10/11/12

I am fascinated by the different qualities attention or awareness can adopt. My awareness can be limp, as when I am tired, lacking the needed energy to be able to focus on one thing with conviction, palpably falling short of any task for which I want to summon it. Or it can pool, which happens in a kind of lazy contemplation, like when I choose to gaze, to rest my attention upon, a bush or a butterfly or something. The object is usually something in nature, because art, created by humans, usually requires more of my consciousness, and can thus induce a deeper, more nuanced kind of contemplation. Instead of pooling, when I experience good art, my awareness is much more engaged, and more is demanded of it than in the facile interaction (if I can even call it an interaction) with the plant. Of course, different kinds of art induce different qualities of contemplation. With a painting as its object, my awareness does not just pool, it dives--not just into the painting itself, but deeper into the present moment. It feels as if the right now is enriched, becomes fuller; my perception of the room's texture changes. For a moment, I am reminded, emphatically, that the world and my experience of it is not just flat, mundane, and repetitive. It feels as if I were hanging out on the surface of the ocean, being lulled into the lazy assumption that this is all there is, and the painting brought me down just a few inches, below the surface, and I can already see hints that there is so much more going on.

In conversation, there is a distinct pleasure in observing the awarenesses of several people, let's say two, and the ways in which they may interact. In some conversations, one person may lead, set the tempo, and the other may follow, happily or not, in a supporting role. In others, the two awarenesses seem to be unsuccessfully trying to locate each other in a maze. And the barriers in that maze may be the result of cultural differences, emotional history, or they may simply be erected out or nervousness or insecurity. Some conversations, such as those between close friends who haven't seen each other in a good while, begin immediately with the two awarenesses seamlessly merging, each being expanded and colored by the other. There is a shared space between the two that can only be inhabited fully when the two are together, like a room that requires two different keys to open, and there is a joy at the opportunity to enter this space again. Perhaps more exciting is the process of creating this shared space, whether by lovers or best friends or even colleagues.

In meditation, depending on the kind, awareness can bore, like a prisoner escaping from his cell, it can tighten, it can hover, it can feed back upon itself. By this last one I mean the process of sitting in meditation and focusing one's awareness on being aware of its own awareness. Who is aware? What is aware of who is asking the question, "Who is aware?" How far back do you go? Or is there something already back there? Is there even a back?

Unchanging

This morning in meditation, I thought briefly about the unchanging. Although there are many different styles and methods of meditation, the meditator often aims at some form of stillness--not necessarily in the emotional sense of placidity or calm, but in the sense of unwavering presence. This may take the form of visual concentration (e.g. staring at a candle flame), or mental concentration (e.g. counting breaths), or holding one's attention taut yet open (as in Zen's "just sitting"). As I bring myself to the mat or chair every morning, I marvel at how difficult it is to be unchanging, still, and immovable, even for fifteen minutes. But this difficulty is a clear sign that the training I am undergoing is valuable.

Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

--last stanza of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (published 1943)

Planting

This summer has been a time of planting seeds. I spent much of the winter and the spring searching for a more convicting and clear sense of purpose--gradually learning to place my finger over the hose to produce a stronger stream, so to speak. I spent a lot of time feeling idle, lazy, and dull. But reading Alan Watts during that period helped me to trust the idleness, the sensations of looseness in my soul.

As spring was moving into summer, I was granted a glimpse of something truer and brighter, and I began to cultivate the motivation this brief vision inspired. It became clear that a higher degree of self-discipline and steady cultivation than I had previously set for myself was now required. So I recommitted myself to daily Zen meditation. I returned to practicing hatha yoga several times a week. I am also now in weekly speech therapy, challenging myself in relation to one of my most fundamental facts: my stutter. I have been writing in a longer, more academic form and cultivating my affinity for synthesizing the many perspectives I encounter in my reading. Finally, as I briefly discuss here, this movement of my soul has been mirrored in my own personal, tactile aesthetics--not only have my clothing tastes been changing, I have just recently adopted a hairstyle (dreadlocks) that require cultivation and patience for them to reach satisfying fruition.

Now, my focus is on sustaining and caring for these fragile seeds I have planted.

Spaciousness

One of the values of practicing hatha yoga, for me, is a deeper and richer understanding of the truism that the body and the mind are one. Since encountering this view a few years ago, I have held it to be intuitively true, but it has been through conscious practice of this particular form of body work that I have been able to flesh out my understanding.

