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February 13, 2012
In
The Valley of the Shadow of Death, James Kugel writes
of his experience of being diagnosed with what was believed to
be a terminal cancer. As
he left the Doctor’s office, Kugel says he experienced a
striking difference in his state of mind.
. . . the background music suddenly stopped.
It had always been there, the music of daily life that’s
constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities;
and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence.
There you are, one little person, sitting in the late
summer sun, with only a few things left to do.
The background music of consciousness,
says Kugel, is always about the illusion of living “in infinite
time.” When that
illusion is shattered and the background music stops, we
suddenly come to feel very small.
Kugel says this is not “comparative smallness,” smallness
in relationship to anyone or anything else, including God, but
rather “absolute smallness
‒ that (usually fleeting)
sense one has of being no more than oneself, of fitting
physically inside one’s borders.”
As Proverbs 19:21 says:
“Many are the projects in a person’s mind, but the Lord’s
plan is the one that prevails.”
It is the fear of our own smallness that leads us to
imagine ourselves as much bigger than we are.
Our presence to Reality is compromised by our refusal of
our own smallness.
Dissociated in this way from reality and in service of the
illusion of self-aggrandizement , we make the world much smaller
than it is and put our plans and projects at its center.
Proverbs 16:1 teaches:
“A person’s mind may make arrangements, but God has the
last word.” Re-orienting
ourselves to the truth of things requires of us that we
recognize and appropriate our smallness.
Kugel attests
that it is actually a rare experience for us to have an
awareness of “fitting physically inside” our physical borders.
Yet, if we are to become more present to the world and to
others, we must first recognize our own borders, our own bodies.
Self-presence is presence to all dimensions of reality.
It is our distance, our dissociation, from the “borders”
of our own bodies that results in our losing touch with the
world of which we are a part.
Tim Parks offers
another striking instance of our capacity to lose touch with our
physical embodiment. In his memoir Teach Us To Sit Still,
he describes how difficult awakening to our own physical borders
can be. This awareness is brought home to him during his
first-time participation in a meditation retreat, during which
he and others are to sit for several hours a day in a
cross-legged position on a cushion on the floor. For much of
the early going, Parks finds himself aware of nothing but the
pain in his legs, and he considers giving up on the retreat.
But that night
Parks experiences what he describes as “a gap between my
actually being here, in this remote valley, sharing a room with
two younger men (one snoring steadily), and some moment in the
past when, presumably, I had had my good reasons for signing up
for five days of Vipassana meditation.” Parks is recognizing
“the gap” between the reality of the present and his
expectations, plans, and ideas about it. In this gap he begins
to reinterpret the meaning of his experience. Brought up in a
rigorously evangelical Christian family, his initial
interpretation might be that he is there and experiencing this
pain for the sake of penance. But, he rejects this
interpretation as a habit of mind and stays awake, continuing
to be present to the gap and remaining in the moment in a stance
of unknowing. Eventually, the he remembers that he had come to
this retreat “looking for a showdown” with himself, to see if he
might discover and face down what he had been told was “a
profound contradiction in . . . [his] character”.
So Parks remains
continuing the work of the retreat. Late in the next day’s
session, after barely bearing through the pain for most of it,
he becomes aware of the presence of those meditating around him
and, supported by their presence, is able to stay seated to the
end of the session. Near the end of the meditation session, his
experience suddenly changes. He has a moment of awareness of
his breath as “a silver thread passing through transparent
water. All around me was dark, still, transparent water . . .
and this delicate, mercurial thread of air ran gleaming across
it, connecting me to some distant point beyond my ken.” For a
moment he experiences “his breath” as not belonging to him, not
“his breath” but part of something much larger. In awakening to
the gentle thread of his breath, he has come to experience it as
a small part of a Whole. As a result, Parks decides to stay at
the retreat.
The next day
begins with the teacher telling the students not to attach to
any pain that may arise. To focus on our sense of aversion to
pain is really to be attached to the pain. At that moment Parks
realizes that he is, indeed, attached to the pain he is
experiencing and that it is this experience of the pain in his
legs that constitutes the “grand showdown” with himself that he
had been aspiring to and so far “had been denied.” The grand
showdown did not take place over major psychic, emotional or
spiritual issues but rather over the very small concrete
experience of the pain in his legs. By ceasing to move away
from the pain, Parks has allowed that very pain (the borders of
his own body) to become the way by which, at least for a moment,
he experiences his actual place in the world, and becomes
present to the world in his unique (original) way, a way not
governed by his attachment to pleasure or aversion (his
thoughts) but by wisdom.
So also for us.
Every time we sit to meditate we are inviting a “grand showdown”
with ourselves, because we are letting go of the background
music. In as much as we “face down” our own smallness and the
death that awaits us, we also open ourselves up to what the
Gospel of John calls “eternal life,” the Wisdom of God in which
we, in our own small but significant way, participate.
