“Sometimes it is the oddest things that stick in the mind. I remember sitting there one evening with a group of other novice meditators, struggling to get comfortable, sitting cross-legged on my cushion and looking down at the bare wall in front of me in the standard Zen fashion, when he said that our minds should be so calm that we would hear a woodlouse crawling across the floor. Somehow this stuck with me and I wanted to be able to hear that woodlouse. I suppose the idea made me realize how much turmoil there was in my mind. There was no silence in which to hear such a tiny noise. A couple of years later I went on my first retreat at John’s farmhouse in mid Wales.
Maenllwyd is a tiny, solid, stone house, nestling in a little cwm or valley, just below the edge of the moor. All around it the sheep graze among the grey rocks and heather, chomping and bleating. Reached by a few miles of rough track meandering between the fields, the house has no electricity, no gas, no phone, and not even mobile phone reception. It is cold there, even in summer, the outlook is bleak, and the nearest tiny village is miles away down the valley.
The house itself is full of ancient furniture, decorated with sheep skulls and bones, lit by oil lamps, and heated by an ancient kitchen range that belches out smoke when the wind is in the wrong direction. Meals are eaten in silence in what was once a small barn, and retreatants sleep on wooden platforms above. Across the rough, unpaved farmyard with its mud and sheep pens, is another barn now converted into a meditation hall.
When I went on my first retreat in 1982, the pipes all froze, the roof was in urgent need of repair, and the wind blew right through the barn where we slept. Owls flew in, and the bats roosted just above us. That January the snow was fifteen feet deep down in the valley and a snowplough had cut through just as far as the nearest farm below. It was there that we left our cars and trudged up through the fields. I was given a walking stick to help me, for I was eight months pregnant with my first child, Emily.
We meditated for many hours each day, in half-hour sessions with brief breaks in between, huddled in blankets in the subzero house with our breaths visibly steaming in the cold air. We longed for the work periods when you could get warm splitting wood, or beating carpets, or even chopping vegetables in the kitchen near the range. I got the chance I had wanted – to get away and contemplate myself and my life before motherhood. But I also got far more than I had bargained for. Perhaps I expected that, with a whole week of practice, meditation would become easy and I’d be quickly transformed into a superior person or even become enlightened. Instead, the long hours of sitting exposed the horrible mess in my mind; the visions, the fears, the anger and resentment, the guilt, the worries and the perplexity.
Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for, and that once you arrive you will realize there was nowhere to go in the first place; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.
John used to say ‘Let it come. Let it be. Let it go.’ This roughly means – when any ideas or feelings or troubles come along in meditation, don’t fight them, don’t engage with them, don’t push them away or hang onto them, just go through this same gentle process again and again: let them arise in the mind, let them be whatever they are without elaboration, and let them go in their own time. Then they cause you no trouble and the mind stays still – however beautiful or horrible they are.
Paying attention and letting go sounds so simple and so easy. It is neither, as I quickly discovered. Hour after hour we retreatants sat there on our cushions trying to calm the mind; letting go and paying attention. Again and again my mind would slip to thoughts about the past or the future; to imaginary conversations with other people; to rerunning something I had done to make it seem better; to planning how to make amends for actions that I felt bad about. ‘Let it go …’. Again and again, I would slip into half-sleep and the cracks in the plaster on the ancient wall in front of me would turn into gruesome visions of horror and war and torture and suffering; over and over, again and again. ‘Let it be …’. One day John said ‘Remember there is only you and the wall, and the wall isn’t doing it.’
Mindfulness is usually described as ‘being in the present moment’. When I first heard of this idea, at a conference on Buddhism and psychology, I thought it very strange because surely I was already in the present moment wasn’t I? Where else could I be? But then I started asking myself ‘Am I in the present moment now?’ and noticed something very odd: the answer was always ‘yes’ but I got the peculiar feeling that perhaps a moment ago I had not been present at all. It was a bit like waking up. But if so, from what?
I wondered whether trying to stay present for longer would bring about some kind of continuity from moment to moment. For the sense of continuity, which I had taken for granted without even thinking about it, seemed threatened by this suspicion that I was frequently not there at all. And where was I if not here? Was ordinary life a kind of dream you could wake up from? All sorts of questions poured up and I had no idea what to do with them.
I was also acutely aware of my own troubled mind. At that time we were living in Germany where my husband was working while I stayed at home with our two small children, and tried to learn German. I longed to find time on my own to write. I felt isolated, unhappy and, above all, unreal. Nothing seemed alive or vibrant. Our flat in the picturesque town of Tübingen looked out over a beautiful park and I used to stare at the trees, pinching myself to try to make them seem real, feeling guilty for not appreciating them. I loathed this unreality. I felt I was not truly there at all. Certainly I was not ‘in the present moment’.
