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Meditation Without Prior Knowledge
Robert Rabbin
“No one’s mouth is big enough to say the whole thing.”
— Alan Watts
The essence of meditation cannot be articulated. We can’t get at it through
words. We must encounter meditation directly, without any ideas about it,
without any prior knowledge. We must investigate meditation for ourselves, we
must find out through our own effort and inquiry.
We may discover that meditation can’t be known in the way we know about
mathematical formulas, or about our cars and home alarm systems. We may find
that our ideas and opinions, our scholarship and knowledge about meditation,
miss the mark.
If we simply repeat what we have read or heard, we’ll just be developing other
people’s ideas. If we refer to previous experience, we’ll be remembering past
moments, and miss this moment, as we so often do. Maybe we have to eat
meditation in order to be fulfilled, instead of reading aloud from a menu that
has already been printed — even a menu written by an expert.
Here’s what my effort and inquiry reveal: In the beginning, meditation is a way
of focusing our attention on a single point — the breath, or a mantra, the image
of a deity, or the picture of one’s guru; we might try to see the space between
two thoughts. As we focus, we discover how many thoughts arise within our mind.
We find concentration difficult. We have to keep bringing our attention back to
the single point. As we restrain the mind’s restless wandering and jumping from
one thought to the next, we begin to see its true nature, just as when someone
thwarts us when we want to do something, we begin to experience what willfulness
is.
Every new meditation student says, “I can’t do this; I’m thinking about all
these other things.” Of course. Meditation shows us that, at a very basic level,
the nature of mind is nothing but thoughts about things, and thoughts about
thoughts. We see that our inner life is like living in a pinball machine,
careening from one post to another without any order or purpose. But as we
continue to focus the mind, something begins to happen. We don’t get carried
away as much. The thoughts and feelings persist, but we begin to see them, not
get lost in them. Another kind of perception, different than thought, slowly
emerges. This is awareness. With awareness, we begin to observe our thoughts
without being carried away by them. We can see that this awareness is different
than thinking. It’s a qualitatively different experience; awareness has a depth
and Silence to it.
As this awareness grows within us, we experience peace. Our chronic restlessness
subsides. A way of seeing and knowing, different from thinking, is aroused. We
might say it is the intuitive faculty, a capacity of perception that is holistic
and instantaneous. It is not fragmented and chaotic. Meditation is what helps us
to see the nature and origin of our thoughts and feelings. So, the first
revelation of meditation is that we notice the difference between thinking and
awareness. Meditation unfolds awareness.
Awareness is not an object and it can’t be known as an object. It simply is. How
do we know that it is? We know it intuitively, and this is what moves us to
begin to meditate in the first place. We sense that the tension and incoherence
of our thoughts is not what life is about, not what we are.
We intuit that there is a wellspring of clarity and peace, within us. We sense
that we are whole, not fragmented, and it is this feeling that prompts us to
meditate, to see directly what separates us from this wholeness. When turtles
are born on the shore, they crawl instinctively back to the sea. Intuitively we
know we need to return to our home, to the source of our life, because we know
the life of thought and image is not true. We know this when we encounter the
nature and origin of thought in meditation. We know that we are not our
thoughts, that thoughts occur within us, as clouds appear in the sky.
We all know the subtle promptings of our longing to return home, to experience
the endless clarity of own essence. Who hasn’t stared out the window and
searched the sky for an answer, for a moment of peace? In that moment we are
refreshed by the wholeness of the sky, which embraces everything. Our breathing
becomes deeper. Our thoughts become quiet. This happens every day, if only for a
moment — but that moment is enough to show us the way home. We sense there is a
sky of peace and clarity within our own self.
Sitting outside on a beautiful day, we listen to the wind moving through the
eucalyptus leaves and we can almost hear the clouds moving overhead, the fog
starting to come over the hills. We can hear the hummingbirds in the background,
the bees swimming from one flower to the next; we can hear all of this going on.
