we are pluralities - meditation and the striving ego

It seems to me that we are not single entities, but pluralities, full of the voices and gestures of people we have known, the places we have lived, and then some. We are unfolding processes, and our present moment, our “now,” is arrived at from “them” and “then” and “there.”

During meditation, it is possible, even for an inconsistent lightweight of a meditator like me, to let go of the trains of thought that usually occupy the mind, and be in the present moment; to drop concepts and judgements, and just be. It doesn't last long before the scripts start running again, and I need to bring the mind back again to the present - often to the breath. 

This to and fro motion is, of course, what a meditation is, for most of us. The Balance is never static, as a tightrope walker might tell us.

For those moments of presentness,  them then and there fall away. When I return to my plural self, it is with more calmness and a better balance. Perhaps for a while I am more fully a plurality, and happy with it; I am not struggling so much to sustain one single "I," worrying about claiming things for my ego. It's easier then to accept change, uncertainty, provisionality.

Meditation, like exercise, can be addictive! 

Death and Billy Collins: two of his poems

We didn't have any Billy C at Trigonos, but we could well have done - e.g. "Picnic, Lightning," which is very much about the present moment.  On that slender excuse, I give you two poems you may or may not know, about death, just to make the point that Collins spends much attention on being right in the present moment of his life, the "drop running along the green leaf." Or as the New Yorker critic put it once, "What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment." Quite.

No Things

This love for the petty things,
part natural from the slow eye of childhood,
part literary affectation,

this attention to the morning flower
and later in the day to a fly
strolling along the rim of a wineglass - 

are we just avoiding the one true destiny,
when we do that? Averting our eyes from
Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker's coat?

The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the infinity of death,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wild flowers along the roadside

when we should be all alone in our rooms
throwing ourselves against the wall of life
and the opposite wall of death,

the door locked behind us
as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,
and the enigma of our origins?

What good is the firefly,
the drop running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

when ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbours?

banging away on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry. 

and

My Number

Is Death miles away from this house,
reaching for a widow in Cincinnati
or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
in British Columbia?

Is he too busy making arrangements,
tampering with air brakes,
scattering cancer cells like seeds,
loosening the wooden beams of roller-coasters

to bother with my hidden cottage
that visitors find so hard to find?

Or is he stepping from a black car
parked at the dark end of the lane,
shaking open the familiar cloak,
its hood raised like the head of a crow
and removing the scythe from the trunk?

Did you have any trouble with the directions?
I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.

(He also has a lovely sly sense of humour.)

Mindfulness retreat at Trigonos

This is Trigonos:

a study/retreat centre in Nantlle, Snowdonia. It's a wonderful place, well suited to a weekend silent retreat for people who have already taken the eight-week evening class in mindfulness meditation, or one of its variants.

I want to try to explain some of the things I have taken from the experience, in the hope that some of it may be useful to my legions of reader out there.

Trigonos is in a very beautiful dramatic setting,  and these pics only give you an idea, a sketch; they can't capture the particular atmosphere and ethos of the place. This is the view from the house down to the lake:

It is a place of calm, although silence and meditation can release powerful and unexpected feelings, of which more, you'll be delighted to hear, later. But Trigonos is a natural choice for a place to be, for at least some of the time, in the present moment.

One point for now: it was a non-speaking 36 hours, rather than a silent one, since one of the techniques is to place your attention in the ears, as it were- simply listening and accepting all you can hear, whether it's the birdsong outside (loved the honk from the geese and the raven's croak, as well as the blackbirds) or a distant dog, or a chainsaw, or the tummy of your meditation neighbour who is overdue for some lunch. 

Sarah Maitland's "The Book of Silence" is as much about solitude as silence, I felt when I read it. There is nothing lonely, nothing solitary, about communal silence, non-speaking, whether it's in the meditation gallery or during meal-times. It's very powerful.

More on this soon.

The Present Moment

Once you get into this stuff, little reminders pop up here and there....

This on a wall at Dartington Hall.

Over to you.

Nao, now - with thanks to Ruth Ozeki

I'm in the middle of a fascinating novel:

Its author:

Here is the teenage Nao Yatsutani remembering how, at the age of six or seven, she tried to grasp the present moment, as she is being driven in the family car:

..."and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now!... Now!....Now!...over and over, faster and faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. It's like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I'd start making it shorter...now, ow, oh, o until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing too.

