the fudges and the shortcuts, and of finding ways of living with them. It is not, that is to say, a means of perfecting the mind, but instead as a kind of empirical practice that acts as an antidote to the fantasy that there could ever be such a thing as a perfected mind, and that finds what could be called practical kluges for living as best we can with the klugey mind.
With this shift in attitude has come something else, as well: instead of finding meditation frustrating, I have found myself increasingly intrigued by the kinds of things that my mind does. Sitting there on my cushions, my mind does what it always has done and always will do: sometimes it remains with the breath, sometimes it gets tangled in obsessive thoughts about German word-order, sometimes it drifts off to wonder about what I should have for breakfast, sometimes it dozes, sometimes it rumbles away with irritation, sometimes it is as raucous as a cage of monkeys… And this, when it comes down to it, is the deal. But the way I see it now, this is not the occasion so much for self-recrimination as for curiosity. Perhaps it is only by recognising how deeply klugey the mind, and by giving up on the idea of perfection, that it is possible to be a little more understanding of ourselves and of others, a little more aware of the ways in which we can move and the possibilities that are open to us, a little less sure of ourselves, and a little wiser in how we respond to ourselves, to others and to the world.
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Scholars and Meditators
Friday May 1, 2009
Over the last few weeks, my life has consisted largely of doing things with bits of paper. Not only have I been working on redrafts for two books (another novel, and the long-promised philosophy book – expect an announcement about the latter here on thinkBuddha in the next few weeks), but I have also been working on the initial research for a further novel, shunting around ideas for various side projects, reading large piles of books, and marking great quantities of student essays, stories and projects. And just at the moment, I confess that I am feeling a bit full up. It gets like this sometimes. As I survey the great, teetering ziggurats of paper that surround me, I can sometimes wonder why it is that I got into this business of paper-mongery in the first place.
The answer, however, is simple: that the world is a fantastically interesting place, and many of those bits of paper – not all, alas, but certainly the bits of paper that I am interested in – are a means of exploring this interestingness of the world. Indeed, many of the bits of paper that I have been reading – the one example that stands out in the last month is Edward O. Wilson’s wonderful Biophilia
In my dealings with Western Buddhists – and sometimes in the discussions on this blog – I have sometimes been surprised by how little time people have for bits of paper. There can sometimes be a tendency to dismiss ‘book learning’ as something somehow undignified and inferior. Sometimes the message seems to be this: throw out your books, burn down the libraries, empty your head and just sit in silent meditation!
But this seems to me to be a shame, if only because it cuts us off from so many rich sources of knowledge about the world and about ourselves, from so many fresh perspectives, from so many thoughts that we don’t yet know how to think, from so many questions we have not yet begun to ask, from so many paths that might lead us into seeing afresh the sheer poetry of the world.
The idea that we have to choose – either sit in silent meditation or labour over dry and arid tomes – is, I think, mistaken because our minds are not organs dedicated to performing only one particular task. There are different ways of thinking, and different ways of using the mind. Aristotle knew this, back in the day, when he saw that there was a difference between theoretical knowledge, practical wisdom, and that tricky-to-translate term poiesis – the kind of activity brings things forth things like books, perhaps, or blog posts, or even cakes (actually, as I write this, I’m not sure that the scholars would be with me when it comes to the cakes, but I’ll let it stand).
It is good, of course, to be aware when things are becoming unbalanced. I have met many scholars who could have done with a bit of meditation to loosen them up. I have met many meditators who could have done with a well-chosen book to really engage their critical faculties. And I have met both scholars and meditators who could have done with a bit more social contact, or with a drink down the pub, because meditation and scholarship are both activities that lead – when left unchecked – to unhealthy levels of weirdness and eccentricity.
And perhaps this is the crux: whilst there is much insight to be had from both meditation and scholarship, these are means to an end, and the end is the transformation of the relationship that we have the world. There is a wonderful passage in Michel Serres’s book The Troubadour of Knowledge
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Mountains? What Mountains?