So when I heard about mindfulness, I decided, right there at the conference, to try it. ‘OK’ I thought to myself ‘how long shall I try it for … an hour? a day?’ But that would be to miss the point. If I were to be truly in the present moment I could only do it now, and then now, and then now. So I began.
The effect was startling – and then frightening. Being in the present moment, which had seemed so uncontroversial in prospect, was terrifying in practice. It meant giving up so much – in fact practically everything. It meant that I was not to think about the next moment, not to dwell on what I had just done, not to think about what I might have said instead, not to imagine a conversation that I might have later, not to look forward to lunch, not to look forward to weekends, or holidays or … anything. But the idea had grabbed me and I kept doing it. In fact I kept doing it for seven weeks.
Most of this process seemed to be about giving up or letting go. As my mind slipped from the world in front of me to thoughts about the past or the future, a little voice inside would say ‘Come back to the present’, or ‘Be here now’, or ‘Let it go’. I remembered John’s saying ‘Let it come. Let it be. Let it go.’ Now I was doing this for real, not just in sitting meditation or on retreat, but in every moment of every day. Everything had to be let go of, apart from whatever was right there, arising in the present moment. I found myself saying ‘Let it …’ or just ‘Le …’ and staying fully present, right here.
There is something truly awful about having to let go of so much. Sometimes in bed at night I just wanted to give in – to indulge in some easy sexual fantasy, or pleasant speculation – but the little voice kept going, ‘Le…’. Then odd things began to happen. First of all, I had assumed (without much thinking about it) that all those endless thoughts about what I had just done and what I had to do next were necessary for living my complicated life. Now I found they were not. I was amazed at just how much mental energy I had been using up when so little is required. To take a simple example, I found that I could go through a series of thoughts such as ‘I think I’ll make a butter bean casserole for supper. I’ve got tomatoes and carrots indoors but I must remember to go out and pick some broccoli before dark’ in a flash, and then drop it, and still remember to go and get the broccoli later on. Why had I been wasting so much effort before?
Another oddity was to realize that the present moment is always all right. This bizarre, but liberating, notion crept up on me gradually. Time and again I noticed that all my troubles lay in the thoughts I was letting go of – not in the immediate situation. Even if the immediate situation was a difficult one, the difficulties almost always concerned the past or the future. For example, I was annoyed that, yet again, the heating oil had run out and I was the one who had to take the can three flights down to the cellar to fetch more, but the steps in front of me and the sight of my feet climbing the stairs were fine. I might be bored and anxious trying to fit in with the other kindergarten Mums but the sounds of children playing, and the kindergarten door in front of me were fine. I might be rushing in a panic for a bus, worrying what would happen and how to apologize if I missed it, but the running feet and scenes flashing by were fine…”
~ Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness (formerly Ten Zen Questions) Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1951) is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memes, evolutionary theory, psychology, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book 'The Meme Machine'. Blackmore is spiritual, an atheist, a humanist and a practitioner of Zen, although she identifies herself as "not a Buddhist" because she is not prepared to go along with any dogma. Blackmore has written critically about both the flaws and redeeming qualities of religion, having said:
‘All kinds of infectious memes thrive in religions, in spite of being false, such as the idea of a creator god, virgin births, the subservience of women, transubstantiation, and many more. In the major religions, they are backed up by admonitions to have faith not doubt, and by untestable but ferocious rewards and punishments....most religions include at least two aspects which I would be sorry to lose. First is the truths that many contain in their mystical or spiritual traditions; including insights into the nature of self, time and impermanence [...] The other is the rituals that we humans seem to need, marking such events as birth, death, and celebrations. Humanism provides a non-religious alternative and I have found the few such ceremonies I have attended to be a refreshing change from the Christian ones of my upbringing. I am also glad that these ceremonies allow for an eclectic mixture of songs, music and words. In spite of my lack of belief I still enjoy the ancient hymns of my childhood and I know others do too. We can and should build on our traditions rather than throwing out everything along with our childish beliefs.’
On 16 September 2010, Blackmore wrote in The Guardian that she no longer refers to religion simply as a "virus of the mind", "unless we twist the concept of a 'virus' to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply." Blackmore modified her position when she saw beneficial effects of religion, such as data correlating higher birth rates with the frequency of religious worship, and that "religious people can be more generous, and co-operate more in games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, and that priming with religious concepts and belief in a 'supernatural watcher' increase the effects".
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