Stuff like this can drive you crazy."

It seems to me that Nao is discovering for herself the great paradox about the present moment: it has no dimension, no length. You can't measure it, and if you try to conceptualise it, even, as she found out, to name it, it becomes then, something you did, in the past. So where and how is the present, now?

And yet I keep banging on about presentmomentness, about mindful meditation creating a state of mind which is not our stream of memories, or our anticipations, or our fantasies; a state of mind which is in the present.

But the present can't be captured in concepts, or measured. It is not a conceptual thing. It isn't a verbal construct, or amenable to such a thing. You have to do it to be in it, and you need to bring yourself gently and calmly back to it, during meditation, whenever your mind starts up is usual thought-train.

"The way that can be named is not the perfect way."

This ancient statement isn't obscurantist, or difficult for the sake of appearing superior, profound, secret to an elite - it's trying, like this post, to suggest via verbal concepts what isn't a matter of concepts.

It is a state of being.

There really is "no time like the present." 

Le Grand Balcon and Stephen Levine - mindfulness and dealing with the fear of death part 3

This blog is taking a week off to do a spot of mid-level walking in the French Alps, where I hope the weather will be as it is in this photo. (My walking group has no horse, however...)

There are quite possibly some slightly scary bits on the path, though, I'm assured, all perfectly safe if one isn't an idiot. H'mmm...

The book below has something interesting, nay, rewarding things to say about fear, and specifically the fear of death. It isn't a book about the last year of an individual life, i.e. it isn't a cancer log, or similar. It is about trying to live as if one had a year left to live. Which means of course, living in the present moment. So in a sense, it's "another" book about mindfulness, though it isn't a course book. Or maybe it is...

I'm still in the middle of it. It's clearly written. He believes that we have a spirit that moves on after death, but even if you don't believe that, it has much to recommend it.

A bientôt.

Dealing with the Fear of Death part 1

 I was asked recently why I started "doing" mindfulness. I answered by relating it to my work as a funeral celebrant. I've said often enough here and hereabouts that it is not depressing work, but it's Big Stuff. You find yourself staring at a lot of coffins in the course of a year.

I needed something to help me deal with what this magnificent poem by Thomas Hardy says, so painfully and so clearly:

               During Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs—

       He, she, all of them—yea,

       Treble and tenor and bass,

            And one to play;

      With the candles mooning each face. . . .

            Ah, no; the years O!

How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

       They clear the creeping moss—

       Elders and juniors—aye,

       Making the pathways neat

            And the garden gay;

       And they build a shady seat. . . .

            Ah, no; the years, the years,

See, the white storm-birds wing across.

       They are blithely breakfasting all—

       Men and maidens—yea,

       Under the summer tree,

            With a glimpse of the bay,

       While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .

            Ah, no; the years O!

And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

       They change to a high new house,

       He, she, all of them—aye,

       Clocks and carpets and chairs

          On the lawn all day,

       And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

          Ah, no; the years, the years

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Well, 'nuff said. I don't think we help ourselves by pretending that the fact of death, of human mortality, isn't a pretty definitive smack in the gob. 

But n.b. mindfulness isn't an avoidance strategy. Trying to avoid our awareness of mortality, which it seems to me our culture does a lot of, gives death enormous power over us. It makes the way we live deathly, morbid, in many ways that need, individually and collectively, to be dealt with.

Let's leave aside, for the moment, questions such as is it fear of death or of dying that troubles us; does it make any difference if you believe in an afterlife; is stoicism the best answer, etc etc. Let's just consider if mindfulness is a way of living with the fact that life ends, so that we are not obsessed by it, depressed by it or dominated by it.

Easy, I humbly or arrogantly submit. Yes, it does, in many interesting and diverse ways, too many, you'll be pleased to hear, to address in one post. 

So here's one way I've found that mindful meditation helps: if you spend part of your day living as far as possible in the present moment, you are not anticipating, planning, dreading, worrying. And when you have to return, after your meditation (or quiet time, or whatever you want to call it), you may find that you retain more calm and more acceptance as you go about your daily life. Your calm will be disrupted, of course. But you know (sweet secret!) that you can go back to that place whenever you choose. It's a place where death has less of a hold on you. It's the timeless present.

"Quick, now, here, now, always....."