Tuesday March 31, 2009
When I started meditating some fifteen or so years ago, I used to think (as I have mentioned before on this blog) of the mind as a territory to be mapped. I fancied myself as a kind of heroic explorer of inner space, setting out to discover new worlds. In this curious (and, no doubt, self-aggrandising) fantasy, the supposedly mystical East and the supposedly mystic inner realm were almost mapped onto each other, so that, on the one hand, I planned for my future by imagining myself trekking up mountain paths in Tibet to meet with wizened individuals of incomparable wisdom whilst, on the other hand, I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and dreamed of similar territories within:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there…
Such a perspective lent my idea of meditation a kind of pioneering bravado, what with all of that clinging to frightful, no-man-fathomed cliffs: the meditator as Tintin, fearless boy-reporter setting out to search for truth in foreign lands, facing untold dangers along the way. The only problem was that, when I started to take a closer look at what was going on in my experience, when I sat on the cushions for any amount of time, hoping to find Gerard’s cliffs to which I could excitingly cling, hoping to find a clear and unambiguous drama, the territory I had set out to explore seemed to be rather more shadowy, ambiguous and mist-shrouded than I had hoped. Things seemed to slip through my fingers leaving only ambiguities upon ambiguities, shadows upon shadows. I wanted revelations and breakthroughs and profound bursts of wisdom to interrupt the everyday, and what I got was a sense that the mind is a slippery thing, hard to pin down, impossible to grasp, sometimes (it seemed, it still seems) hardly there at all, sometimes chuntering on in its own sweet way without any obvious sense or purpose, and without telling me what it was up to, always subverting my attempts to get to grips with it, to map it. And if I couldn’t even get clear on the territory, if I couldn’t even track down some cliffs on which I could bravely hang, then things began to look pretty bleak for an aspiring boy-reporter of the inner life.
I don’t know for certain when things changed. It took several years. But little by little, as I became more frustrated at the seeming absence of any clear plot or drama or even any clear territory on which such an adventure might be played out, I started to notice instead those things that I had hitherto dismissed as distractions form the story I was telling myself: the equivocations and the uncertainties and the slips; the way that the mind goes its own sweet way, often as obscure in its inner workings as is the pancreas; the flickering of awareness that came and went, never quite resolving into a plot or a story. And the more I noticed these things, the more the business of sitting on my backside on a cushion for stretches of time, doing nothing much, began to make sense to me. Of course, it wasn’t any longer Tintin in Tibet: there were few cliff-hangers, there was nothing much in the way of an adventure (and Snowy and Captain Haddock were nowhere to be seen). No longer a heroic quest; more a matter of a kind of closeness to the business of living. To the ordinary, everyday business of living.
But then, I’m from Norfolk. What do I know about mountains…?
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Slip Slidin' Away
Thursday March 19, 2009
I’m back home up North for a few days, hanging out with Bodhicattva the thinkBuddha whilst I get down to work the philosophy book – about which I’ll say more in the next few weeks. It’s good to be back, and to re-establish what has been, over the last couple of weeks, a somewhat patchy meditation practice.
One thing that I am thinking about lately, and also noticing when I manage to make it to my meditation cushions, is what a downright curious thing experience is. For most of the time, it can seem as if there is nothing more blindingly obvious, nothing more directly in front of our noses, than experience. We know we are having it when we are having it (so we tell ourselves), and we know what kind of experience we are having. Even if we are not experts in anything else, we act as if we are experts when it comes to our own experience.
However, when you start to pay attention to this seemingly obvious thing, it begins to slip between the fingers. One fun thing to do is to ask yourself questions like the following: What am I experiencing now? How do I know that I am experiencing what I am telling myself that I am experiencing? Is my experience continuous or is it momentary and atomic? Do I experience all the senses together, or do they have different rhythms? Do I have a single experience, or multiple experiences? What do I experience at the fringes of my visual field? Do I have an experience of myself? If so, what is this experience?
