Meditations on Meditating

Just like when Leonard Cohen spoke of “the staggering account of the sermon on the mount, which I don’t pretend to understand at all,” it’s probably foolish to think that we can understand meditation, because that would mean understanding the structure and the frame of our own being, the one doing the meditating. Can we, for instance, actually watch our own thoughts in real time? No more than we can have the pleasure of standing in our own shadow. What we can do is shut up and breathe – or at least try.

 But we can also try to notice some other things. I see that in order to concentrate enough to be present in any way, the agitated parts of me have to settle down. Concentration means not much more than doing one thing at a time. Under the conscious surface of me, there are many disconnected and agitated parts and pieces, agitated for different reasons, often not even aware of one other, or what day it is.

 In order for ‘me’ to concentrate, these parts have to contrive a way to quell their fears and rages, and be at ease. In order for them to have a chance to do that, the thing I like to call “I” has to connect with them and soothe them. The me who can do that will have a sense of self that is confident enough to address all the broken off bits of me, the shrapnel of my life, so they can hear and see, and finally be at ease. In order to have that confidence, this Me Central needs to genuinely know it has the information that somehow, in some mysterious way, all is well. “I accept and honour all my resistances,” says Me Central, with a knowing like T.S. Eliot’s knowing when he says:

 And all shall be well

And all manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knots of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

 The corrosive element of fire and the fiery delicacy of the rose become “one” in some sacred space unapproachable by our normal thinking and our normal laws of what is real, and in that space alone do we really know that all will be well. A space where, paradoxically enough, words can turn into other things, such as flesh, or so we are told. Our calming comes from a oneness that nothing can supplant. I’m sure people have been there through meditation, though, speaking purely for myself, I’ve never been at a meditation retreat long enough to see it. We can, I would say, reach it more easily through a psychedelically enhanced meditation, a chemically imposed mystical experience. Even so, this may still be a thing we spend a lifetime honourably pursuing, glimpsing occasionally in whatever way, while maddeningly, encouragingly, somewhere inside us we can sometimes notice that we know that the “all-is-well-ness” is always there. Though the quest is not quite redeemable, the only mistake is giving up. There is an “I” that can properly say:

 I wish soothing to you.

I wish peace for you

I wish you the joy you should always be having.

I wish you forgiveness

I wish you encounters with the sacred,

The source of all comfort,

Which can be known and deciphered

From somewhere deep inside you.

May we reach out to the divine together,

There is a process that wants to happen,

We are here to do nothing more than

“Kneel where prayer has been valid.”

 Our trouble – my trouble at least – is that prayer is no longer a simple matter. We have what Eliot calls, “the unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,” and in that condition, who exactly are we to pray to? Should our prayer resemble church prayers, written in the florid language of court flattery, trying to coax some special favours out of a monarch in the sky? That won’t work, nor will praying to the cold, dead science of a cold, dead universe. If we can just get a notion of that sacred space where – as we now remember, the trip being over – all is already well. Then we may deliberately wish for what we want and our hearts, trapped in the days long past, may finally start to blossom.

 Eliot puts it like this:

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew tree)

The life of significant soil.

 That “temporal reversion” may be our death, but surely not the death of the body, since the soil that kind of death contributes to is not particularly “significant”; instead then, a death where the significant soil can grow things beyond our current imagining. We must die to beauty. In meditation, since there isn’t much else to do there anyway, maybe we can call on ourselves to breathe our way to a kind of dying, to a death that is not horror or even pain in the usual sense, but is, in Shakespeare’s words now, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” The transmutation of the rose.