Good morning. Many of you have been consistently meditating for more than a year at least twice a week. I thought I would share some thoughts on what the Buddhists call “Path” to give you a little preview of coming attractions. Of course, your experience will be different than mine. But there are some common elements of contemplative practice that seem to run through most people’s experience.
The Beginning of the Path
First, let me set the stage. We all come to this moment in our lives with different backgrounds, memories, and relationships to those pasts. Most of us have had difficult, painful, awful experiences. All of us have suffered. All of us, even if just for a moment, have felt joy, experienced love, seen beauty.
At this moment, we all have a lot going on. We have others in our lives who we worry about, think about, want to help. There are people in our lives we just can’t stand and try to avoid. We worry about money - do I have enough? did I get ripped off? can I get more? We have concerns about our health, our society, our planet. And we bounce off each other in real time, creating all these unexpected interactions. “What did she mean when she looked at me like that?” Um... nothing?
Or we are isolated and somewhat disconnected but still living with this rich internal life. We have a lot going on.
At the start of “The Path” meditation usually feels like another thing to do. It’s another activity on a long checklist. When we don’t do it we feel guilty or rebellious. When we do it, you feel the satisfaction of checking it off the list, and also the benefits of a sort-of pause in our normal stream of events. But then we get on with other To-Do items.
There is something pulling us back to meditation, but we aren’t sure what it is. We have tried all these other techniques for dealing with our life situation. There’s a glimmer of hope maybe that this approach of not-doing could work better. But it’s hard to go more than an inch deep when we are spending so little time on meditation.
It’s just like anything else. If you read Tolstoy for 10 minutes a day three days a week, you can still enjoy it and appreciate it, but it’s hard to go very deep. And your life experience is WAAAY more nuanced than anything Tolstoy wrote.
The end of the beginning of the path is when you do your first weekend retreat. Whether it’s yoga or sitting or Aikido, something changes inside when you spend a day doing contemplative practices, go to sleep, wake up and do it again. Even if you can’t point to anything specific, your mind is changed from that much practice.
I do not recommend going into that experience cold, so if you want to do a weekend retreat, talk with one of us and we’ll help put together a little pre-retreat training program so you enjoy the weekend more.
Another marker of the end of the beginning of the path is that you experience a moment of peace while practicing. Even just for a moment, the waterfall of thoughts pause and you see your world clearly. The same place where you’ve been sitting takes on a different light. Or you get up to go about your day but things look different. You stop while taking out the trash to look at the light on the staircase.
I think we’ve all had one or both of those experiences, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here today.
The Middle of the Path: Working with Others
The middle of the path is about working with others. It’s about recognizing other beings in ourselves and ourselves in other beings. This sounds obvious - we all do this to some extent already of course. But the middle of the path, the bulk of it, is about bringing all the complexity, joy, pain and annoyance of other people into our own journey.
In other words, it’s about understanding and over time starting to dissolve this separateness between our own personal experience and that of “other”. It’s seeing and experiencing the truth that while the pain I feel is not exactly like the pain you feel, it’s not totally different either - we share common experiences there and in other ways too.
How do you do that? Well meditation practice is interesting here because it’s not about studying from a disinterested point of view or an objective removed perspective. It’s not about gathering a statistically significant sample size in a double blind experiment. The meditation process is about plumbing our own depths of experience, really going into them. Being willing to sit with our our true feelings of pain, pleasure, boredom, everything. And then emerging from that practice to relate with the world from that deeper, more unified perspective.
All the things that we used to think of as other To-Do items - go to work, do the dishes, pick up the kids, deal with my boss, in the middle of the path, those things start to become part of the path itself. Meditation practice begins to bleed into “normal” life. That moment of clarity you had at the end of the beginning happens again and again, sometimes in intense situations where it’s really helpful. I remember being in a huge argument with my wife when my whole internal storyline of being right just dissolved in front of me. I was suddenly able to just apologize for being a jerk. She didn’t see that coming I assure you. Frankly neither did I.
In the middle part of the path, we start to gather tools for our toolbox. We learn new meditation practices, we read books about meditation that help us understand the world in different ways. We also forget to practice, space out, drop out, get disillusioned, feel betrayed, all these intense and painful things. It’s a long and winding road.
But over the years we do change. We do become more open, more connected, more caring, and more effective.
The End of the Path: Dissolution and Return
There are lots of hot takes on the end of the path, but I haven’t been there, so I won’t comment except for the one thing I do know... we die.
At the end of the path, we die. Our body dissolves, our thinking mind dissolves. We return to complete union with the world. They say that this dissolution is scary for us, because we are so used to feeling separate. We aren’t separate, we never were separate, but we think we are. So when, in death, it becomes unavoidably obvious that we are not separate, we can get really scared. The more that we’ve connected in life, I believe, the less strange completely dissolving into death will feel.
What’s left over at the end of the path is the impact we’ve had on others. The rock has disappeared beneath the surface of the pond, but the ripples are still spreading out in the water.
I don’t have a big wrap-up paragraph yet. I’m still working on this but I wanted to share it now because you all were really the inspiration. It’s 9:30 now so if you have to go, I hope you have a good morning and day. And if you’d like to stay and discuss, that would be wonderful.
[dedication of merit]