We can hear the little finches pecking at the birdseed and the barking of a
distant dog. We have to become very still to be able to see and hear and sense
all of this subtlety. This stillness is also meditation. The subtle music of
life, in order to be perceived, requires a serenity of mind. We perceive the
subtlety of life, not with thoughts, but with awareness. When we begin to see
with subtlety, we begin to sense a pervasive presence about which nothing can be
thought. When we try to know it, it recedes; when we simply allow it to be, it
emerges. The pervasive presence we intuit in stillness is Silence. Silence and
awareness are the same thing.
We cultivate inner Silence through meditation. Silence is a subtlety of
perception, which is not a function of sense perceptions or of thought, and the
projections of thought. Everything appears as it is, without representation, in
its essence. Our inner reality becomes a vast sky, in which things as they are
appear and disappear. There are no unfulfilled desires, no clinging, no
struggling, no persistent effort. There’s simply an opening in which this subtle
pervasive presence emerges.
At this stage, we are not meditating as a practice. Meditation is occurring as a
fact of being. Now, the awareness that has been freed from thinking is evident.
It is not your awareness, nor is it mine. It is, and it is whole. Like the sky,
awareness embraces all, including the mind and the thoughts of the mind.
Meditation as a fact of being is not a state of mind. It is beyond a state,
because no one can enter it and no one can leave it. It is known in Silence. It
does not belong to anyone. Silence does not refer to an absence of speaking or
of noise; it does not refer to a suppression of thoughts. Silence is what we
return to as turtles return to the sea. It is our source. It is who we are.
Silence is a release of all self-centered concern, of thinking, of identifying
with one thing or another.
We say “Silence” because nothing can be said about it, just as we can’t ever go
to sleep while we are thinking about sleep. We can’t objectify sleep; we can
only enter it. Silence is entered through a release of self-centered thinking.
Meditation can never be known, it can never be an object of anyone’s knowing, it
can never be an object of anyone’s experience. And so the truth can only be
known in Silence, where there is no image, no knower, and no experiencer —
nothing but Silence.
Meditation is first a practice that helps us to see the nature and origin of
thoughts. Then we begin to perceive in Silence, without thoughts and symbols and
images. Then meditation becomes a fact of existence, referring to the wholeness
of life, the totality of life. Nothing is excluded. Nothing is higher, or lower.
Life, is. We all belong to it. We can see this directly for ourselves. Now the
question must be asked, “If we see that we are this wholeness, how do we become
partial and separate to begin with?”
The answer to this question is another gift of meditation. Meditation allows us
to see the separation as it happens. The separation occurs in a moment of
inattention. It is these moments of inattention that we struggle with as we
begin our meditation practice. The separation occurs when our awareness does not
notice thoughts, but merges into them and becomes them. We can see this directly
for ourselves.
How many times have we gotten up from our chair in the living room to get
something from the kitchen? As we start the journey of a few feet, something
else occurs to us. Maybe we remember the upstairs light needs to be turned off.
Maybe we remember a friend we were supposed to call, and head off to the phone.
Something else grabs our attention. This happens to all of us. Sometimes we
never even make it to the kitchen; we become sidetracked on a journey of a few
feet. This is the cause of separation: becoming lost in thoughts and mental
impulses. We quite simply forget who we are. In a way, we are hypnotized by the
melody of thoughts and our habit of giving our attention to objects. We forget
we are awareness. We think we are a thought, image, or object within
awareness.
We have all had the experience of lying in bed in the morning, not quite
sleeping and not quite awake, just sort of hovering. In this state we are aware,
but not in a self-centered way. There is simply a noticing of processes and
objects. We see the cat’s paw strike at the curtain; we see the curtain move. We
notice particles of dust as they float brightly in the air. We hear sounds both
close and far. We feel the weight of the blanket on a body. Our body? Not yet.
It is just a body with a blanket over it. We continue to notice without
excessive labeling and categorizing. We do not yet create separation by
referring what we observe to an observer. There is just observing. The presence
about which we were speaking a moment ago is there in the morning, too. This
presence is like a breath that seeps into and through everything. It’s as though
the processes and objects are held by this presence. It doesn’t belong to
anyone. It just is.
