The Round Shield and the Clear Blue Sky

It’s a resting place for the mind: cool and clear breaths, coming in through the nostrils. Feel the subtle movements of the clean air brushing against the nostrils. The exhalations come out through the diaphragm and cause the whole body to breathe out any stale air.  And this is a refuge. There is nothing simpler than watching the breaths. There is nothing more vital to life. It is just a choice, not to concentrate awareness, but to make awareness so relaxed and clear that it is easy to let go of everything. And then the breath is a natural focus point, not compulsive or forced.

One of the participants in today’s meditation class compared the first sitting to holding up a big round shield to thoughts. Rather than allowing the thoughts to naturally come in, the shield tries to shut out thoughts together. But later I explained another kind of analogy: the thoughts are the clouds in a clear sky of mind. Rather than treating thoughts as the enemy that need to be shut out of the mind, thoughts are seen as merely clouds that come and go. And no matter how imposing and grim the clouds might look, they cannot block or obstruct the nature of the sky itself. No cloud can ever match the vastness and the unlimited nature of the sky. No matter how many millions of clouds have passed through the sky, can one say that the sky gets ‘tired’ of the clouds? Does the sky ever collapse because the clouds are too heavy or there are ‘too many of them’? In fact, it’s the nature of sky that it doesn’t even become blocked by the clouds. The clouds simply pass through the medium of sky without bumping up against the sky’s nature. I think this kind of analogy works for beginning meditation practice because it is a good way of showing the difference between thoughts and awareness. It is almost to show the kind of substance of awareness that makes it more spacious than thoughts.

Once the participant had understood the analogy and applied it to the second round of sitting,, she described her thoughts as just ‘popping’ in and out of her mind. She started to realize that she didn’t need to use mind to shield herself from thoughts anymore. Rather, she allowed those thoughts to come up and disappear again, as she rested her awareness on the basic function of the breath. I further related an analogy I had recently read in The Path of The Buddha which describes poison in an ocean. A drop of poison or impurity in an ocean is not enough to affect the ocean itself. If one has confidence that mind is the same way, the thoughts tend lose their poisonous sting.  In fact, no thoughts are inherently dangerous. It’s the tendency to cling to thoughts in a compulsive or protective way that tends to make the thoughts dangerous. At that point, they produce specific outcomes which often seem beyond control. What is required is a perspective of resting mind on mind itself, so that the thoughts are seen to move and shift about in their own time. By having this standpoint to observe thoughts moving in and out of the screen, the thoughts don’t seem so real. It is as though one were watching a play and suddenly the stage starts to wobble for no apparent reason. That tendency to wobble then causes the audience to snap out of their rapture with the story being played out on stage. It reminds people that this is just a scene in a play, and the mind needn't attach to the scenes in such a sticky way that often happens in daily life.

The practical aspect of this is hard to realize, because it sometimes seems too good to be true. When I am on the subway and there is a teenage boy spreading his legs into the seat  I occupy, what arises in mind? Maybe irritation or some other feelings arise in mind. I could go on to say, “I don’t want these kinds of thoughts; I want to have more peaceful, comfortable thoughts, but not this kind of unpleasant sensation.” But in doing that, I am reacting to the previous thoughts I had regarding the situation. And this produces a lot of inner turmoil. I first see the feelings and label them as “not good”, and then I look for more pleasant thoughts and feelings to replace the “not good” feelings. In fact, at every moment, each feeling is part of mind itself. But when I react, I compare two different thoughts and prefer one thought to another. And this is vexation, because I already tried to reject the previous thought. But if I acknowledge that all these states are part of the same nature, do I need to struggle against some states and seek others? This would be like trying to take a painting and eliminate certain paints because I don’t feel they belong in that painting. But of course, when I look at a painting, my role is simply to see how the totality hangs together. It is not my role to take out paints because I don’t happen to like them that day. Such a mentality is attachment, and it is painful.

So when I go back to the situation on the subway, what might ‘clear blue sky’ look like? I think it might start by acknowledging that the feelings arising are part of the nature of mind. But they are not a fixed characteristic of ‘me’. They are impermanent and subject to any number of new conditions. So I can relate to them in a softer and more tentative way, because I start to directly experience how they are arising and where they might be going. And again, that direct awareness is always tentative. It is not trying to create closure or conclusions. It is just being with the situation as it unfolds without adding judgments. The more purely I stay with the pain and not attach other thoughts and meanings to it, the more provisional it looks, and the more it becomes an internal process. I stop feeling suffering when I fully own that pain and not try to reject myself for the pain.

         The other point about that experience is that I can almost start to engage in it in a phenomenological way. When I say this, I mean that I approach the experience without throwing so much baggage into it. I start to become curious about the shape of the experience rather than trying to look for reasons or explanations for it. And finally,  there is an acknowledgment that I am trying to get at the authentic way of the experience rather than judging it or myself according to its shape and contours. And I am observing it in this way to become acquainted with the experience and to try out its contours. To me, this might be a tentative sketch of what clear blue sky being might look like. But of course, this needs to be tried out and explored further in daily life. I hope that this blog is an invitation to explore the state of being further in daily experience.

References

The Path of the Buddha (1956) ed. Kenneth W. Morgan. New York: Ronald Press Company