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Question of the Month  |
I'm trying to figure out
what else I can say
that I didn't say yesterday
that sounds profound to you
without actually answering
your question.
- George W. Bush, 7.19.05
Once a month, Dean responds to a question on meditation, awareness practice, spiritual books and concepts, or any other topic related to the attempt to live a more enlightened life. Please submit your question to deansluyter@yahoo.com with "Question of the Month" in the Subject line.
MAY 2008: IS THE PRESENT PERFECT?
QUESTION: I loved the video you featured in last month's question, about Dr. Jill Taylor, the brain scientist who suffered a stroke and experienced (among other things) feeling so large and light that she didn't know how she would ever fit back in her body. I would love to have that experience (not the stroke of course). But I guess that by seeking that experience, I won't get it right? Because the point of sitting is to sit, not to try to feel any certain way. But here's my real question, an idea I've been struggling with, and would so appreciate your thoughts. I understand the idea that the present moment is all there is. I understand that we can only ever be happy in the present moment and that our constant focus on the past and future causes us to miss all the joy of the present moment. What I don't get it the idea that the present moment is perfect. I can be (or try to be) fully present in any given moment, but if it happens to be in a moment at 3 a.m., when one of my kids is screaming and I'm exhausted, it's hard for me to understand in what way that moment is perfect. I know it's the only moment I have, but I don't know how to see it as perfect.
It's not the idea of the moment being perfect, but the experience. And it's exactly the experience you're already growing into through your sitting practice. You're probably already noticing at least occasional glimpses of things being somehow, let's say, lighter - the circumstances of kids, work, etc., are the same, but they impinge less heavily on your awareness. Now, if you can imagine that lightening process extrapolated to the nth degree, you would wind up with something like Dr. Taylor's "too large and light to fit into the body" experience. One traditional metaphor for this process compares the impact of various traumas, be it screaming kids, job pressures, romantic breakups, or whatever, to a line being carved in rock: the impression is very deep and stays there for a long, long time. As we progress in our practice, it becomes more like carving a line in water: the impression is still there, but closes up quickly. And when we've gone beyond practice, to the enlightened state, it's like drawing a line in air: no impression at all.
Another way to think of this is in terms of Dr. Taylor's left brain / right brain explanation. The analytical left brain sees events not only in terms of past and future, as you've indicated, but also in terms of good or bad, depending on how closely they correspond to our preferences. Those preferences are not ultimately reality, but a kind of overlay that the left brain superimposes upon reality. ("There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet) Our judgments of good and bad can change in time, so that now you probably enjoy red wine more and cotton candy less than you did when you were six. Recently I met with one of the meditation groups I lead, and there was a young guy there who was attending his first session. I talked about how we usually feel good when we make it through a green light and bad when we have to sit at the red light, straining away at mentally trying to make it hurry up and turn green, and how instead we could just sit, breathe, and enjoy being at the red. At the next session he came back and reported that all week he'd been enjoying the red lights so much that he felt disappointed when he hit one on the green!
Of course, the screaming kid at 3 a.m. is a tougher test than a red light; that's on the Advanced Placement level. We have to start on the kindergarten level with red lights while we're driving, noisy lawnmowers while we're meditating, and people ahead of us in line at the supermarket spending five minutes having a problem about the price of bananas. In each case, we can notice whatever resistance might bubble up in us, not trying to repress it but recognizing it as merely based on a "good" v. "bad" judgment, and gently relax our grip on that judgment, just neutrally letting the lawnmower (or whatever it is) be there (which of course it's going to do whether we "let" it or not). Gradually this way of "just being" with things, of being OK with them, percolates into all the warp and woof of ordinary daily experience. As the mind becomes more and more familiar and at home with this way of just being, of resting in the essential OK-ness of every moment just as it is, it can find it in more and more challenging circumstances, such as the A.P. level of the crying kid and eventually the post-graduate level of one's own inevitable deterioration and death. I've had the privilege of watching a couple of people pass this final exam with an A.
So your question really goes to the heart of the matter. This is what enlightenment is: not some new kind of exotic, extraordinary experience, but the perpetual, spontaneous cognition of the infinite OK-ness of ordinary experience, just as it is. "Good" and "bad" things still happen, and the enlightened person still chooses accordingly: she doesn't become an apathetic lump who shrugs off the problems of her friends and the world and doesn't care whether she eats a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of gravel. But all those ostensibly good and bad experiences occur within our own endlessly OK awareness, like birds flying in a sky that is endlessly vast. There's room for countless birds, and they never scar the sky.