Now, suddenly, something else begins to move. It, too, is a process, but we
don’t notice this process, we become lost in it. What is this process that
happens every morning about which we are unaware? Memory. Suddenly, memory
appears. When memory appears, self-centeredness appears too. The memory is ours.
Suddenly, a body becomes my body. Thoughts become my thoughts.
Rather than noticing thoughts, I react to my thoughts. Now, I leap from
bed, full of me and everything I think I am, as well as everything I think I’m
not. We have become partial and separate through a moment of inattention. There
it is. We can actually observe the process of creating the separate self. We can
actually observe the way we remember my body, my room. Slowly the
concerns of yesterday are carried forward to today through psychological memory.
It’s not that they’re necessarily real or self-sustaining.
Every morning we jump-start the car of separation, and we can actually see how
we do it. We jump-start the battery of identifying with thought and memory and
objects through inattention and habit. On some mornings, we can even see how
much effort it takes to create separation from wholeness. We have to
painstakingly rebuild, piece by piece, the whole structure of our life, and
remember the things that we are supposed to worry about, the things that we
wanted, the people we like and don’t like. Sometimes we don’t remember our name.
We have to search long and hard in the files of habitual inattention to become
partial. It isn’t natural. It’s fabricated. This is the separation that
meditation helps us see as it occurs.
We can’t become whole, we already are whole. Meditation is simply the seeing of
how we fabricate separation. We don’t attain anything through meditation.
Meditation does not belong to anyone, nor can it benefit anyone. Meditation
reveals the illusion of separation and all of the loneliness and sadness and
fear that come with that life. Everything is seen for what it is. Meditation
breaks our fascination with the thundering images of the mind. We come to see
what those images are and how they come into being. We see this as meditation
ripens. And we see how all of the effort associated with self-centeredness is so
unnecessary and destructive.
Meditation as an expression of our natural state of wholeness of being occurs
through a spontaneous release of the habitual fascination with thoughts, images,
and objects. We can’t do this directly, because the one that wants to give up is
also an image. If we try that, and certainly we have tried that, we end up with
an image of “not me.” In this way, we’re like children who continue to argue
their innocence, even when caught red-handed. So, how do we get from meditation
as a practice, which we do, to meditation as a fact, which no one can do?
J. Krishnamurti said, “You can only sit by the window and wait for the breeze to
blow in.” We can sit by the window. If it’s closed, we can open it. We can be
patient and wait. We can pay attention. By doing this, we put ourselves in
proximity to this breeze of Silence.
We want that Silence and move towards it spontaneously. What we create in our
lives through self-centeredness is never enough. No matter how much a person
achieves or experiences or possesses, still we are not whole, and we know it. So
we abandon everything to dissolve our separation in sleep; we leave the
fragmentation of our self-centered waking state for at least that semblance of
wholeness that we find in sleep. But what we most want is to have the Silence of
our essence free us from our own images.
Without meditation, we become entrapped by images. We see only a single wave; we
don’t see the whole ocean. With meditation, we see that the waves are
expressions of the ocean. The ocean is the larger reality, the source of the
waves that we see as we stand on the seashore. This is what we see in Silence.
We see the background of awareness from which all things manifest and into which
all things finally merge. Until Silence claims us we are so hypnotically fixated
on each wave that we don’t even see the ocean. Silence simply brings the ocean
into view, so we say, “Oh, this little wave is not something in and of itself.
It is not enduring; it is simply a momentary creative expression of something
bigger.”
That presence, the ocean, is beautiful and pulsing with love. Diving into that
ocean is like falling in love with all things. It is not possessive love. It is
not dependant love. It’s simply a quality of that presence that emerges in
Silence. The actual gift of meditation is the opening into the stream of life as
it truly is, before form, unknowable as an object by the mind, full of beauty,
full of peace, full of love. That’s the actual gift of meditation.
And that’s why people intuitively move towards that, because no one will ever be
fulfilled unless they return to this source. We’ve forgotten about this. If we
would just sit quietly by the open window for a few minutes each day, we would
remember who we are. We have been paying attention to the waves of the mind. We
need to see the ocean.
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