29 August 2006
Backward Teachings
St. Helena, CA
The very act of noticing is worth noticing. As I was sitting last night in the meditation session, I found myself working at not working, and that wasn’t working. I noticed frustration as I tried not to try to think about whatever. The koan:
The teaching is upside downfelt like a distraction, and then it didn’t. I began to turn all sorts of thoughts backwards and forwards in some strangely entertaining ways.
And then there were a few moments, just a few, when I noticed that my mind was wondering and wandering toward various images and memories, thoughts about relationships that are, that aren’t, that might become, that probably won’t become… and I was able to let go of them for a moment. In those rare instances I experienced some of that spaciousness that John speaks of. There was an inkling of freedom. It felt a bit like times when clouds part for a second and the blue sky emerges. At such times I often have the sense that the blue sky wasn’t there all along. As if the filters are somehow more real than what they are filtering. When the filter evaporates, or the frame loosens a bit, then I feel free until, of course, I put a new filter on the lens, or tighten the frame joints again.
John’s talk, as it turned out, mirrored parts of the conversation I had with Roger on the way to the dojo. We spoke of such things as how we keep from feeling the emotions of others, how uncertainty informs our lives, you know, the usual premeditative blather that I treasure.
At one point early in his talk John made mention of the fact that we humans not only have thoughts, but we have thoughts about thoughts. He called them reviews of our thoughts – judgments we make about the thoughts we experience. And he framed it fairly precisely. Rather than speaking as if we “have” thoughts, he asked this question: Who owns these thoughts of ours? And then he said something that really impacted me – anyone could think the thoughts I think. What a way to smash through the illusion of specialness. I was reminded of my first philosophy class in college when I encountered some thoughts that I thought were uniquely mine only to find out that these same thoughts were thought thousands of years ago by much clearer thinkers than me.
Then John used the metaphor of a thought as a coat that I can take off (or not), that I can let go of (or not). He even suggested that I do not have to hold on to the thought of who I am. That even that thought of who I am is an illusion – it is merely a thought of who I was. John also made a suggestion about how we can sit with these thoughts as they arrive in our consciousness. He said, “Whatever comes is something you can walk through.” Again, he reminded me of the spaciousness that comes with possibility, with experimenting with being different. Another way of saying how restful it can be to sit with not knowing.
Finally, he talked about the non-linearity of thoughts. How it is possible that when these chains just break, we are then free.
The morning after: I did a google search to find the origin of the koan John introduced. I couldn’t find it. Oddly enough, though, during my search I almost immediately came across this piece in a Christian publication entitled, Running to Prison.
Updated link:12.29.06