At the only sandy ‘beach’ in Lower Park, a big group of parents and children frolic in the water. It’s a lazy summer afternoon and the temperature is over 100 degrees.
At One-Mile, where the creek has been dammed for decades to create a huge public swimming pool some 200 meters long and 50 meters wide, there are more people in the water and on the grass than I’ve ever seen.
Though the sun beats down relentlessly during the hottest part of the day, it’s tolerable in the shade beside the stream. Butterflies flit over the creek, and birds land on the rocks at mid-stream.
It takes the better part of an hour for meditation to ignite. During sittings in nature there is no goal. But there is intent – to quiet the mind, and cleanse the heart. After a few days of difficulty and distress, the body itself yearns for rebalancing and renewal.
Describing meditation is inherently an intellectual endeavor, but it’s not an intellectual process. There is no method by which the mind can awaken it, because all methods are devised by thought. So there is something of a contradiction in my writing about it. But hopefully the writer, and the reader, can see beyond the contradiction that language itself imposes.
So what is meditation? Why does one usually require nature to awaken it? Perhaps others don’t require the mirror of nature. But I’m sure that techniques and methods are inimical to the spontaneous combustion of meditation. And ‘group meditation’ is an oxymoron.
The mind-as-thought mediates experience with symbols. And words, images, and memories—the residue of experience—pile up in the mind and heart, clouding perception and corrupting feeling.
As we grow older, the accretion of experience—all the hurts, sorrows, unresolved conflicts, and unnecessary memories—grow and slowly shrink the mind and heart. These accretions, as much or more than poor diet, also affect the body, making it insensitive to inner and outer stimuli.
Therefore understanding and applying the art of meditation is as important as any other health maintenance practice. In a sense, meditation is inner hygiene.
But since any form of effort prevents the meditative state from happening, what can one do?
Take and make the time to do the most radical thing in this society — nothing. Simply let go and observe. Don’t watch your breath and all that other nonsense; just listen and watch what is, outwardly and inwardly.
Though all relationship is a mirror, nature is the best mirror. If one sits and is passively aware in a relatively quiet place where one isn’t likely to be disturbed, the senses soon become attuned to one’s surroundings.
Then, by allowing the same inclusive, undirected awareness to turn and watch thoughts and emotions as they arise, without judgment or interference (that is, without the watcher), they flow by and are emptied out.
This is the highest action of which a human being is capable, and it has nothing to do with discipline. That word, discipline normally means to force oneself to do something one doesn’t want to do for the sake of something supposedly greater thing that one wants to achieve.
Having negated the observer in passive awareness, which is quicker than thought, there is the insight that thought/emotion is a single stream. In attending to the stream without division or effort, the pollution of the past within us flows by and is cleaned out.
Space in the mind is the most important thing. Without it, there is only the continuity of thought, memory, and conditioning. Life becomes, as most people experience it, an unending series of thoughts strung together in an unbroken chain of memory. That way of living absolutely prevents freedom, and sinks one in the muck of the human past.
The deepest urge in the human being is for liberation. And however briefly, one is free of the polluted stream of content-consciousness in the unwilled action of meditation.
Duality does not exist in nature, only in the human mind. Anyone who has sat silently and alone under an open sky as the sun slides below the horizon and dusk descends over the land knows that life is a seamless movement. But because there has been so little insight into the evolution of thought, which can only separate, humans have made the world into an increasingly fragmented and desolate place.
Even so, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
Martin LeFevre