The more I ask these kinds of questions (whilst on the meditation cushions, but also whilst on the bus, whilst sitting on the railway station, whilst idling away time with the cat, and so on), the more perplexing it all seems. Trying to catch hold of experience seems as successful as sitting by a pool on a full moon night, and trying to catch the moon’s reflection in a net: whenever you think you’ve got it, it eludes you. The idea of “getting hold of” experience or of “grasping” experience seems to immediately push it out of reach.
Image: Hiroshige (again!), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Virtuosi
Monday November 24, 2008
I was awake just after five this morning, whilst oustide it was still dark; and because I didn’t feel like sleeping any more, and had an early train to catch, I got up and went into the next door room where I sat down to meditate. It was probably the my most substantial period of meditation for weeks: given that I live in one town and work in another, I spend a lot of my time on the move, and this nomadism is not particularly suited to consistency when it comes to meditation practice. Anyway, I have long got used to the idea that, when it comes to meditation, I cut a fairly shambolic figure. No doubt I could be more self-disciplined, no doubt I could put in more hours on the cushions, no doubt I could make more effort when I do sit down to meditate: but, at the moment at least, I’m just lurching along in a half-baked fashion, and I’m pretty happy with this state of affairs.
When I first learned to meditate, over a decade and a half ago now, I sometimes fantasised that I might become some kind of meditative virtuoso, a Yehudi Menuhin of the meditation cushions. But even if, at various times, I have put a fair amount of time into my practice of meditation – on retreat, or during those periods in which I have developed and sustained a particular taste for meditation – I have not reached anything like virtuosity, nor (I suspect) will I ever do so.
I do think, incidentally, that there is such a thing as meditative virtuousity. If you put in the hours, and you put in the hours in the right way, then there are no doubt results. But the idea of becoming a virtuoso meditator is one that very quickly lost its lustre for me. Not because of the hours and hours of practice involved, but more because I became increasingly uncertain what this kind of virtuosity was for. There are plenty of Buddhist stories about meditative virtuosi who simply miss the point. I’ve written before, I think, about the charming tale of the sage Saraha who asked his wife for milk and radishes, and then went to meditate. Months or years later, he got up from his cushions and saw a plateful of wizened, rotten radishes and coagulated, dried-up milk. ‘What kind of a wife are you,’ he demanded of his long-suffering spouse (remember, folks, never marry a sage or a saint – it’s really far more trouble than it’s worth), ‘that you should serve me with rotten radishes and dried-up milk?’ His wife’s retort was to the point: ‘What kind of a sage are you that, after all that meditation, all you can think about is milk and radishes?’ And if there are lots of stories about Buddhist sages who, despite years of meditation, miss the point, there are also plenty of Buddhist stories about those without any virtuosity in meditation who get the point.
When I now think back to my early days as a meditator, it seems to me that, for a brief period at least, I had things back to front. Life, I used to think (and this is a confession, alas, so I feel a tinge of shame-facedness), was for meditation. But it seems to me now that exactly the opposite is true: meditation is for life. If sitting on your arse for years turns you into a humourless and tedious fuss-pot who frets over milk and radishes, it’s really not worth it. You’d be better off doing something else. Despite the current rush to find scientific evidence for the benefits of meditation, there is no reason to assume that meditation is always and unquestionably of benefit. It may well be that there are also potential harms – possible candidates for inclusion in the list might be: self-absorption; a growing inability to interact socially; the amplification of bizarre personal quirks and tics; over-sensitivity; preciousness; belief in one’s own inherent superiority; an increasingly disdainful attitude towards what some meditators like to call ‘everday life’…
At the very least, there is plenty of evidence that there is no necessary correlation between meditative virtuosity and virtuosity in living. There have been many skilled meditators who, when it comes to living, have again and again made a hash of things. The reason for this is perhaps relatively simple: if there are virtuosi in playing the violin and in the literary arts, if there are virtuosi of scientific understanding and of mathematics, if there are virtuosi in meditation and in philosophical subtlety, it may be that there simply are no virtuosi in the business of living, and there never have been. The task of living is too vast, our capacities are too limited, we are too much in the thrall of chance and uncertainty. We do as best we can.