One aspect that I pay much attention to is the experience of spaciousness. I was talking with a friend the other night about a theme that I return to constantly--the recognition of an external apprehension, especially one that evokes strong emotions within me, as an internal reality. I often think of this in terms of architecture, prompted by readings such as Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, and St. Teresa's Interior Castle. The example I used with my friend was the emotions I feel in a spacious, cavernous room, especially with very high ceilings. There is a distinct sense of freedom; a feeling that suddenly more time has been bestowed upon me; my mind feels more calm, capable, and secure. When I notice this connection between the space I am in and how mind and my soul feels, I try to contact, even momentarily, the "space" within me that corresponds, like Teresa journeying through the mansions of her soul. 

This process is not easy, and I believe it requires patience, focus, and commitment to find the internal equivalents of what is more easily apprehended outside of oneself. But what I am finding with working with my body is that this process can be conducted both through the mind and the body, for they are, I am assuming, two sides of the same coin, the total organism (though I am not ignoring the significant and necessary differences between these two sides--e.g. the ability of the mind, rather than the body, to take the perspective of someone else but myself). Of course, there are many body practices, each with their different aims, but something that I really connect with in hatha yoga is a focus on the very spaciousness I have described. I don't know very much about the technical intricacies of yoga, but it seems to me that one of the purposes of the poses is specifically stretching different areas of the body in order to create more space, slowly extending the walls, as it were, of the bodymind. And the more I practice, the more I appreciate the openness I experience in both my body and mind after a session.

I value this openness for several reasons, but one in particular is connected with another theme I have been pondering lately--tension, conflict, ambiguity, and ambivalence. In trying to get more in touch with how much of these sensations I constantly live with, I have realized that in order to learn from my ambivalences and internal conflicts, they need space to exist within me. If my bodymind feels cramped or constricted, it is more difficult for me to give the two sides of the conflict their proper due, or to accept their interdependence. For example, in my speech therapy I challenge myself to approach situations where I am afraid to speak, like on the telephone. There are two strong forces at play--the fear of embarrassment and the drive to conquer this fear, to challenge myself, to expand my capabilities. I notice that if I am feeling cramped or constricted, it is much more difficult to honor these two forces, and I feel the tension, which is in some ways necessary, much more acutely. But if I breathe deeper, open my body more, and introduce more spaciousness to mind via my body, I find that I am more capable of being aware of the tension, acknowledging and honoring its value, while also feeling stronger and more confident in my decisions. Another way to look at it is that the more closed and constricted my bodymind feels, the more easily I contract around the tension, especially the fear--my awareness becomes myopic, I cannot feel that I am anything else but this uncomfortable and disturbing fear. 

It is one my fundamental convictions that everything can be a teacher. In the example I am discussing, a more subtle element of the tension is my deep desire to treat fear as a teacher--in other words, to not be afraid of fear. Both David Deida and Alan Watts (especially in his Meaning of Happiness) talk about this a lot, and it has really helped me: in order to effect this attitude towards fear, one of respect and honor, even humility, rather than more fear, fleeing from this deep and fundamental emotion, space is useful. It is as if, in the presence of fear, there needs to be room for both teacher (the fear) and student (the part of me that wants to honor the fear). If there is not enough room, only one will be able to stay--and that is almost always the fear itself. 

Mirrors

I did a post over at my other blog.

"What the lover sees himself as wanting is his beloved. In this he is not mistaken, of course; the point concerns only why he loves her. That question the lover himself does not ask: immersed completely in the universe of love, its object is self-evidently its final cause. But if our object is to understand, the question 'why' obtrudes. The beloved attracts because she configurates the precise aperture through which being [the Infinite] can pour through to her lover in largest portions. Or change the image. Among innumerable pieces of quartz that lie strewn about the floor of a quarry it may chance that one alone bends the sun's rays at the exact angle that sends them toward my eyes. Doing so makes the quartz gleam. Yet it is the sun's light I see; were cloud to intervene, the quartz would turn to slag. So it goes: every emptiness we feel is 'being' eclipsed, all restlessness a flailing for the being that we need, all joy the evidence of being found."

--Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (1976)

That image with the quartz really gets me, especially the idea of bending light at the right angle (also the image of the aperture). It seems that what determines the precise "angle" which is necessary for a person to perceive the Infinite in the most powerful and arresting manner is the result of, really, one's entire history--culturally, historically, emotionally, psychologically, one's language, personal experiences, family, body, karma, anything. Everything affecting everything else to allow one to perceive through this particular piece of quartz the shining bliss of the Divine.