Smiling at Life

After the meditation period yesterday, the facilitator had remarked about one of the participants, who was always smiling during meditation. He was saying that at times, even when we don’t feel like smiling, the act of simply smiling can be a radical way of transforming one’s experience. I started to reflect on what it means to just smile at a particular experience. What is the radical idea behind that, and how does it relate to meditation?

                There seem to be two distinct orientations toward meditation that I have experienced in my own sitting practice. The first has to do with somehow deploying these expedient sort of means to arouse specific energies. This is similar to the idea of ‘do something, and something else will follow.’ There is a second approach to meditation, and that involves seeing the totality of where one is and gently inquiring into it. What is that space, and what am I doing to resist that mental space? How do I judge it, detach from it, or even try to separate from it? I suppose the first approach is about being unsatisfied, feeling off the mark, while the second is about asking the opposite: what am I not letting go of to see that I am already on the mark? What stops me from being with the mind in this moment? The first approach suggests that practitioners need to add something that is lacking in themselves, while the second approach suggests that practitioners simply need to let go of their sense of lack or separation, to see the richness in themselves.

                In the early part of the 20^th century, there was some kind of big movement in psychology, and it was based on the idea that one should act first, then feelings will follow. This psychological theory emphasized acting before feelings and attitudes, to the point where it even ignored feelings altogether as motivators of action. Pretty soon, however, people started to see that the idea subtly disempowers people, because it suggests that people are blank slates who can be programmed in a variety of ways to perform in certain capacities. I don’t need to ‘feel’ that I am the President, only act like I am one, and then I will become how I act. But it even seemed to get to the point where feelings didn’t even factor into the equation, much less introspection. This is similar to treating the mind like a computer which can be fixed, upgraded or even replaced with new programs.

                But with meditation, I am not sure if the goal is to make the mind a blank slate in this way, so that it could be filled with more positive or uplifting things. I tend to think quite the opposite, which is that meditation reveals the process of mind that is always present and from which we can never be alienated. Even if I use a method to arouse myself into a particular state (such as more alert, or light, or carefree), I soon realize that those methods are temporary means, and they are no substitute for the mind to which they point. Without that sense of ‘awe in the ordinary’, meditation could end up being another exercise in a futile striving for self-improvement. But the more a person meditates, the more she or he realizes the infinite abundance of the experience, but also the fact that expedient means are always temporary and they don’t speak of this infinite essence of mind..