So I’m not too repentent about my shambling meditative practice. It serves its purpose well enough for the time being. And if pressed to answer the question of what purpose it is that meditation actually does serve, I would have to say this: that in its attention to the strange and erratic functioning of the mind, it is one way of bringing home to me the fact that the dream of virtuosity in the business of living is just that: a dream.
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Lightness of Touch
Friday September 5, 2008
In one of my favourite quotes from the Tao Te Ching, the old layabout and sage, Lao Tzu writes that one should rule a large country the way one cooks a small fish. Too much poking, Ursula Le Guin says in her translation (if I remember rightly) spoils it.
Fortunately, perhaps, I am not ever likely to be in a position to be able to put this advice into practice, as it seems highly unlikely that I will be running for public office any time soon; but if we accept Plato’s suggestion that there is a parallel between the governing of a state and the governing of one’s own life, then perhaps Lao Tzu’s words have a wider applicability.
I have been thinking recently about lightness of touch as a necessary component of meditation and of ethics. The way that we think about ethics, very often, is in terms of a kind of heroic struggle for the good, an idea that reminds me of the songs that we used to sing at school about fighting the good fight with all our might. But I am not sure that ethics is a matter of this kind of heroic struggle at all.
Here, there is a lovely Buddhist story that says something, I think, about the necessity for lightness of touch, whether in ethics or in meditation. The story goes (and it is, of course, just a story…) that on the night of the Buddha’s awakening, he was assailed by the terrifying armies of Mara, the personification of death. Here’s a section of Ashvaghosha’s entertaining description of the encounter from Canto 13 of the Buddhacarita.
19 Having the faces of boars, fishes, horses, asses and camels, or the countenances of tigers, bears, lions and elephants, one-eyed, many-mouthed, three-headed, with pendulous bellies and speckled bellies;
20. Without knees of thighs, or with knees vast as pots, or armed with tusks or talons, or with skulls for faces, or with many bodies, or with half their faces broken off or with huge visages;
21. Ashy-grey in colour, tricked out with red spots, carrying ascetics’ staves, with hair smoke-coloured like a money’s hung round with garlands, with pendant ears like elephants, clad in skins or entirely naked;
22. With half their countenances white or half their bodies green; some also copper-coloured, smoke-coloured, tawny or black; some too with arms having an overgarment of snakes, or with ros of jangling bells at their girdles;
23. Tall as toddy-palms with grasping stakes, or of the the stature of children with projecting tusks, or with the faces of sheep and the eyes of birds, or with cat-faces and human bodies;
24 With dishevelled hair, or with topknots and half-shaven polls, clothed in red with disordered headdresses, with bristling faces and frowning visages, suckers of the vital essence and suckers of the mind.
Not a pretty bunch, in other words. Anyway, in certain versions of the story (although not in Ashvaghosha’s somewhat overwraught version) as Mara is throwing whole armies of demons at the Buddha, he demands of the seated sage what right he has to sit there beneath the Bodhi tree. In reply, the Buddha touches the ground lightly with his fingertips. And the barrage of missiles, arrows and burning coals that Mara and his hordes hurls turns into a shower of fragrant flowers.
The gesture of touching the earth – known in Buddhism as the bhumisparsha mudra – is a beautiful one. It is, for me, a gesture that responds to brutishness with subtlety, to sound and fury with quiet attention. And it is one that undercuts the idea that ethics and meditation (and the image seems to be one that says something about both) are a matter of heroic struggle.
Recently, I have been bearing Lao Tzu’s advice in mind as I meditate in the mornings. Meditate the way you would cook a small fish. Too much poking spoils it. It seems, as far as I can tell, to be excellent counsel. And perhaps, if it is possible to put aside what are often self-aggrandising stories of heroic struggle, it is good advice also when it comes to the curious business of how we might best go about the governance of our own lives.
